Yesterday, for the first time in years, I went to church. I was motivated to go not only by a need to connect with people in my community in an offline space, but by the banner that was hanging outside the church.
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The first gay club I went to was a small, dark bar on the plains of Colorado, the summer after my first year in college. I went with my childhood best friend, because we’d both spent the last year discovering that our sexual orientations weren’t as straight as we’d thought. I don’t remember the name of the club. I do remember feeling like I was stepping into a new world, one that was both terrifying and exhilarating.
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Over the weekend I caught the tail end of a Twitter discussion centered on the hashtag #dontselfreject, created by writer and editor Rose Lemberg in response to an essay by writer and editor Nisi Shawl in the literary quarterly The Cascadia Subduction Zone. Nisi Shawl’s essay, titled “Unqualified,” is about how difficult it is for writers of color, and particularly African American writers (Nisi is African American, among other identities), to develop the confidence to try to get published — essentially, how hard it is to believe that their stories are valuable and worth it.
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