“The L Word” Breakups as Adele Songs

If The L Word’s multiple iterations have delivered anything, it is consistent relationship drama. And if there’s any artist aside from Taylor Swift who delivers delicious breakup albums in all shades of grey, it’s Adele.

This is not an exhaustive list by any stretch, so please include your faves in the comments!

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Bette/Tina, the original run: My Little Love (30)

I’d like to invite you to listen to “My Little Love” as them singing to baby Angie, explaining why they can’t be together.

I love your [mom] ’cause [she] gave you to me

Bette/Tina, Gen Q: Someone Like You (21)

“I will always love Tina.”

WE KNOW, BETTE. WE KNOW!

You know when Bette misses Tina in season two and finally realizes for real for real that she is never getting her back? What a moment, to see that kind of acceptance hit a character who so rarely accepts that anything is out of her control. (Please, let’s just pretend, for now, that the last ten minutes of the season didn’t happen.)

Dani/Sophie: Rumor Has It (21)

Because the narrator of “Rumor Has It” is obviously Finley. A missed opportunity for this to be the song that was sung at karaoke, but that would perhaps have been too cruel, even for The L Word writers.

Gigi/Nat: I Drink Wine (30)

This is some real grownup divorced woman shit. Some, goddamn we have loved so hard and yet.

You better believe I’m trying
To keep climbing
But the higher we climb
Feels like we’re both none the wiser

Helena/Dylan: Set Fire to the Rain (21)

When you find out that someone has been dating you to scam you out of your money or your pride or really anything, you should absolutely gain the magical power to destroy them. Tell me this isn’t exactly what happened with Helena and Dylan. Y’all, I’m still spittin’ mad the writers had them get back together in season six. MAKE ANYTHING FROM SEASON SIX MAKE SENSE.

‘Cause there’s a side to you
That I never knew, never knew
All the things you’d say
They were never true, never true
And the games you’d play
You would always win, always win

Shane/Quiara: a tie between Hello (25) and Can I Get It (30)

Hello, can you hear me?
I’m in California dreaming about who we used to be

Not to be toto literal, but this is Shane at the very start of Gen Q, where she would give anything to be by her wife’s side. To quote Melissa Febos’ forthcoming Body Work, Shane is also in a state where she is willing to sing any “beggin’ ass song” in order to win Quiara back, which is exactly what “Can I Get It” is:

I long to live under your spell
And without your love I’m hollow

Alice/Tasha: I’ll Be Waiting (21)

Among the many issues with Gen Q: Where the fuck is Tasha and what the fuck happened with her and Alice? Do tell. Those two had something real and significant and profound and the total dismissal of their relationship in season six of the original run and the absence of any mention of it in Gen Q is suspect. SUSPECT, especially given this show’s treatment of characters of color. So I’m just throwing this song choice out there in the hopes of an Alice/Tasha reunion.

Jenny/Tim: Chasing Pavements (19)

I maintain that his name is actually “the guy” because does he even deserve one, honestly? Point being. “Chasing Pavements” is a very, you’re a dyke getting out of an early relationship with a guy and coming out to yourself and holy shit, wow you are really gonna turn your life upside down and do this? kinda song.

Also could be called “Chasing Straightness.”

Shane/Carmen: Rolling in the Deep (21)

Y’all, I don’t even know if I can write about these two, I’m still so upset about what happened. Shane has arguably had the most character growth between the original show and Gen Q, which is great, but good goddamn if Carmen’s joy and probably several years of her life were not sacrificed on the spit for that to happen. It’s further compounded by the fact that Carmen is a femme Latina, and Shane is very, very white (important to remember: Sarah Shahi, who played Carmen, is not Latina, but Iranian and part Spanish, as was covered by Yvonne during the show’s run). Emotionally available femme // emotionally unavailable fuckboi butchish person is a trope both on television and in real life that is deeply exhausting.

So anyway obviously I sympathize with Carmen on this one, because yes, they could have had it all.

Bette/Jodi: Send My Love to Your New Lover (25)

You told me you were ready
For the big one, for the big jump

These two remain one of my all-time favorite couples on the show, in spite of Bette’s fuckery. Jodi, played by the ever-brilliant Marlee Matlin, was a fucking badass artist with her own queer community who brooked sub-zero levels of bullshit. For once, Bette was evenly matched with someone with her own professional power who did not tolerate her antics. God, Jodi was such a force, a much-needed adult corrective to the high school levels of drama to which the writer’s room too often descended. But then Bette Betted and cheated on Jodi… with her ex-wife Tina. Lest we have too much maturity on this show at any one time.

We’ve gotta let go of all of our ghosts
We both know we ain’t kids no more

Alice/Dana: One and Only (21)

Not a breakup, but the most devastating end to a relationship in the show’s history, and it’s not a contest. In the immortal words of Westley, “Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”

Or, as Adele sings,

Come on and give me the chance
To prove that I am the one who can, walk that mile
Until the end starts

9 Witchy Alternatives to Traditional Holiday Movies

Holiday movies — which is basically to say, Christmas movies — almost uniformly traffic in the values of white heteronormativity predicated on nostalgia for nuclear families and, inexplicably, romance. Unclear how “romance” and “meeting the parents” go together, but last year’s fucking frightful Happiest Season is a demonstration of what it looks like when you try to slap LGBTQ+ characters onto an incredibly straight genre. Horror show. (Yes, I know it was based on Clea DuVal’s real life experience. Like I said!)

For me, an ideal December release would be a queer/wlw, distinctly witchy romantic comedy set around Yule. Glinda the Good Witch falls for the Wicked Witch of the West type shit without the dramatic monkeys, you know? But that film hasn’t been made, and I sincerely love to avoid overtly hetero, Christian-inflected or otherwise Christmas-themed movies at this time of year, so I tend to go for more witchy, fantastical, and otherwise supernatural fare around this time of year. If you’re similarly inclined, here are some alternatives to watch with your chosen fam, roommates, or simply on your own with a healthy pour of your favorite beverage.

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Brandy’s Cinderella

Fairy tales are perfect holiday fare. Personally, I make a point to watch such films on Yule — particularly ones that feel magical, hopeful, and the best kind of nostalgic, the kind of story that lets me refract my childhood hopes, so formed by conservative Christianity, through a distinctly pagan adult queer lens. I grew up on Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella; the 1997 version starring Brandy and Whitney Houston, which came out when I was 10 years old, was one story that helped me change how I understood myself. (It’s possible!)

We deserve that sense of possibility that Whitney sings about, and we deserve to keep the stories of our childhoods that helped us first imagine them.

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A Christmas Carol

Yes, I am including one actual bona fide Christmas movie. But listen. Ghost visitations and subsequent prophetic visions on Christmas Eve prompts a spontaneous life crisis (that does not result in marriage)? Honestly sounds like an extremely witchy and queer holiday breakdown! Also I remain obsessed with the question of who cast the spell to summon Scrooge’s ghosts. Please put all applicable fanfic recs in the comments.

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Practical Magic

Any movie in which sisters reunite to kill bad boyfriends feels like Christmas to me, okay? Also, it’s about a family curse, and what holiday is that not appropriate for, I ask you!

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The Wiz

Ease on down the road with the 1978 cult classic, which reimagines the Wizard of Oz with an all-Black cast in an Oz that is, in fact, a fantastical New York City. The original cast is legendary: Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, Lena Horne. Or try the 2015 made-for-TV special, which sets the story in the more traditional Oz setting and stars folks like Uzo Aduba, Mary J. Blige, Amber Riley, and queer icon Queen Latifah as The Wiz. Give me gender-swapped wizards all day every day. As in all Oz stories, the themes of friendship, trust, and found family are strong.

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A Wrinkle in Time

If you want some time-bending sci-fi, stunning visuals, and a compelling story of a daughter trying to save her father, look no further. Hits the nostalgia button hard as we root for the brilliant heroine so many of us loved as kids and fall for a triad of fairy godmother-type figures who are… less “good” than they are “oh you didn’t die, cool cool cool” chaotic neutral.

This one features timeless themes around finding yourself as well as some more traditional family storylines, but without the religious or holiday stuffing you may be surrounded by this month — if you need a movie to recommend to the folks you’re stuck in a house with.

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Hocus Pocus

Travel to Salem. Light the virgin candle. Protect your little sister like the cat-boy couldn’t! Sing along to “I Put a Spell On You”! Ugh, a classic. Technically a holiday movie, just not this one.

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Coco

Also an out-of-season holiday movie, in that it takes place on the Mexican Día de los Muertos — and so we travel to the realm of the dead following one little boy’s journey to receive his family’s blessing for the career path he wants to pursue, which goes against every living family member’s wishes. This one is all about memory and connection and legacy and healing ruptures in the natal family, which means you might want to have a therapy session booked for soon after. What do we pass down to each other? How is trauma inherited? This visually, musically stunning film tackles some enormous questions which, honestly, get me in the gut every time. If you would like a cathartic cry, I heartily recommend it.

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Into the Woods

By which I mean, a recorded video of the original Broadway cast that’s on YouTube with Bernadette and Joanna Gleason, not the 2014 film with that awful late night guy. Unless you’re with people who don’t do Broadway recordings. In which case, I understand and also, I’m sorry.

Good for both solo viewings and folks who are interested in introducing their loved ones to some truly exquisite satire and also tragedy. Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood! Careful the things you say, CHILDREN WILL LISTEN! (RIP Sondheim, we love you.)

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Anastasia

Feels Christmasy without being Christmasy, by virtue of being mostly set in Russia. (Lots of animated snow.) Iconic music, iconic voices (Meg Ryan, Angela Lansbury, Bernadette Peters). Also, the love interest Dimitri, voiced by John Cusack, is right up there with Leo’s Jack Dawson as a ‘90s queer butch icon; a not insignificant number of my exes look exactly like him and I’m not mad about it.

Thematically, this is all about feeling lost in the world without family only to learn that the family you were missing was the one you found along the way, because it turns out being a secret lost princess is overrated when you could be dancing on a boat with Leo. Dimitri. Whatever his name is. Also, she defeats the sorcerer who has killed off her entire family which means she is probably a witch. 10/10, v. gay.

Holigay Gift Guide: Picking the Perfect Lingerie for the Babe in Your Life

Lingerie! Underthings! We all wear them, or at least something resembling them, probably most of the time! You may be someone who wants to wear a lacy balconette bra or a binder, boxer briefs or a thong — or maybe some combination of all of the above, depending on the day! You may also be someone who has asked for one of these items as a holiday gift, or someone who is here for advice because your person (or one of your people, or someone you generally care about in a romantic or platonic or as-yet-undecided way) asked for one of these things!

Welcome, friend. I’m here to help. Why am I qualified to help you? For the last almost-four years, I owned and operated Bluestockings Boutique, a lingerie store geared to the LGBTQ+ community. I recently closed Bluestockings in order to focus on other endeavors, but I still want to help y’all out when it comes to lingerie and underthings – and that also means when it comes to shopping for other people.

Let’s be real: shopping for other people is already daunting. Shopping for lingerie and underthings? Holy motherfucker.

Here are some of the essentials to know when it comes to lingerie gift giving.

A Brief Note to Folks Who Want Lingerie & Underthings as a Gift

First off: do your person a massive favor and give them an explicit list of options within the agreed-upon budget you have set for gift-giving. Include your preferred size, brand, and color. If you don’t know your size in a particular brand and are requesting a size-specific item like a bra, binder, or underwear, provide your measurements so they can accurately use the size guide. Eliminate guesswork.

However, assuming you’re here because you have not been provided with an explicit wishlist, here are tips for gift-givers:

Pay Attention!

This is the baseline of all gift giving, but especially applies when considering clothing and intimates. What kinds of styles does your person wear? What makes them feel most confident, most themselves? What do they like showing off? What kind of colors? What kind of fabric? (Also, before buying someone silk pajamas – is your person the kind of person who would handwash silk pajamas? So many things to consider!)

If You Have Consensual Closet Access, Check Their Sizes

First off, our language around clothing could use a major overhaul. “I’m a 14. God, I’m an A cup. Ugh, I’m an H cup, nothing fits me.” Y’all. No one is a size – we wear a size. (My dear friend, the lingerie blogger Sweet Nothings, wrote a brilliant piece on this topic a while back.)

Also? Unless your person is loyal to absolutely only one brand (which then makes your job very easy!), odds are good they have several sizes in their underwear drawer. This is because sizing in fashion is not standardized. Let me repeat: sizing in fashion is NOT standardized. Literally every brand has slightly different standards for sizing, which is why knowing the size someone wears in one brand may not be helpful (at all) for guessing at what they might wear in another brand. Do your research, and if you need clarification, ask!

Tops & Bottoms

If you go the tops-and-bottoms route, here are some solid places to start. Queer-owned brands like GC2B and PlayOut have a variety of styles of tops and bottoms to choose from in fun and unique colors and patterns (and they offer fast shipping). Me Undies has a solid size range, some middle-of-the-road bralette options for folks who don’t want underwire bras but also don’t want to bind (all the time), and the ability to build-a-pack of underwear. Do not sleep on ModCloth for both femme and plus size options. And if you’re going to spring for an underwire bra for your person, the Natori Feathers is one of the best bras on the market.

An additional component of sizing to keep in mind is that, when it comes to underthings, different fabrics fit differently. A jersey bralette with a lot of stretch will fit very differently than a 3-part cup underwire bra with powermesh wings. Cotton underwear tends to be stretchy and have some give. Silk underwear, less so. Lace can go either way! And when you’re buying online and don’t have access to what the fabric feels like, it’s anyone’s guess (unless you are adept at understanding descriptions of fabric blends).

Personally, I have at least three different sizes of underwear and probably at least six different bra sizes in my closet — to give you an idea of the range we could be working with. This leads us to the next tip.

Loungewear Is Your Best Friend

What do I mean by loungewear? Pajama sets. Robes. Teddies. Monogrammed shit! Theirs & theirs, hers & hers, theirs & hers, his & hers, his & his, mix and match, you get the idea! Sizing concerns are less stringent with loungewear, and you can get super festive with loungewear (red polka dots, anyone?), or keep it simple with a classic set of silk pajamas, or plaid. Plaid is good.

PJ Sets for Every Style

Loungewear tends to come in more basic size ranges – XS-5X+ – and the sizing also tends to be much more generous. You can also find really excellent, quality loungewear that won’t fall apart immediately at all price points, and with excellent holiday discounts as the season progresses.

Robes

Robes are one of the easiest items items to buy in that they often have generous sizing and can also be found in a variety of fabrics and styles to suit a variety of gender presentations and personalities. They are, uniformly, a crowd pleaser.

Also? Loungewear has the added bonus of often being considered an “extra” item that people are less likely to buy for themselves.

Be wary of the sale rack

Always check the return policy, regardless, but especially remember these three things during holiday season:

1. Underwear that is purchased online is often not returnable
2. Final sale items are rarely returnable, no matter where they are purchased
3. If purchasing internationally, double and triple check the policies! Many independent designers and boutiques do not accept international returns and exchanges.

Don’t buy a gift that is actually a suggestion

This goes without saying, but always bears repeating. Get a gift your person would enjoy – not one that is trying to encourage them to do or be something or someone they aren’t.

Gift cards are your friend

Seriously.

9 of the Best Witchy, Astrological or Otherwise Woo Books of 2018

2018 has been the Year of the Witch. While “witchy” aesthetics have been dominating Instagram for the last few years — crystals, altars — and queer astrologers with cult followings like Chani Nicholas have broken through into the popular consciousness, with coverage in places like Shondaland, 2018 has really brought astrology and other witchcraft-associated practices into mainstream coverage. It seems like every major website (Autostraddle included) has regular coverage, and all of your favorite occult practitioners are getting book deals — and not just with classic occult publishers like Llewellyn (who still put out some of the best books on the market).

Whether you’re into some kind of witchery yourself or you’d rather keep it fictional, here’s an overview of some of the best books from 2018.

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Non-Fiction

Inner Witch: A Modern Guide to the Ancient Craft by Gabriela Herstik

Gabriela “Gaby” Herstik, the writer behind Nylon’s popular “Ask a Witch” column, published her first book earlier this year to much acclaim. Gaby covers Witch Basics in this book: casting a circle, writing and casting spells, candle magic, crystals, building altars, reading tarot, and the very basics of astrology.

This book is accessible, comprehensive, and a must-read for anyone just starting out – and even for folks who are more advanced in some areas (like, say, tarot reading) but who want to get into others (like, say, casting or candle magic).

Note that in the U.K., this is published under the name Craft.

Astrology for Happiness and Success by Mecca Woods

You may have read Mecca Woods’ horoscopes and astrology articles in Bustle, Essence, or I Am & Co. Her first book is a comprehensive breakdown of every sign: It doesn’t just offer descriptions, but also specific activities geared to each sign’s relationships, finances, and communication and conflict patterns. When it comes to those who are inclined to witchcraft, the information about colors, scents, and other more associations with each sign will definitely impact your altar building, wardrobe choices, and intention setting.

The book is a must-read for anyone just getting interested in astrology, but even as someone who is more advanced, I found a ton of useful information. This is a reference I’ll be coming back to for years.

P.S. Mecca advises folks to read the sections not only for their sun but also for their rising, moon, and Venus.

Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries by Lee Harrington and Tai Fenix Kulystin (editors)

This intersectional, multi-genre anthology weaves together academic essays and first-person narratives alongside comics and other styles of art to explore the relationship of magic to identity. “Drag queen magic, Inclusive witchcraft, and magic for healing and survival. Gender transition in Rome, possession practices, and DIY divination. Social justice, queer black tantra, and polarity beyond gender. Honoring ancestors, fluidity of consciousness, and reimagining the Great Rite. Queer sex magic, power sigils, deities that reflect diversity” – odds are good that this anthology has something for everyone.

Queer Magic: LGBT+ Spirituality and Culture from Around the World by Tomas Prower

Similar name, very different content than the previous book on the list. In this Queer Magic, Tomas Prower takes us on a deep historical dive into the intersection of queer sexuality and spiritual practices from around the globe. One example? Prower traces the practices of pre-modern native cultures (and their acceptance of what we would call queer sexuality) and the devastating effects of Christian colonialism.

There is a practical component to this book, as well. Prower includes stories from LGBT+ magical practitioners – Pagans, Catholics, Buddhists, Muslims, and others – in sections such as “Wisdom of a Welsh Druid Drag Queen” and “Being a Blatina Bisexual In The Catholic Church”. Alongside the researched explorations of queer sexuality and magical practice, there are spells, rituals, and other meditations and exercises.

This book is unique in that it is not entirely a history and not entirely a “how-to” reference, but an essential marrying of the two.

Enchantments: A Modern Witch’s Guide to Self-Possession by Mya Spalter

Spalter has worked at the iconic occult shop Enchantments in New York’s East Village for years. Her book is part memoir, part how-to. It’s gorgeously illustrated and focuses on how to incorporate witchcraft in the everyday: money magic starts with tipping well; aspirations start with an altar. Cleaning up your life starts with your bedroom. And on it goes.

Enchantments is built on the idea that intention and self-possession is the foundation of a magical practice – and really, isn’t that how all we all start down this path?

Llewellyn 2019 Witches Datebook

Released by occult publisher Llewellyn every year, the Witches’ Datebook is a planner that is also essentially a witches’ almanac. It has all the information about moon cycles, sabbats, equinoxes and solstices, and other significant dates to plan around. There are recipes, witchy tips, and other assorted information on each page. A must for any witch or occult practitioner.

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Fiction

Circe by Madeline Miller

Odds are good you’ve heard about this book or seen it on endcap stands in bookstores and libraries. It made all the lists (and is currently making all the end-of-year Notable Fiction lists), even though it was shut out of the major literary awards.

The TL;DR is that this is the novelization of the story of the goddess Circe, who here is figured to have been born less of a goddess and more of a witch. You know the plot already (caught between gods and men – plus, pretty much every character from The Odyssey is in here), but it is so very, very worth a read.

Toil and Trouble: 15 Tales of Women and Witchcraft by Jessica Spotswood and Tessa Sharpe (editors)

Is there anything more powerful than a girl learning to believe in herself? Here are some of the highlights from this extraordinary collection (which includes a LOT of queer romance!): A young witch uses social media to connect with her astrology clients — and with a NASA-loving girl as cute as she is skeptical. A priestess of death investigates a ritualized murder. A bruja who cures lovesickness might need the remedy herself when she falls in love with an altar boy. In Reconstruction-era Texas, a water witch uses her magic to survive the soldiers who have invaded her desert oasis. And in the near future, a group of girls accused of witchcraft must find their collective power in order to destroy their captors.

Teenage girls overturning the patriarchy FTW!

Summer of Salt by Katrina Leno

“On the island of By-the-Sea you could always smell two things: salt and magic.”

This novel has everything – and I mean everything. First off, it’s magical realism in the vein of Practical Magic (the book, not the movie). The atmosphere is lush. The main characters are Georgina and Mary, almost 18-year-old twins from a family of witches. There’s a horrible murder which disrupts the town. There is also a queer romance for one of the sisters that unfolds in the sweetest way – you just have to read it.

Starstruck: Find Out What Your Crush’s Mars Sign Says About Your Compatibility (and Their Sex Drive)

We’ve talked about how to interpret the placement of your Moon sign, your Mercury, and Venus, planet of love — now it’s time to talk about Mars. Mars, the planet of action, helps us assert ourselves. It helps us go after what we want. Mars is our individuality. I want. I need. I desire.

Mars is our daring, our energy, our drive.

To oversimplify, Mars is also how we fight and how we fuck. It’s where we expend yang energy. It’s how we chase, how we pursue, how we instigate.

In our culture, if Venus is undervalued and neglected, Mars is often perverted: by toxic and hyper-performative masculinity and machismo, by a culture of gun violence, of rape and sexual violence, of colonialism, of an (in)justice system. Mars is the god of war, and we see their energy everywhere, in every news cycle. Destruction — Tower energy of the Tarot, if you will — is a vital component to any cyclical process, but war and destruction and tearing down without respect for human dignity, or the dignity of the self, lays waste to what it touches, leaving trauma in its wake.

What is Mars if it is all fight with no dignity?

Mars is where we dig deep in order to fight for ourselves and for those (and what) we love and value.

Mars is where we find our courage.

A note on compatibility: When it comes to synastry, what we really look for is Mars matching with a partner’s Venus sign. The most potent synastry comes when your Mars and your partner(s)’ Venus is in the same sign, but having Venus and Mars in the same element (e.g. both fire – Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) is also pretty smoking! Reason being: Mars is yang, Venus is yin. Mars is sex drive; Venus is love and romance and wooing. And we all have both in our chart, with different expressions and strengths.

Remember that ultimately, this series on compatibility is about empowering you to better understand your needs as well as those of your partner(s). Any particular grouping of self-aware, emotionally engaged, conscientious, communicative people can make a go of it. Astrology isn’t a didactic ideology to be used to batter us into the idea that we can’t or shouldn’t partner with certain kinds of people “because” they’re a certain sign; rather, it should be used to help us better get to the root of our own self-expression.

Aries Mars

Mars is happy in Aries, the ruler of the fire signs. Aries is the warrior in the front lines. Mars in Aries is decisive, impulsive, aggressive. You know what you want, and you’re going to get it – no matter the cost. Just remember to respect people’s boundaries. While folks appreciate your passion and forthrightness, checking in is vital.

How you channel energy: You’re take charge, take no prisoners. You have a thought, or a feeling, and you’re out there, going for it.

How you ask someone out: A little less conversation, a little more action. You’re bold, dominant, and no bullshit. You can’t stand not having it all out in the open. You’re ready to risk it all.

Let’s talk about sex: You can’t get enough, and you’ve got the stamina for it. It can be challenging to find folks who can keep up with you. For you, sex is recharge: it helps you connect to your body, helps you connect to other people. However, it’s not necessarily intrinsically tied up with your emotions.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Janet Mock, Angelina Jolie

Taurus Mars

You might be slow to anger, or arousal, but you know what others may not — you’ve got stamina for days and are sensuous as hell. You’re also extraordinarily stubborn in the boardroom and bedroom so, you know. Buckle up.

How you channel energy: Thinking it through. You’re thoughtful, and you like to have a plan for how you approach a situation — whether it’s a conflict at work or a romantic prospect.

How you ask someone out: You can be direct (Taurus is earth energy, after all), but you also know that slow and steady wins the race. Think the tortoise and the hare. If you hold your ground, you know you’ve got a fighting chance. The key is to actually make an effort, Taurus.

Let’s talk about sex: Your patience and sheer tenacity works to your advantage in the bedroom. You’re an expert at seduction, at creating a sensory, multi-layered experience. Taurus is ruled by Venus — and it shows.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Ellen Page, Queen Latifah

Gemini Mars

Was that debate flirtatious or for someone’s evisceration? It can be so hard to tell. Words are your weapons, and your seduction tactic. You require variety and stimulation; boredom — in any arena of life — is anathema.

How you channel energy: Words are what you wield. They’re what you reach for when wooing; they’re what you reach for when you need a weapon. You cut to the quick with a well-placed line.

How you ask someone out: Woof, but are you charming and witty. You instinctively know how to read the room. Whether it’s using a line from someone’s favorite movie or doing it up with clever word play, you’ll find a way to turn their head. (The key, of course, is that you don’t always do so well with people who can’t get on your wavelength.)

Let’s talk about sex: Dirty talk? Yes, please. Communication in bed is probably something you like giving and/or receiving.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Sara Ramirez, Samira Wiley

Cancer Mars

The key to unlocking your sex drive? Your emotions. You’re deeply protective and far more sensitive than you’re comfortable letting on. You can also hold a grudge like nobody’s business. You love deeply; you hurt deeply. You don’t let shit go. You’re in it — no matter what it is — for the long haul.

How you channel energy: By taking care of those around you.

How you ask someone out: You prefer to let things unfold slowly, over time. You trust your intuition about people, and you don’t feel a rush to move things along. You would rather take an indirect approach.

Let’s talk about sex: You can do casual sex, of course, but for you, the best sex comes within partnership – real partnership. In order to truly be intimate with someone, you have to let the drawbridge down – and that can take a while. That’s okay, babe. Don’t rush it. You know that the mind-blowing passion is worth the wait.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Hayley Kiyoko, Tilda Swinton

Leo Mars

You’re confident as hell, and you know that’s sexy as hell. You’re invariably a high achiever, because you’re always on — and you, unlike so many others, delight in being “on.” For you, all the world’s a stage, and you know exactly what strings to pull to get what you want.

How you channel energy: By performing. With you, the challenge is asking what you really want, and where your motivations are really coming from. You can charm your way in and out of any fight or flirtation, but what will really serve you?

How you ask someone out: Do you want to ask them out, or do you want them to ask you out? You can go either way, and you can arrange the production so that it happens either way, too. And you know it. And that’s hot.

Let’s talk about sex: Let’s be real: you like to be worshipped. But you also have a playful side that’s rarely appreciated, and partners who can tap into this side of you — and who themselves can rock with that — are key to helping you let loose.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Kate Moennig, Kehlani

Virgo Mars

Your cool, intellectual exterior belies your proclivity for strategy (and predilection for kink). You know, better than most, that the devil is in the details, and you know how to play your cards close to your chest. You’re hard to read, and nigh impossible to predict.

How you channel energy: Planning. Wellness practices. And probably a not insignificant dose of organization and cleaning.

How you ask someone out: Grand gestures? Not your thing. You make your move thoughtfully and quietly — but powerfully.

Let’s talk about sex: For you, it’s all in the attention to the small things that so often go unnoticed and neglected. That small sigh, that quick brush against a thigh. You’re keenly aware of your lover’s body in a way that they probably have never experienced before. Oh — and you’re going to do anything you can to elicit those responses. (Anything.)

Celeb Doppelgangers: Tessa Thompson, Evan Rachel Wood

Libra Mars

Mars can have a tough time in Libra, which craves harmony and balance. But you’re a natural diplomat, and you’ll charm the pants (or skirt) right off someone. You fight fair, and you take you time deliberating, in both fight and flirtation.

How you channel energy: By keeping the peace. This doesn’t mean you aren’t willing to take a stand for what’s right — far from it. But you believe in establishing harmony in your life. Keeping a level head. Pleasing conversation. Beautiful surroundings. Establishing balance.

How you ask someone out: Let’s be real: you prefer to be asked out. Or you arrange the situation in such a way so that they ask you out. You’re so charming, this isn’t that hard.

Let’s talk about sex: Aesthetics are foreplay. You enjoy beautiful surroundings and a sensuous lead-up – a good dinner where you’re all well dressed; a romantic bedroom setting with candles. It’s the little things.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Janelle Monae, Kate McKinnon

Scorpio Mars

Ruled by Mars, Scorpio — like Aries — is where Mars finds its height. But whereas Mars in Aries is the warrior on the front lines, a bit rash and impulsive (if extraordinarily powerful and fearless), Mars in Scorpio is the spy. All strategy, all stealth. Mars in Scorpio will wait you out. Out think you. Out play you. Outlast you. As Theresa Reed says, never go to war with a Mars in Scorpio — you’ll lose. If wronged, you never forget. And you’ll take years to get even.

Oh, and when it comes to sex, nobody does it better.

How you channel energy: You’re single-minded in your passions and pursuits. Productive, obsessive, possessive — you know how to get what you want.

How you ask someone out: You are the type to drop hints and work your way up to the actual ask, but the key for you is to remember: be direct, and don’t waste your time on those who can’t meet you on your level.

Let’s talk about sex: When it comes to the bedroom, no one matches your intensity. Also? You’re up for anything. Basically, you’re an ideal playmate — if you let your walls down and are willing to be really vulnerable.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Laverne Cox, Lena Waithe

Sagittarius Mars

Sagittarius energy always wants to roam, and paired with Mars, this makes for an extraordinarily active person, whether with fitness, sex, mentally, career wise — you’re the person who, like the Hamilton song goes, is never satisfied. You’re always on the hunt for the next adventure; the challenge is to enjoy the present conquest, the present hill.

How you channel energy: You need to spread your wings. Like Gemini, your opposite sign, you require freedom and variety in romantic adventure.

How you ask someone out: Bluntly. I want you, do you want me? If so, great. If not, you go your way and I go mine. This is a very take no prisoners, no hard feelings placement. You’re very blunt and very public – but not in a showman Leo or Aries type way; it’s just a very honest, why would we hide this? way. The celeb doppelganger couples are great examples of committed couples with this placement.

Let’s talk about sex: You’re an adventurous, playful spirit with a lot of passion who is honest as hell and up for anything. It’s important to you to find partners who can match your energy – and who value it.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Holland Taylor & Sarah Paulson, Ellen DeGeneres & Portia de Rossi

Capricorn Mars

When you decide you want something (or someone), you are unyielding. This means, of course, that you dominate whatever field you’re in. Your biggest turn-on is success — your own as well as that of others.

How you channel energy: Productively and obsessively. In earthy Capricorn, the sign that wants to build, Mars, the planet of action, is exalted. Like Mars in Scorpio, you have a tendency towards fixation and workaholism, and you require partners and playmates who understand this side of you. Of course, when that energy is focused on them, more’s the pleasure.

How you ask someone out: Directly. You have approximately zero time for bullshit. You’re busy.

Let’s talk about sex: When you’re in the mood, or in a new relationship, you can go all day, all night, anytime, anywhere. But when you’re focused on work, you can also go without. You love sex, but it’s really about what’s occupying your mental energy at the moment.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Tig Notaro, Sue Perkins

Aquarius Mars

Think Professor X. You’re already ten steps ahead of everyone else, literally and figuratively. That fight with your partner they just now saw coming? You had it in your head ten minutes ago. You’re already on to the makeup sex.

Also? You need freedom, love fighting for a cause, and adore a good challenge.

How you channel energy: Intellectual stimulation. Curiosity. Social engagement.

How you ask someone out: You are an expert at playing it cool, at asking folks out without seeming too emotionally invested. (You’re also probably pretty comfortable at sliding into folks’ DMs.) But why are you so detached, babe? What do you have to lose by showing your hand every once in a while?

Let’s talk about sex: Experimental and open-minded — that’s you. Sex is about exploration, and you’re all about discovering what turns your partner on. Every evening (and morning) presents the opportunity to learn something new.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Rachel Maddow, Kristen Stewart

Pisces Mars

You’re the definition of “lover, not a fighter.” Sensitive to conflict and deeply romantic in bed, you’re the person who could, very honestly, say that all you want is world peace. You can be prone to escapism, but at your best, you’re dreamy and magnetic. The ultimate romantic.

How you channel energy: Through touch, through just being. You’ve got an otherworldly touch to you. You’re uncomfortable with conflict, in part because you take in the energy around you, and you can feel others’ anger on a deep level. Cultivating boundaries and learning to articulate what you need will help.

How you ask someone out: With a glance. With touch. With energy. With words, of course, but you’re all about the nonverbals. You know how to project yourself across a room.

Let’s talk about sex: You’re into deep, soulful intimacy, even with casual partners. You don’t ever not give all of yourself — and that’s sexy as hell.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Stephanie Beatriz, Lea DeLaria.

Here’s How to Do It Yourself

There are many places you can go, but to do your own chart, go to astro.com. To get the most accurate chart, you need your exact time of birth in addition to your date and place of birth; however, you can still do a chart without a time of birth.

If you’re an app person, I would recommend Time Passages, which provides an incredibly detailed breakdown breakdown of your chart with daily horoscopes as well as your transits and progressions (this will make sense to the more advanced astrology folk among you). It also gives you the opportunity to save other people’s charts

If you’re interested in starting to research and learn more so that you can interpret your chart for yourself, start with The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need (which is not, in fact, the only book you’ll ever need, but is a great starting point). There’s also a wealth of excellent free content by queer practitioners on the internet, like Chani Nicholas’ horoscopes and courses as well as the queer-centric astrology content at Beth Maiden’s Little Red Tarot. Go forth and learn!

Starstruck: Here’s What Venus, Planet of Love, Says About Your Astrological Compatibility

Welcome to the latest installment in our series on astrological compatibility for queers! If you haven’t, I’d recommend reading the Moon and Mercury articles first!

Of all the planets, Venus is perhaps the most instantly intuitive and recognizable. Venus is the goddess of love, attraction, relationships. She rules beauty and art and aesthetics — the things that make this world lovely. She shows up in museums the world over, a muse who inspires.

But what does that mean for you? Venus is whatever you personally do in your life to attract and inspire your lover(s), those you want to impress. Venus craves a response. Venus is passion. Venus is also receptivity, receiving. Venus wants to woo and be wooed. Venus is romance.

Venus is asking your partner to tie your tie, and putting on a garter belt and stockings just as they’re leaving for work to maybe make them stay a few extra minutes, and putting on an old thing they got you ages ago that will make them weepy because oh my god, how do you still have it?

Venus is call and response.

In traditional astrology, Venus and Mars were often shoehorned into traditional heteronormative gender roles, with Venus being “more” important for women and Mars being “more” important for men, in that Venus was the receptive source of desire and Mars was the active pursuer, the dominant sexual partner.

For queers, of course, we know that we can deconstruct the shit out of this. First of all, everyone has Venus and Mars in their chart: yin and yang, receptive and active energies. How Venus and Mars work for you, and how you express them, will be individual, depending on your sign, on the planets’ placement within your chart (what “house” they are in), as well as other planets aspecting (or acting on) your own personal Venus and Mars. Add on to that your own personal bevy of romantic and sexual experiences, desires, wants, needs, goals, and you’ve got your own unique cocktail for how you do sex and/or relationship.

tl;dr We contain multitudes, let’s not be reductive.

A note on compatibility: when it comes to synastry, what we really look for is Venus matching with a partner’s Mars sign (Mars is the next and final article in the series). Your Venus and your person’s Mars being in the same sign makes for the most potent chemistry, but having Venus and Mars in the same element (e.g. both water — Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) is also pretty smoking. Reason being: Venus is the more receptive. Venus expresses love, but Venus really likes to be wooed. Mars is the active agent, the pursuer, the sex drive. And we all have both!

However, remember that this isn’t a necessary thing! After all, (rumored) couples like Janelle and Tessa don’t have this synastry. Janelle and Tessa have a fire Venus, water Venus, earth Mars, and air Mars. Which is to say: not obvious Venus/Mars compatibility at all. Casual reminder to not sweat it too hard, and rather to focus on learning about your partner(s)’s stuff in order to better understand them.

Aries Venus

Think Wonder Woman. Beyonce in the “Don’t Hurt Yourself” video. Furiosa in Mad Men. The last scene of Carol. Tasha riding her motorcycle off the base in The L Word.

A Venus in Aries’ motto in love might as well be, “Just do it.” You always know how you feel and don’t know why others don’t. You’re direct, flirty, feisty, and hopelessly addicted to the pursuit. (You might be a tad impulsive, sometimes.) You aren’t afraid to go after what you want, to pursue, to allow yourself to be pursued. Matters of the heart always involve risk. You understand this, intrinsically, and it doesn’t frighten you.

How you show love: Energetically. You like shared, spontaneous activities that get your heart pumping. You don’t overthink it.

How you want to be wooed: Bold and adventurous grand gestures. You know your heart and aren’t afraid to show it, and you need – nay, require – folks who will show up as fiercely as you do. However, you can get bored easily, so you also need folks who are interesting, ambitious, and who can keep you on your toes and juggle that need you have for your own space. It’s all a balancing act.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Janet Mock, Rachel Maddow

Taurus Venus

Your love languages are luxury and long-term commitment. Creatures of habit, Venus in Taurus folks are deeply connected to your bodies, to desire, to what you want – and when you figure out what and who you want, you dig the fuck in. You’re bullish, stubborn. Venus is at home in Taurus and luxuriates in the slow, sensuous earthiness. You know how to show up every day and do the work of tending, of building something beautiful.

As a Venus in Taurus recently told me about her 5+ year partnership: “The sex I had last night. I swear to god, the sex gets better and better every day.”

How you show love: The fine art of tending. Tending looks different, depending on the stage of a relationship. This could look like building a nest together; it could look like tending to the body of the one you care for – whether for sexual pleasure, and/or for someone’s health. It always looks like nourishment through food. Venus in Taurus expresses care through the physical.

How you want to be wooed: You don’t need the trappings of romance; you’re looking for substance. You want someone who is direct and committed and knows how to communicate that.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Hayley Kiyoko, Lena Waithe

Gemini Venus

Oh, Venus in Gemini. You light up a room with an effervescent ease and wit. Think Jack Dawson charming the pants off all those stuffy first class folks in Titanic. You can put enough grease on any conversation to ease what was struggling; you have that particular gift of helping folks feel at home in their own skin without sacrificing your own integrity. You are always wholly yourself. Of course, you also run into the problem of being read as flirtatious in situations where you don’t intend to be. In truth, variety is just the spice of life. You enjoy meeting different people, and it takes a lot to hold your attention for long. At the end of the day, you need people in your life who are secure in themselves (and in your affections) – and who aren’t the jealous type. Clear communication is one of your non-negotiables.

How you show love: Because you so enjoy variety, when you bestow your attention on someone for an extended period of time, that’s a sign. For you, affection (given and received) is also verbal, so communicating interest directly through language is important.

How you want to be wooed: Clever and intelligent conversation. Witty banter. A trip to the bookstore.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Laverne Cox, Jasika Nicole

Cancer Venus

Security is everything to Venus in Cancers; you are private when it comes to matters of the heart. You want the other person to show their cards first. Meanwhile, you’ll cook for them, care for them, remember every little thing they’ve ever mentioned in conversation. But you need to feel emotionally secure before taking any next steps. It takes you a while to come out of your shell.

Also? Family is important to you, whether natal or chosen, and it’s important for you that your partner(s) blend well with your people. That’s always in the back of your mind.

How you show love: By taking care of your people. Nourishing them. You have a knack for sensing their needs, and filling them.

How you want to be wooed: Consistently, but not necessarily directly. You take time to reveal yourself, and you need folks who get that you’re the slow burn type. Being asked to make a yes or no decision right away probably isn’t going to go over very well. But a slow dance? Yes, that’s more your style.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Angelina Jolie, Jane Lynch

Leo Venus

Did someone say grand gesture? Romantic. Ride or die. Loyal AF. Experts at making your person feel like your one and only. Generous to a fault. That’s you, Venus in Leo, riding in on a white horse with a bouquet of red roses and a speech that will command the attention of everyone in the vicinity. You’re the person who announces to the world that you and your beloved vibrate on the same frequency, if you know what I mean.

How you show love: You’ve got a big heart and aren’t afraid to wear it on your sleeve. Shouting from the rooftops for all to hear? That’s you. You’re loud and proud, whether that means flowery social media posts, lots of PDA, fancy dinners out on the town, or treating your person to their favorite things.

How you want to be wooed: Anyone who is willing to go over the top for you – especially when it’s out of their comfort zone – is golden. You’re a sucker for a grand gesture, but you aren’t used to getting as good as you give. You’re also loyal to a fault, so demonstrations of commitment go a long way.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Tessa Thompson, Sue Perkins

Virgo Venus

Your penchant for noticing the little things serves you well in life – and in the bedroom. A little on the kinky side, you’re earthy and find pleasure in attention to detail. You’re not over the top – this is not the sign for grand gestures, flowery language, or long emotional conversations that go until the wee hours of the morning. You tend toward the pragmatic. If we’re talking love languages, you’re Acts of Service, all the way. You want to build something together. Help folks get their life together.

How you show love: Compared to some other signs, you’re reserved and subdued in your affections. You’re the person who reminds them to make an appointment, or who goes out and buys Drano for their always-flooding bathtub.

How you want to be wooed: A shared Google Calendar. Being put together. Sharp fashion. A clean living space. Good cologne and perfume.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Sara Ramirez, Demi Lovato

Libra Venus

When it comes to parties and fashion, no one does it better. You’re ruled by Venus, which brings an extra touch of beauty and charm to everything you do, but the catch is that you require substance with style. If someone doesn’t have their shit together internally as well as externally, don’t even bother. You want someone who can match you, who wants to rule the collective roost and look good doing it. For you, partnership is everything.

You also value harmony. Picking a fight, or arguing for the sake of hot makeup sex? Not your thing. You prefer a peaceful environment, to be in a sanguine agreement with your partner(s).

How you show love: You’re a classic romantic. Whereas Venus in Leo is over the top and Venus in Pisces wants to U-Haul, you’re the consummate rom com hero(ine). Thoughtful, tasteful, just enough. Always the right gesture at the right time.

How you want to be wooed: When it comes to romance, mutual, shared passions are a must – with a romantic cherry on top, like someone planning a day for you and then picking you up in a rented convertible.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Amandla Stenberg, Shailene Woodley

Scorpio Venus

Venus in Scorpio is all intensity, all the time. Extraordinarily private, it takes a lot to win your trust. You’re slow to share, slow to peel back the layers and reveal yourself. But once you feel safe with someone, you put all your cards on the table. Totally committed: sexually, emotionally, spiritually. That kind of single-minded focus draws people to you like a moth to a flame.

This kind of energy can easily feed into that green-eyed monster, jealousy. A key for you in relationship is being with folks who are gut-honest about how they feel about you. Plain and simple.

How you show love: Quietly, thoughtfully. Over the top social media posts? Not your style. You’re more behind the scenes: love letters, long drives, sex all night – and calling in sick to work the next day, so you can do it all again. You’re all about investing that quality time.

How you want to be wooed: While wanting someone to just “get” you is a common desire, when it comes to Scorpio energy, you need someone who matches your intensity and has an intuitive sense for how and when to push. They have to be able to really see you, see your wounds, and not flinch, not press too hard, but not shrink away, either: just stand with you, naked in vulnerability. That. That’s what does you in.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Janelle Monae, Jodie Foster

Sagittarius Venus

Freedom is a must. Love looks like trusting you to do your own thing and come back around for more. More than any other sign, you are 100% down for long distance relationships. You need the space to roam, literally or figuratively or both. But this doesn’t mean that you don’t want your person/people to not be loyal, or to not check in – you crave communication, after all. Sagittarius energy is no bold, forthright, let’s get this shit out there and talk about it. Being able to trust that someone can level with you is everything. After all, you are further empowered in your freedom and independence when you have the emotional support and security in strong, healthy relationship.

How you show love: By planning an absolutely killer trip, complete with adventurous sex — and then by encouraging your boo to go off and do their own thing. Love is embracing each other’s individuality and exploring each other’s worlds.

How you want to be wooed: Expansion is really the key here: sexual adventures, or exploring your local surroundings. Conversation and flirtation that goes beyond the everyday. Smart live entertainment that inspires debate. Thoughtful gestures that push you both/all towards the limit.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Kate McKinnon, Tilda Swinton

Capricorn Venus

There’s no flash here, just consistency and a plan for the future with killer follow-through. You’re the person whose understated, self-controlled demeanor belies a deep well of emotion that shows itself in concrete, actionable plans. You want a relationship you can grow with and grow into – and you want people who are as committed to self-improvement as you are. To you, the idea that relationships are work is not frightening. It’s just part of the process.

How you show love: By providing structure for the people you love. Helping them fix what’s broken. Helping them organize their life. Being consistent and showing the fuck up.

How you want to be wooed: Let’s be real: you get off on competence, which doesn’t just mean book smarts. You love when someone shows they care about something, have put in the effort to become an expert. And when someone shows that they’ve put in the time and energy to understanding you? That’s everything.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Elliot Page, Jamie Clayton

Aquarius Venus

You’re the ultimate unconventional rule breakers who say “fuck off” to social expectations around love, sex, and relationships. While some astrologers call you the most likely to be in an open or polyamorous relationship, the truth is, you just want the space to construct the relationship that best suits yours and your partner(s)’s needs. You value your independence and don’t invite people into your space lightly.

How you show love: You come off as aloof, but when you’re interested in someone, you pay attention and seek common ground through intellectual connection. You’re the person who watches the TV show your person casually mentioned, who sends over a book recommendation you think they should check out.

How you want to be wooed: You often prefer to be friends first, and this carries over into the relationship: you want to be treated like you’re someone who matters – who is valued, prioritized, thought of and considered in the little things. You find it easy to cut and run at the first sign of waning interest (after all, your time is valuable), so follow-through and consideration are non-negotiables in any kind of partnership.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Ellen DeGeneres, Stephanie Beatriz

Pisces Venus

You are the ultimate romantics. Sensitive, intuitive. You care with your whole heart. You crave oneness: merging, losing yourselves in each other, two (or more) become one.

For you, trust is the ultimate currency of care. Learning to discern in love, and to discern who to trust, is a lifelong journey, because once you trust, you trust. You’re compassionate, gentle, and giving, and it’s vital for you to be with folks who invest in you emotionally and spiritually just as much as you invest in them.

How you show love: While in some ways you’re prone to the trappings of romantics, the truth is that you’re the kind of person who will do anything for the people you love – hence, why discernment is so important. And why it’s important for you to know what you want and need. It’s easy for you to bend, to adapt, to their needs.

How you want to be wooed: You want to be cherished. No matter the calcification on top, you’ve got a tender heart, and you need to be nurtured.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Kristen Stewart, Samira Wiley

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Here’s How to Do It Yourself!

There are many places you can go, but to do your own chart, go to astro.com. To get the most accurate chart, you need your exact time of birth in addition to your date and place of birth; however, you can still do a chart without a time of birth.

If you’re an app person, I would recommend Time Passages, which provides an incredibly detailed breakdown breakdown of your chart with daily horoscopes as well as your transits and progressions (this will make sense to the more advanced astrology folk among you). It also gives you the opportunity to save other people’s charts

If you’re interested in starting to research and learn more so that you can interpret your chart for yourself, start with The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need (which is not, in fact, the only book you’ll ever need, but is a great starting point). There’s also a wealth of excellent free content by queer practitioners on the internet, like Chani Nicholas’ horoscopes and courses as well as the queer-centric astrology content at Beth Maiden’s Little Red Tarot. Go forth and learn!

“In Intimate Detail” Is the Singular Guide to Lingerie – and It’s Queer-Inclusive

The Lingerie Addict is, simply put, the largest and most influential lingerie website in the world. Cora Harrington is its founder and editor-in-chief: over the last ten years, the blog has grown from being Harrington’s personal lingerie blog (originally written under a penname and called “Stockings Addict”) into a six-figure earning fashion website. TLA is the preeminent resource for all things lingerie, complete with a team of writers and an unparalleled commitment to inclusivity and transparency.

So, when a Big Six publisher came looking for someone to write the singular guide to the subject, Cora Harrington was the person they contacted.

In a particularly conservative corner of the fashion industry, one that is entrenched in white supremacist, heteropatriarchal commitments to the representation of people’s bodies and sexuality, Harrington is a consistent, reliable voice advocating for change. She’s an advocate for small, independent brands, including those owned by and/or geared to WOC and LGBTQ+ folks. She is conscientious of the ways in which the current political climate (like the passage of FOSTA/SESTA) impacts lingerie — and the people who wear it.

In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie, Harrington’s first book, foregrounds the needs of people who wear lingerie above all else. The book is thoughtful and accessible, the most comprehensive lingerie guide to date. There are entire chapters dedicated to bras, underwear, shapewear, and more, as well as appendices which go into detail on topics like binding, for example. The book is intended to provide an overview of the subject rather than a deep dive, but Harrington still takes the time to provide historical context for garments, fabrics, and nuances that the everyday consumer may have questions about.

As a queer woman in the lingerie industry whose store (Bluestockings) benefited tremendously from being featured on TLA, and most especially as a friend who got to witness this book come to life, it was my genuine pleasure to talk with Cora Harrington on behalf of Autostraddle.

JK: In the book’s introduction, you say “For many of us, lingerie can feel like a fancy party we weren’t invited to…. Nice lingerie is for everyone. It’s for you. It’s for me. It’s for anyone who wants it.” Can you expand more on the exclusivity of the lingerie industry and how you’ve navigated it — and are now helping others to, as well?

CH: I think one of the lingerie industry’s biggest failings has been that they perpetuate the idea lingerie is only for certain people. That you have to look a certain way, be a certain way, be a certain size. Obviously, this is taken to its most extreme with Victoria’s Secret, a 40-year-old company that only hires supermodels and refuses to expand into plus sizes, full bust sizes, or a range of nudes for all skintones, but almost every brand is culpable. There is a culture of exclusivity in fashion in general, and this is heightened in lingerie. I’ve had conversations with brands where they’ve been very explicit about who their customers weren’t. They weren’t plus size people. They weren’t queer people. They weren’t people of color. And those attitudes affect me as well as a black, queer woman.

In terms of navigating it, I’ve tried hard to make TLA as inclusive as I can considering our limited resources (we’re a bootstrap business with no outside funding or investors and limited advertising). I also try hard to connect with other marginalized people in the industry, not just professionally, but so they can know I’m here for them and want them to succeed.

You’ve been asked a lot about your commitment to inclusivity on both your website, The Lingerie Addict, and in this book. What does a commitment to inclusivity mean to you, personally, and how did that guide In Intimate Detail?

I think of inclusivity as an ongoing journey — not a destination you arrive at. You’re always learning something. You can always get better at understanding something. You can always tweak your language so it’s more clear or more inclusive. To me, inclusivity means creating an environment where people feel welcome, where they feel like even if every article on TLA isn’t for them, there is something that’s been written with them in mind. A major limitation on our efforts to be inclusive are budget, quite frankly. There’s only so much I can publish, so many people I can hire, etc. But we try to push as far as we can with what we have.

For the book, it was important to me from the very beginning that it be unlike any other lingerie guide that’s been published before. I wanted to write a book that was relevant and useful and would stand the test of time (i.e. be just as worthwhile 15 years from now as it is today), but I also wanted to show that we can talk about lingerie in a different way. The book uses gender-neutral language, for example. You won’t find constant references to “she” or “her.” The book uses illustrations instead of photos, because I want people to be able to look at and envision the pieces without comparing themselves to models or experiencing dysphoria. The book has several appendices, including paragraphs on shopping for lingerie if you’re trans or have a physical disability. I’m not going to claim the book covers everything, because no book can, but there was deliberate effort and intention to make this a book almost anyone could pick up. And I feel so grateful to have had an editor and a publisher who believed in that specific vision for In Intimate Detail.

What are common challenges you see facing LGBTQ+ folks when it comes to lingerie and underthings?

A lack of options and bad marketing. There is so much resistance in the lingerie industry to making products more inclusive and to making the way we talk about lingerie more inclusive. People want those diversity cookies (i.e. articles and praise for being “diverse,” inclusive,” and “body positive”), but they don’t actually want to take a risk or upset the mainstream too much. An absence of more gender neutral or non-binary options is an ongoing problem. So is marketing that focuses on and prioritizes heterosexual relationships.

In your 10+ years of blogging, how have you seen things change for LGBTQ+ folks when it comes to lingerie and underthings?

The biggest change is that people are actually talking about LGBTQ people, even if it’s infrequently and not enough. We’re also seeing more visibility for binder brands and masculine-of-center brands. In this case, the internet has been the great equalizer. Brands don’t have to rely on getting their products into a boutique if they want to reach customers. You’re able to set up your own website, your own storefront, your own social media and reach your customers in your way. That’s a change which affects everyone, of course, but I believe it’s had the biggest impact for brands that serve customers who will never be able to find options in a local brick-and-mortar or department store.

Your editorial photo shoots are stunning, and are also some of the only lingerie shoots of an out, queer black woman around. How do you use these shoots as a vehicle for your own creative self-expression?

It feels strange to me to think of them as a “vehicle for creative self-expression” because I’ve never used that kind of phrases to describe the work I do. But I do enjoy the fantasy of lingerie and creating stories around textures and embroideries and embellishments and other details that often aren’t appreciated. I wish there were more lingerie editorials in general, and more editorials featured people of color and LGBTQ folks. I don’t really have the funds to finance fully-fledged lingerie editorials complete with models, but when I get a bit of money and am able to hire a photographer and a makeup artist, I’m usually my own model, using things from my own collection. I think of it as being a part of being the change I want to see in the world when it comes to representation. And it’s also a way for me to tell the story of lingerie.

Now that your first book is out, what are your goals for this next year?

Hopefully to sell a lot of books! I’d like to write a second book about lingerie. I’d like to find an agent. I’m hoping to get back into blogging as there are definitely some things I’d still like to say using that forum. And there are some other projects I’m hoping to get off the ground by the end of the year that I’m not quite ready to share yet. But I’m feeling incredibly optimistic about the year ahead!

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In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie is available on Amazon (US & UK) and at Barnes & Noble. 

P.S. Straddlers! Cora is doing book signings in Atlanta and Chicago in September — come say hello, drink some champagne, and try on lingerie with other lingerie addicts! Follow Cora on Twitter to stay tuned for updates.Atlanta: Trashy Diva, September 15th from 4-6pm
Chicago: Department of Curiosities, September 29th from 6-8:30pm

“Wild Mares” Is a Story of Women’s Land and the Midwestern Lesbians Who Loved It (and Each Other)

Wild Mares is one woman’s telling of her own history with land, and women’s land, of lesbianism and lesbian separatism in the Midwest during the 1970s and 80s.

Dianna Hunter grew up rural working class in North Dakota. She went to a liberal arts school, Macalester, in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she came out, co-founded a Lesbian Resource Center, and started her back-to-the-land journey with women she met in the city.

Wild Mares begins in the late 1960s during Hunter’s adolescence and college years, during which she comes out, but the bulk of the narrative takes us through the early 1970s into the late 1980s, through her journey of back-to-the-land living with other lesbians through four farms in northwestern Wisconsin: Haidiya Farm, Rising Moon, Del Lago, and Pliny. By virtue of the life Hunter lived, and that this is representative of that life, the story centers on women’s land, on the challenges of communal living with other queers, and, notably, on the romantic relationships that develop (Hunter’s own as well as between others) within these distinctly intimate spaces. Wild Mares is a story of land, but it is also a story of love, of seeking and finding and losing and finding again. Rather like the relationship to land itself. It begins,

On a map, Lake Superior pointed like a giant finger at our farm, directing rain, snow, and fog from the east. Winds off the lake sometimes pinned a weather system in place right over us, until we couldn’t drive our tractors into the fields because of too much water in one form or another. Each morning at six a.m., I walked from the house to the barn, hung my coat on a nail inside the door, and went to work feeding and milking thirty Holsteins. I dressed to survive and thrive in coveralls, jeans, shirts, and rubber boots that I bought from the men’s clothing section of local farm stores. My men’s clothes were made with stouter fabric, heavier zippers, bigger pockets, and more generous seam allowances than the clothes in the women’s section. Mine stood up to barbed wire and other farming stresses, and they fit me. I was blessed with muscles and a waist that bore little resemblance to the connecting tube of an hourglass. At the Lesbian Resource Center in the 1970s, we used to say that any clothes a woman chose to wear became women’s clothes. By the spring of 1986, I had been out of the closet for fifteen years, and I didn’t care if the wrong people thought I looked like a dyke as long as the right people recognized me for exactly who I was.

At the end of the prologue, I had to put the book down, because I had broken out in ugly, heaving sobs on a Monday night in the dog days of summer, after a hot and heated and emotionally heavy July eclipse, drinking a glass of rose in my apartment in Harlem. For me, conversations about small, family farms — always present in the communities I grew up in in rural Iowa and northwestern Wisconsin – have centered around heteropatriarchal family lineage, around fathers passing on land to sons. To suddenly learn that there were these communal, women’s farms entirely populated by queers practically in my backyard all that time — something in me unraveled.

It was immediately clear to me that Wild Mares wasn’t just a story of land. It was going to be about my land. From the streets Hunter names in the Twin Cities to her trips to Duluth to the rolling farm country of northwestern Wisconsin, I could picture it all perfectly. It was as if I had suddenly accessed a layer underneath the topsoil. I could feel the dirt underneath my fingernails.

Wild Mares is at its best when Hunter is giving us narrative scenes that will be familiar to readers of memoir, representing her younger self and her friends and lovers as characters with dialogue in the moment, showing us the details of the weather and the farms and the animals themselves, of the fraught emotions and concerns faced by queers not very long ago.

The line between memoir and autobiography is slippery. These days, autobiographical writing tends to be labeled memoir; certainly, when a narrative only covers a slice of life, or seems to be thematically organized, it is more likely to get chunked in as “memoir.” However, memoir as a genre has developed to a point where stories are often expected to read more as compelling narratives, with a distinctive storyline and well-developed “characters,” if you will. Memoir also often features the narrative voice of the author within the time frame being represented within the book.

This is where Wild Mares seemed more autobiographical. The course of events were presented chronologically and often unlinked thematically for the reader; Hunter’s narrative voice is also distinctly distant and reflective, the voice of Hunter as she is now, in the 2010s, not Hunter as she was then. Few characters are developed in a sustained way throughout the course of the narrative. There is frequent “pulling out” of the scenes themselves to telescope time and discuss what happened to her ex-friends and lovers within the narrative, or to offer glimpses of her conversations with their family members.

For all that Hunter deals with the nitty gritty of farm life, she selectively dives into systemic issues and challenges that they faced. She addresses that it was easier to be “out” in the city than it was in the country, where your neighbors all knew you; she does not, however, reckon with white privilege, which looms as an overwhelming spectre. Presumably, the collective of women is mostly, if not exclusively, white, and there is little discussion of race in the book, or of the societal privileges that allowed a group of women to, if not flourish, at least exist without explicit harm in northern Wisconsin in the 1970s and 80s. For example, Hunter doesn’t interrogate why her group of friends feels safe, even when explicitly considering homophobia in passages like this one:

In a resort town, we met a delicately built man with long, golden hair and a well-groomed moustache. He offered milk for our kittens, which he hurried into his house to get and then on his return set the saucer on the ground in front of the with a dramatic flourish. His house sat near a country store. As we stood in the shade of maples and pines, he told us that his lover was a doctor, and the people who ran the store and lived in the next-door house were his lover’s parents. “We’ve been together twelve years,” he said, “and it just keeps getting better and better. Every day is a honeymoon.”

“Do they know about the two of you?” Shirley asked, gesturing toward the store.

“Oh honey,” he crooned. “If they don’t, they’d have to be blind.”

Of course, many people preferred to ‘be blind’ in those days. My friends and I were in the thick of figuring out how to live a rural life that was visible and honest while also protecting ourselves as best we could from the homophobic blowback that sometimes came with visibility. We knew that the consequences of homophobia, then as now, could include discrimination, gay bashing, and murder. The wonder is that most of the time we felt safe.

The issue of money is also a question. Hunter herself grew up working class and addresses her own economic situation but does not address the socioeconomic status or contributions of other women on the farms. Hunter is clearly not trying to formulate any new theories or even overtly situate her work within the existing ouevre of LGBTQ+ literature or broader, more prescient cultural conversations around queerness, gender, or intersectionality, but this raises the question: to what extent can our work, as queer writers, exist in such a silo?

Even though Hunter is clearly telling her story, and not presenting any theories around queer living, Wild Mares can’t help but be significant in how it works out and through notions of queer utopia. Who among us (or maybe it’s just me?) does not think of running off to Themiscyra or some queer commune or even just A-Camp 2019? The farms that Hunter works and lives on with other women and queers both affirm and challenge the idea of a queer utopia by simply reminding us that people are people, weather is hard, animals get sick and sometimes die, chores sometimes don’t get done, and some folks are bad cooks. Also: there’s always romantic drama or friendship drama or some drama happening, not necessarily because queers, but, again, because living in close proximity and intimacy with other humans is going to cause friction, is going to send shockwaves through the collective and elicit little earthquakes.

Everyone seemed so much more competent [on the farm] than I. Others have told me they felt the same way, so it seems we all had each other fooled and impressed in ways that kept us from relaxing and really knowing each other’s hearts.

How rare is it, to be able to have a story that feels so intimate and personal to oneself. We do not have many of these, memoirs by this older generation of dykes and queers. There is the exquisite, classic work of Leslie Feinberg and Alison Bechdel, of course, and then the theory of Audre Lorde and Kate Bornstein and Jack Halberstam. There is a new generation: Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, Janet Mock, Melissa Febos. But we do not have a plethora of memoir, of subjects, of eras represented.

Having a memoir by a Midwestern lesbian writer that is riddled with stories of negotiating with neighbors, the varying cost of Grade A milk, unreliable farm animals, and the the farm crisis that affected so many of our communities is rare. Passages like this one hit home in a unique and profound way,

By 1985, the farm financial crisis had deepened. I saw stories about farm foreclosures, bankruptcies, and rural suicides in the Duluth paper. Evidence of local damage was mounting on the bulletin board at my feed store. There were so many auctions that the sale flyers were stacked and pinned together. Some of my neighbors had already gone out of business, and I found myself needing to carry one bill or another over to the next month almost all the time.

As distinctly, uniquely queer as so many of the subjects in this narrative are, just as many of Hunter’s concerns are distinctly rural, concerns that will be familiar to readers who grew up in places (not just the Midwest) that were dependent on agriculture. It is rare to read a queer woman’s perspective on these moments. Usually, it is cishet white men and their families who are the faces of the 1980s farm crisis – certainly, not queer women and their communities.

There is power in storytelling, in lifting voices, in showing how we were part of major cultural moments. Wild Mares is a slow burn of a read that offers an important glimpse into a slice of all-too-recent history. It’s a story of land, of “do it yourself and make it up as you go,” of pro-woman, green, sustainable, non-violent social experiments sprung in the most unlikely of places. Of what Hunter herself calls a Fool’s Journey. Of what if. Of possibility.

Starstruck: What to Know About Your Mercury Sign for Astrological Compatibility

Welcome to the latest installment in our series on astrological compatibility for queers! If you haven’t, I’d recommend reading the Moon article first! I will make the same disclaimer here I made in that article, which is to say that you are a person with agency who has free will and who ultimately has to take responsibility for your life and your choices. Astrology provides you with information, but it in no way governs who you end up with. Ultimately, you make your own choices and live your own life and can make a relationship work with good communication. Boom. To find out your Mercury sign along with the rest of your chart, you can use a number of free online resources; I personally recommend astro.com!

So, Mercury! What even is Mercury? you ask. Mythology buffs will recall that Mercury, or Hermes, is the messenger of the gods, which gives you an idea of what this planet rules: ideas, communication, thoughts, self-expression, the written word; how we move through the world when it comes to expressing ourselves with language on a day-to-day basis.

Communication, of course, is the bedrock of any relationship — romantic, sexual, platonic. And yet! Mercury often gets totally overlooked when it comes to synastry, or the astrology of relationships. There are ample resources about the moon (emotions, habits, instincts), Venus (how you woo/like to be wooed), and Mars (fucking and conflict), and obviously those things are super important. But communication (both verbal and non-verbal)! It’s the nuts and bolts of how relationships are built. When psychological researcher and relationship expert John Gottman talks about “emotional bids” as a foundational component of successful relationships, he’s talking about communication. So buckle in, folks; let’s talk about how we process.

Aries Mercury

I am that I am. No one embodies that more than folks with Aries energy, and Mercury in Aries is no exception. What you think and what you say is who you are, is a direct reflection of your character, your identity, your core beliefs. Your thinking is dynamic, sharp, innovative. You’re the fire-starter of the fire Mercurys: you ignite inspiration wherever you go.

How you process: Talk first, think later. You move quickly. You’re decisive. You just know, in your gut, how to approach a situation. Trust you gut. You learn through risk, through adventure, and you’re looking for partners who can roll with you.

The communication you crave: Direct honesty. You’re a no-bullshit straight shooter and you wish that others would be, too. Sometimes this gets interpreted as being challenging or competitive – warrior-like, if you will – but you just say what you mean and mean what you say. You don’t dance around matters of the heart.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Learn something from: Gemini, Libra
Be challenged by: Cancer, Capricorn

Taurus Mercury

You take pride in your word; once given, it’s a promise. You’re slow to commit to an idea or belief, but once you’re there, it’s hard to change your mind. Stubborn, some call you. You’re methodical, measured. You take your time. You’re not charmed by quick wits; you lean back in a leather-bound chair, quiet, thoughtful. You play the long game.

How you process: You do best with concepts that you can put into practice, that you can see and touch and taste, that you can really work through with your hands. You want to work it out for yourself in an environment where you can savor the texture of a word, an idea. (Which is to say, dates should always involve good food.)

The communication you crave: Folks who offer a pragmatic solution they’ve taken the time to think over and tailor to your tastes. Who don’t rush you for a response. Who put some beauty, a touch of Venus, into their efforts.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Capricorn, Taurus, Virgo
Learn something from: Cancer, Scorpio
Be challenged by: Aquarius, Leo

Gemini Mercury

Mercury is at home in Gemini, where it can fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Mercury in Gemini natives are the fast-talking, quick thinking, clever conversationalists who are motivated by curiosity above all else. You appreciate ideas and debate for their own sake, understanding that many things can be true at the same time. You don’t necessarily personally identify with every idea you may hold in a particular moment, like some other signs do. You do best when you find other folks who can meet you on this level — and who can keep up.

How you process: By. Talking. It. Out. You need to talk out your feelings to know what you’re feeling.

The communication you crave: Witty conversationalists whose minds work as quickly as yours. Folks who can fly with you, dancing from topic to topic. Who don’t just get your need for intellectual variety and stimulation, but who share it, and who delight in your ingenuity.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aquarius, Gemini, Libra
Learn something from: Aries, Sagittarius
Be challenged by: Pisces, Virgo

Cancer Mercury

Mercury in Cancer folk, more than any other sign, notice the non-verbals: what is not said aloud. You see below the surface, immediately picking up on the disconnect between people’s body language and what they’re trying to talk themselves into. You ask your people how they’re doing, how they’re really doing. You’re the group mom, the group dad, the caretaker.

How you process: Quietly. Privately. In the shower; in the bathtub. In the safety of your own home or chosen environment, with food, with comfort. You need space and time, but you also need folks who will care for you as you care for them, who show up for you when you call.

The communication you crave: Words and non-verbals that feed your soul. Words as nutrition for the heart. You’re slow to reveal yourself, but you still take in everything that’s coming at you. Folks who speak and touch and move with awareness and sensitivity: these are the people with whom you feel most at home.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Learn something from: Capricorn, Taurus
Be challenged by: Aries, Libra

Leo Mercury

You’re the consummate storyteller. Mercury in Leo has a flair for the dramatic; you know not only how to command the room, but also how to direct it — how to shine the light on anyone with something interesting to share. You don’t get enough credit for being one of the best (and loudest) cheerleaders of those you love. Fiercely loyal, you have no problem advocating on others’ behalf, especially those in your circle who aren’t as comfortable with a microphone as you are.

How you process: It’s cliché to say with an audience, but: with an audience. You want to be with your trusted folks, who can bear witness to what’s going on — and who can validate it.

The communication you crave: Directness, delivered with empathy. You’re an entertainer at your core, but you most value those rare people who can see through your layers and challenge you while still holding space for your vulnerability. These are the people who make your heart sing.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Learn something from: Libra, Aquarius
Be challenged by: Taurus, Scorpio

Virgo Mercury

Mercury is at home in Virgo, where it uses its deft intellect to organize, to master the technicalities of ideas. Your goal is always to simplify, to get to the point. No beating around the bush, no fanciful fluff. You are at your best when bringing projects to life that have a tangible result, where you have the opportunity to be exact and precise in your thinking and execution. Of course, communicating about emotions is not always so precise.

How you process: Compartmentalization. Pro/con lists. Calendars. Writing it all down. Methodically working through. Taking a walk in nature.

The communication you crave: Practical language. This isn’t to say non-emotional language; you just value concrete words and definitions you can wrap your mind around. Also? You want to share a task, to take a walk together, to accomplish something while doing the work of communication.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Capricorn, Taurus, Virgo
Learn something from: Scorpio, Pisces
Be challenged by: Gemini, Sagittarius

Libra Mercury

Mercury in Libra is the diplomat, the keeper of the peace. You can appreciate and embody multiple viewpoints even in the span of one conversation and delight in debate for its own sake. You value fairness and have an even-keeled way of presenting things, even when discussing a topic you care deeply about. However, your mild(er) manners aren’t necessarily indicative of the passion you can tap into.

How you process: Through conversation with others. Talking it out always helps you determine what you think — however, more than any other sign of the zodiac, you value finding the right words, saying it precisely the right way. You want to take others’ views into account, and you want to communicate your point and minimize friction, but it is vital to remember that you are the leading person of your own life.

The communication you crave: Conversation that promotes harmony and appreciation between those involved. Elegance. Lyric. Beauty.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aquarius, Gemini, Libra
Learn something from: Aries, Leo
Be challenged by: Cancer, Capricorn

Scorpio Mercury

You don’t have to try to see people’s ulterior motives: you just do. Scorpio energy is kin with the underworld, the abject, the mysterious, and in Mercury’s realm, is adept at ferreting out secrets. This can sometimes bring a touch of paranoia (sometimes, folks really do mean well, but you never quite know what to do with the earnest and good hearted, even when you are one of them). Your humor can be dark, sarcastic, biting. At the end of the day, you just want people to stop putting on airs and be real. You’re like a surgeon: your language can cut so as to heal.

How you process: You need the space to get away from the constant flood, to allow yourself the time to integrate information. Set up a morning routine that helps to ground you, that offers you a sacred space to return to each day that is just for you, and you alone.

The communication you crave: Deep, intimate connections that easily vacillate between soul-heavy, shared interests, and sharp humor.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Learn something from: Capricorn, Taurus
Be challenged by: Aquarius, Leo

Sagittarius Mercury

Mercury in Sagittarius is most at home in your library, in your lab. Even when traveling, or on retreat, you are not truly at rest: your mind is soaking up everything around you. You collect words like others collect hobbies and things; you are ever in search of new and better ways to express yourself to those around you. Of all the fire signs, you speak with the most conviction, that what you believe now, in the present moment, is the absolute and unswayed Truth — which, with time, you come to understand is not always the case.

How you process: Through learning — about yourself, about others. Jay-Z, a Mercury in Sagittarius native, said “I’m hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day.”

The communication you crave: Like all fire Mercurys, you crave directness, but whereas Mercury in Aries wants directness with blunt honesty and Mercury in Leo wants directness with empathy, you want directness with context: to understand how someone else’s life experience brought them to where they are. How did they arrive at their Truth? What informs their language and expression? And you, in turn, want to be able to explain yourself to others, want someone who wants to understand your Truth.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Learn something from: Aquarius, Gemini
Be challenged by: Virgo, Pisces

Capricorn Mercury

Above all, Mercury in Capricorn natives are deliberate. Efficient, productive, and capable, you understand how to make the most of your ideas: how to translate thought into result, word into action. You consider someone’s word to be honor binding, and you have little use for frivolity and flirtation that isn’t going anywhere. When you flirt, you flirt with intention. You’re methodical and no-frills in your approach — and you understand how to get what you want.

How you process: Working on a project. Like Mercury in Virgos, you like your pro/con lists, but you would rather have a shorter list and get shit crossed off. You want to do something about your emotions.

The communication you crave: A cool-headed, concise, precise conversation that clearly communicates needs, wants, and actionable next steps. Clear definitions and action points are paramount. You don’t do mind games.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Capricorn, Taurus, Virgo
Learn something from: Cancer, Scorpio
Be challenged by: Aries, Libra

Aquarius Mercury

Mercury in Aquarius folks are less concerned with being charming conversationalists and more concerned with contributing new and worthy ideas to their friend group and society at large — and, on occasion, calling people’s bluff. You enjoy challenging encounters that stir the pot: you aren’t as confrontational as the fire signs, but you enjoy digging into the way people think. Where are folks’ unconscious biases? You want to know. You’re an astute observer of people’s thought processes, and the fact that you’re usually a few steps ahead of the conversation helps you steer the course.

How you process: First: solitude. Research, journaling. Getting your ducks in a row. Talking it out comes after you’ve organized your thoughts.

The communication you crave: In all things, you are committed to progress: to intellectual progress, to social movement, to personal evolution. You want relationships that are grounded in purpose and to be with people who see beneath Aquarian detachment to the vulnerable heart at your core.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aquarius, Gemini, Libra
Learn something from: Leo, Sagittarius
Be challenged by: Taurus, Scorpio

Pisces Mercury

You’re an associative thinker who delights in dreams, the subconscious, and the intangible. More than any other Mercury sign, you take in all the information in your environment: non-verbal cues, the music that’s playing, the energy of the people around you. You know that words are only part of the picture. Mind, you can be a warm and thoughtful conversationalist, and you’re also a good listener, but sometimes have to quietly withdraw from the world altogether, which people don’t always understand. Introspection and contemplation are keywords for your communication style.

How you process: Baths, showers, and springwater soaks can help clear your mind, but how you synthesize this information is a challenge. Sleep, and let your subconscious do the connective work. Read poetry, listen to beautiful music.

The communication you crave: Heart-led, empathetic demonstrations of love. Tender energy matters more than precise language.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Cancer, Pisces, Scorpio
Learn something from: Taurus, Virgo
Be challenged by: Gemini, Sagittarius

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Here’s How to Do It Yourself!

There are many places you can go, but to do your own chart, go to astro.com. To get the most accurate chart, you need your exact time of birth in addition to your date and place of birth; however, you can still do a chart without a time of birth.

If you’re an app person, I would recommend Time Passages, which provides an incredibly detailed breakdown breakdown of your chart with daily horoscopes as well as your transits and progressions (this will make sense to the more advanced astrology folk among you). It also gives you the opportunity to save other people’s charts

If you’re interested in starting to research and learn more so that you can interpret your chart for yourself, start with The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need (which is not, in fact, the only book you’ll ever need, but is a great starting point). There’s also a wealth of excellent free content by queer practitioners on the internet, like Chani Nicholas’ horoscopes and courses as well as the queer-centric astrology content at Beth Maiden’s Little Red Tarot. Go forth and learn!

Starstruck: What Your Moon Sign Says About Your Romantic Compatibility

When it comes to astrology much is made of romantic compatibility, especially with sun signs. But humans are complex! As our queer forefather Walt Whitman, lover of Oscar Wilde, once said, we contain multitudes. And our charts contain multitudes! Your sun sign is only one part of you. When it comes to romantic and sexual partners, there are many other parts we should be paying attention to when it comes to overall energetic compatibility.

The moon, for example, governs your emotions, habits, and instincts. When it comes to relationships, this is important! Your moon is how you are emotional. It’s how you express your tender little queer heart!

In this new series, we are going to be talking about compatibility with planets that aren’t your sun. We’ll be focusing on the Moon (how you do emotions), Mercury (how you communicate), Venus (how you woo and like to be wooed), and Mars (sex drive). Starting with moon sign compatibility!

I’ve been studying astrology for several years, as well as doing the practical side of reading birth charts. Personally, astrology has helped me learn how to better understand parts of myself – and empathize with others – in ways I never thought possible. I think that it can explain a lot about people, but it rarely explains (or predicts) everything.

At the same time, as someone who left fundamentalist Christianity and who uses astrology and tarot as tools of self-empowerment, I feel a need to make a fucking gigantic disclaimer, which is this:

You are a person with agency who has free will and who ultimately has to take responsibility for your life and your choices. Your astrology provides you with information, but it in no way governs who you end up with.

Even as I write this, Tessa Thompson has come out publicly and said that she and Janelle Monae VIBRATE ON THE SAME FREQUENCY. swoon. And y’all, I’ve looked at their birth charts. They are not the kinds of charts that scream soulmates. They aren’t even the kinds of charts that scream, “oh, obviously these people would end up together.”

Let’s be real: two or more mature and well-adjusted people with good communication and boundaries and a shared commitment to mental and emotional wellness (whatever that looks like for you!) can make a go of a relationship! There are no rules! You literally make your energy work for yourselves as you go — you just have to understand who you are, how you work, and what you need. People like Janelle and Tessa prove that you in no way have to have “ideal” synastry (the term for astrological compatibility) to pop out of vulva pants and inspire queers the world over.

Of course, I also obviously think that understanding both your energy as well as that of your partner(s) and/or love interest(s) is rad and helpful. Astrology helps me live a more self-aware life on a daily basis, and I hope that in learning about your moon sign and moon sign compatibility, it can help you, too.

Great! Disclaimer over. Before we dive in, here’s a quick explanation of one component of these descriptions, which is the “compatibility” section (keep in mind: these are moon signs, not sun signs). This is mostly for fun, because as established, free-will. That said, here is what the sections mean:

Most Compatible – You work with emotions similarly, because you share the same element (fire, air, water, or earth). When it comes to communicating, empathizing with, and understanding each other’s feelings and motivations, you just “get” each other.
Meet Your Match – These folks work with emotions in a way that is different than you, elementally, but share similar emotional themes and goals in a way that makes you go yes. There will be some challenges, but with good communication, you can really learn and grow together.
Take a Risk – You are the relationship no one in your life saw coming. Y’all are wired very differently, but who’s to say that friction doesn’t make things hot as hell and super interesting? Everything is a growth opportunity!

Now! Let’s talk about your badass moon signs!

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Aries Moon

An Aries moon is intense, but holds a fierce independence. You want to be able to do your own thing (some might call you impulsive), but you’re still extremely dedicated to your causes, your relationships, your interests, to that which feeds you, to that which you love. You care a lot (like, a lot), and you want to do everything right now. Who’s coming along for the ride? You’ll do it if no one else will. Your life’s work? Really seeing things through for the long-haul.

What turns you on: Courage. People who are unafraid to wear their heart on their sleeve, who fearlessly do their own thing, who are unafraid to be the outsider, who are willing to take a risk for love. You’re attracted to independence – you’re an emotionally independent person, and you require similar qualities in the people (platonic and romantic) you surround yourself with. Ultimately, you need someone (or multiple someones) who can keep up – and who is cool splitting off to do their own thing.

What you want: Inspiration. To rent a car with someone and plan a road trip on the fly.

What you need: Your own space. Books like A Room of One’s Own were written for Aries moons. You move quickly and are decisive, but this doesn’t mean you want to U-Haul. Far from it.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Passivity. People who don’t care.

Aries Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Meet Your Match: Gemini, Aquarius
Take A Risk: Virgo, Scorpio

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Taurus Moon

The most sensually grounded of the earth signs, Taurus moons express their emotions through their body & environment. A Taurus moon wants to nap it out, eat it out, fuck it out. But Taurus is also the stubborn bull that moves pretty slowly – you can’t rush this energy through anything. You Taurus folks process your emotions in your own time; you are the sign that sows seeds, that teaches us to grow, that most cherishes your own inner stability. You need to physically feel your way through something, processing it through the body, whether through physically working out, laughing, crying. Your life’s work is understanding how to let it all move through you in your own time.What turns you on: The slow burn.

What you want: The finer things – which doesn’t have to mean “expensive” or “luxury” (unless, of course, you want them to). Good food at hole in the wall restaurants. Unexpected, unique ambiance. Candlelight. Good smells that evoke a sweet place and time. Your sign is ruled by Venus, who elevates anything she touches.

What you need: To accept that you don’t need to match everyone else’s (fast) pace – your speed is just fine. Stop challenging yourself to be that spontaneous person and feeling guilty. You have so many gifts to offer. What you need, Taurus moon babes, is someone who matches and enjoys your pace – which is leisurely, luxurious, and downright sensuous.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Being rushed.

Taurus Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn
Meet Your Match: Leo, Scorpio
Take A Risk: Aries, Sagittarius

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Gemini

You Gemini moons, children of Mercury, are charmed folk who can talk and flirt your way into anything and make the other person think it was their idea. Adaptable and curious, people have to work to keep your attention (you want to bestow it on everyone! There are so many people to talk to!). You process your feels by talking things out – but the real question at the end of the day is, what are you feeling? You can easily charm and distract with your wit, so making sure you are deeply grounding your language in your gut, in the mess of emotions and instincts, is your life’s work.

What turns you on: A quick wit and a dry charm. Facility with language, if you will.

What you want: Intellectual feeding. Someone who wants to learn from you. Someone you can learn from.

What you need: To learn to sit in the discomfort when you don’t have the words for what you’re feeling. It’s important to you to have people in your life – romantic partners and otherwise – who also have a love of language, who are willing to sit in that morass with you and talk it through. Hold onto those people, and let the rest go.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Being called flirtatious when you’re just expressing yourself. (Explicitly clarifying situations and intentions will help a lot here.)

Gemini Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Meet Your Match: Virgo, Sagittarius
Take a risk: Taurus, Pisces

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Cancer

The moon is at home in Cancer. The moon feels deeply here. Shifts with the tides. Is strong. Emotional is too easy a word; we all have emotions, and the moon rules our emotions, always. It’s not that you are more emotional than other moon signs: it’s that your sign understands how to honor and protect and wield emotions in a profound way. Cancer is the crab; the hard shell, the soft underbelly. It’s not about being more or less, it’s about a deep knowledge, understanding, intuition. Cancer wants to be able to take off its shell, its burdens, and lay down with its love(s) in tenderness, in solidarity, in total union and familiarity. The bridge between the shell and the underbelly: this is your life’s work.

What turns you on: Hygge.

What you want: To nurture, nourish, and care for others, especially through the means available through a home: food (cooking, going out), cleaning, gardening, child and elder care. Care is your comfort zone, and you’re a homebody at heart. Given the right food, company, and comforts, you could easily not leave your house for days.

What you need: To understand what home is, for you. This may not be a physical place. This may not be certain people. How do you carry home within yourself?

Biggest Pet Peeve: A lack of gratitude and gentleness. People who don’t reciprocate the care you give to them.

Cancer Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Meet Your Match: Virgo, Capricorn
Take a risk: Libra, Aquarius

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Leo

Leo is the lion, the ruler: the kings and queens of the zodiac. For Leo moons, your life’s work is learning to claim and own and occupy and revel in your space in that uniquely performative Leo way that ultimately gives permission to the people around you to revel in their own space. Leo energy inspires others to live their own best lives. And yes, you are fed and nurtured by appreciation. Yes, you’ve got a flare for the theatrical. What others sometimes read as stereotypical Leo arrogance can, in fact, be the manifestation of insecurity. Remember that you are worthy, that you deserve to own your own space, that you absolutely deserve to have people in your life who shower you with love and tenderness.

What turns you on: Unmitigated, unadulterated self-expression. Fearless creativity unfolding on a stage.

What you want: Playfulness. Leo moons have a light heart, and finding loyal mates who appreciate you and who can play just as hard as you? That’s the winning combo.

What you need: Opportunities to build your confidence. Venues that feel comfortable, where you can risk and fail splendidly, with supportive partners and community. What is going to help you build that self-expression that is so vital for your Leo energy, that is going to help you play with your inner performer?

Biggest Pet Peeve: Energy that seeks to shame and belittle that which is bold and inspiring.

Leo Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Meet Your Match: Cancer, Aquarius
Take a risk: Scorpio, Pisces

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Virgo

Virgos are known for their love of organization, but at the heart of it is a desire to control their environment. When it comes to emotions with Virgo moons, this is challenging! You are an excellent social secretary for your friend group and family, the person everyone goes to for advice – but when was the last time you directed all that fixing energy inward? Your life’s work is turning that desire to understand, to organize, to control inward rather than outward. When you focus on cultivating a sense of self-awareness, sitting with discomfort, sitting in the mess of emotions, resisting the urge to sort them out right away, letting them take their time: there is extraordinary growth and harvest to be had.

What turns you on: Someone who has their shit together. In spite of your discomfort with emotional mess, the external pieces of your life usually run like a well-oiled machine. You’re organized AF. You cannot be the organizer of someone else’s life.

What you want: To be heard. To have someone else explicitly acknowledge and value the nitty-gritty in what you’re saying.

What you need: Folks who show up for you the way you show up for them. What does that look like? Being punctual, courteous, considerate, thoughtful. You are more pragmatic than showy, but the occasional romantic gesture goes a long way. With you, Virgo, it’s the little things.

Biggest Pet Peeve: People who have no follow-through.

Virgo Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn
Meet Your Match: Gemini, Pisces
Take a risk: Aries, Leo

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Libra

Charming and diplomatic, Libra moons are the consummate lawyers of the emotional zodiac: able to see and argue all sides to an issue. While Libra is a partnership-oriented sign, always seeking harmony in relationships (romantic and platonic), you struggle with indecisiveness. Your head often wars with your heart, and you end up talking yourself out of the good stuff because you don’t trust it. But why don’t you trust your gut, babe? The tarot card for Libra is Justice, represented by the scales. You can think of the scales as the head and the heart, and a Libra moon is never not weighing the two. Here’s the god’s honest truth: you know how to listen to your head – maybe a little too much. Your life’s work is learning to let your heart weigh in.

What turns you on: A challenge – which is to say, someone who doesn’t just keep up with you, but pushes you, debates you – and, of course, does all of this while respecting your boundaries and actually listening to what you’re saying.

What you want: Someone who is so intoxicating that your inner critic can’t help but shut up.

What you need: To learn how to trust your gut and get out of your own head when it comes to your feelings. You can be so dedicated to keeping the peace that you overlook your gut and the things that you really want in the interest of the greater good.

Biggest Pet Peeve: People who disrespect you, or the people and beliefs you value.

Libra Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Meet Your Match: Aries, Capricorn
Take a risk: Taurus, Cancer

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Scorpio

Scorpio moons are deep emotional wells. Scorpio revels in the transformative, in those liminal moments between life and death, between foreplay and sex and orgasm, between society and the abject. Scorpio is comfortable in the dark, in decay. So when it comes to the moon – to the emotional realm – well. Scorpio moons are comfortable with your own company. Secretive isn’t quite the right word; you have strong boundaries – fortress-like walls, if you will – and you drop the drawbridge for very few. Scorpio moons are intense, and the intensity isn’t for everyone. You’re like black licorice; you’re an acquired taste (and you like that). But for those who can run with you, who share your desire to know – really know – the depths and mysteries, the nooks and crannies of what makes this world (and you) work. Well. There is the promise of a lot of passion, a lot of heat, a lot of understanding. And understanding: that’s your life’s work.

What turns you on: The unknown. You’re game for anything that promises to get you closer to the veils of the beyond.

What you want: Someone you can’t scare off.

What you need: To not be rushed. You move at your own pace. You’ve got strong boundaries, and you aren’t going to share anything with anyone that you aren’t comfortable sharing. Some parts of you are just for you, and anyone who doesn’t get that can show themselves out.

Biggest Pet Peeve: People pushing your boundaries.

Scorpio Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Meet Your Match: Taurus, Capricorn
Take a risk: Gemini, Leo

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Sagittarius

Sagittarius moons are explorers at heart. Your heart is fed by meeting new people, in learning from new cultures (in non-appropriative ways!), in being footloose and fancy-free. Like your fellow fire folk, Aries moons, you enjoy your freedom, but you aren’t nearly as intense – you trust that things will work themselves out. This is what you teach others how to do: to live in the moment, to find joie de vivre in their current situation. But your life’s work, Sagittarius, is in establishing boundaries for yourself within this footloose lifestyle. Structure doesn’t have to mean conservative boredom; the right kinds of structure can help you thrive, and can help bring people into your life who don’t feed off your vibrant energy but rather, who themselves are centered and add to your joy.

What turns you on: Someone who helps you expand your mind. Who introduces you to new concepts. Who pushes you in new directions without trying to pin you down – and who isn’t an emotional vampire.

What you want: A one-way ticket to anywhere.

What you need: To be trusted by your person. You have a strong inner compass, and even though you crave freedom to roam, you require people who get that your magnetic, life of the party, flirtatious energy doesn’t actually threaten your relationship. You don’t need labels or boxes, and you do best when you feel trusted.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Cages of any kind.

Sagittarius Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Meet Your Match: Gemini, Aquarius
Take a risk: Libra, Capricorn

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Capricorn

You’re an unapologetic boss with a bitch face that never rests. But here’s the thing: it’s not that you’re not emotional – and in fact, you may be like, “why do all of these astrology websites say I’m cold and unemotional? I’m totally emotional.” But you are an expert at locking that shit up. You know that line from Frozen, “Conceal, don’t feel?” Capricorn moon, right there. You want to be in charge of how you present to the world. And how you present which emotions to the world, and when. Scheduling emotional shit into your calendar? Sounds like something you do. Vulnerability is your life’s work, and not just with other people, but with yourself. What is your own personal awareness of your emotions like? Can you locate your feelings in your body at any given time? It might be time to break out that journal and start getting in touch with the connection between your body and your emotions.

What turns you on: Safety – which is to say, someone you feel safe with and seen by.

What you want: To be able to trust someone else enough that you don’t always have to be in charge, planning every date and making every move.

What you need: Consistency – whatever that looks like to you. For example, if you’re a texter and crave responsiveness, that’s vital. You are reliable and consistent – the person everyone in your life goes to when they’re in trouble. You need someone who you can count on to be there for you, whether it’s picking up groceries for dinner or something a lot more serious.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Unreliable fuckbois who ghost.

Capricorn Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn
Meet Your Match: Cancer, Libra
Take a risk: Sagittarius, Pisces

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Aquarius

Aquarius moons are probably one of the most fearless moons of the zodiac, which is to say, you could legitimately give two fucks what anyone thinks. When you’re done with a person or a situation or a job, you’re fucking done. You’ve got airtight boundaries. Here’s the thing about Aquarius moons: you’ve got a strong internal compass, and you just know what you want. You’ve fought like hell to figure out who you are, and you aren’t going to settle for a less-than life, which also means the people you surround yourself with. Your life’s work? Understanding how to accept the situations that are within your control, and the situations that aren’t. (Just because a situation is out of your control doesn’t mean you have to go for the nuclear option.)

What turns you on: A sense of purpose, or calling, or vocation. Aquarians are often called the humanitarians of the zodiac, and folks with Aquarius moons feel strongly about being emotionally connected to a community.

What you want: Independence. Many folks in astrology take the easy road and say that your independent streak makes you more open to polyamory and open relationships. That’s too easy a stereotype. Folks with strong Aquarian energy require the freedom to build their own kind of system, no matter their relationship orientation. You need freedom within whatever relationship system you are building with your partner(s), who themselves have to be thoughtful and considerate and open-minded people.

What you need: The time and space to set your own boundaries.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Clinginess. Any energy that wants to contain you.

Aquarius Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Meet Your Match: Aries, Sagittarius
Take a risk: Cancer, Capricorn

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Pisces

Sensitivity is strength. Pisces moons know this better than most; you feel more deeply and are more psychically in tune with this world than others are capable of grasping. Your capacity for empathy is inspirational to those around you, but you also pick up on everything in your environment like whoa. Your life’s work? Developing boundaries. Not feeling everything going around you, everything people put on you. It is not your responsibility, alone, to take on the cares of the world, or even the cares of those closest to you. Learning to filter out, and feel through, the various layers is a difficult road, but one that leads to deep and fulfilling relationships that build you up.

What turns you on: “How do you feel about that?”

What you want: Big, romantic gestures. Everyone loves to be appreciated, but you, more than most, appreciate the grand gesture, the one that is specifically attuned to your interests, the one that is over the top. The one that, let’s be honest, makes you cry.

What you need: Tenderness. Friends and lovers who are real with you and who understand you, and who, for this reason, can challenge you and push you while cherishing you. Who know how to be tough and tender at the same time.

Biggest Pet Peeve: People who view feelings, empathy, and sensitivity as “less than.” Fucking heteronormative patriarchy.

Pisces Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Meet Your Match: Taurus, Virgo
Take a risk: Gemini, Aquarius

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Here’s How to Do Moon Sign Compatibility Yourself!

There are many places you can go, but to do your own chart, go to astro.com. To get the most accurate chart, you need your exact time of birth in addition to your date and place of birth; however, you can still do a chart without a time of birth.

If you’re an app person, I would recommend Time Passages, which provides an incredibly detailed breakdown breakdown of your chart with daily horoscopes as well as your transits and progressions (this will make sense to the more advanced astrology folk among you). It also gives you the opportunity to save other people’s charts

If you’re interested in starting to research and learn more so that you can interpret your chart for yourself, start with The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need (which is not, in fact, the only book you’ll ever need, but is a great starting point). There’s also a wealth of excellent free content by queer practitioners on the internet, like Chani Nicholas’ horoscopes and courses as well as the queer-centric astrology content at Beth Maiden’s Little Red Tarot. Go forth and learn!

Wherever West Is

My daddy was a particular kind of man. Tall, physically tough and imposing, the type of guy who had built his career out of manual labor, literally working the land, digging ditches for those “Call before you dig” signs. Emotionally hardened, stoic. Carhartts and steel toe boots and thirty-racks of Budweiser and always, a pack of Winstons in the cupholder of his Ford truck. Classic rock and fried chicken on Sunday afternoons and Nascar and college football.

The kind of man who was happy where he was, who was stuck in his ways, who voted for conservative, Far Right politicians. The kind of man who didn’t think twice about the way he talked to his wife or daughters.

The kind of man who always provided for us, who taught my sister and I how to ride a bike, how to understand pretty much every sport on the planet except soccer (because it’s not American), who put on John Mellencamp’s “Sweet Suzanne” before bed every night and twirled us around and around the living room, dancing like fools, just a daddy and his girls, before tucking us in.

I loved my daddy, but growing up, I feared him, too.

By the time I was a senior in high school, he and I found ourselves in full-blown screaming matches on a daily basis.

College was my ticket out, my ticket away from that kind of life, from getting stuck like my mama: stuck in a nowhere town, financially trapped in a no-good marriage with a man who provided for you but didn’t appreciate you.

An education was my ticket away from the country, away from small towns and small minds and the kind of masculinity that chased women like me until it choked the life out of us.

I met a man in college and, in spite of my doubts, married him anyway. He was a good Christian man from a good Christian family. City boy. He’d never been in a fist fight in his life.

I could have taken him. I had been in fist fights.

Immediately after the wedding, I moved to Boston with my decidedly non-country, non-lumberjack husband. He could not have been less like my father if he tried, in both physicality and demeanor, and that suited me just fine. I didn’t need any of that John Wayne confidence, didn’t need someone who knew how to walk into a bar and make everyone his friend without trying. Definitely didn’t need the smoking and the drinking.

So it wasn’t long, of course, before I fell in love with a woman from shitkicker Missouri, who strutted into a room full of Boston academics wearing cowboy boots and flannel, a master storyteller who spun stories that could keep huge groups in her thrall. She smoked Marlboro Lights and kept half a dozen full bottles of whiskey on the top of her fridge as a reminder not to drink them. She was the best man I’d ever met, and I told her so. When she looked me in the eye and said thank you, the subtle twang in her voice reached parts of me I thought I’d buried.

The first night we went out dancing — because I was spiraling out of my marriage, a ball of yarn coming undone — she pulled me onto her lap and asked if I loved my husband. I said yes because that’s what I was supposed to say, even as I immediately realized my honest answer should have been hell no. Couldn’t backtrack, though. We went out dancing every week after that, and she held me close, while never making a move. We’d go out driving late at night until one, two in the morning, talking and listening to country music, and when we got back to her apartment she would pull out her toolbox and fix things, all kinds of things, and make things, all sorts.

I think I thought she could make, or unmake, me, if only she was willing. Butch was a word she taught me, and she was its definition.

I divorced the city boy, and things ended badly with the Missouri woman, who, beneath her layers of flannel, insisted she didn’t feel a thing for me, that it was all in my head.

I dated furiously, women of all backgrounds — across races, presentations, body types. I would go on dates with women I met online who, once we started talking in person, were clearly from rich families, or at least ones better off than mine, women who talked of European vacations and summers on the Cape, women who had gone to college on lacrosse or rugby scholarships. Women who popped their collars, wore boat shoes, and donned pants the color of salmon or seafoam in the middle of a Boston winter.

I was a PhD student and passed, culturally, just fine, but none of these were people who could understand. I couldn’t introduce them to my family. Hell, I couldn’t get past the fact that they assumed I’d traveled to England, given my graduate work.

They couldn’t understand why I’d run a thousand miles away from home, stopped only by waves crashing against a rocky Massachusetts coast.

Even though I was in Boston, surrounded by the intellectual elite, I found women who had grown up rural working class like I had, women who drove trucks, were emotionally stalwart, women who wore Carhartts and cowboy boots and flannels, women who were comfortable with physical labor.

My first actual girlfriend, just as femme presenting as me, with long curly hair that trailed down her back in waves like a mermaid, drove me out to her family’s home, with all their land on the Connecticut border, soon after we started dating. She and her brother made a bonfire, chopping wood and stoking the flames, while her brother’s wife and I prepared food to roast over the fire.

She, with the mermaid hair and the red lacy bra, was as close to a stone top as I’ve ever dated, took me to dive bars where we shot pool (badly) with George Strait and Johnny Cash singing in the background, sought my advice when picking out a new truck.

She fell in love. I didn’t.

Home isn’t just country music and pickup trucks.

It’s women who understand how to handle land, how to take the vast empty of a quiet field into themselves.

It’s women who see my invisible cross, the one that has never entirely gone away, the ones who can smell the church on me and who say “Me, too,” these are the ones who get me to cry oh god in the holy of holies.

I met someone, a tall woman who wore men’s clothing and Oxfords and, when the weather was warm, boat shoes. This was Boston, after all. She was younger than me, from shithole Florida, from a family just as broke and fucked up as mine. She drove an old, run-down pickup, listened to bro country. On our first date, we spent four hours downing pints of well-poured Guinness, talking about what we wanted in life, how, even with our intellectual pedigrees, we both felt like outsiders in Boston.

It was obvious that she had emotional walls a mile thick and a mile high. That kind of challenge was intoxicating.

By the end of our second date, I knew I wanted to have dogs with her, and I chased her, relentlessly, until she gave in. We did get a dog, eventually. But I never quite got over her walls. She never got over mine, either. We were both Capricorns, trying to build something out of our togetherness that never quite took. It was as if, for three and a half years, we built on sand.

That ended, too.

Not all women who embrace androgyny or masculinity are butch. Not all butch and gender non-conforming folk have difficulty expressing their emotions. Not all queer women who dam up their emotions present in masculine ways — god knows I don’t. We do what it takes to survive where we are, and the woman I’m drawn to have been through wars.

I’ve been through one, too. The red lipstick masks the blood.

It has taken me years to understand that my instinctual draw to, yearning for, can’t eat can’t sleep reach for the stars over the fence World Series kind of stuff tug I feel in my gut around a certain kind of woman with a certain kind of look and a certain kind of confidence —

it’s taken me years to connect this yearning to home. And it’s taken me years to feel comfortable with the fact that, for me, butch/femme is deeply connected to — might even come from — a particular kind way I was raised.

It’s not that way for everyone; god knows it’s not. Of course it’s not. Desire, attraction, connection are individual, impossible to pattern.

But for me. For me.

It wasn’t until I moved out east that I started wearing cowboy boots and leather, kept my perfume in bullet cases, hung Johnny Cash lyrics in barn wood frames on my wall. Discovered the hardness within me. The hardness that wasn’t butch, but the hardness that was Maureen O’Hara in a John Wayne movie.

A hard femme bitch, the kind chiseled by flatline winds cutting across cornfields and toughened by deep freezes that make your bones shake.

Boston, and then New York, asked me to consider maybe, just maybe. Maybe, there’s something to the land, and all that space to breathe and expand in. Maybe.

One of the ways I judge the women I meet is how they respond to learning where I’m from. I never expected to say “I’m from the rural Midwest” in the middle of a lesbian bar in Manhattan, lifting my chin in defiance, daring the woman across from me, just daring her, to say something condescending. The Midwest, the South, the Mountain West — these places have problems, and god knows I’ve got plenty of issues with the red states that formed the person I am today, with the deeply, explicitly entrenched isms of which there are too many to list. But if you can’t tell Iowa from Idaho from Ohio, I really don’t care to hear your opinion.

Doesn’t change the fact that my parents’ home is one I can only abide for a few days at a time. It’s the reason I only go “home,” inasmuch as it’s going home, once or twice a year.

But I think about moving back west, wherever west is, nearly every day. All it takes is a minute of watching the sunset over One World Trade from my office to take me back to sunsets in rural Iowa, spiraling out for miles in every direction, unobstructed by any building, the summer heat rippling over the sweet corn and soybean fields as the sky bursts with the kinds of vibrant pinks and purples and reds and oranges New Yorkers keep bound up in nicely printed coffeetable books.

It’s not so cut and dry as to pit one state against another; of course it’s not. But there is something to the land that is inside me, that has never gone away, and it took moving to New York City for this profound ache, this grief for land and space and sky, to come pouring out of me, as swift and fierce as my queerness did nearly six years ago.

Loving women and loving the land are the two things I told myself I would never do, and somehow, they got all tangled up in each other.

Making a home out of other people is dangerous. Any kid who grew up in a home where there was more shouting than laughter is aware of this. And I’m 30 now, with an ex-husband and an ex-partner; there are too many people who I once thought would be in my life forever who aren’t anymore. Of course, they thought I’d be their person, too.

Home is a feeling I deeply crave, and it’s a feeling I’m scared to get close to.

Doesn’t mean I don’t want it, though, whatever the hell it is.

To say I like women like my father is reductive and not even remotely close to the truth — at least, not anymore. More accurate would be to say that there are qualities I was socialized to appreciate growing up in rural Iowa farm country, and then in the northwoods of Wisconsin, some of which were shared by my father but some of which weren’t, qualities I despised in the men I grew up around, qualities I criticized in my women’s studies classes in college, qualities I saw in the bravado of John Wayne’s westerns.

The protector, the provider, but also the one who was a leader, the one the community looked to when things went wrong, the one who had confidence — even swagger. The John Wayne who looked at Maureen O’Hara, the strongest, fiercest woman in the town, and said, “Why did it have to be you?” because she was the only woman who could stir their heart.

There’s masculinity in there, there’s strength there, survival there, and it turns out that women who show those characteristics — not necessarily the physical trappings, the beer drinking and the truck driving — but the character qualities, the way they hold themselves; the women I meet who are comfortable and confident with their strength and who have almost always gone through a war to get where they are, these are the women who make my heart sing.

It’s in their eyes, the quiet strength beneath the hardness, that makes me want to pull them into my skin and say, stay a while.

This is what I know: I’ve spent a lifetime running, fleeing home, burning bridges and discarding the people and places I traveled through. And yet, the women I find — the women who find me? — have bodies as smooth as the Iowa plains and crevices that feel like dropping off a Lover’s Leap into the Mississippi, sweeping me under. They carry the wind in their hair and promises on their breath and when I trace the lines of their palms,

they carry me home and home and home and home.