08.Sep.25

Today I went outside and it totally paid off.

Okay, so, imagine you're me. You're one week into a two-week hell where you're working your job and an internship, both of which you're going full-force at (I'm getting emplyee of the month or so help me god). Today is my only day off for, like, a while - yay! So i spend all my morning lazing around, then clean a bit, and find an old issue of Dyke News Scottland.

I will look at it later, I say, thinking nothing of it.

And so I venture off into the world and head into a bookshop. I browse. In the arts section, I find her - Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front, by JEB. I leaf through it, and suddenly I cannot part with her (she is a her now). I buy it, and it doesn't feel like an empty purchase.

I wander, I read, I sit in places. I look up Dyke News Scotland, because that book really did shake me, and the power of talking to people and being there for them has gotten to me. I head into a bookshop that should have the new issue in stock.

Disaster strikes: they've run out. The lesbians in this city are voracious and our depraved little fingers ache for that peper-flesh.

But in the zine section, I discover there is more. Modern Queers has been running for five years, and after announcing they'll be shutting down after the next issue (BOO RUDE. I just found you, man), they tell me (me, specifically) that anyone can make their own newsletter, and that they encourage us to.

See, I like getting involved. And I like making stuff even more. I like people and what we have to give, and that so much of what makes life interesting is that we can gather all these things people have to say, and keep them, and share them, too

I want to take pictures of my friends, old and new. I want to pick a strand and pull at it, follow it wherever it leads. I want to write, but I also want to read, and the magical science of printing something and leaving it where people might find it is the most beautiful thing I can imagine.

I often become frustrated by how convoluted we can get sometimes, how many complicated words we use and how much we intellectualize what can actually be quite simple: we should talk to people when we find them, and treat them kindly always. That's all that has to be said, I think. And if there's an entire world of people reaching out to each other, typing up their weirdest dreams and terrible dates and all the sex they wish they were having, then I want to be part of it. Really, really badly.