Hashtag Queer: LGBTQ+ Creative Anthology, Volume 2

By Qommunity LLC

The second volume of "Hashtag Queer: LGBTQ+ Creative Anthology" contains more fiction, more nonfiction, more poetry and more scripts by and about LGBTQ+. This volume welcomes back five writers from volume 1 and two writers from "Queer Families: A LGBTQ+ True Stories Anthology". This volume also welcomes 20 new writers to the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Qommunity LLC
• Release date: Jun 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781946952127

Book preview

By Genre

Fiction | Short Stories & Flash Fiction

Loving Kindness | Bill Gaythwaite

Actual Miles | Thomas Kearnes

Back Home Boy | Ryan Skaryd

Mira | Melanie Bell

Raunch Daddy | Dale Corvino

Paul and Cézanne | Andrew L. Huerta

As Long As We Both Shall Live and After, Too | Ephiny Gale

Nonfiction | Essays & Memoirs

Simpson Meadow | Carla Sameth

Holy City | Cat Cotsell

Taffy Stretched Between Two Poles | William Henderson

Magnetic Attraction| Lalo Lopez

A Weed Among Dandelions | Nicolas Johnson

Poetry | Poems

Hide and Seek| Claudya Nicky

Quiero | Melissa Sky

A Flame and a Whisper | Isaac Andrew Arthur

myspace | mud howard

Half and Half | Kenneth Pobo

Butter is not a dress | Sara Codair

Femme Poem #1 | Allison Blevins

Normalcy Osmosis | Krystal Norton

When straight girls complain about their boy problems and say: I wish I liked girls. It would be so much easier. | Marissa Johnson

Oil Slick | Tréa Lavery

Studying Rachel Maddow in Provincetown | Mary E. Cronin.

My Daughter Returns From Her Other Mother’s House With Braids In Her Hair | Allison Blevins

things i wish to do on the rag | Nefertiti Asanti

This is That | Kenneth Pobo…

Soliloquy of a Diabetic | Fabiyas M V

Sliced Open | Amy Reichbach

Threads | Amy Reichbach

How to love a survivor | Amy Reichbach

Daughter, What I’ve Learned | Allison Blevins

Instructions to a Newly Dead Merwoman | Jessica Dickinson Goodman

Found | Melissa Sky

for k | Marissa Johnson

Scripts | Plays

Adios | Richard Ballon

The Morning After the Rage: Bitch and Pussy Through the Trumpocalypse | Deborah Chava Singer

Seeing Eye to Eye | Richard Ballon

By Chronology

Editor’s Note | Sage Kalmus

Hide and Seek | Claudya Nicky

Loving Kindness | Bill Gaythwaite

Simpson Meadow | Carla Sameth

Quiero | Melissa Sky

A Flame and A Whisper | Isaac Andrew Arthur

Actual Miles | Thomas Kearnes

Adios | Richard Ballon

myspace | mud howard

Half and Half | Kenneth Pobo

Butter is not a dress | Sara Codair

Femme Poem #1 | Allison Blevins

Normalcy Osmosis | Krystal Norton

Back Home Boy | Ryan Skaryd

When straight girls complain about their boy problems and say: I wish I liked girls. It would be so much easier. | Marissa Johnson

Oil Slick | Tréa Lavery

Holy City | Cat Cotsell

The Morning After the Rage: Bitch and Pussy Through the Trumpocalypse | Deborah Chava Singer

Studying Rachel Maddow in Provincetown | Mary E. Cronin

Taffy Stretched Between Two Poles | William Henderson

My Daughter Returns From Her Other Mother’s House With Braids In Her Hair | Allison Blevins

Mira | Melanie Bell

things i wish to do on the rag | Nefertiti Asanti

This is That | Kenneth Pobo

Raunch Daddy | Dale Corvino

Magnetic Attraction| Lalo Lopez

A Weed Among Dandelions | Nicolas Johnson

Soliloquy of a Diabetic | Fabiyas M V

Sliced Open | Amy Reichbach

Threads | Amy Reichbach

Daughter, What I’ve Learned | Allison Blevins

Instructions to a Newly Dead Merwoman | Jessica Dickinson Goodman

How to love a survivor | Amy Reichbach

Seeing Eye to Eye | Richard Ballon

Paul and Cézanne | Andrew L. Huerta

Found | Melissa Sky

As Long As We Both Shall Live and After, Too | Ephiny Gale

for k | Marissa Johnson

Contributors

About the Editor

About the Publisher

Editor’s Note

SAGE KALMUS

Pride is one of the biblical deadly sins. Yet every year millions of us queer folks and our allies across the globe gather to celebrate just that: our pride. The irony of this is certainly not lost on many of our straight acquaintances over the years who’ve inquired of us, Why do you have to hold a parade about it? You don't see straight Pride parades, and if you did, everyone would be up in arms about it! And they have a point. But what they’re missing is that straight people have not been teased, belittled, mocked, abused, discriminated against, shamed, beaten and killed explicitly because of their straightness. Straight people have not lost jobs, housing, benefits and the right to serve, let alone family and friends, just for being straight. Straight people have not been forced to decide between living in the closet—living a lie—and risking being ostracized, alienated and subjugated for the rest of their lives for, if not proudly then at least unashamedly being who they are. But we have. 

And we can't escape it either, because even when we try to focus on something other than what makes us so different, the fact of it confronts us everywhere we turn. When straight people look around, they see themselves everywhere they turn. Not so for queer folks. When straight people see themselves on TV and in the movies, for example, they see themselves in all sorts of roles, just like in real life. But with scant exception, and much of it pandering, the history of gay people in cinema has us appearing almost exclusively as villains, foils, and lovable, sexless BFFs to the straight hero. Today’s efforts to capital-R Represent queer folks in the media seems almost the polar opposite: an antidote, a nod to Pride, and hence just as inauthentic.

Because in real life, sometimes we are the villain, the foil or the lovable, sexless BFF. Sometimes we're the heroine. Sometimes we're the fuck-up or the passive observer. Because even before we are queer, we are human, with all the good and bad, the sin and virtue that contains.

Another argument against Pride parades we hear a lot of late is the world has changed. They may have been necessary in the past but now there's legal gay marriage in the US and everything's okay, isn't it? Unfortunately, not quite. Not yet. Legalized gay marriage, while certainly welcome and a long time coming, was imposed on much of the country, not decided collectively. Many people still begrudge that imposition. The current administration in Washington has ended the practice of declaring June National LGBTQ Pride month. Thus, now more than ever, and as long as there continues to be shame, there needs to be Pride, as a countermeasure, a protest, a rejection of a paradigm that should have died with the dinosaurs. An assertion and a validation that we exist and, more, we belong. Queer acceptance and equality are only an issue because they’re an issue. In other words, if they weren’t an issue for others, they wouldn't be an issue for us. Pride parades would be irrelevant, and we could go on living, loving and being ourselves. But that's not the world we live in. Not yet.

Our world is and forever will be filled with people flawed and conflicted—some may suggest it is precisely why we are here—and queer people are no more or less innocent of this. The risk of capital-P Pride is that it risks sending us in the opposite direction, to a higher ground, indeed, but one just as separate, as alienated. We are no worse or better than people not like us. We are not the demons some make us out to be, sure, but that doesn’t make us angels either. Queer folks don't have the monopoly on making pride a virtue. nor is pride the only Deadly Sin we celebrate or its antithesis, humility, the only Virtue with which we struggle.

The six other Deadly Sins and their corresponding ironically so-called Contrary Virtues are: envy/kindness, gluttony/abstinence, lust/chastity, anger/patience, greed/liberality and sloth/diligence. Whether the precise terms bear relevance, the concepts certainly do. All of us--queer and straight alike--feel the push and pull of the conflicting forces competing for our attention. All of us struggle toward the virtuous while coming to terms with our sinfulness, whether we frame it in those terms or not. As human beings first, beyond sexuality and identity, we all try to elevate ourselves while remaining ever-present to what we are aiming to elevate ourselves from. Beyond (and beneath and behind) the battle for outward and inward acceptance, queer folks’ lives—like all lives—are a constant war between our best and worst selves.

This dual struggle—one universal yet one so personal—forms the conflicted origin and wounded soul of Pride: the need to feel good about who we are as we claim our rightful place among the family of other perfect and perfectly flawed human beings. And this is the spirit of the work presented in this volume. Where Hashtag Queer, Volume 1 presented A Life in the Day, revealing the experience of being queer at various stages of life, this volume presents us as people first and queer people second. The stories, essays, memoirs, poems and plays in these pages don’t try to candy-coat their queerness or capital-R Represent. Rather, they expose their writers’ raw vulnerability as everyday people struggling with the eternal conflict in each of us between, to put it one way: Sin and Virtue.

Sin and virtue, bad and good, low and high, toxic and healing, oil and water—we are all all of it. And like the oil slick on the cover of this volume (inspired by the title of the poem by that name in this book), what emerges from that struggle can sometimes be beautiful.

We at Qommunicate Publishing and its parent, Qommunity Media LLC, see ourselves as not just a business, but a family—a community. We are, therefore, eager to build relationships with our writers and artists, to continue speaking and singing (and sometimes screaming) from the margins together. That is why, in this precious second volume of our flagship publication, we are proud (no pun intended) to welcome back several writers from the inaugural volume of the anthology. We welcome back from Hashtag Queer, Volume 1 Bill Gaythwaite and Thomas Kearnes with more fiction, Carla Sameth with more memoir, and mud howard and Kenneth Pobo with more poetry. We also welcome back, from Queer Families, our first True Stories Anthology, William Henderson with more personal memories from his queer family and Andrew L. Huerta, this time with some fiction for us. There is even one writer, our dear friend playwright and poet Richard Ballon, who we welcome back for the third (and hopefully not the last) time! In equal measure, we are delighted to welcome new writers to our family: Claudya Nicky, Melissa Sky, Isaac Andrew Arthur, Sara Codair, Allison Blevins, Krystal Norton, Ryan Skaryd, Marissa Johnson, Tréa Lavery, Cat Cotsell, Deborah Chava Singer, Mary E. Cronin, Lalo Lopez, Dale Corvino, Nicolas Johnson, Fabiyas M V, Amy Reichbach, Jessica Dickinson Goodman and Ephiny Gale.

One last note: All the work in this volume is original. That is, whereas Hashtag Queer, Volume 1 contained some material previously published in other media, beginning with this volume, all the work in the Hashtag Queer series will hereafter be all original, never-before seen in print.

So, as you read all the exquisite and poignant words of these so generously vulnerable queer artists, may they kindle within you a spark of unity with all who are so like and unlike you. And may this remind you that, while we may not be perfect (by whatever half-cocked estimation we define it) we are nonetheless inescapably one family and more alike than we are different.

—Sage Kalmus

Hide and Seek

CLAUDYA NICKY

i used to hide from God, thinking

that we’re in a game of hide

and seek, knowing well that

i will be found.

i hide in the closet,

the storage room in the basement,

all the unconventional spaces i know

because i was told that

listening to God count to ten

is as humble an experience as

the love that rescinds the hate

that the Christian hands that willingly

embrace the less privileged are

the same hands that hold

hateful picket signs against

same-sex couples, humans.

said it was unnatural, a

disease, a sin, i wonder maybe

that’s why i have not been found

among the hays, the wildlings,

because it is easier

to handpick the diamonds

in the rough than to

touch the thorns. today,

i am waiting in line to be called,

to be sitting in His swing of

love and grace, on His lap

and smiling for the camera

because He comes bearing

gifts for the good ones,

the ones that desire to be cajoled

and harnessed to a saint. i am

slowly mastering the art of

masking my horns as a

gold-plated halo, a white coat

to cover my bloodstained

skin from boys who stare

too much but don’t see

enough, from girls

who know too much

to come close, from my own

set of gnawing teeth, i

am plastered with

bruises that God condemns;

this must be the only way.

but sometimes when you

hide for too long, the closet

starts to feel like home, the

calm air and deafening

silence, don’t mind the dusts

they form parables for

bedtime stories. stay safe,

and locked in, but sometimes

when you hide too well, no one

bothers looking for you, not even

God.

Loving Kindness

BILL GAYTHWAITE

In last night’s dream, Scotty was a young boy again, but a boy who had missed an important flight to Istanbul. He was weeping silently as crowds streamed by him in a cavernous terminal, which for some reason had the polished pine floors of an IKEA showroom he’d once visited in New Haven, Connecticut. A woman approached, as if fast forwarded from another part of this sleek airport, and stood staring down at him, scolding him for his tears and his poor time management, which had caused him to miss the flight. She kept on ranting, while threatening him with something that looked like a large wrench ― even though Scotty was just a small child in the dream and he was listening to her compliantly enough.

Scotty disliked dreams, their mishmash of real life and the psychological sleight-of-hand. For instance, after he woke up, he recognized the angry, scolding woman as the same person from a subway incident he’d actually experienced the week before. He’d gotten up to offer an older lady his seat on a crowded train, but she’d been immediately insulted.

Yeah right, asshole, she had sneered, as if I’m a hundred years old!

The woman had glared at Scotty with such scorching defiance that his head began to throb. He had stood there in some strange limbo of embarrassment and rage as a hipster in a Death Cab for Cutie T-shirt scooted past them both and took the empty spot. Scotty was almost fifty years old and wondered if he was perhaps too old to be offering a seat to anyone, something the furious subway woman might have said to him if he hadn’t gotten off at the next stop.

A lot of his dreams involved some aspect of travel. He wasn’t sure why ― maybe because as a young man he had backpacked all over the world for a year. This was after he’d dropped out of BU and gone to work at his father’s busy hardware store in a Boston suburb, where he learned how to charm the customers and steal sums from the cash drawer. After he’d accumulated enough stolen funds to purchase a round-the-world ticket from a now defunct airline, Scotty wrote a marginally sincere apology letter to his parents and fled for Logan Airport.

His first stop overseas was Japan, where his provincial sensibilities were initially overwhelmed by the neon chaos of Tokyo, so he had taken the bullet train from there to Kyoto and toured some temples and Zen gardens, while keeping an interested and serene look on his face. The next night, he’d gotten on a local train to a town on the edge of a dark forest, where he discovered a famous lantern festival was in progress. Lanterns by the thousands were hung on tree branches, lighting up the woods in a ghostly, overexposed fashion. The religious implications of all this escaped him, so Scotty just wandered around blinking at the astonishing display. There were also tame deer in these woods and you could buy little bags of dried fruit for them. The deer would come up and actually bow to you in greeting. And then, after you fed them, they’d bow to you some more.

In the town that had the festival, there was a youth hostel where he stayed for a couple of nights, meeting other travelers and hearing various tales of adventure. They all sat around a long table in the common room, over a meal of steamed rice and miso soup, jockeying for attention, in the manner of performers sharing a stage at a talent show. Since Scotty was just starting his travels, he didn’t have much to add, but the others told vivid and harrowing stories from their treks through Asia and everywhere else.

A skinny Canadian explained how he had gotten a job chartering junks with billowing red sails in Hong Kong harbor; a swaggering Australian told everyone about how he’d been stabbed in the neck while strolling through the Patpong area