Category Queer Issues

On the Matter of Crayons and Carp

A white-haired woman in a tan leather coat swims in an aquarium with a cobra-fish and a beaked swordtail.

Sometimes the safest place in the world is the one that should kill you. In the fishtank, where the rules say you aren’t supposed to breathe, she finds the only kind of silence that doesn’t eat her alive. There’s a dead goldfish to carry, tunnels that only run one way, and walls begging to be colored in before the filters scrub everything clean again. The farther she swims from the surface, the clearer it gets: somebody has to decide which deaths are accidents and which ones are crimes, and the water is not nearly as confused about it as the people on land.

Children of a Forgotten Tomorrow: Part 6

A young woman with a faint scar above her brow stands beside an old pickup truck loaded with boxes, a duffel bag, and a computer monitor. A teenage boy leans on the tailgate, smiling shyly as golden autumn light filters through the trees around a quiet suburban street.

In The Last Straw, hunger and circumstance drive Doc back to the house she fled, where old ghosts wait behind every doorframe. Her friendship with Bill, the only mind that ever matched her own, glows briefly and ends too soon in a crash that René witnesses from the wrong side of a body bag. Peachy drifts into borrowed identities, the town unravels, and Doc—scarred, exhausted, furious—watches it all from the eye of the storm. By the time she boards the westbound bus, she’s outgrown the gravity of the poisoned river and the broken pumps. She carries only the hum of memory and the strange mercy of surviving long enough to start over.

LGBTQ+ Privacy and Safety Tips

Pride month may be just behind us in the rearview mirror, but it seems like it’s still far too often that I hear from one of my friends about someone suffering abuse, scamming, or hate based violence. Below is a…