Queer & Dear
Quilting the Queer Experience
APRBLEM was born in/from isolation, shame, guilt, and frustration; it was born out of brokenness and in a desire to be whole. That said, APRBLEM exists for people who feel too broken to become whole. More often than not, the people in this position are at the intersection of marginalized gender, sexual, religious, and/or class identities and/or abilities. Put differently,
If you are not a not a cis, het, white, middle class, able-bodied, Christian male, you are aprblem for many.
Queer & Dear, APRBLEM’s newest project, is an exploration of queerness and queer experiences. It is an archival space in which those at the intersection of their queerness and other identities can speak to their (mis)understandings, yearnings, and learnings.
Our aim is to build community and foster connection around queerness through storytelling because that is where healing happens.
“rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation”
bell hooks
The Call
This is a call for all the queers! The gworls, gays, and theys. We are creating an archive of images, poems, and narratives detailing our queer experiences and reckonings. This archive is a space for us to be the people we needed, and still need. Where we can find community, belonging, and solace in our parallels and reflections. In short, we are sharing these stories because we need(ed) these stories.
Your submission can address any/or all prompts or themes written below and in the official call for submissions (access by clicking "Submit") through writing, a voice memo, a video, or any other medium. The prompts/themes are there to guide, not restrict.
All stories will not be shared publicly, but those that are will require your consent/permission and the post will not contain any personal information outside of your sexuality and gender identity.
Themes/Topics:
Shame, Intimacy/Sex, Memory, Identity, Joy, Body, Love, Imagined Possibilities, Self-Definition, Fear
My early understandings of queerness were relatively ‘hush hush’. My uncle is gay, and he’s been ostracized in my family for as long as I can remember. Out of the 3 uncles/aunts on my mom’s side, he has struggled the most to maintain stability. When he’s not around, he is judged harshly. Not a second is spent thinking about why stability is so hard for him to achieve. He is a recovering addict, HIV positive and has never resided in 1 place longer than a year. I struggle with my queerness everyday even years after coming out. I struggle to believe I am deserving of something truly fulfilling. I have yet to experience it. As many afab people can relate, I am a survivor of assault. More recounts than can git on one hand. Our bodies hold onto that trauma, and in a way, abuse becomes comfortable, natural, what I’ve come to expect. God, it’s so sad written like that, but it’s true. I remember an assignment I had to do in college about bringing together different memories in time, so I went chronologically, on stories that lead to one main conclusion: women are hot & I’m queer. Point being: my early understandings of queer existence directly correlated with struggle, harsh judgement, and instability. I feel like I am still working through all aspects of my sexuality/identity. It is a constant process. I use she/they pronouns, and feel safest in spaces where both parts of me are honored and seen. I also identify as bisexual. I’ve probably had more crushes on girls than I’ve ever realized, so easily manifesting as friendship—my comfort zone with women. I’ve had boyfriend after boyfriend since my teens—all lacking deep connection, emotionally, intellectually. With men, I feel as though my body and looks are the main reason for their attraction to me, so I’ve leaned into that over the years, appealing the gaze. And after the dopamine wears off, I am left to feel incredibly empty. I am working through my fear of intimacy with women, for I feel it will be so much different than with men, and I don’t know how my mind, body, soul, may react. But I feel ready, more ready than ever, to dive in. Dive in to all that is unknown. I made a goal for myself for 2024 to live outside my comfort zone. This will absolutely be outside those bounds. To my younger self, I would tell her to be open with her friends about her questioning. Maybe they’d have been able to relate. Maybe we could have worked through it together vs struggling in silence. Your feelings deserve to take up space. Oh, absolutely struggling with shame. The first thing to come up in my head regarding, this is being positive for herpes. I got this diagnosis 3 years ago–and I can still feel how the shame, and fear of rejections, pulls me away from opportunities for intimacy. I ache to be loved, and accepted, for all that I am. And now, herpes is part of who I am. Intimacy that I dream of, would feel like truly being seen. For my trauma, my joy, my fear, and all the love I have to offer. It would look like someone never falling short of making me feel safe, heard, respected. It would feel like Friendship on fire.
AQueerStory
what were your early understandings of queerness?
I was between the ages of 7 to 9 when I was told that lesbians were either ugly, fat or both. I took it for what it was and it became a metric to hold up against the women that I knew liked women going forward. My mom’s friend was gay, and she was neither fat, nor ugly by any stretch and neither was her partner, might I add. As I grew and was exposed to more wlw, I realized that gay women looked all kinds of ways. To this moment, I don’t know that greater society knows that; I think my then 16 year old male friend echoed the same sentiments. Note: Comments like, “you’re too pretty to be gay” haven’t been part of my experience, but they’re out there. It’s one of many misconceptions about leading a life as a woman who loves other women. I remember thinking, well, she’s gay so we are not the same as if being hetero was greater than. I didn’t have the language, nor the willingness to question myself at the time. I didn’t outwardly mistreat anyone I knew was gay, but recognizing and concentrating on their difference was a hell of a lot easier than dealing with my own inadaquecies. Say it with me: Internalized homophobia. While I didn’t judge the women loving women I knew, and in some cases, loved because they were (like) family, they were different. I had little to no access to the interiority of their sexual lives and/or circumstances, so wlw desires seemed trivial and purely physical. Or perhaps, their interactions were trivialized, sexualized, and othered in ways that the young and straight were not; I just couldn’t see it yet.
My early understandings of queerness can be characterized primarily by confusion, because although my parents told me explicitly there was nothing wrong with being gay, I went to a Catholic school that told me otherwise. In school there was a lot of homophobia. I had a friend in high school that was the first guy who came out. I remember being at a group event sitting next to him and hearing the seniors behind us whisper “faggot” to him. I remember thinking to myself (as selfish as this was), at least that’s not me. As I grew older and began to think more about attraction, I wondered if that was true. When I first realized I was attracted to women through a video I saw on social media, I cried for days and denied it for years.
what is love to you?
friends to lovers
Sitting across from my mom, I asked her to reflect on her marriage - after thirty five years together, what had her union taught her about partnership? What did she want in a partner for me? She said she had talked about this recently. And of course she had; conversations like this were frequent in our household. Marriage was a topic that sat perched on the tip of everyone’s tongue. “I think it’s important to have a foundation of friendship,” she would eventually confess. “I want you to be friends.” Later that evening, I asked her dad who his best friend was. Without hesitation, he gestured in the direction of my grandmother. He’s at an age where he’s started to forget things; he won’t always remember where he is or what he did that day. But when I asked, his words were clear. It wasn’t something he needed to be reminded of. “She was.” A beat. “She is.” … The night we met, I remember thinking that we would become fast friends. Barely six weeks into actually knowing one another, we said ‘I love you’ for the first time. Days later, I considered holding your shaking hand. In the months that followed, we would spend hours sitting outside of my house, talking until our eyes grew tired and our words would jumble together. We ended every evening with pinned conversations for the next time we could string together a coherent sentence. I’d leave each exchange thinking this was the closest I’d ever felt to another person. I felt it the night you showed me where you might one day propose. And four months later when you jokingly got down on one knee. In a smile shared across a hospital room. Laced fingers through empty parking lots and quiet streets. In dark corners of museums, movie theaters, and concert venues. When we decorated your Christmas tree; each time we slow-danced in your living room. In ‘coming home’ texts. Flowers brought to the airport. The image of our rings stacked neatly on your nightstand. Each moment of quiet intimacy felt punctuated with the same sentiment: you were my greatest love and favorite friend. … We don’t talk as much anymore, but I still find myself wanting to reach out and tell you how my day was. What shows I’m watching. The foods I’m craving. Moments you would have rolled your eyes at. I wonder how your family is and whether you’re getting enough sleep. If there are things that remind you of me. Of our love, of our friendship. What was and what could have been. Another set of pinned conversations for a future meeting, if only we have the chance.
they say there’s no love like a parent’s love for their child that this love is the closest to unconditional all my life i found this to be true and i was a daddy’s girl so all i really cared about was you until that day, 2 weeks before my birthday the love i’d always known seemed to evaporate as i spoke my truth and the father i aimed so desperately to please throughout my youth told me i was a disappointment those words became a permanent installation on my wall of emotional damage and i allowed them to break me down to the point where i could no longer manage to look at myself in the mirror i’ll never understand how a person can add so many rules and stipulations to something that in its essence exists without and after all this time i have no hate in my heart even though i don’t doubt it would’ve saved me some heartache but even after all this time even after all that was said and all that wasn’t i still wish to be daddy’s little girl again
Love is HER.
I always knew Love was a “she” And that is why I purposely neglected her for years, carefully evading her touch. Alluding her was as easy as it was for one to remember their favorite song. Bouncing away from her as if she were a beat, to her loving Rock, I would Roll. As she blasted her feelings into the Rhythm of her Blues, I would leap and stumble away from her Pop For 23 years, I wrote the book on eluding love and her entrancing ways For 23 years, I successfully evaded ever having to fall for what the world had been falling for, for centuries. Or so I thought. That was until I met her. Love, that is. Instead of coming to me the way I supposed she would, full on in the heap of my emotions; she sat in the form of a beautiful Black woman. Beautiful brown eyes, smile that shined so bright it could light up the night sky She looked innocent enough, and with that I made my first mistake of underestimating how strong she really was Once I knew her, and I mean TRULY knew her—- Love that is. I fell for her ways as quickly as one would breathe air And with one swift movement, everything in my world changed Everything and nothing I wanted Love to be appeared to me the very moment I saw her Attempting to block out all the unfamiliar feelings of Love I could feel myself doing something I had never done before I had started opening myself up to her As I tried to fight off her feelings I could see my body moving on its own accord Refusing to listen to my silent screams Making its way to her, without me warranting it to do so The feeling I had once ran, rolled, leaped, stumbled away from I was now welcoming While the feelings of Love danced around my body she held her hand out to mine I reached and took her hand within my own within that moment I finally understood Love is not a “she” Love is HER For 23 years, I successfully avoided Love And after having finally met her, after I have finally experienced all of her talents I thought to myself there is no way I’m ever letting her go
After You
After You I will be content to spend the rest of my chapter here, a second pair of eyes to yours looking only upon that which has tasted the pleasure of your gaze smelling flowers by the shop front only after you call my attention to the bright beauty of their petals I will find no greater purpose here than to be the adlibs to your song the soundtrack to this film that is us, waking up together in Cork and learning to make pasta from scratch and then, never doing it again because we agree that the pasta from Tesco tastes better It will serve me well to live whatever is left of my years as a shadow, cast only beneath your light that when I walk into a room and a joke is told I will search first for your laughter before I allow mine and when at 3am your hands search for me in the flickering led light looking to make music of our bodies I will play your strings first to the crescendo and then, follow after you.
what is intimacy to you? How does it feel in your body? In your mind?
In the Venus mount of your palm Is the softness of a peach a shell of breath warming on the surface of you in this bed we are unending molten until morning face-to-face we sat in our night tree feeling the salt in our throats. in the darkness I can see your face wet I don’t fear God she’s in my bed
JUNE MAY BE OVER, BUT PRIDE CONTINUES.
We decided to take the train to New York.
An act of budding love, of nauseating shaking, of hopeful dreaming.
A form of resistance.
I hold your hand and realize this would not be possible without the history we propel towards.
I think about that 15-year-old girl in the cab. A tear rolled down the day they said we could get married.
But I didn’t even know you.
Yet.
This pride weekend, for the first time, I’m celebrating love.
Celebrating her
Him
Them.
Celebrating us.
what is your relationship with your body and how has it changed over time?
My relationship to my body has changed so much over time. I hated it for most of my high school and college years and struggled a bit with various health issues and disordered eating. Accepting my body seemed impossible to me at the time, especially because of the health trauma of my youth which left me permanently disabled. Having a disability has also complicated my relationship with my body quite a lot. However, I am happy to say that as the years have passed, I have fallen deeper in love with my body and what it has done for me. I thank it every day for carrying me through the hardest part of my life and exercise regularly to celebrate its beauty and resilience.
"I will be happy"
I have always been one to fall in and out of love; soft and easy with friends, hard and fast with lovers, and briefly with strangers passing by. There are signs from the universe everywhere if you look for them, and I rely on them to guide my fall, absorb the shock from the crash, and to catapult me back into sanity when I find myself in a fool’s paradise. “I’m a hopeless romantic,” I say, hoping that the vapid phrase captures my freefalling disposition, but I don’t think it is the same. I mean, how could it be? For I am not a hopeless romantic in the sense that I picture myself with a soulmate for life, a love story for the ages, or a happy-ever-after. If anything, I think I’m a hopeless romantic in that I am hopeless for love, hopeless for romance. I picture myself on my deathbed replaying memories of all my soulmates, falling asleep to a story filled with love and more than just two lovers, and a happy-ever-after because after every love that I have experienced and am yet to experience, I will be happy.
Audre Lorde
Your silence will not protect you
“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language." I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever. Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
