Queer validation and a bit on activism, again

Hello from a 31-year-old Karis 🎈

As you may know if you have followed me on socials for more than 30 seconds, I had a birthday recently: on Friday, I officially graduated into my “early 30s” as opposed to just “30.” Wild. It’s wild. I can’t wrap my mind around being that age, partly because I’m just a 17-year-old girl at heart, and partly because I just genuinely never thought I’d hit my 30s. This is not a reality I have imagined, so I’m deeply unprepared for whatever is to come this decade.

My birthday was okay. The day portion of it was a letdown, and I spent much of the day PMSing and moaning and groaning about how depressed I was. I isolated myself and hated the experience. In the evening, though, I trekked out to Manhattan and got dinner at a fancy restaurant (and then at Applebee’s) with some of my favorite NYC people, and that put a beautiful, joyou shine over the whole day. So I had a birthday. It was okay. I loved and hated it in equal measure. I suppose that’s just the way it is sometimes.

From the heart 💗

I got a really special early birthday gift this week. Technically, I got it on May 3rd, but I got it confirmed this week, and had the chance to share about it with social media on Tuesday, and it felt like a beautiful way to spend my birth week.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was waitlisted for the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. At the time, I was doing everything I could to be okay with the prospect of not getting in, including convincing myself that I didn’t want to go anyway, since the retreat would be virtual.

The moment I got the email saying I was in, though? I knew I’d been lying to myself. I would do whatever it took to go to this retreat, including fundraising1 through Lambda’s platform and taking up a friend on the offer to crash in her spare room for the duration of the retreat. I felt myself soaring.

It’s not just the validation of being seen and accepted as a writer that gets to me. It’s being seen and validated as a queer person that really means the world to me. The thing is, I’ve only been out — even to myself — for about three years. That’s barely one-tenth of my life. For the first 28 years I was alive, I was convinced I was straight. First I was homophobic, then I became an ally, then a really really invested ally, and then I realized that the queer call was coming from inside the house.

But I doubt myself all the time.

When I was paired with a queer advisor in my third semester at VCFA to work on my critical thesis about pride, I immediately felt a stab of fear — what if I was exposed as a fraud? I didn’t think I was a fraud, but what if I was?

When I got up in front of my school community in January to deliver my lecture on pride and spoke candidly about my own experience, I caught myself wondering if I was lying to everyone, including myself.

When I think about the book that got me my agent, a book so queer that one of my favorite things about it is how it’s full of “surprise gays” and it’s an unabashed love story between two girls who are so fucking proud of who they are…I wonder if I have a right to tell that story, because I’ve never had a queer romance of my own.

Ding ding ding we have a winner.

So much of my self-consciousness stems from my dearth of queer romantic relationships2. It comes from the fact that I have no way to point and “prove” that I’m queer. I know I am, in my soul, but there’s so much biphobia and bi-erasure around, from the queer community and the homophobic community alike, that I feel this intense need to have something I can point to and be like: yes, I’ve been with a woman! I count!

Which is really fucked up when you think about it. It’s my internalized biphobia for sure, but knowing the source doesn’t help me get rid of it. The only thing that will help me get rid of it is just accepting myself for who I am: a woman who is attracted to people of many genders and hasn’t had the chance to have a romance with anyone yet.

Another thing that helps? Getting into Lambda. Getting accepted to this retreat made me feel so seen, and it was really validating to think that the application readers and the retreat faculty for YA read not just my writing sample but also my artist statement and saw to the heart of who I am.

The reason I want to go to Lambda is the same reason I want to publish my queer YA books, ultimately: because I want teens at all stages of closetedness to see themselves, to recognize themselves, to know that they are beautiful, perfect, accepted, whole, just the way they are. To know that there is nothing wrong with who they are, who they’re attracted to, whom they love. To know that there are others out there who have experiences like theirs3 and who survive. To know that survival, that thriving, are options.

So I got into Lambda. I’m over the moon to join this community, to learn from my fellow attendees and the faculty, to meet other artists in different disciplines and share with them and hear their stories. I’m delighted to get to workshop a piece of my own, to strengthen my writing and think more deeply and critically about how I portray queerness in my fiction and celebrate the beauty that is being artists who are queer. I cannot freaking wait.

From the camera roll 📸

From the page ✍️

It’s taken me three weeks to get to this section to talk about why I believe writers should be activists, and I’m still not sure I know the best way to say what’s on my heart. I’m not sure I’ll be able to communicate it propertly and clearly, but I’m going to try, because I think it’s really important.

Listen, I don’t want to overstate things, but I do believe it to be true that writers have a lot of power. Not so much institutional or financial power, but we do have power. Whether we’re writing investigative articles, fluffy love stories, or incisive personal essays, the words we put on the page have the ability to resonate far beyond us.

Writers have power because words have power; because stories have power. These are our tools, and we should be conscious as we wield them of their power.

Humans have been sharing stories for millennia, from the time we first woke up on Earth to today. We’ve shared stories orally, pictorially, in written form, in visual media. We share stories in the way our faces react to the world around us. We are hard-wired, I think, to resonate with each other through stories4.

Writing is a unique form of storytelling that takes advantage not just of our human desire to hear stories, but tells them using words, manipulating sentences and vocabulary to bend to our will. Two writers can share the same story of an argument; if you hear one’s version, the word choices they make will leave you supporting them, without realizing that there’s another version of the story where they’re the villain.

Writers have power. What are we doing with that power? Are we using it purely for entertainment? Most of us, whether consciously or unconsciously, are spreading messages through our stories. The choice an author might make to describe a villain as queer, disabled, or BIPOC, can influence the way we see the villain — and the way we see our queer, disabled, and BIPOC neighbors.

Whether we mean to or not; whether we recognize it or not, writers are doing activism with every story they tell. There’s a danger in not realizing this, because it means we may be unaware of the way our subconscious biases are coloring our writing.

So I argue that writers should be activists because, well, we already are. We are activating for a certain worldview, a certain way of inhabiting our skin, in every word we write, every story we tell. There’s no getting out of it. Even our silence is loud5.

So be conscientious, and conscious, of the activism you do. It’s unescapable, so be deliberate. I don’t believe there’s a way to create a story purely for entertainment. There is always a message, no matter how subtle. Is the message you’re sharing the one you want to share? Is it one you stand by? Is it one that will improve the world?

Stories have power; words have power; writers have power. Use it wisely.

Alla prossima 👋

The Gaza Evacuation Fund Book Auction is running for ~12 more hours today. Bid on a variety of bookish packages, and winners will donate the amount of their bid to fund an evacuation fundraiser for individuals and families trying to flee the Gaza Strip. Israel is continuing its genocide of Palestinians, corraling them to Rafah and then bombing Rafah. At this stage, our money can best be spent going directly to Palestinians to get them out, to save their lives.

It is heartbreaking that we’ve reached this point. That after 75+ years of oppression, Palestinians are forced to flee their ancestral homeland or be killed by a genocidal entity. I’m so. I have no words. Free Palestine. That is all.

Be good to each other. Love one another.

— Karis xoxo