Commentary
When queerness and art collide: My journey as a writer
Peter Pan, ‘Poor Things,’ and the power in pleasure
Gay Carrie Bradshaw. Wannabe Dan Savage. Writing about barbacking like it’s some sort of mission trip. I’m not unaware of the perceptions surrounding this column, which, when directed toward me, often presents as, “How exactly did this happen?”
That question is valid, in part because it happened so fast that I never processed the events leading up to it. It’s even more valid considering my dream was never to be a columnist at all, if one could call me that (delusional blogger, maybe?). No, instead, I wanted to write science fiction.
That’s right — for years, I dedicated thousands of hours typing away at my laptop, making up plots, characters, settings, and sometimes laws of physics out of thin air. For most of that time, it was a hobby I kept close, telling few in my inner circle to avoid what others might think. Despite this insecurity, I managed to complete three-and-a-half full-length novels that now sit patiently as PDFs on my hard drive.
Here you thought this column was weird. Oh, it’s just the tip of the iceberg, my friend.
So how exactly does one go from science fiction to sex column? Buckle up for the unfiltered, unadulterated, and likely unrequested story of how that abrupt shift came to be. It all took place during a cold week last February, when three events aligned like planets to pave the way.
First came some disappointing news. After being in talks with a literary agency for an entire year about one of my novels, the opportunity slipped through my fingers and crashed to the ground like the glassware drunk customers seem to love dropping, which, in both instances, leaves me sweeping the mess away. I should have expected this, for breaking into publishing is no small feat, particularly given my experience, or lack thereof. I have no MFA. No publishing credits. No formal creative writing training of any kind. I’m completely self-taught, relying on books and YouTube to learn both craft and industry. Given this, recognition from an agency as someone worth considering should feel like an accomplishment on its own.
Still, the news was devastating, especially after abandoning my old career to pursue writing. I’ll never forget when Dusty, one of the bar owners, found me in the kitchen to ask if I was OK. I held back tears as I nodded back yes, but the voices in my head scolded me on how pathetic I probably appeared to the world. Sounds harsh, but let’s be honest: You’re only praised when your art makes it big, but when it doesn’t, you’re just another weirdo. More on that later.
Fortunately, I had a bar shift to take my mind off the matter, which led to the second event. A few regulars sat at the bar and, as usual, gave me a friendly hello. On this wintry day business was slow, enabling me to chat more than usual. Naturally they inquired about my life outside the bar, which I’ll admit put me on edge. I mean, what do I say? Something told me, “I’m a twice-fired loser who thought he could write but just learned he can’t,” would bring down the mood a bit.
Instead, I kept it vague with, “I like to write,” before turning the question back on them. As it just so happened, one of those regulars was Brian Pitts, co-owner of the Blade.
“Maybe you could write for us,” he suggested. When I asked what they were looking for, he shrugged and suggested show reviews. I smiled, told him I’d get back to him next week, then walked away dismissing the idea. I mean, show reviews? Was I even qualified? I wasn’t sure I could write a story, let alone critique one.
Then again, what more could I lose? Figuring a review was at least worth a try, I stumbled into the third event following my shift that Super Bowl Sunday. Instead of the Big Game, I hiked to Atlantic Plumbing to catch “Poor Things,” starring Emma Stone. I vaguely knew the premise but not much else, other than buzz around Stone’s performance.
For those who haven’t seen it, “Poor Things” is a Victorian-era, somewhat-steampunk fantasy about a mad scientist who brings a deceased, pregnant woman back to life by replacing her brain with her infant’s. It’s a bonkers plot in which Stone’s character, Bella, becomes a woman reset—quite literally in this case—but as her young mind develops in her adult body, she experiences life uninhibited. Then come the most shocking sequences of all: Bella having sex, and lots of it. At one point she even becomes a prostitute, using the gig to explore her sexuality while building in free time to pursue other interests.
I watched mesmerized, both appalled and intrigued, equally awed and revolted, while I couldn’t help but wonder: Is that me up on that screen?
I haven’t been shy about my own sexual journey, which I had assumed began and ended with my coming out. But damn was I wrong, and “Poor Things” showed me why. Notably, Bella’s sexual liberation shares a likeness to the queer experience. “Polite Society will destroy you,” one character tells her, which holds true for all queer journeys. Yet once we break free from these social chains, we often enter a reset—an infantile stage, if you will—to relive our robbed youth through fresh eyes.
Unfortunately, not all queers leave this phase, instead remaining caught in an eternal adolescence often referred to as Peter Pan syndrome. Bella only escapes it through critical self-examination, understanding better what she truly wanted from life. Here “Poor Things” depicts sexual liberation as more than a moment; rather, it’s a process where rebirth is just the beginning. How far Bella’s liberation went relied entirely on her willingness to explore herself. Consequently, her liberation didn’t end with sex but rather her self-actualization, so by the final throes of the film sex is rarely mentioned. Herein lies the Power in Pleasure — the unabashed pursuit of all things you enjoy to become your happiest, most well rounded, most fully realized self.
Later that night, instead of writing a review, I sat there reeling from the similarities between Bella’s life and my own. Bella taking on frowned-upon work in pursuit of herself mirrored my becoming a barback to pursue writing. And the sex? My God, I was amid a slut phase already, though I wanted to believe I was more than that. But wanting and believing are different things, aren’t they? I realized then I was holding myself back. My Peter Pan must grow up.
As for my art, I bought into this silly notion that I’d open up as a writer if I ever made it big, as if that would shield me from rejection. Not so coincidentally, my mindset was similar before coming out as gay: I thought, let me hold off until I’m successful, then show the world successful people can be gay. Both experiences felt too similar to ignore, until I finally saw the profound connection between art and queerness.
“Art was the precursor to fully allow me to embrace my queerness,” Scott would later tell me, who I’ve mentioned in the past is both my coworker and a performance artist. Scott was a theater kid in high school, which led them into a proud “Band of Misfits” that wore difference as a badge of honor. “I was able to find my queerness through art, through performance, and through training to become an actor.”
My journey was the opposite: I came out as gay well before as a writer, which Scott assured me is normal. “We’re often told don’t express yourself, conform, conform, conform, and artists do the opposite of that,” said Scott. “Being an artist is hard. It’s a queering of what societal expectations are, particularly here in the District where there is so much ladder climbing professionally, socially, politically. The title of artist sort of queers the idea of what it means to be in Washington, D.C.”
Scott was right. D.C., in comparison to other cities, feels uniquely difficult to pursue art. Even when we’re out — perhaps especially when we’re out — we D.C. gays tend to overcompensate for our perceived deficiency by ensuring everything else is in order, projecting a brighter image of what a good citizen ought to be, serving an ideal of a new normal, and leaping from one box only to scurry into another, albeit gayer, one.
Yet was fitting into any box what I truly wanted? If polite society says yes, then fuck polite society.
So, in a case of art imitating life imitating art likely imitating someone else’s life, I sat down and told my story, wrestling doubts of my craft, fighting my fears of what others might think, at times typing through my tears, all for the sake of my authenticity, since my repressing it was no longer an option. This is what it takes to bear your truth to the world. It’s what it takes to be an artist. No surprise, it’s also what it takes to come out queer, and to become the bravest version of yourself imaginable.
I sent what I wrote to the Blade as soon as I finished, and the rest is history. And there you have it: the story about the review that never happened but became so much more, brought to you by my dramatic flair and ADHD.
Though I must admit, gay Carrie Bradshaw has a nicer ring to it.
Jake Stewart is a D.C.-based writer and barback.
Commentary
Protecting the trans community is not optional for elected allies and candidates
One of oldest political tactics is blaming vulnerable group for societal woes
Being an ally to the trans community is not a conditional position for me, nor should it be for any candidate. My allyship doesn’t hinge on polling, focus groups, or whether courage feels politically convenient. At a time when trans people, especially trans youth of color, are under coordinated attack, elected officials and candidates must do more than offer quiet support. We must take a public and solid stand.
History shows us how these moments begin. One of the oldest political tactics is to single out the most vulnerable and blame them for society’s anxieties — not because they are responsible, but because they are easier to blame than those with power and protection. In Nazi Germany, Jewish people were primarily targeted, but they were not the only demographic who suffered elimination. LGBTQ people, disabled people, Romani communities, political dissidents, and others were also rounded up, imprisoned, and killed. Among the earliest acts of fascistic repression was the destruction of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, a pioneering center for gender-affirming care and LGBTQ research. These books and medical records were among the first to be confiscated and burned. It is not a coincidence that these same communities are now the first to suffer under this regime, they are our canaries in the coal mine signaling what’s to come.
Congress, emboldened by the rhetoric of the Donald Trump campaign, recently passed HR 3492 to criminalize healthcare workers who provide gender-affirming healthcare with fines and imprisonment. This bill, sponsored by celebrity politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, puts politics and headlines over people and health outcomes. Healthcare that a number of cis-gendered people also benefit from byway of hair regeneration and surgery, male and female breast augmentation, hormone replacement therapy etc. Even when these bills targeting this care do not pass, they do real damage. They create fear among patients, legal uncertainty for providers, and instability for clinics that serve the most marginalized people in our communities.
Here in D.C., organizations like Planned Parenthood and Whitman-Walker Health are lifelines for many communities. They provide gender-affirming care alongside primary care, mental health services, HIV treatment, and preventative medicine. When healthcare is politicized or criminalized, people don’t wait for court rulings — they delay care, ration medication, or disappear from the system entirely.
As a pharmacist, I know exactly what that means. These are life-saving medications. Continuity of care matters. Criminalizing and politicizing healthcare does not protect children or families — it puts lives at risk.
Instead of centering these realities, political discourse has been deliberately diverted toward a manufactured panic about trans women in sports. Let me be clear: trans women deserve to be protected and allowed to compete just like anyone else. Athletics have always included people with different bodies, strengths, and abilities. Girls and women will always encounter competitors who are stronger or faster — that is not a gender or sports crisis, it is the nature of competition.
Sports are meant to teach fairness, mutual respect, and the shared spirit of competition — not suspicion or exclusion. We should not police young people’s bodies, and we should reject attempts to single out trans youth as a political distraction. Families and doctors should be the authority on sex and gender identity.
This narrative has been cynically amplified by the right, but too often Democrats have allowed it to take hold rather than forcefully rejecting it. It is imperative to pay attention to what is happening — and to push back against every attempt to dehumanize anyone for political gain.
Trans people have always been part of our communities and our democracy. Protecting the most vulnerable is not radical — it is the foundation of a just society. My work is grounded in that commitment, and I will not waver from it. I’m proud to have hired trans political team Down Ballot to lead my campaign for DC Council At Large. We need more ally leaders of all stages to stand up for the LGBTQ+ community. We must let elected detractors know that when they come for them, then they come for all of us. We cannot allow Fox News and social media trolls to create a narrative that scares us away from protecting marginalized populations. We must stand up and do what’s right.
Anything less is not leadership.
Rep. Oye Owolewa is running for an at-large seat on the D.C. Council.
Commentary
America is going in the wrong direction for intersex children
Lawmakers are criminalizing care for trans youth, while permitting irreversible harm to intersex babies
I live with the consequences of what America is willing to condone in the name of “protecting children.”
When I was young, doctors and adults made irreversible decisions about my body without my informed consent. They weren’t responding to an emergency. They were responding to discomfort with innate physical differences and the social and medical pressure to make a child’s body conform to a rigid female-male binary. That’s the part people like to skip over when they talk about “child welfare”: the harm didn’t begin with my identity. It started with adults deciding my healthy body needed fixing.
That’s why the hypocrisy unfolding right now from statehouses to Capitol Hill feels so familiar, and so dangerous.
While harmful medical practices on intersex children, the nearly 2 percent born with differences in one or more of their physical sex characteristics, have been ongoing in the U.S. for decades, until recently, there was no law specifically condoning it.
This month, House Republicans passed one of the most extreme anti-trans bills in modern American history, advancing legislation that would criminalize gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth and threaten doctors with severe penalties for providing evidence-based treatment. The bill is framed as a measure to “protect children,” but in reality, it weaponizes the criminal legal system against families and providers who are trying to support young people in surviving adolescence.
At the same time, the administration has proposed hospital and insurance policies designed to choke off access to affirming care for trans youth nationwide by making providers fear loss of federal funding, regulatory retaliation, or prosecution. This is a familiar strategy: don’t just ban care outright; instead, make it so risky that hospitals stop providing it altogether. The result is the same everywhere. Young people lose access to care that major medical associations agree can be lifesaving.
All of this is happening under the banner of preventing “irreversible harm.”
But if America were genuinely concerned about irreversible harm to minors, the first thing lawmakers would address is the medically unnecessary, nonconsensual surgeries still performed on intersex infants and young children, procedures that permanently alter healthy tissue, often without urgent medical need, and long before a child can meaningfully participate in the decision. Human rights organizations have documented for years how these interventions are justified not by medical necessity, but by social pressure to make bodies appear more typically “female” or “male.”
Here is the uncomfortable truth: all of the state laws now banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth explicitly include exceptions that allow nonconsensual and harmful intersex surgeries to continue.
A recent JAMA Health Forum analysis found that 28 states have enacted bans on gender-affirming care for minors that carve out intersex exceptions, preserving doctors’ ability to perform irreversible “normalizing” procedures on intersex children even while prohibiting affirming care for trans adolescents.
This contradiction is not accidental. It reveals the real priority behind these laws.
If the goal were truly to protect children from irreversible medical interventions, intersex kids would be protected first. Instead, these policies target one group of children, transgender youth, while continuing to permit permanent interventions on another group whose bodies challenge the same rigid sex and gender binary that lawmakers are trying to enforce.
Intersex people are routinely erased from American policy debates, except when our bodies are invoked to justify harmful laws, warning that intersex children are being used as legal loopholes rather than protected as human beings. This “protect the children” rhetoric is routinely deployed to justify state control over bodies, while preserving medical practices that stripped intersex children like me of autonomy, good health, and choice. Those harms are not theoretical. They are lifelong.
What makes this moment even more jarring is that the federal government had finally begun to recognize intersex people and attempt to address the harms suffered.
In 2024, at the very end of his term, the Biden administration released the first-ever intersex health equity report — a landmark admission that intersex people have been harmed by the U.S. health care system. Issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, the report documents medically unnecessary interventions, lack of informed consent, and systemic erasure and recommends delaying irreversible procedures until individuals can meaningfully participate in decisions about their own bodies.
This should have been a turning point. Instead, America is moving in the opposite direction.
On day one, President Trump issued an executive order defining “sex” in a way attempting to delegitimize the existence of transgender Americans that also erased the existence of many intersex people.
When medicine is used to erase difference, it is called protection, while care that supports self-understanding is treated as a threat. This is not about medicine. It is about control.
You cannot claim to oppose irreversible harm to children while legally permitting surgeries that intersex adults and human rights experts have condemned for decades. You cannot claim to respect bodily autonomy while denying it selectively, based on whose bodies make lawmakers uncomfortable.
Protecting children means protecting all children, transgender, intersex, and cisgender alike. It means delaying irreversible interventions when they are not medically necessary. It means trusting and supporting young people and families over politicians chasing culture-war victories.
America can continue down the path of criminalizing care for some children while sanctioning harm to others, or it can finally listen to the people who have lived the consequences.
Intersex children deserve laws that protect their bodies, not politics that hurt and erase them.
Kimberly Zieselman is a human rights advocate and the author of “XOXY: A Memoir”. The author is a co-author of the JAMA Health Forum article cited, which examined state laws restricting gender-affirming care.
Today, on World AIDS Day, we honor the resilience, courage, and dignity of people living with HIV everywhere especially refugees, asylum seekers, and queer displaced communities across East Africa and the world.
For many, living with HIV is not just a health journey it is a journey of navigating stigma, borders, laws, discrimination, and survival.
Yet even in the face of displacement, uncertainty, and exclusion, queer people living with HIV continue to rise, thrive, advocate, and build community against all odds.
To every displaced person living with HIV:
• Your strength inspires us.
• Your story matters.
• You are worthy of safety, compassion, and the full right to health.
• You deserve a world where borders do not determine access to treatment, where identity does not determine dignity, and where your existence is celebrated not criminalized.
Let today be a reminder that:
• HIV is not a crime.
• Queer identity is not a crime.
• Seeking safety is not a crime.
• Stigma has no place in our communities.
• Access to treatment, care, and protection is a human right.
As we reflect, we must recommit ourselves to building systems that protect not punish displaced queer people living with HIV. We must amplify their voices, invest in inclusive healthcare, and fight the inequalities that fuel vulnerability.
Hope is stronger when we build it together.
Let’s continue to uplift, empower, and walk alongside those whose journeys are too often unheard.
Today we remember.
Today we stand together.
Today we renew hope.
Abraham Junior lives in the Gorom Refugee Settlement in South Sudan.
Top 10 international LGBTQ news stories of 2025
A pledge to keep fighting in 2026
Top 10 LGBTQ national news stories of 2025
Looking back at the 10 biggest A&E stories of 2025
Kazakh president signs anti-LGBTQ propaganda bill
Holiday week brings setbacks for Trump-Vance trans agenda
Out actor talks lead role in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
This gay author sees dead people
How to cope when a partner gives you the silent treatment
