The queerness of rediscovering the trumpet in middle-age

My connection to my former selves is sometimes so tenuous that I feel compelled to reach across the years. I inspect old photos and journals, and even conduct tests, eager to discover if the me that I seem to be now can still do what previous versions of me learned to do. As a youngster, […]

When the MAGA fashion police decide you’re a faggot

I was walking across a Menard’s parking lot a couple of months before the 2016 election when a car swerved toward me as if to run me down. It was a fortyish white guy in a white Buick with a red Trump bumper sticker. He got so close I could see the McDonald’s cup in […]

Queer style and aesthetic mindfulness: Breaking the habit of being ourselves

When I was a kid, Alvin was a dog in my neighborhood with an underbite and a pushed-in snout. Mostly soft gray, but with wiry patches of whisker-like black fur sprouting up here and there, everyone agreed that this dog was ugly. Everyone, that is, except Alvin, who wandered from house to house with the […]

Beyond “sugar and spice”: The queer side of niche perfume

The world of perfume exhibits some of the most regressive and progressive tendencies when it comes to gender. On the one hand, mainstream designer offerings are typically rigidly segregated by gender with “women’s releases” constituting a vomitus of pink fruity florals in shapely bottles and men’s offerings focused on synthetic woods, ambers and leathers in […]

Queer eye on Father’s Day: Masculinity and subversive gay style

The Avon bottle looked like a stagecoach and sat precarious and dusty on the spindly metal shelving in the single bathroom shared by my family in the 70s. The beer-bottle brown angular container wasn’t easily identifiable as a stagecoach. It was so abstracted or, perhaps, so poorly designed, so that I couldn’t easily associate it […]

Gender-bending fragrance choices: The courage to be queerly perfumed

Many outspoken male fragrance enthusiasts share childhood memories of being captivated by their mothers’ perfume. It’s such an iconic moment among non-gender conforming male perfume connoisseurs that it deserves its own film sequence: the mother sweeping up her little boy in a cloud of No. 19, Diorella, Chloe, or Halston. And then his secret missions […]