I was seventeen years old the second time someone pointed a loaded gun at my face. Of course, it was the police, of course I hadn’t broken any laws or even committed a misdemeanor, of course it was because my skin is black. Of course, it was because I was…

I don’t remember when I started viewing my body as an enemy, but it was pretty early on. I resented my body because it stood in the way of my happiness. It felt wrong. It was not fast enough or strong enough or coordinated enough for me to have the…

When I was about 12 years old, I got caught masturbating. It was, it seemed, the final straw in a long line of behaviors tied to my budding sexuality that the people who were raising me found troubling. A few weeks earlier I had been caught trying on women’s clothes. …

Part Four of a Four-Part Series on Beauty — The way I love cherry blossoms has always, to me, felt kind of weird. More than just being unmanly, I’ve been concerned by how basic it is to love these trees that bloom every spring in DC and to which so many people come to visit that they have to…

Part Three of a Four-Part Series on Beauty — As we walked we noticed a rustling in the bush and I remembered that it was early spring, a time that is supposed to be related to resurrection. We don’t do resurrection back in California because nothing ever dies there and time is not a circle. There it is more…

Part Two of a Four-Part Series on Beauty — We continued to walk. I want to say it was unseasonably cold, but what are seasons now anyway, other than a memory of a time in which we thought the world would move according to our expectations? Yesterday, there had been hail. Now tiny flecks of snow danced in the…