Love, language and cigarettes
Off the Beat
Platonic love is a slow, sustained burn with bright flashes of color, like throwing salts into a fire. By necessity or otherwise, I think queer people have always known this
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Dating the enemy
Off the Beat
A bad EDM remix was blaring over the speakers, the alcohol was nonexistent and still, my head was already pounding by the time he looked at me from across the dance floor. That’s where I met him, in a sweaty jumble of bodies. He was cute in a blonde-suburban-white-boy-next-door kind
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Annals of Beauty
Miss Communication
There is an inconspicuous clinic on an unremarkable street lined with tall oak trees in which I spent the better part of an afternoon against my own good judgment and the advice of my close friends. I sat in a sterile waiting room — the walls were cream, the smell
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Low-hanging fruit
Miss Communication
You can find Lolito alone at the bar, propped up against the record machine or looking demure in a dimly lit corner. He’s dark, sultry, devilish. I like to think he has dark hair and darker eyes, that he grows facial hair well but always keeps a close shave. He
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Economy of likes
Miss Communication
“Can I include you in a piece I’m writing about influencers?” “But I’m not an influencer.” John says this a lot. I think what he means is that he isn’t a typical influencer. He doesn’t take the same canned photo in the same strained pose in the same basic outfit
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Saying the words
Miss Communication
I know from a small handful of experiences that when you meet someone famous in person, they’re usually shorter than you expect. Raymond Braun is only sort of famous and only sort of tall, but he stood a couple of inches above me, so his height surprised me. I interviewed
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Social media hits the fan
Miss Communication
In 2011, seven years after Mark Zuckerberg sat in a Harvard dorm room and birthed a monstrosity, I made my Facebook profile. For someone born in the very last years of the 20th century, that was considered late. I sat at a school computer, a black, bulky Windows desktop. Of
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Mom’s rules for the internet
Miss Communication
It was a 20-minute drive from my childhood home in San Diego to my middle school one town over. Twenty minutes that my mom never failed to capitalize on. It was the time for her proverbial lectures on the dangers of the world. I was her captive audience, and our
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Chumming the water
Miss Communication
At 10 p.m., sitting in one of four mustard-yellow lounge chairs in my living room, I open Grindr. A little green circle pops up at the bottom corner of my profile, indicating that I am online. I had released the bait, chummed the waters, so to speak, and patiently waited
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The 5 stages of ghosting
Miss Communication
“What’re you up to tonight?” I said nothing. The next day, my phone illuminated with another text: “How’s it going?” He was brief and unassuming, but again, I said nothing. A couple of hours later, “How about a drink tonight?” I quickly dismiss the notification as if doing so made
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