If You're Nice About It, Call Me Allison

  "Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there, I did not die." -Clare Harner Imagine that for as long as you can remember, you’ve been asked to stand in a field and hold a balloon. You do not understand why this field or this balloon or the particular importance of why you need to do this. But everyone tells you that you do. It’s the only way you can get approval.  And so you do it to please. Everyone seems happy about this but you. You notice the sun has emerged from the clouds to bake your face. It’s making you uncomfortable. You want to go inside and drink a Pepsi, not caring what happens to the balloon. But you’ve been told that the sun is God and it will be furious with you if you let go of the balloon. You don’t want to make God angry. So you hold on tight.   I’m 5. Perhaps 6 or 7 but let’s just go with 5. One of my earliest memories is of my friend Sue. Sue had long, strawberry blonde hair that fascinated me. Indelible in my memory is a day in class when I ob...

  But it was never supposed to be for you It was supposed to be for someone not you Who had shown me scorn Who had not taken me when I was wandering Who had not loved me when I stumbled I don't want to break YOUR hearts Narratives don't fit I refuse ours to be one of hate But now I have to be me And I want that to be in service to you And I know that's not what you want I just didn't want it to be this hard And so for my last performance I bare in pain the man you loved The man I cannot be anymore I witness to my love for you And take my leave And when you hear the truth You will likely grieve that man You need not look further than the steps to your altar For he was not there Except for my heart Which always defaults to love It is grievous that God wrote love in the cosmos And humans rewrote it with hate We meet some day at the foot of the Cross Because love wins out Remember how I told you that story? Old and familiar but still comforting I hope I told it well

" Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being... Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is simply what man decrees...She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential a opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other."   Simone de Beauvoir "Jesus healed these women  as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out." -Luke 8:2 I was in my early-20s when I began to confront the reality of systemic racism and my role in it, a confrontation that will continue either until systemic racism ends or I die. Like a lot of white people faced with the truth of how the world works, I cycled through familiar stages: denial ( I have Black friends! I'v...

Some of them say that we're sick, or crazy, and some of them think that we're the most gorgeous special things on earth.   -Venus Xtravaganza Then saith Jesus to the disciple: Behold thy mother! -John 19:27 ​I found Venus Xtravaganza’s grave thanks to the Catholic Church. And like the Catholic Church, their help came in the most Catholic Church way possible: play-for-pain.  It was Good Friday. My service on one side of the Hudson had let out, but I had to get to Jersey to pick up my family from the airport. So I decided to make a stop on the way.  Jesus died at 3 o’clock. I was in my car by 3:10.  ——— I have a strong relationship to historical spaces and not just like a Civil War battlefield or Grant’s Tomb. If you tell me something amazing happened on an exact spot, I don’t care what’s there now, I have to see it. I don't care if, like the building where Chester Arthur got sworn in, it's now a grocery store.  My favorite memory from visiting London many moons a...

  June 22nd, 2025. The day before I turned 40. My wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I said I wanted her to take the kids to the movies so I could eat and drink alone at my friend's bar. Wish granted, I housed a plate of wings, had a burger, multiple gin and tonics and decided I would transition.  No, it wasn't the alcohol talking. For weeks, I'd known that I was ready to do it after years of making excuses, a full year after blurting out loud to my therapist I want to love women as a woman  and allowing myself to wonder how nice that would be. I look forward to one day sharing a very dysphoric photo I took on 6/22/25 for the kind of before/after-HRT collage trans people are so fond of posting.  There was one problem with finally coming to terms with my gender: I wouldn't be able to do anything about it for two weeks. I had to accompany my family on a cruise, a summer routine that allows my wife and I some downtime from the kids. I figured being trapped on ...