“Through my chalk drawing, I wanted to engage with the concept of fluidity and a flexible present. What if the priority was not permanence, but the process?”
My sister started her coming-out process in eighth grade. My brother and I were in seventh. She entered her final year of middle school feeling alienated and afraid, so when the girl next to her in homeroom showed up with a print-out of Sid Vicious taped to her binder, Steph seized the opportunity to make a friend. Her name was Anna. She was thirteen, wore rainbow-banded tights and sometimes smelled like cigarettes. Her screen name was “kind-o-kinky.” She was the first bisexual any of us had ever known.
“You look Right into the mirror and recognize what you’d drawn, part by part. Then you blink and completely forget what you’d seen, where you’d been –– or rather, you can’t really tell whether you had ever seen anything in the first place.”
When I googled the meaning of my last name, I felt the same way I felt while visiting the museum at Gettysburg when a docent urged me to search the database and see if my ancestors had been involved in the battle.
Recently, a friend was telling me how a certain musical artist had entranced him with her talent—until he found out she was very religious and thanks God for her success. My friend considers himself liberal and advocates for the rights of women, racial minorities, and the LGBT community—yet, for him, religion elicits a “bad taste in [his] mouth.”
My senior year of high school I began working for my mother’s gynecologist. A couple times a week, I would take the 4 or 5 train from my school in Brooklyn Heights to the Upper East Side.