The summer light is fading earlier and the town pond is closed during the week now that the lifeguards are back in school. And yet, my urban kid still has two and a half more weeks before the bell rings on her first day of middle school. We’re living in the liminal right now.

While I can't stop thinking about this month's book, The Lilac People, I also haven’t been able to face writing about it. What was I thinking, programming a historical novel set before/after the Holocaust as our summer read?

And, yet, Milo Todd’s exquisitely researched debut lived up to all the positive recommendations and awards. If you haven’t picked it up yet, I encourage adding it to your TBR list. I thought I knew what I needed to know about the horrors humans inflicted upon each other, but Milo opened my eyes to how history has softened the sharp reality of queer life before and after the war.

I knew that the Weimar era was more permissive for sexual and gender play (Cabaret is, of course, seared into my soul), but I didn’t realize the degree to which trans people were receiving medical treatment and proto-government ids. Meanwhile, the self-congratulatory post-war history celebrated here in the United States conveniently forgets how the Allied forces liberated the concentration camps, only to send the black and pink triangles (aka the queers) to jail. It was both better, and worse, than I’d been taught.

Throughout the book, Milo speaks to us through his characters, reminding us of the importance of witnessing history and investing in our cultural archives.

“I don’t tell you all this to shock you. I tell you because I need someone to know.” —Karl

I grew up at a time when we liked to believe that these kinds of community-erasing, genocidal evils were history. The Lilac People is a heartbreaking, dark mirror to what we know is happening right now here in the US and abroad.

I’m looking forward to going deeper with Milo Todd and our Being Alive Book Club crew tonight. Join us? Read the book but can’t make our gathering? Email me back with questions or post to our chat.

xx Kyle

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There’s nothing more glorious than an extended stretch of summer time on a screened porch or face down in the sand, and books to get lost in. This month, The Lilac People inspired me to pick up Secret Historian which has been collecting dust on my shelves for over a decade. Justin Spring shares Milo’s interest (and mine) in recovering queer histories. This biographical account follows “sexual renegade” Samuel Steward from young academic cozying up to Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder in Europe all the way to opening a tattoo parlor catering to the Hells Angels in Oakland. Similar timeline, shared themes, other side of the ocean.

And, just to keep things interesting, I chased all of the above with Natan Last’s comprehensive cultural study of the crossword, Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. Did you know not one but THREE major publishers can trace their origins back to the introduction of the black-and-white puzzle grid? Simon & Schuster, Random House, AND Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. What a moment in publishing. The paperback comes out right in time for your holiday gifting. (Thanks, Dev, for my copy!)

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IYKYK, if you don’t… you are overdue. Willkommen to Cabaret. You can watch all those jazz hands with ads on YT or rent on various streaming services. You won’t regret the re/watch, even the orchestra is beautiful.

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

Tonight! We’re gathering with Milo Todd to unpack The Lilac People. Join us?

All are welcome at book club. While many people read cover-to-cover, others join for the community, craft, and conversation even when they haven’t started/finished. (Heads up for tonight: there will be spoilers.)

Monday Aug 24 8p ET / 5p PT on Zoom. (RSVP)

RSVP for Milo Todd Mon Aug 24

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Visit the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps. All but one of this year’s books are available now:

• July: What I Made for Dinner with Krys Malcolm Belc

• August: The Lilac People with Milo Todd

• September: Saint Consequence with Michael M. Weinstein

• October: Mad Eden with Morgan Thomas

• November: Love in a F*cked-Up World with Dean Spade

• December: And If I Die Before I Wake with George M. Johnson

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me a message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

I hate this entire genre of fidgets. Maybe I could let it go if I got any pleasure from them. I do not enjoying touching them, at all, ever. Instead, they feel like an ever present reminder of everything that is wrong with right now. To paraphrase another hot take I read on the internet: some people in the world are desperate for kitchen staples, while others are arguing about buying $6 plastic wrapped, foam-filled replicas.

A friend called in the middle of me writing this rant, she agreed (again, I’m paraphrasing) “They are terrible. Designed to kill our planet, faster. And we have a lot of them in our house.”

She also kindly suggested that I switch topics and write thoughtfully about my earlier post. My friend is wise. (You should read her.)

Note received, writing prompt queued.

In the mean time, you can join me and discussing REAL butter, parenting tradeoffs, our favorite food recipes, and his memoir What I Made for Dinner. This is your official invite to join the Being Alive Book Club —  No worries if you haven’t read the book, this is not a conversation that will spoil. (See what I did there?)

RSVP at the link below and we’ll see you tonight at 8p ET.

xx Kyle

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I saw The Odyssey. I bought Circe. IYKYK

▶️ Press Play

For those not yet in on the joke…

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

Can’t wait to dig in with Krys Monday July 27 8p ET / 5p PT on Zoom. (RSVP)

All are welcome at the BABC book club. While many people read cover-to-cover, many join for the community, craft, and conversation (even when they haven’t started/finished.)

RSVP for BABC x Krys Malcolm Belc

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Visit the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps. All but one of this year’s books are available now:

• July: What I Made for Dinner with Krys Malcolm Belc

• August: The Lilac People with Milo Todd

• September: Saint Consequence with Michael M. Weinstein

• October: Mad Eden with Morgan Thomas

• November: Love in a F*cked-Up World with Dean Spade

• December: And If I Die Before I Wake with George M. Johnson

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

Everyone talks about beach reads, but I think summer invites the opportunity for escapism without getting sand stuck between your toes. Especially for parents (and teachers) these weeks off from school offer a break from the typical routine, a temporary realignment, or as I like to reinterpret the Catholic framing: extraordinary time. There’s a beginning, an already-agreed-upon end, and with those constraints, the opportunity to make the most of the space in between.

I devoured this month's book club read, What I Made for Dinner, in between prepping meals for my daughter during our vacation home swap in Emeryville, CA. It was extra sweet to read intimate observations about someone else's kitchen while engaging in the most familiar domestic tasks I've done hundreds of times before — while in someone else's kitchen.

Krys' unconventional memoir is all at once a meditation on the specificity of queer parenting, the drudgery of child rearing, and the parasocial erotic power of watching food creators. In many ways, the parallels to my life are clear — transmasc dad frets over whether or not child rejects one’s care — but, in other ways we sit on opposite sides of the screen. I’ve spent the past 20+ years making content (films, tv, podcasts, marketing, etc.) with audiences in mind; Krys writes deeply about being the viewer, and in this Reel-era, the voyeur.

I can’t wait to break bread with Krys next Monday night. All the details below. Bring your fav recipe to share or, better yet, call in while you’ve got something in the oven. You wouldn’t be the first to cook during book club (shout out to 👨🏻‍🍳 …)

xx Kyle

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Krys' first memoir The Natural Mother of the Child, interwove his diaristic writing with the visual ephemera of pregnancy. I don't know how anyone keeps publishing while feeding four children, but I can't wait to ask.

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What got missed by many during the ‘transgender tipping point’ elevation of Laverne Cox to the cover of TIME magazine is that she’s not just a gorgeous, talented actress — Laverne is a studied, strategic, tireless advocate. We all benefit from her care and commitment. (And charisma!) Her new memoir Transcendent is at the top of my TBR pile and she’s at the top of my 2027’s book club vision board… press play on this excellent interview with Design Matters’ Debbie Millman.

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

Who amongst us doesn't have at least one celebrity chef they channel while sautéing? I want to hear which food celeb you invite into your kitchen, come chop it up with us in the BABC chat thread.

Can’t wait to dig in with Krys Monday July 27 8p ET / 5p PT on Zoom. (RSVP)

All are welcome at the BABC book club. While many people read cover-to-cover, many join for the community, craft, and conversation (even when they haven’t started/finished.)

Hope to see you next week!

RSVP for BABC x Krys Malcolm Belc

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Visit the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps. All but one of this year’s books are available now:

• July: What I Made for Dinner with Krys Malcolm Belc

• August: The Lilac People with Milo Todd

• September: Saint Consequence with Michael M. Weinstein

• October: Mad Eden with Morgan Thomas

• November: Love in a F*cked-Up World with Dean Spade

• December: And If I Die Before I Wake with George M. Johnson

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

I keep declining social invitations with ‘other plans’ or rationales that my social battery is low. All true. But, underneath all that, something else is going on that I don’t yet have words for.

Maybe it’s that I want to spend more time alone in the country. Maybe it’s because I quietly stopped drinking alcohol six months ago. I’m not sure what’s growing in my cocoon yet, but I look forward to reemerging into my next butterfly phase.

I might be on the couch, but it still makes me so damn happy to feel all the queer joy vibrating through the city and in Mayor Mamdani’s IG feed. Happy Pride!

xx Kyle

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This month’s Being Alive Book Club author Emily St. James came across my radar as a pioneering, prolific TV critic first at The A.V. Club and then Vox. In addition to novels, and TV writing (and parenting!) she continues to write cultural and media criticism for her own publication, Episodes. You can support Emily’s work by subscribing directly, and for the next two days take advantage of her 20% off Pride sale.

▶️ Press Play

This is a quick one: listen to Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s 2019 interview with Emily after publicly coming out and in the context of The Handmaid’s Tale.

And there are plenty of trans journalists who were like, oh, you should just start publishing under your new name. And, yeah, I could have done that. But I also think the relationship the critic has to the reader is a very important one… if there was a way I could use my coming out to draw just a little bit of attention to that, it felt to me like a net good.
— Emily St. James

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

I can’t wait for our Being Alive Book Club conversation with Emily St. James tomorrow night: Monday June 29 8p ET / 5p PT on Zoom. (RSVP) All are welcome to attend—if you can’t make it, post your questions/comments to our BABC chat thread.

RSVP for BABC x Emily St. James Mon 6/29

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

Visit the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps.

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

It’s also, goodbye-to-all-that-elementary school this week as my daughter graduates from fifth grade. She, sometimes wise beyond her years, informed me today that she’d save the real celebrating for when she finishes high school. (“Maybe middle.”) Every time I try and talk about how big this week is, she tells me kindly to “Stop.” And then gets quiet.

I get it. Where did/does the time go? And how to make sense of it?

Those of you reading our book club pick this month, Woodworking, will know that putting on a community production of Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town is so central to the book that it appears on page 2. A hundred pages later, I decided I couldn’t fully understand Emily St. James’ narrative choices if I didn’t sit with the play first.

I’ve spent the last two weeks immersing myself in Wilder’s existentialism—reading the text, watching proshot productions, listening to Scott Simon interview Howard Sherman about the work’s contemporary relevance. I’m grateful to meet the play in my late-40s, now able to viscerally feel the gut punch that comes in the third act.

I read through these last pages of Our Town while reclining in the center of my newly adopted, very small Yankee town. A place I imagine was once not dissimilar from the Grovers Corners, NH described at the top of Act 1. This is a longitude and latitude I never saw in my future. Wilder’s great lesson, regularly (and perhaps unwisely) forced upon high schoolers, is that life unfolds faster than any one of us can comprehend. You could sum up the play’s ethos just by repeating the great adage about parenting: the days are long, the years short.

I woke up this morning, back in Brooklyn, acutely aware of this particular phase of life I’m in. My daughter, an earlier riser than I, left a note on the kitchen table telling me she loved me and that she was looking forward to our daddy-daughter roller skating date. I checked my phone, my mom sent emojis, my step-father texted a link to this Zach Ellams/Hannah Jacobs visual opinion essay: What I Learned About Parenting as a Trans Dad. Today, it feels good to be seen, to be alive.

Last night, I took my daughter to see Toy Story 5. Did I think we needed a fifth? No. Did I cry? Absolutely. Seeing any Pixar movie will make me emotional. I worked there for a decade, it’s where I became Kyle. When I started at the studio I was just a year out of college, eager and fresh-faced. Ten years later, I made one of the hardest decisions of my life and turned in my key card. We were ready to have kids, our families were all back East. And my dad was dying. It was time. It made sense. (Except when it didn’t. Doesn’t?) And now I will spend the rest of this life metabolizing that choice and all those that followed.

I remember watching TS4 during the pandemic, when my own five-year-old daughter looked remarkably like Bonnie. Last night, I cried watching eight-year-old Bonnie struggle to make a friend while thinking about all the ups and downs my ten-year-old had with her friends this year. And I cried thinking about all that time in between. It’s all fun and games when you are making movies about toys in your 20s—and then you blink and Andy’s on his way to college.

TS5’s “all-character” movie poster is selling you a movie of Toys vs Tech. That’s there for sure. But, and I promise you it’s not just all this Wilder I’m consuming, Toy Story 5 is also Our Town: a meditation on time passing, being present in the moment, and the importance of one’s community.

And, as if I scripted this. just as I got to the end of this essay “Oh Happy Day” drove by again.

And, scene.

xx Kyle

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I’m enjoying all the proud display tables and end caps celebrating queer voices this month. Look at all those Being Alive Book Club picks in the wild!

I love these displays! And… I bought books from other shelves.

I knew Strand would deliver on my desire to purchase a well loved copy of Our Town (they had three) along with Ann Patchett’s Our Town-inspired novel, Tom Lake. (Anyone read?)

At Greenlight, I picked up Jordan Ritter Conn’s new portrait of four American Men after learning that one is Black and trans, along with Laverne Cox’s new memoir, Transcendent. (Natch, Laverne had her book launch at Strand. Hah.)

What's on your summer reading list?

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There are many, many productions of Our Town—remarkably, ~400 a year. I started with Gregory Mosher’s 1988 Broadway production as captured for PBS’ Great Performances—starring the great Spalding Gray as the Stage Manager.

Now that I’m deep in Thornton Wilder lore, I regret missing Kenny Leon’s 2024 production starring Jim Parsons. I savored this 11-minute deconstruction of all of their artistic choices. Even if you don’t know the show, it’s a great behind-the-curtains look at what goes into a Broadway staging.

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

Being Alive Book Club meets with Emily St. James Monday June 29 8p ET / 5p PT on Zoom. (RSVP) All are welcome to attend—if you can’t make it, post your questions/comments to our BABC chat thread.

RSVP for BABC x Emily St. James Mon 6/29

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

Visit the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps.

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris (Zoom Wed May 27)

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

Writing you tonight from a very sweaty Brooklyn apartment due to my ongoing refusal to turn on an air conditioner before July. (I promise, Carter, to install them before you get here.)

In addition to the heat wave, and Knicks Fever, it’s also end-of-school season in NYC. And just like Pride, the events takeover the entire month. Meanwhile, I’m in a daze. My daughter is about to graduate from elementary school and say goodbye to the building we optimistically dropped her off at in September 2018. It’s all calendar Tetris and tears over here. Tonight, I started crying watching her make a zine for her final project. She rolled her eyes.

When I wrote this essay in 2019, I wondered if Pride would ever make sense to a kid growing up protected from transphobia and homophobia. What a naive concern in hindsight, given how many protests my daughter has since attended. Resharing this piece on the eve of Brooklyn Pride in honor of all the gay dads who taught me to march, and my sweet little girl who won’t be one much longer.

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It’s June and there’s a lot of good queer book news to celebrate:

1. Good luck to the four (!!!!) BABC featured authors nominated at tonight’s Lambda Literary Awards. Congratulations Tourmaline, Denne Michele Norris, Emily St. James and Milo Todd1. You can watch the livestream on YouTube. And bookmark the 2026 Lambda Literary Award Finalists.

2. What a delight to see my dear friend, and movement hero, Jamison Green pop up in my LinkedIn feed with celebratory news of recognition for the 43 authors and editors who made A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States. At 784 pages, I have been a little intimidated to assign for book club, but if there’s enough interest I’ll reach out to James to see what we can organize Drop me a line.

   

   

3. My fab coworker and producer extraordinaire Rachel Karp just launched her new book, Lesbian Bar Chronicles at the very Ginger’s bar that kicks of my old essay above. The collection brings together stories Rachel and her co-creators gathered on a 2021 road trip to visit as many remaining lesbian bars as possible. Along the way, they produced a podcast “Cruising” and contributed to a new wave of investment in queer-owned community spaces. Between their two seasons, EIGHT new lesbian bars opened across the country including a few fun women-oriented sports bars. If you feel alone at any point this month, I rec reading Lesbian Bar Chronicles at the nearest lesbian (queer) bar. You won’t be alone for long.

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I kicked off Tony’s weekend with another pilgrimage to the Library of Congress—this time to visit the recently-archived papers of one Mr. Stephen Sondheim. Friends, you can just go there and read his handwritten lyrics. I touched them! Remember this fact when you are mad about paying federal taxes.

The weekend ended with Qween Jean winning for Best Costume Design, wearing an outfit handcrafted for the moment, and not afraid to use her time on the mic to speak out.

“This experience has been monumental. We are here for the legacy of queer people, trans people. We are taking up space. We have to take up space. We have to shift the paradigm….We know as a society, that when we come together we can make real, permanent change.”—Qween Jean, Tony Award Winner

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

Twice now I’ve been stopped while carrying Woodworking by someone wanting to tell me, “I loved that book!” Join us this month reading Emily St. James’ debut novel. Emily will join us on Zoom for a book chat Wednesday June 24 8p ET / 5p PT. (RSVP)

RSVP for Emily on June 24

Related: the universe is inviting me to finally read/watch Thornton Wilder’s classic three-act Our Town. I want to hear your stories of reading, seeing, performing in. Tell us all about it in our June BABC chat thread.

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

Visit the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps.

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris (Zoom Wed May 27)

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

“even though you’ve been riding in the abject cold and the abject heat, there’s something about this like middle temperature zone where it’s like, you just feel differently alive.”

Yesssss. He goes on to eloquently explain that every spring he rides along with one album on repeat, and this year it’s Harry Styles’ new, uncomplicated and breezy Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.

One. I wholeheartedly endorse this choice (esp the “Aperture” open) and recommend listening to both the album and WeMo’s audio essay.

Two. I too was listening to Harry, but turns out I like to disco with more frequency. Enter another British dance floor queen Jessie Ware and her brand-new Superbloom. I can’t stop, won’t stop dancing shirtless alone in my apartment singing at the top of my lungs, “I’m the looooove of your life.”

Neither album asks too much of us, and that’s A OK. There’s time and place for the endless weight of the world, right now I want Jessie to take us to the sauna.

Keep dancing and keep going,
xx Kyle

PS This video is hilariously minimal, a very expensive GIF of Jessie sweating and posing. Not mad about it.

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When I’m not reading books, I’m often listening to interviews with authors. It’s a harm reduction strategy after years of mainlining politics, news, tech, and media business commentary all. day. long.

Two standout conversations from this week’s writerly playlist:

• discussing Famesick on Rachel Martin’s Wild Card (YouTube, NPR)

• Harriet Clark talks The Hill with Rachel Aviv on The New Yorker Radio Hour (Apple Podcasts, NYer)

Both are good hangs and full of thought-provoking, sometimes overlapping craft advice.

In the first, Lena offers up some wisdom shared to her by the now-Netflix-famous therapist Phil Stutz as she struggled to make meaning after a traumatic event: “Why don’t you try to write the story like it’s a myth?”

In the second, Harriet shares the decisions that went into her writing a novel which is inspired by growing up with her mother in prison, but takes dramatic departures: “I wanted the prison to have this kind of mythic sense.”

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I’m sorry—The Voice started in The Netherlands?!

Back on the internet after weeks heads down writing in the woods, thank you and the algos for bringing this year’s The Voice of Holland finale to my attention. Excuse me for a while as I listen (again) to Sanne van Assouw channel Adele and Annie Lennox…

Incredibly, Sanne DID NOT WIN (!) losing out to a baby faced Dutch Benson Boone singing a cover of Harry Styles. It’s a patriarchal sign of the times; I look forward to Sanne’s disco club remix.

Side note, who is this Dutch Brandi/Reba/Melissa singer-songwriter who looks like a Nicole Kidman?! Ilse DeLange is Connie Britton’s Rayna James come to life. Bye, I’m moving to Amsterdam. (Wendy, this is your fault.)

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

I’m devouring interviews with prepping for our Zoom hang Wednesday, May 27 8p ET / 5p PT. RSVP to join. She’s SUCH a delight. We’re going to have a great time.

RSVP for Denne on May 27

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

Visit the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps.

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris (Zoom Wed May 27)

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

RENT was the first show that was mine. It arrived just in time to give this queer high school sophomore struggling in the Southern suburbs something to look forward to—a messy, artistic urban life full of friends, compromise, passion, and grief. (Mission accomplished.)

Junior year I started hanging out closely with a group of senior girls, one of whom absolutely mesmerized me. She was stunningly beautiful, the best actress in our high school theater department, and kept everyone guessing. The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, she held her cards close, aimed for perfection (always), and then much to my surprise, invited this soft butch downstairs to her bedroom to listen to the recently-released Ragtime concept album. And then some. If you know the show, this both makes all the sense, and none. But let’s just say she taught me “new music.”

Fast forward to now, thirty years later, Ragtime is back on Broadway and it is phenomenal. I’ve seen it twice already.

This week, I enthusiastically showed my kid the cast’s recent Tiny Desk Concert. Much to her embarrassment, I ugly cried through the whole thing. I dropped the link below, enjoy. (I just watched again writing this and sobbed hard. So it goes.)

Keep singing and keep going,
xx Kyle

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This month the Being Alive Book Club is reading ’ novel When the Harvest Comes, just released in paperback. It’s a healing, heart-warming love story full of unbridled love despite life’s harsh realities, perfect for reading in the springtime sun.

I had the pleasure of seeing Denne in conversation with at last year’s Brooklyn Book Festival, and I’ve been waiting to dig deeper ever since. She joins us on Zoom Wednesday May 27 — RSVP link below.

It’s a big year for Denne: she’s the incoming Executive Director and Publisher of Electric Literature, and her anthology Both/And was just nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.

Denne signed copies of both books for us. Join the conversation in the chat and I’ll send copies to a couple readers.

▶️ Press Play

This. Show.

Shoutout to director extraordinaire (and fellow UVA ‘02 grad!) Lear DeBessonet—what a gift of life to get to grow up and see your take on the shows of our youth.

Make them hear you.

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

Book club night is my favorite night. Can’t wait to sit down with Denne and all of you on Zoom this Wednesday, May 27 8p ET / 5p PT. RSVP for the link.

RSVP for Denne on May 27

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

Visit the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps.

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris (Zoom Wed May 27)

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

I am sitting here drinking my Sunday morning coffee wiping tears away while I read the lyrics of Hadestown. I’m trying to make sense of the stories we pass to our children—the songs we sing, the songs they choose to harmonize on. And then, rising above television’s pitter patter din I hear, "Summer lovin’ happened so fast…tell me more, tell me more…” Ha. The characters in my daughter’s teen romance-show-of-the-moment are singing Grease karaoke. Reader: once I finish, I hope you’ll understand that this tiny moment on a rainy weekend morning is the whole story.

One of the singular joys of parenting is finding an interest to share with your kid. You expose them to the wonders of the world, at first entirely filtered through your eyes, and then, if all goes well, their aperture widens. They see the world anew. And then, ideally, so do you. (If you choose to.)

Not everything that delights my daughter brings me joy. Some of it I can barely tolerate. But I feel genuinely grateful that a few things that I hold dear she’s also developing a passion for. Musicals is one of those things that brings us together, in full voice.

As is our tradition, we decided to go see a Broadway show together to kick off my birthday week. She’d heard from friends that Hadestown was the ticket to ride, I was hyping up Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

Now, I don’t like cats—achoo!—but, in our family, Cats is canon. I’m a child of the 80s who watched my little brother dance to Mr. Mistoffelees in our suburban living room, and then I proudly celebrated his 21st birthday with him backstage (face full of whiskers) on the national tour. Though I could (still?) sing along to every word, I couldn’t tell you what the show was about. Something about ascending to the Heaviside Layer? And that famous song about a Memory? (Was it just one?)

And then I saw last year’s off Broadway revival which resets the show in queer ballroom culture. Everything made sense. Voguing down a runway is exactly the right setting for a show about strutting dancers saying their names, asking to be seen. We’re here, we’re queer, we’re feline. Of course you are. Jellicles can and jellicles do.

All my daughter knows about the global sensation is that her Uncle B was once a performer whose job it was to prance around a stage. I played her a clip of the revival. She was baffled. I thought she’d be amazed by the dancing and the makeup, but I guess I’ve over-indexed on the Sondheim and haven’t woven in enough RuPaul. She needed more cultural context. Surely, this clever refresh would be properly astounding once she compares it to the original. I continued to make my case and pulled up the 1983 Tony Awards performance. She. Was. Horrified.

“What’s a jellicle?!”

“What IS happening?!”

And, evidence that she is indeed my kid, she immediately gave notes:

“If they were trying to look like a cat there are multiple ways to do that!”

She doesn’t care that the show ran for 18 years on Broadway, is full of catchy tunes, or continues to run in Japan 23 years later. None of it translates.

We bought tickets to Hadestown.

Now, Hadestown is a newer show based on a much, much older story. Ancient! It’s a tale of a love from long ago. It’s a sad song. But we’re gonna sing it even so. The musical retells the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In this version, Eurydice escapes to the industrialized underworld to escape hunger and poverty. Orpheus is her beloved, determined (but, ultimately doubtful) striving artist-activist who gets lost in his own thoughts. Tale as old as time.

The night before, we cracked open my daughter’s beloved copy of Greek Myths (DK) to refresh our memories of the tragic love story. Knowing the ending before we sat down in our seats did not spoil, it enhanced. We knew there was no chance the boy would get the girl in the end (unless…? maybe this time?) and yet, we were deeply invested in every scene.

Which begs the eternal question, why do we tell the stories we tell? Even when we know where it’s headed. Especially when we do.

Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel, Night Night Fawn, is an answer to the next question: what if the stories we were told are wrong? Or worse. NNF is a work of autofiction, a hybrid memoir page-turner written in the voice of Jordy's dying self-avowed Zionist, transphobic, narcissistic mother, Barbara. I won’t spoil the moment exactly, but there’s a climactic scene set in the back row of a screening of the 1960 film Exodus that unforgettably dramatizes how the stories we put on stage and screen shape and seduce us. It is this scene where the book truly exposes itself.

Hadestown also memorably reveals itself at the Act 1 closer “Why We Build the Wall.” We’ve followed Eurydice down to the underworld where this particular Hades, presented as an industrio-nationalist despot, calls out to his workers to recite their allegiance to his isolationist project:

They keep singing…

Oh my. I thought the subway ad promised “Broadway’s Greatest Love Story.”

While reading Night Night Fawn, I projected myself into Jordy’s position, a child grappling with cultural inheritance, filtered through the voice he gave his mother. After watching Hadestown with my daughter, I reconsidered my own subjectivity and put myself in Barbara’s heels. It’s not just the stories we repeat, but the framing we offer in which to interpret them that we pass to our children. Some audiences might leave the Walter Kerr still hanging on to the love story, I went home that night gutted by the critique of extractive capitalism and grasping for ways to keep the conversation going when we got home. But, maybe her mother and I have already given her enough of a frame to form her own interpretation.

My daughter left the theater singing Eurydice’s call to action:

Every time I listen to “Wait for Me (Reprise)” now I cry envisioning my girl stomping her feet, fist held high, “I’m coming!” She’s not going to love all the choices we’ve made, she won’t endorse all of mine. I hope my daughter never stops rethinking what is or stops imagining what could be.

I can’t promise you fair sky above. Can’t promise you kind road below. But I’ll walk beside you love, any way the wind blows.

Keep going, keep reading, keep drumming…
xx Kyle

Professor Rosenberg reignited the dormant academic in me in preparation for our conversation later this week. If you too are looking for opportunities to earn extra credit, I recommend reading these two provocative essays Jordy wrote that feature his mother Barbara:

• The Daddy Dialectic (2018 LA Review of Books)

• Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day (2014 Avidly)
  

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The “New Non-Fiction” shelves at our local library branch never disappoint, but gracing the cover of Trans Cinema was a special surprise. Thank you, librarians! I’m so happy to learn this book exists.

This past Saturday was Independent Bookstore Day—did you celebrate? Drop a comment with your fav local indie so we can all visit.

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The kid and I went on a mini, and very rainy, book crawl around our neighborhood. Here’s our not-so-mini haul.

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In addition to Andrew Lloyd Webber lyrics, the 1980s also burned into my brain “Just Say No.” Michael Pollan’s new book on consciousness (see above) inspired me to pick back up his influential 2018 book on psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, and watch the corresponding docuseries. Both are great, but you could start with the Alex Gibney-produced series—archival material, patient sessions, and interviews invite you to reconsider what the government wanted us to fear.

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

I am loving all the messages coming through after BABC members finish Night Night Fawn.

“Wow.”

“I just finished and am in shock!”

I can’t stop thinking about the book either. Jordy joins us on Zoom this Wednesday, April 29 8p ET / 5p PT. RSVP for the link, hope to see you there. Drop me a msg if there’s a question you want to make sure we cover.

RSVP for Jordy on April 29

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

Visit the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps.

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg (RSVP for April 29th)

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris (STD for May 27)

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

After months of slogging through the brutal northeast winter, I’m on my second consecutive week of California sunshine and can’t shut up about it. Can’t? Won’t. It’s amazing what 80 degrees and a colorful salad can do.

There’s no bad time to be in the Bay Area, but now that I live back East, I appreciate April’s literal “spring break” the most. Everything is brighter, warmer, more delicious after you’ve been bundled and burrowed. Also, the poppies. I took the California poppy, not to mention all the other flora, for granted when I lived here. Now, I look forward to their florescence all year long.

I still hope to hike the hills tomorrow, but even a walk around Oakland this time of year provides prime poppy peeping.

Do these Californians know how good they have it? With their gardens and sidewalks that are bursting bouquets? Stop and marvel at these gorgeous petals that bloom for just a few days. I found all of these within one city block.

The weather, the food, and the friends are delivering a much needed spring awakening for this body and heart.

Keep reading and keep going,

xx Kyle

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It will surprise none of you to learn that I’m an unabashed book tourist who has to make sure there is always room in my luggage to cart home new acquisitions. Already this trip I’ve visited three bookstores and limited myself (for now) to three new selections for my trans library (and two gifts. 🤫)

• When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader

• How to Fuck Like a Girl

• Original Plumbing: The Best of Ten Years of Trans Male Culture

It’s remarkable to simultaneously witness the explosion in trans-written books alongside the exponential increase in transphobic attacks. Culture is non-binary like that.

At the queer-focused Fabulosa Books in San Francisco, I marveled at the breadth of the trans-written offerings and debated throwing down $150 for the first-edition, pristine Stone Butch Blues showcased above the register. Holding back for now with my fingers crossed I’ll still one day uncover my beat-up original from high school.

I know I’m in the Bay Area, but it was nice to see trans books promoted across the Bridge at mainstream bookstores, too. Including this month’s “impossible to explain” banger, Night Night Fawn.

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

Lucky me us, we’re gathering this month (on my birthday!) with the academic alchemist Jordy Rosenberg to discuss his brand new, jaw-dropping novel Night Night Fawn.

RSVP for Jordy on Zoom Thursday April 29 8p ET / 5p PT
NOTE UPDATED DATE!

RSVP for Jordy on April 29

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

Visit the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps.

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins (RSVP for March 30th)

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg (RSVP for April 30th)

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

I hit the starting line bundled up for freezing spring temps with my dear friend . We’ve known each other for decades thanks to the small miracle that was growing up with gay dads in the 1990s. (I endorse reading all about it in her memoir Family Outing.)

Jessi is one of my life’s steadiest anchors who married my best friend from college and then moved so close we’re now neighbors in Brooklyn. Relying on each other in ways big and small eventually led to the good fortune of joining her at LinkedIn two years ago. Now we’re also desk mates in the Empire State Building.

What I’m trying to say is that we’re tight, even on the weeks when we’re far too busy to connect. Jessi and I ran into each other at SFO right before boarding our flight back from separate work trips and then met again 24 hours later to run this race we both secretly signed up for. We couldn’t have planned it if we’d tried.

Feels good to slow down long enough to mark what friendship can look like 25+ years later. (Not pictured: our kids all protesting later in the day ❤️)

Keep reading and keep going,

xx Kyle

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I can’t stop thinking about ’s All the Way to the River. I sat out last fall’s launch swirl and finally dove in after another Liz (and frequent BABC attendee) gave her positive rec. My take: humans are messy and perhaps we’re all destined somewhat to repeat ourselves. Reading AtWttR is a rough ride because watching someone whose work you’ve genuinely loved face plant in life sucks. I’ve never been to a recovery group, but it occurred to me three-quarters of the way through that the Big Magic™️ of the book might be converting every reader into an attendee. And fuck—it’s an ugly mirror.

▶️ Press Play

I spent a couple hours on Amtrak listening to Get Out the Map on repeat. I get a little weepy thinking about idealistic, twenty-something me crossing state lines to live the big, queer life of my dreams and savoring any chance I got to see Amy and Emily sing live. I ask myself all the time if I’ll ever stop moving. If I can be happy, still.

Why do we hurtle ourselves through every inch of time and space? (Yes)
I must say around some corner, I can sense a resting place
With every lesson learned, a line upon your beautiful face
We’ll amuse ourselves one day with these memories, we’ll trace

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

This month we’re reading ’ multi-award-winning memoir Pretty. Join me and KB on on Zoom Mon March 30th at 8p ET 5p PT—we’ll dig into their memoir, dance in their poetry, and drink a toast to their recent appointment as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Santa Clara University. (RSVP for KB)

KB gives great Substack. Rec following them here and subscribing to their publication: .

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

Bookmark 😉 the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps.

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins (RSVP for March 30th)

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg (RSVP for April 30th)

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

As the temps keep teasing us here in the northeast with spring flowers, this remains my drumbeat: Keep marching. Running. Resisting. Writing. Keep drawing and dissenting. Keep going, and going, and going, and living… What’s keeping you alive this month?

▶️ Press Play

Another dose of Robert Glasper to remind us all that it’s Gonna Be Alright. This particular recording is from an outdoor session with the Metropole Orkest in Rotterdam.

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

This month we’re reading ’ multi-award-winning memoir Pretty. Join me and KB on on Zoom Mon March 30th at 8p ET 5p PT—we’ll dig into their memoir, dance in their poetry, and drink a toast to their recent appointment as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Santa Clara University. (RSVP for KB)

KB gives great Substack. Rec following him here and subscribing to their publication: .

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

Bookmark 😉 the home of Being Alive Book Club for links to all the upcoming books, FAQs, and previous recaps.

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins (RSVP for March 30th)

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg (RSVP for April 30th)

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

It’s not a bad view, but everything is contextual. The sky was always gray. The river always frozen over. The vibe was heavy. The air freezing. There someone beloved was dying nearby in the hospital and there was nothing any one of us could do but let it unfold. To witness the crossing over.

Michael died peacefully, on his birthday, with his husband, my stepfather, by his side. That morning before I went to the hospital I drew the flowers I bought for him. For both of them. For all of us. Because that was something I could do.

Two mornings later, mourning, staring at the bridge I crossed more than 100x as a child, I took out my sketchbook and drew. I scribbled arches impatiently, got the proportions all wrong, moved on to the planes headed towards DCA, and then to the inconsequential Arlington skyline.

On the sixth morning of bridge staring, more rested, I grabbed my sketchbook and took a seat. I slowed down my breathing, sharpened my looking. I hadn’t noticed the bridge’s reflection before. And what is going on with those arches exactly? I started researching.

(Francis Scott) Key Bridge was conceived in 1916, though in typical Washington fashion, it took many years and a few dramatic Congressional appropriations negotiations to complete. The new bridge finally opened in January 1923.

The bridge was constructed in collaboration with the Army Corps of Engineers and the US Commission of Fine Arts employing the relatively new technology of reinforced concrete and steel. To lighten the load of each concrete span, the designers punched out additional arches creating its iconic, elegant “open-spandrel” structure.

What is an open spandrel? And before we get to that, what’s a spandrel? I wondered, too.

In architecture, a spandrel is the space between a curved figure and a rectangular boundary—the gap between something (an opening) and the surrounding structure. When designing and confronted with the inadvertent, one has the obvious option to leave it unadorned. Or, lean in and make a dramatic moment out of the whole situation. This is the Library of Congress’ approach.

In 1979, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and geneticist Richard Lewontin employed this architectural metaphor to argue in a groundbreaking paper that not all biological traits evolve directly from natural selection, some are what we might call happy accidents. What happens because something else happens. Music is a classic example, something so fundamental to the human cultural experience which exceeds evolutionary explanation. Gould and Lewontin named these nonadaptive byproducts spandrels.

That bridge staring back at me was in fact a key—last week, our family, a beautiful spandrel.

xx Kyle

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It’s been a heavy time, take a break and watch these queer Icebreakers carve some space on the ice. Co-directors Marlo Poras and Jocelyn Glatzer’s short doc weaves together gorgeous contemporary shots and riveting archival footage.

I grew up watching my brother dance. Watching Joel Dear skate reminds me of how my brother used to move. The resemblance is so uncanny that within seconds my daughter asked, “Is that Uncle B?”

For a sport that revolves around expressiveness, romance and a hell of a lot of sequins, the world of figure skating has a startlingly archaic stance on sexuality and gender. Same-sex pairs and gender bending are strictly forbidden in elite, international competitions – but once every four years, a parallel skating universe appears. At the Gay Games, an intergenerational group of skaters pushes the boundaries of their sport in the hope that mainstream skating will one day encompass a richer spectrum of the human experience.

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I still pay to have someone deliver me the NY Times on the weekends even though unwrapping it doesn’t feel as good as it used to. During a recent recycling purge I dug up an entire section devoted to the state-by-state impact of “Remaking America.” Bittersweet to see the paper featuring a trans military officer losing benefits (Hawaii) and a trans teenager at risk of losing hormones (Colorado.)

Master Sgt. Logan Ireland (above) was the named plaintiff in Ireland v Hegeth, now covered by Talbott v USA, which challenges the administration’s executive order banning openly transgender people from serving. He is also one of the service members featured in the award-winning 2018 documentary TransMilitary. Highly recommend and free to stream on YouTube.

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

This month we’re riding along with Imogen Binnie to Nevada— a novel with psychological urgency and a cult following that's only grown since it was first published in 2013.

Join us on Zoom Wed Feb 25th at 8p ET 5p PT (RSVP for Imogen)

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

Keep going.

That’s the post. And my mantra right now.

We’re having a brutal winter here in NYC. I’m having a a burst-out-in-tears-on-the-subway week. Keeping this short and sweet so that I can keep going…

xx Kyle

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

This month, we’re reading Imogen Binnie’s righteous road trip to Nevada.

This book is legendary, says all the things, and unfolds at break neck speed. Truly a marvelous representation of what it feels like to be a years deep into your transition and just at the starting block. Join Imogen on Zoom Wed Feb 25th at 8p ET 5p PT (RSVP here)

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

▶️ Press Play

Bought tickets to take the kid to see Brandi next week so that for the rest of her life she gets to say that her first concert was this badass queer rocking out at Madison Square Garden. (And, selfishly, it gets her hooked enough to dig into Brandi’s discography on on road trips and slow Sunday mornings.)

🔗 Follow the Reader

I have a post it on my studio wall (thanks Tunde) that reminds me:

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

It’s nice reinforcement for me to focus on what I can control, even while we all grapple with rapid (and unwanted) change we never asked for. My dear friend Liz Tran has an incredible new book that launched this week that speaks to this exact moment.

AQ presents a framework for assessing and cultivating one’s agility. Liz's book will get shelved under “business” but I think her lessons are applicable for a much broader audience. She lays out four AQ archetypes, gives you a quiz to identify yourself, and then offers tailored strategies for facing CHURN: Change, Hiccups, Uncertainty, Rupture, Newness.

Thanks to Liz, I now know my agility archetype is somewhere between 📝 Novelist and 👨‍🚀 Astronaut. I’m passionate, I see the future (yay!), but throw a little CHURN my way… that’s when I can get overwhelmed and impatient. Like when I smashed my laptop screen earlier this week and had to do my job on a phone for two days.

Liz is one of my favorite people to turn to when I’m feeling stuck, I’m excited for you to get some of her wisdom.

There’s a deep pressure hanging out at the top of my lungs. I keep blaming the unmasked sniffler who sat to my right on the flight back home, but it’s probably not fair to use her as a scapegoat. There’s also the immoral and illegal and irresponsible administration of this country. And then there’s the hyper specificity of today’s milestone in my timeline: the 10th anniversary of my dad’s death.

I expected to spend all of January thinking about 2016 and the night everything shifted. I did not prepare for the entire internet to engulf me with synchronized nostalgia for that very same period. To abuse (modernize?) the old ani difranco line, every post in every feed was suddenly speaking to me with #Bring Back2016 and “2016 me…” Ugh.

2016 me was the most lost I’ve ever been—drowning in grief over losing my father only five months into my own fatherhood. I will spend the rest of my life trying to metabolize this chronological injustice.

I think about my Dad all the time. He was a technooptimist who would be awed (and horrified) by how the internet and supercomputing has reshaped our world. He was a historian who would be calling me now daily, with a shattered heart, to share context for current events. He was an entrepreneur and a professor who would be so proud of how my career has unfolded. He was an attentive Dad, who would have loved FaceTiming his granddaughter to make her laugh. And he was a sensitive, romantic, gay man who came out later in life and also, always, spoke of his love for my mother. (He would have both lusted and sobbed all the way through Heated Rivalry!)

It’s taken me a full ten years to articulate that I need a shared ritual around his remembrance. So with guidance from the most spiritual person I know, and permission to weave in some Jewish tradition, we lit a candle last night for my Dad and talked about his passing.

The candle took the center of the dinner table. The candle illuminated the dessert art jam. The candle cast a warm glow bedside as I slept. The candle joined us for cereal and coffee before school. The candle flickers now as I write.

Tonight, when the candle is out, my daughter and I will head to the city to see Jonathan Groff (my Franklin Shepard, my daughter’s Kristoff) strut, sing, and seduce the entire audience “in the basement of Wicked.” It couldn’t be more my father. Just in time.

xx Kyle

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

It’s book club time! Come hang with me and historian Kit Heyam this Sun Jan 25th at 2p ET 11a PT on Zoom. (RSVP here) Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

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The memes and the parties are fun, but I’m here for the longform Heated Rivalry discourse.

The Querent

In Your Arms I Would Start A War

Hudson Williams in a screenshot from a video of his photo shoot with Timid Magazine…

Read more

8 months ago · 437 likes · 98 comments · Alexander Chee

I’m here for work where I’ve gathered my direct reports to get to know each other better and plot the next six months. We’re going to do this partially by drawing together—which is why my second carry on yesterday was this giant tote overflowing with art supplies.

My head and body are here, but my heart is all over the place. There’s so much violence and horror transpiring around the world and unfurling on our social feeds. It’s too much for anyone’s nervous system to hold. Yesterday on the plane I was catching up on work threads and right in the middle of a typically business-as-usual conversation was a note from a colleague who has lost all contact with his family in Iran. It was a rare message of written vulnerability poking through to acknowledge that he was not ok, his business today could not be usual. We’re all holding so much, sometimes we need to say it out loud before we can attend to what (else) is in front of us.

One of my new team members recently told me that I was the first leader he’s ever heard talk about nervous systems at work. I took it as a massive compliment. (Though, I was surprised coming from a life long Californian.) I’ll never ask someone to bring their full self to work, some parts you should reserve for yourself and loved ones, but I will ask what you need to be your best self.

This morning, I’m excited to lead the team through a work version of the More/Less list I described in my last post. Right after clear space in our minds to dream big by writing everything else that distracts down on Post-its.

I will start by recognizing my friends and heroes who are at the Supreme Court this morning arguing (again) that trans people are just… people. The headlines will make you think this is about protecting women’s and girl’s sports, it really isn’t. This is just one site where the right is successfully ratcheting up their campaign to dehumanize and delegitimize us.

Take a few minutes today to read ACLU lawyer ‘s recent post because:

We are fighting not just for the legal principles at stake but more importantly in defiance of the attempts to obscure the fact of our embodied existence, our core humanity, and the simple but enduring truth that we are loveable and we are loved.

xx Kyle

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

I am learning so much reading Kit Heyam’s Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. Come chat with me and Kit about gender across time and cultures Sun Jan 25th at 2p ET 11a PT on Zoom. (RSVP here)

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres.

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

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🔗 Follow the Reader

My neighbor, coworker, confident, constant inspiration, and dear friend going on 25 years captures the zeitgeist and my 2026 mantra: What got me here won’t get me there.

Writing you from “feels like 11," which CT Insider explained is thanks to the arctic air mass parked nearby. I’ve never lived in a place where the snow doesn’t melt between dumpings. This is all new to me. I’m arguing with myself about whether or not I can go for a run at this temp. Or whether skipping my run to write is principled avoidance.

At the height of my daughter’s back-to-school, end-of-elementary dysregulation this fall she yelled at me, “you are ruining every tradition!” This was her response to me explaining that we’d spend the holidays a little differently this year—aka celebrating Christmas in our new house, just the two of us. She has a way of expressing my quiet heart out loud. I didn’t want to admit to anyone that I was anxious about the changes, too.

But, we did it!

We decorated. We blasted Christmas carols. We baked cookies. We visited our friends nearby. We read our own books, in our own beds, on different floors. We made new friends at the local café. We made each other laugh. We opened presents. We watched movies. We got on each others nerves. We had a great time and shared all the feelings. And then we drove down to New Haven, bundled up for a brief, brisk walk around Yale, and boarded the Amtrak south to visit the family. I think we successfully made a new tradition or two along the way. (We also sang “TRADITION! Tradition!” very loudly, often, because musical theater explains the our world.)

December felt like one long month of hurtling through time and space. Today, Jan 2, is slow. The big new house is now empty, my brother and his husband left this morning to make their long way back to LA. I’m settling into my new studio, testing out desk placement, and letting the shelves fill in as I go.

Yesterday, I joined nearly 800 artists around the world to kick off ’s 3rd annual 30 Days of Drawing. We always start with Julia Rothman’s More/Less exercise. A very good tradition Julia launched into the world (and turned into a book.)

This is my fourth New Year’s More/Less list. Some things change, some things always stay the same. (More writing! Less avoiding!) There’s still time to join us drawing ten minutes a day for 30 days. You can start today, or next week, whenever you want. I’m here to spread the good word that a few minutes of drawing with yourself, and especially with others, can meaningfully ripple through your life. Habits are like that, bringing consequences you hope for and ones you never new were possible. (Hot tip, email community@drawtogether.studio and tell them—err, me, I answer the emails—I sent you for a pass to join.)

I’m officially past the peak of the sun, but determined to start this year/month with some forward motion… off I go to don all my winter apparel and run as long and I can tolerate.

Then, quickly back inside to warm up with this month’s Being Alive Book Club pick: Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. Scroll down for more information on our Zoom conversation with historian Kit Heyam and to preview the unbelievable list of books (and writers!) gathering with BABC over the next six months.

Book club fed my heart and soul last year. Thank you for keeping me (and you) alive.

xx Kyle

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

New year, new books, new design!

Kit Heyam joins us from the UK on Sun Jan 25th at 2p ET 11a PT on Zoom to discuss his highly-recommended book, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. Kit will call in from the UK so we are meeting on a Sunday afternoon instead of our usual Mon/Wed evening. Hope this works for as many as possible. (RSVP here)

Being Alive Book Club is a community effort to amplify trans voices by reading trans authors. Every month we read a book across genres. Look who has already said YES for this year:

• January: Before We Were Trans with Kit Heyam

• February: Nevada with Imogen Binnie

• March: Pretty with KB Brookins

• April: Night Night Fawn with Jordy Rosenberg

• May: When the Harvest Comes with Denne Michele Norris

• June: Woodworking with Emily St. James

Have a trans author you want to recommend to Being Alive Book Club? Drop me message or comment on this post.

Leave a comment

▶️ Press Play

Spent much of the holidays getting cozy with harpist/composer/educator/bandleader Brandee Younger’s discography. Her latest, Gadabout Season, hooked me in, but you can get acquainted via her 2022 Tiny Desk Concert. One of my 2026 intentions: more IRL jazz. Send me your rec’s or, better yet, let’s go listen together.

🔗 Follow the Reader

Thanks, Biz for leading me to read ‘s The Body You’ll Have Tomorrow:

The system needs you to believe you’re separate from the sick. That the 5 percent is a them, not a you-in-waiting. Convince the healthy they have nothing in common with the dying, and they’ll dismantle their own safety net with their own hands. They’ll call it freedom. They’ll call it personal responsibility.

***

I’m one of 56 boxes tonight in this Zoom meeting. It’s Giving Tuesday and each of us has donated to a local mutual aid organization. The event page called it a “keyboard danceathon.”

Hosts Jade Chang and warm up the room by inviting authors Justinian Huang and to respond to the existential question that haunts us all: What is the point of making art when it feels like the world is falling apart?

Justinian apologizes for his brain working at half-speed, he has a newborn and his sleep is upside down. I’m reminded that raising a child requires a regular self-delusion and a never-ending series of optimistic creative acts.

Thomas offers a Martha Graham quote he found tacked up at an artist’s residency.

We are truly pebbles thrown into this vast ocean of creativity and history. But we must keep throwing in our pebbles, and we must stand at the shore and watch as others do the same. —Martha Graham in conversation with

Ann immediately renames our gathering “Pebbles-to-power.”

It’s a rainy, cold, wintery mix kind of night outside my Brooklyn windows, but I’m feeling warm inside. This is my second virtual co-writing session with Ann and Jade. Writing time never passes by faster than accompanied by others. At a writing retreat years ago, Jade shared that she wrote much of her first novel at loud restaurants with a beer. I’m reading her second novel now wondering if she also likes tater tots.

I feel self conscious writing with the camera on, but I also signed up for the accountability. I’m often in an empty house. I crave company. I am suddenly very aware that I put a pencil in my mouth 7 minutes ago and am still clamping down. Would I have taken it out of my mouth by now if I knew I wasn’t on camera? Am I performing? Did anyone else notice? Did I just discover my creativity unlock? I’m reminded how much freedom there can be under restraints. What else will open with my mouth closed tight?

Everyone is typing at once, on mute. No one can hear the noisy clicking that these 45 gram-force “cowberry” switches make on my mechanical keyboard. It’s a very divisive device with a hyper-specific sound that simultaneously makes me very happy and a little bashful. But aren’t all the best pleasures a little bit embarrassing? These immodest keys are keeping me company.

***

A lot of tears in our house this week. There was screaming and sobs on the street corner. It’s been a fall of big feelings. (“You’re the WORST!”)

My daughter is in her last year of elementary school. I’m witnessing her navigate a chapter ending, her first. We talk often about what lies ahead, what might be. In the name of equity of good intentions, the NYC public school system allows fifth graders to apply to any middle school in the five boroughs. There are over five hundred. She, well we, are asked to rank our top choices (“as many as you want”) and submit into the web portal. Then, months from now, the same portal will notify us of her placement based on her lottery number, my street address, what everyone else picked, and hopefully a bit of her preferences.

For the first time in her little life, my daughter is being asked to weigh in on a big life decision that she’s grown up enough to know will impact who her friends are, how she spends her days, who she might one day become… all while actually having very little control on the outcome. It’s too much. It’s also what it means to be alive.

Some parts of parenting over this decade have come naturally, easing her mind right now feels impossible. I’m hyper verbal, I want to fix everything with words. Now, my reassurances elicit more tears and set off infinite insolvable loops. My therapist recommended that I stop talking so much and instead focus on timing my breath with hers. Mid-meltdown, pencil in hand, sitting in her bedroom combusting from the confusion of not knowing whether or not a school should be #6 or #7 I put my hands on her knees looked in her eyes and said, “Your mom and I will keep you safe and make sure no matter what that you have a good experience.” Her breathing returned back to normal, she put the pencil down. We don’t have answers, but we’re all in it together.

***

Last night, I went to see Merrily We Roll Along on a massive screen in Times Square. I saw this same version with Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez twice on stage. (And wrote about it once.) I’d see it weekly if I could. I never understood Bible study, but returning to the same text to make new meaning does make sense.

The show feels like a magic trick, its reverse chronological structure a revelation. A car crash in reverse. Also known as life.

I sat in the second row, staring straight up at the much, much larger-than-life Frank, Charley, and Mary. Watching theater sometimes feels like peeking into a magical doll house. The film takes the opposite approach by bringing the audience up on stage, often closer. We’re sitting on the three friends’ shoulders. I missed the wide perspective and the mid-century scenery, but at this angle appreciated little nuances and acting choices I had missed before. I know every word, and yet last night felt the sadness in the show more deeply. Merrily is a meditation on all those forks in the road and the consequences you don’t see coming. It hits hardest when you realize you are also standing in one of those spots.

I woke up singing this passage from the gospel according to Stephen, by way of Mary singing to Frank:

Okay, now you know,
Now forget it.
Don’t fall apart at the seams.
It’s called letting go your illusions,
And don’t confuse them with dreams.
If the going’s slow,
Don’t regret it,
And don’t let’s go to extremes.

It’s called what’s your choice?
It’s called count to ten.
It’s called burn your bridges, start again.
You should burn them every now and then
Or you’ll never grow!

Because now you grow.
That’s the killer is,
Now you grow.

🌱

Here’s to us—Who’s like us? Damn few!
xx Kyle

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

I started this book club a year ago with the notion that reading Sarah McBride’s memoir with others would lift my spirits. It worked! Together, we’ve read NINE books by trans authors and gathered just as many times to discuss.

Every time someone reaches out over email, comment, chat thread, text, IRL to say they picked up one of of the BABC books I feel inspired to keep going. An angel gets their top surgery. Thank you for reading with me, with each other.

Whether or not you have participated in a BABC gathering before, you are invited to our end-of-year holiday hang & book rec swap this Monday, December 15th at 5:00p PT / 8:00p ET. (RSVP) Grab your holiday sweaters, a cozy beverage, and your favorite books from 2025 to share.

RSVP for BABC Holiday Hang | Mon Dec 15

I cannot wait to share with you the authors and books that already committed to join BABC in 2026. In the lineup already are some hits and award-winners from this year, hotly-anticipated new releases—and we’ll kick off the year with a book BABC members keep requesting.

Have a trans author you want to suggest? Drop in the comments or send me a message.

Suggest a book for Being Alive Book Club

🔖 Bookmarks

Speaking of being alive… I endorse spending some of your holidays with Jade and her new novel, What a Time to be Alive. She’ll make you laugh out loud:

A small woman with intensely blue eyes and the kind of radiant, expensive skin you got only from ingesting the purest nuts and seeds, practicing the most punishing and esoteric forms of yoga, and being injected with the most discreet Botox sat up on her knees and said, “I feel deeply attuned to the moon.”

And, also cry:

I closed my eyes and thought about how, for the first time in months, his name didn’t immediately weigh my heart down at each corner and again in the middle, each chunk of despair so solid I could draw a contour map of it. I still felt that heaviness, that inability to move outside of his absence, but it was less constant.

In some ways, I missed it.

Earlier this year I’d asked my dentist about that heaviness. He’d brightened and immediately responded, “Vasoconstriction. Stress makes your blood vessels constrict and the shortage of oxygen to your heart makes it feel weighted down.” He thanked me for thinking he’d known the answer to a medical question. I didn’t tell him in that moment the smashing of my heart had felt so dire I’d forgotten the deference between types of medical professionals.

▶️ Press Play

Merrily is playing at select theaters for a little longer this month. And then hopefully Sony Pictures Classics will release digitally and I’ll get to watch over and over and over… in the meantime, this trailer’s on repeat.

Plot twist!

I really didn’t see it coming until I woke up one morning this summer with something akin to an epiphany: it was time to create my own sanctuary in the woods. Now, I fill all my extra minutes pinning interior inspiration and scouring second-hand furniture outlets. Ok, that’s actually not new behavior. The change is that the mood board now has a freshly-installed pewter gray roof overhead.

At zero points in my life could I have imagined myself uttering that opening sentence. I’m still in disbelief, shy about telling friends. I haven’t figured out how to confidently weave being a solo homeowner—outside the city!—into my story without some sheepishness.

Why do I feel so guilty? Is it because I still struggle with taking up any kind of space? Or because, especially post divorce, all my dreams about the future disappeared? Did I ever have them? I’ve lost track.

I’m not the only person to struggle to see past what’s right in front of me. Therapist wrote this week in his newsletter about how claiming our trans futures is an act of resilience, devotion, and defiance:

Many of us also struggle to imagine futures for ourselves. I hear regularly from my trans clients “I never thought I’d make it this long and I don’t know how to picture what comes next.” I’ve never been actively suicidal, but I’ve felt that too. I couldn’t imagine growing old. I couldn’t imagine much of anything far into the future. My early thirties were the first time I had the “well, shit, here I am. Now what?” moment.

He describes how the recent injuries to his body and the persistent administrative threats here in the U.S. made him doubt his ability to keep going. And then something shifted:

I decided to stay. To make a conscious choice to stay. In my house. In my town. In my life. For the first time in my adult life, I’m putting down roots intentionally, based on what I want. I’m making my home feel like my home, our home, my daughter and me.

I relate. Nyle and I are both divorced trans dads, in our mid 40s, with daughters turning ten this year. We’ve never met, but have quite a lot in common—not just three-fourths of our handpicked names. (Our daughters’ names are also uncannily close!) We’re living parallel lives, in different parts of the country, choosing to live.

But, Connecticut?! Of all places? This Southern boy always projected his heart (and body) into San Francisco. Twelve years, countless Broadway shows, and a Mamdani vote later—I’ve become a proud New Yorker. I don’t even know what you call someone from Connecticut. My real estate agent kept referring to herself as a Yankee. I couldn’t bear to tell her that the word still rings in my ear like a slur. I googled the answer: Nutmegger?! Now that’s some defamation.

I feel at peace when I wake up in my new house. It’s spacious, not yet weighed down with material objects and compromises. Every moment there feels like opportunity. And it’s quiet, except when I’m playing showtunes as loud as the hell I want. I spend evenings there imagining how much more I will love it when it looks more like me. Benjamin Moore describes Powder Buff as a “sweet shade that glimmers with a slight orange undertone.” I’m here to report that it is an offensive beige at every time of day.

I’m enjoying watching the season change outside every window. There are trees! Trees in every direction that recently gifted their leaves and needles to feed the soil. Woods now barren, I can see farther into the distance. There is so much sky. Last week there were flurries and I woke up to snow dusting the backyard. I’m reconsidering my choice not to park in the garage.

The house is in a small town, anchored by a single coffee shop with five tables, four counter seats, and made-to-order pancakes on Saturdays, cinnamon rolls on Sundays. The kind of place where you are greeted by name when you open the door and people introduce themselves if they don’t recognize you. It reminds me of the best parts of living in the South. I already feel like home.

I’m planting seeds and painting walls in this new house all while continuing to raise my kid primarily in Brooklyn. It makes for a lot of time in the car, but even just one night replenishes my battery. Then, a few hours on the road, and I’m all the more grateful when I return to this city I love so dearly and step inside this old rent controlled apartment that made my new dream come true.

Gearing up to drive back to Brooklyn Saturday morning, I opened my phone and pressed play on my podcast queue. Up popped The Daily:

My name is [BLEEP]:. I live in Tennessee. I’ve got four kids. And my wife and I decided a few months ago that we needed to pack up and move. We actually feel like asylum seekers in our own country. Our hope is that in Connecticut, the powers that be will be able to protect us.

We’re leaving all our friends behind. We’ve been here for 13 years. All our family lives in the South. We’ll be 1,000 miles away. I don’t know. The whole thing is heartbreaking. My wife cried a bunch this morning because we’re going to do a big farewell party this afternoon, and do a little country boil, and say our goodbyes.

All the best.

Connecticut?

The voice memo ends, and NYT’s Natalie Kitroeff introduces the episode, "Parenting a Trans Kid in Trump’s America":

Since coming into office, President Trump has thrown the full weight of the federal government behind denying the very idea of transgender identity and pushing to prevent trans minors from getting gender affirming medical treatments. In the middle of all that, are families scrambling to figure out how to best support their children without becoming targets of the government. Today, we talk to one of those families.

What follows is a deeply-reported, 47-minute portrait of a family doing everything they possibly can to provide a nurturing community and affirming healthcare for their trans daughter. After Tennessee passed the ban in 2023 the family was forced to cross borders to access care. I cried listening to the father describe how he felt driving over eight hours to see a doctor.

So I drove Allie up for her first appointment at the clinic at UVA. We stayed overnight at a hotel, got up early, went there. She was excited. I honestly was excited to be able to — it felt like I was being a good dad.

It was like, it just felt right. It’s like, I’m doing right by my child. That’s what I was feeling.

Yeah, I was proud.

But these extraordinary commutes weren’t enough. Even in states without bans, clinics close and refuse care out of fear of increasingly aggressive administrative action. Meanwhile the social climate had become so toxic, the parents fear for their daughter’s safety in Tennessee. The family begins looking elsewhere, searching for a place of refuge, where all of their children can be safe to keep growing.

New York? Too expensive. They hear of a welcoming school in Connecticut, where other families have settled.

Yeah. And we weren’t this anomaly. There was actually a community. And so then, to have people that understand, and to meet other parents that have moved across the country — there’s lots of us. We’re at this thing, and they introduce us to at least three other parents who had moved from the South to Connecticut. And all of a sudden — and you’re like, OK, we’re not alone. And for me, that’s — yeah, that pretty much locked it up for us that this was where we needed to be.

The story warms my heart. And it also feels like a warning. My new sanctuary state is not mine alone. I spent the next hour of my drive dictating voice memos to anyone I know with a connection to the Nutmeg state. Sanctuaries require strong foundations and reinforcements.

A glittering, gorgeous group of friends and family gathered at the legendary Riverside Church in Harlem Saturday afternoon to honor trans activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy who passed away in October. She was 78. An epic setting for a larger-than-life woman.

On Trans Day of Remembrance, I pulled Miss Major Speaks off the shelf and flipped through the included photo insert with my daughter. We lingered on the last photo of Miss Major reclining alongside her partner and their newborn son. “This is your mom’s college friend, Beck and their kid.” My daughter looked closely. “It’s so sad this boy lost his mother.” Yes. Lots of people lost their mother.

My daughter perked up at the idea of attending the memorial. “I’m kind of excited, this will be my first.” A few days later, she got all dressed up in a white dress, black sweater, and black converse. She fit right in and sat in the pew rapt listening to the eulogies.

Speaker after speaker stood at the pulpit thanking Miss Major for saving their life. For surviving Stonewall. For surviving prison. For starting Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project. For “telling it like it fuckin’ is.” For living.

Miss Major spent the last decade of her life in Little Rock, Arkansas building her own sanctuary, The House of gg aka the Griffin-Gracy Historical Retreat and Educational Center "so that “trans folks would know they have a place, a lineage, and a family to land in.” There, she welcomed trans activists from across the country to The Oasis, a four bedroom retreat center with a pool, screened-in porch, pergolas, wisteria, oak trees, double ovens, and a “yellow bricked road” to follow around while they “recharge for the ongoing fight for their lives.”

About halfway through the celebration, stood up and read a powerful eulogy that began sitting bedside with Miss Major last month:

… even in hospice care, she was reminding us of our power. Still showing us how to lead with grace, even in the midst of a mess of a thing. Miss Major had a gift that can’t be taught. She listened to voices that others couldn’t hear.

That calling that brought her from San Francisco to Little Rock. The one that continues to be filled with harsh conditions, that was prophecy. She went where she was needed most, following divine guidance. She told me, maybe a decade ago, that it was a voice in her head that led her to Little Rock and she trusted it completely.

She modeled it for all of us what it means to follow you intuition, your inner guidance, which is also your inner power. Even when the world calls you crazy for it.

We love our mad queens here.

I kept looking over at my daughter, seeing the celebration through her big eyes. What a gift to sit here, with her mother and brother between us, honoring Miss Major together. I feel like I’m doing right by my child.

xx Kyle

Subscribe now

Keep Going…

• Donate to Trans Youth Emergency Project which helps families navigate accessing care.

• Watch the Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, A Life Celebration livestream.

• Watch the award-winning 2016 MAJOR! documentary. (Avail on Amazon, but buying on Vimeo gets more money to filmmakers.)

• Read Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary (Verso, 2023) created with writer Toshio Meronek.

• Read NYT’s obit: Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Trans Activist Who Saw It All, Dies

• Listen to one of Miss Major’s last public interviews with Raquel Willis on her AfterLives podcast.

• Listen to Miss Major on LGBTQ&A with host (2021.)

📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ Being Alive Book Club

Thanks to all who came out last week to talk Crawl with author . We had a grand gay time talking about his love-lettter-to-the-editor to queer 2010s Seattle.

We’re gathering next on Monday, December 15th at 5:00p PT / 8:00p ET for a holiday hang & book rec swap. Grab your holiday sweaters, a cozy beverage, and your favorite books from 2025.

RSVP to BABC Holiday Hang Mon Dec 15

📌 Community Bulletin Board

The inimitable Ann Friedman and Jade Chang are hosting PEN TO POWER: A Co-Writing Fundraiser on Tues Dec 2nd at 5:00p PT / 8:00p ET. I’ll be there along with the featured guest writers Justinian Huang and Thomas Page McBee. Thomas’ two award-winning memoirs Man Alive and Amateur are part of A Transmasc Library list. (I highly rec both!)

The event is raising money for mutual aid groups in cities occupied by ICE. You can choose from their suggestions or pick a group in your community. I donated to Another World, “a community space for social change where neighbors in central Brooklyn can come together to solve shared problems.”

PEN TO POWER on Dec 2

▶️ Press Play

Be still my heart.

Ideally, watch Come See Me in the Good Light with someone you love. Even if they’re on FaceTime. ❤️❤️

I’m feeling especially tender going into this holiday season as it marks the ten year anniversary since my Dad passed. We all knew it would be his last and tried to keep a sense of humor despite.

Anyone who has dealt with a treatment rollercoaster will relate to the film’s sensuous portrait of Andrea Gibson and her partner Megan Falley holding on while Cancer took them for the ride of a life. One’s life inevitably gets a little bit smaller, the days and weeks fall into a maddeningly predictable rhythm. And yet, if you’re lucky, you eke out laughs and joy along the way.

I was already a big fan of Director Ryan White’s work (see Pamela: A Love Story, The Case Against 8, many others)—his curious, tender, elegant eye is evident in every frame of this documentary. Streaming now on Apple TV.

Max Delsohn’s stories in Crawl are full of transmasc narrators that pull at your heart and friends/lovers/bosses/passerbys that frustrate even as they delight. That would be enough! But, the words. My god, the sentences. Tightly wound, they pack a meaningful punch and have you humming along.

See this description of Denny-Blaine, a queer “beach” spot in Seattle:

Here you were bound to see someone you’d fucked, someone you’d fucked had fucked, someone you thought you could love or someone you fucking hated.

Or, after witnessing a lawn exercise involving giant plastic human-sized hamster balls:

The whole think reeked of team-building.

Every single story in this collection hooks a reader from the jump. I’m reminded of another, more notorious Max, who rose to fame and fortune peddling his art of the pick-up line. They both invite you to bull up a bar stool, except this Max (my preferred model,) uses his verbal superpower to celebrate the human experience, not exploit it.

A handful of ’s great openers:

Crawl

There in the bright, near-empty sports bar, Jack decided that this would be the year he loved men.

All Time Low:

I dated a straight girl. Just once.

The Bubble

On the first sunny day of the season, the city of Seattle went to Cal Anderson Park. It wore shorts, tank tops, bikinis, flip-flops, sun hats, and cutoff overalls; it lounged on beach towels, jumped for Frisbees, clustered under red maples, crouched to pet French bulldogs slobbering exuberantly. It shouted and smiled with alien urgency, and every breath it took seemed to crackle with potential. On the first sunny day of the season, the city of Seattle remembered it was alive.

The Machine

On Friday as always I built the damn machine.

Moon over Denny-Blaine

People called it a beach, but it wasn’t. People called it paradise, but baby, it wasn’t. It was a public park shoved against a lake.

Max Delsohn joins the Being Alive Book Club tomorrow, Monday Nov 17th on Zoom at 8p ET / 5p PT. All are welcome, RSVP for the link.

Purchase "Crawl"

Trying a new thing! Going to pick a name from the book club hat tomorrow night live. Want a chance to win this signed copy of Crawl? Drop a comment over in the chat.

Press Play

• Dr. Tressie McMilian Cottom talks with Glennon, Abby, and Amanda on We Can Do Hard Things. “Desire and creativity really resists power…” — TMC

• James Baldwin’s Biographer Nicholas Boggs on the meaning of love. (NYT Book Review podcast)

The Being Alive Book Club is an open invitation to read trans authors.

BABC is open to ALL— there are many ways to participate, none of which absolutely require reading the (entire) book. We do, though, highly endorse the reading. More questions? New here? Check out the Being Alive Book Club FAQ!