identity

[W]hen tickets went on sale for a DIY punk music festival that my wife had attended several times before we were married, and she lamented that there was “just no way” that she’d be able to go, a light bulb went off in my head. “What if we just all went together?” I said.

If I get into a heterosexual relationship and spend the rest of my life with that person, I will still be bisexual. I will still feel that attraction to the man on the other side of the bar, even if I’m in love with my partner who happens to be a woman.

If I get into a heterosexual relationship and spend the rest of my life with that person, I will still be bisexual. I will still feel that attraction to the man on the other side of the bar, even if I’m in love with my partner who happens to be a woman.

Even a Google search will conflate “queer women” with “lesbian.” So the first and most obvious thing I wish people understood about being a queer woman, is that we exist.

I vividly recall standing in front of the bathroom mirror looking at myself as I’d done countless times as a childless person. As myself. As the woman I’d always been until days before. It was like stumbling upon an identical twin I never knew I had — the same, so well-known, yet so alien and unfamiliar.

The bottom line is, I never made it to Harvard. I no longer own that stupid expensive car. What goes up must come down.

This film had the power to help me process my own childhood as a second-generation Japanese American.

Toni talks to us about queerness, games, the meaning of safe space . . . and, of course, bears.