What a Difference a Day Makes

twenty-four little hours

First…

Let me set the stage.

Two weeks ago, I received an email that might just change my writing career.

Some of my readers might not know Ms. Gay or

The Audacity.

but I have been a fan of her writing since I read The Hunger. (I also had weight loss surgery, a roux-en-y gastric bypass, in 2004.)

my ecstatic face

I have been ecstatic since receiving this email and one of the reasons has to do with the accepted essay itself. Desire, Desiring, Desired grew out of a prompt from my friends Aileen and Megan at The Witches of Pitches back in December of 2022. They asked me to identify the themes in my memoir, write essays addressing each, and then submit them.

Themes? I think there might be five within Crying in a Foreign Language.

1. My fear of and flight from HIV-AIDS in the 1980s.

2. Physical dysmorphia (i.e., the conflict between who I am physically and the images of gay men in the media I consumed).

3. Inhabiting sex (i.e., how my vision of myself as a sexual partner grew and changed).

4. Responding to grief with animotophobia, a fear of emotions, in general, and tristophobia, a fear of sadness, in particular.

5. How creativity in general and music in particular helped me to grow into my queerness.

The third of these was easiest for me to embark on (and after a few different title ideas, became Desire, Desiring, Desired. I won’t pull any punches: this essay will need a content warning. I think it’s smart and funny, encompassing different perspectives on sex and love, and ultimately uplifting, but it’s also honest frank about sex, and I know this won’t be for all readers.

With any luck, however, it will be live in The Audacity in May.

But That’s Not All

When I shared news of this amazingness on Twitter (and on all my other social media channels), an agent reached out to me and asked to see my proposal. I’m working on revisions to said proposal in a great class taught by

Greg Mania

and the agent has agreed to wait for the finished product.

And I just got some development editor feedback which has excited me (I love a challenge) and revisions to the memoir are in a higher gear, too.

Something Completely Different

One of my reference sources for my memoir is one of the English-language newspapers in Japan, The Japan Times. They recently sent me an article from 1924, and after giggling at the headline, I loved the perspective on culture shock shared. Also, can we please bring the cat’s ankles back in vogue.

Lucie Frost

, this might be a fun topic, 1920s’ slang.

Japan nice but men dress in very queer ways

Of Japanese blood but American birth, education and ideas, a party of very pretty girls is now stopping at the Woman’s Home in Okubo, Tokyo, taking their first sights of Japan and the Japanese. They are Miss Toki and Miss Tai Miyakawa, sisters; Miss Sumire Okazaki and Miss Kimiyo Kimura, arrivals by the Kaga Maru on Sunday, intending to visit their Japanese relations.

After some preliminary consultation, in which they decided “to take a chance,” the fair quartette viewed, and this is the consensus of their expressed views:

Tokyo is wonderful. While they expected to find a city in ruins [after the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923], they find one all rebuilt, with everybody cheerful and happy.

They are simply enraptured with the Japanese women in flowing kimono, but what in the world do they put so much face powder on for? Of course, it makes them look like dolls and is cute, but it must be an awful nuisance having to paint up so thoroughly all the time. In America we just carry around a handy powder rag and a lip stick, and fix up whenever we need to.

The way the Japanese women use purple in their clothing color schemes is most attractive, while the girls in America would simply jump at the chance to get that print mousseline in big flowers and checks, like the kind the Japanese flappers wear. It’s just the cat’s ankles.

Wouldn’t it be fun to have our hair fixed in that way, like a whisk upside-down, that you see so many women with. Oh, that’s the "shimada," is it. Only married women? Well, I guess that lets us out. But we could wear those long floppy sleeves, couldn’t we, without getting married?

Say, there’s one fierce thing in Japan we don’t like. That’s the public baths. Honest, I thought I would die when I went into one last night. But what are you going to do? We have to bathe, but it will be a long time before we go without being scared, I’ll tell the world.

On the ship coming over, we four girls had to take our baths all together. Of course, then, we could put the lights out and in the dark it wasn’t so bad. But here! Say, the more light there is in these public bath places, the more they seem to like it.

And laugh! Say, some of the Japanese men do dress in the funniest way. Hard hat on the head and wooden geta on bare feet. What do you know about that? And some of them, looking so proud, and wearing cloaks, just like women, and the fur boas they have.

But the worst are those men with bare legs who get right into the streetcars and don’t seem a bit ashamed of themselves. They wouldn’t last long like that in Seattle. I’m here to say.

And speaking of cops, why do the Japanese police let the streetcar company run their cars so full for? It must be dangerous. In America we wouldn’t let them get away with anything like that.

Until next time, friends!