The Gender Identity Talk
The “parts” that are covered up by our underpants are private. It’s no one’s business to ask about them or talk about them. (That goes for the parents, too!) If someone tells you she is a girl, she’s...
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The Rumpus Interview with Ariel Schrag
About four years ago, I was giving instructions to a house sitter I’d lined up for the weekend when the sitter asked, “Where are you going?” I explained that I was going to be doing a reading with...
View ArticleMen With Women; Women With Men: Fight Club, 15 Years Later
While I know a lot of men from my generation who love Fight Club, it was always the girls with the posters featuring Brad Pitt, half-naked and bloody. The fights throughout the film are all vaguely...
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Aspects of Travel
carBecause we are humans we have created a room that will carry us across a distance. I begin in a car. A person maneuvers the room through the city of Providence carrying me, my bags, my clothes, and...
View ArticleRachel Dolezal: A Rumpus Roundup
Six months ago, Rachel Dolezal, an academic and the president-elect of NAACP Spokane chapter, wrote an op-ed piece piece describing the importance of the #BlackLivesMatter protest movement. On Monday,...
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Fresh Comics #4: Making Babies!
Aside from defecating or having sex, giving birth is one of the most common life experiences. Half of the world’s population is capable of doing it and every single one of us has been through it, even...
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: My Dream of Androgyny
The first time I saw Ty he was standing in my small apartment kitchen surrounded by women. It was the mid-1980s, and while the men and some of the other female members of the book club mingled in my...
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Regarding the Boy
The boy is from a drug town, a rust belt town. It’s a violent town. Sometimes this violence looks like cops parked in front of the boy’s high school, but more often means city blocks with more...
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(K)ink #9: Writing While Deviant: Jera Brown
There’s evidence that D.H. Lawrence enjoyed an erotic power exchange relationship with his wife, that James Joyce was into scat (among other things), and that Oscar Wilde—well, most of us know what...
View ArticleWhen Clothes Don’t Make The Man: What Suited Leaves Out
Jason Benjamin’s HBO documentary Suited, produced by HBO’s Girls co-creators Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, is an eye-opening journey into the niche subject of dressing for success when you’re a gender...
View ArticleMercury Plummeting
For the New York Times, Marisa Silver reviews Jenni Fagan’s new novel, The Sunlight Pilgrims, which takes place in a scarily plausible world in which ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and...
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Album of the Week: Arca by Arca
In 2012, after leaving their homeland Venezuela for New York City and then London, Alejandro Ghersi began playing music under the stage name of Arca. A former child star, Ghersi has collaborated with...
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Ready for Change: Discussing Sexual Assault with SafeBAE
SafeBAE was founded by three teenage survivors of sexual assault and cyberbullying, Daisy Coleman, Jada Smith, and Ella Fairon, along with Daisy’s older brother, Charlie Coleman, with the assistance of...
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Those Freemartin Girls
The first time I met my patronus, I was wearing full-body overalls, my arm still stinging from being wedged up another cow’s sphincter. She was a small yearling calf with a blue tag on her ear, and I...
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Just Doing It: A Conversation with Mallory Ortberg
Mallory Ortberg is one of the Internet’s more beloved voices. Ortberg began publishing at Gawker and The Hairpin, two now-defunct outlets known for championing writers new to the business of writing,...
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The Genius and the Nobody: Lynne Tillman’s Men and Apparitions
There are girl girls and boy girls and boy boys and girl boys, I once heard Eileen Myles tell Lynne Tillman. You, she said, are a masculine writer. (I’m paraphrasing.) The two of them were discussing...
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It’s A Boy!
They say my dad jumped up and down for joy on the day I was born, running the halls of the hospital yelling, “It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” I imagine him, curly black hair and Burt Reynolds mustache,...
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On Beloveds, Birds, and the Expansiveness of Space: Talking with Paige Lewis
When I first met Paige Lewis, they gave me a Pokémon card. Now forever armed with Machop, I keep him in my journal in case my writing muscles aren’t being properly flexed. Lewis running around with...
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Everyone You Meet Is God in Drag
Drag night with Patrick begins with cocktails and pop music, and the two of us dressing up to go nowhere. With Gaga blaring, we take out the makeup from our bags. Mine is a mess, but then again, so is...
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Queer Logic: Females and My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
In the tenth grade, emboldened by youth, I pinky-swore to the most popular girl in school that I was bisexual. I did it for the challenge, to see her uncomprehending look as she tried to reconcile that...
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