Issue 9

She’ll tell you about a forgotten actress from fifty years ago in her ruby red Repetto slippers. Your attention is held. Galen Hopper embodies the word cool from the moment you meet her. I met Galen some years ago and was immediately struck by her effortless IT factor. My bias is that I still think she's really cool. Even after all this time. Galen is striking. Beautiful, yes. Interesting, yes. Articulate, yes. An actress and a writer, Galen understands the weight of each

From age 10, this sentence served as a contingency plan. God forbid anyone in my middle school uncovered the truth about me. It was backup if confronted with a yearbook photo from third grade or a gymnastics roster with my birth name on it. If disaster struck, at least I’d have something poised and simple to say. At its surface, it seemed like a great sentiment. My butch lesbian therapist and I worked on crafting it for weeks. We were trying to encapsulate the vibe of: Don’t

I first encountered Nick Laird’s poetry at a summer creative writing program in Paris. I was twenty-one, having chosen to go abroad primarily for the simple reasons: to get drunk each night on the Île Saint-Louis, to spend my day at the Louvre or the Orsay, to read poetry at a cafe while drinking espresso (to be watched while doing all of the following). I wanted to be one of those people who came back from study abroad and said emphatically: “It changed me; it’s truly hard t

Spoilers Ahead for Blue Heron (2025) When I first read the synopsis for the film Blue Heron, I thought that perhaps I would find some aspects of the subject matter relatable, but that it would ultimately not hit home for me because it is told from the perspective of a younger sister, not an older sister like me. Mere minutes into the film, I realized that I could not have been more wrong. The semi-autobiographical film is Sophy Romvari’s debut feature, told largely through th

Trite as it may be, I’ve come to associate spring with revitalized lust, a season where desires seem to resurface from the depths of melted snow mounds. Having shed the oppressive layers of winter, we are at long last reminded of our bodies' existence. As Guinevere sings in Camelot, spring is “that shocking time of year/when tons of wicked little thoughts merrily appear.” It was amid this shift that I revisited Hold Me While I’m Naked, a 1966 short film by the multi-discipli

There are four boys sprawled like ragdolls on the couch of a Venice apartment, waiting out the rain. A movie is playing on the television. It has been selected for the purpose of killing time. Instead, the movie mesmerizes. It freezes the litter of boys, and then, like a puppeteer with four marionettes, rearranges them so that they are cross-legged and leaning forward, wide-eyed. On the screen, a story unfolds: first, of a house that heaves, cracks, and sighs under the weigh