A Heresy of the Archive
Heretical Histories, Trans Erasures, Sapphic Fragments, Queer Dreams
Peter said to Mary, “Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than all other women. Tell us the words of the Savior that you remember, the things you know that we don’t because we haven’t heard them.”
Mary responded, “I will teach you about what is hidden from you.”
— The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (10,1- 10)
Early Saturday morning, I woke abruptly from a dream.1 I rose from bed, leaving Aaron sleeping soundly. Our dog Apollo cracked open one eye (his only eye) from his crate, wondering if I’d feed him early. He swiftly surmised I would not, huffed, and went back to sleep. I shuffled in sock feet to the kitchen in the new morning quiet, switched on the electric kettle and set up the pour-over for coffee. While the water heated, I took my journal with the moss-green cover to my favorite reading chair—a plush, champagne velvet, vintage circle chair tucked between the bookcases and the window where my Mary fountain sits.
I scribbled down the dream as best I could before it disappeared from my mind.
The water in the kettle shushed and whispered, getting louder, the roaring whisper of a waterfall heard through the trees on a hiking trail, heard long before you see it. If you see it. The kettle clicked off.
I wept.
The water got cold.
At the end of my dream, a woman knelt on an unmade bed, arms around her abdomen, head flung back, singing—wailing—a lament.
“God is changing”
“God is changing”
“God is cha-a-a-anging.”And then I woke up.
It makes sense that I would dream such a dream. I’m writing a book about God(s) and the queer divine, or more aptly a book about re-finding queer sacred stories in the erasures, the gaps, the whispers of the past. Lately, I’ve been studying the gnostic gospels, the “heretical” writings of the early Christians in the first few hundred years after Jesus’s death. Precious few survived after the newly formed “catholic” (meaning “universal”) Christian church ordered them destroyed. The texts that did survive were hidden for nearly two millennia, resurfacing (literally returning to the surface in the case of the Nag Hammadi scriptures that were buried in the ground in Egypt) only in the 19th and 20th centuries.
There was no singular, centralized or codified “Gnosticism.” Instead, there were numerous autonomous sects of gnostic Christians with varying beliefs that followed different teachers. In many of these sects, women were considered equal to men. Women held leadership positions in the Christian community. Women preached, gave the sacrament, and baptized. In the time of the apostles, the members of the Christian community shared money and property and didn’t heed laws they found pointless and harmful.
They don’t teach you this in Sunday school.
Most exciting for me are the gnostic writings that teach that God is dyadic—male and female both—or neither. In her book The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels writes that some gnostic teachers, “insisted that the divine is to be considered masculofeminine—the ‘great male-female power.’ Others claimed that the terms were meant only as metaphors, since, in reality, the divine is neither male nor female. A third group suggested that one can describe the primal Source in either masculine or feminine terms, depending on which aspect one intends to stress.”2 Further, gnostics believed the divine existed inside every person, and we could find it through gnosis, or knowledge derived from first-hand, subjective spiritual experience. Pagels quotes from a gnostic writing, the Great Announcement: “there is in everyone [divine power] existing in a latent condition… This is one power divided above and below; generating itself, making itself grow, seeking itself, finding itself, being mother of itself, father of itself, sister of itself, brother of itself, spouse of itself, daughter of itself, son of itself…”3
Eventually, though, the gnostic Christians were deemed heretics. “Heretic” is a strange word, because it is defined by what it is not: anything that is not orthodox doctrine is heresy; anyone who believes anything other than doctrine is a heretic. Kind of like queer is anyone who isn’t both cis and straight.
But who decides what is doctrine? Who decides which God is “real”?
When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the orthodox church ordered all heretical writings destroyed, and all heretics too.
Perhaps the most popular argument among the anti-trans crowd is that trans people aren’t real. We aren’t real because we’re supposedly “new.” We’re “new” because we don’t have historicity, meaning historical authenticity or actuality. And we don’t have historicity because (reductively),
the terminology we now have to talk about transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people, as well as the diagnostic metrics by which trans people are judged4, are new, and
the archives have not remembered us—or have not seemed to.
There are many reasons for the seeming dearth of trans and gender nonconforming people in the historical record, the first being that at many times in history, it has not been safe to openly defy binary gender categories or sexual norms—arguably, it still isn’t. If Jack felt like a Jill, she kept it to herself. Most of those who did defy their socially assigned gender category did it in secret, like Irish surgeon James Barry who rose to the second-highest medical office in the British Army, and who upon his death in 1865 was “discovered” to be a “woman.” Others lived as outcasts and criminals, like the sex workers called “mollies” in 18th and 19th century London, some of whom were effeminate gay men who cross-dressed, and some of whom lived as women full-time.
The archives don’t tend to remember the marginalized, the underground.
The “Lovers of Modena” are a pair of skeletons from between the 4th and 6th centuries CE, discovered in Italy in 2009. They lay side-by-side, holding hands, one skull turned toward the other as if to gaze upon it for eternity. The pair was assumed to be heterosexual lovers. Then, in 2019, a new tooth protein technique concluded that both skeletons were male.
Though their burial position is so tender as to have earned the title “Lovers” when they were assumed to be straight, experts now say that it is unlikely the pair were romantically linked. The authors of the study write, “Late Antique social attitudes and Christian religious restrictions lead to the rejection of any hypothesis of deliberate manifestation of homosexual relationship.”5
When they were assumed to be straight, all signs pointed to Lovers.
When they are proven to be two men, what previously seemed obvious—their love, their tender eternal embrace—the “hypothesis” of their homosexual love is “rejected.”
Maybe they were just very good friends.
The common refrain among academics that reject all hints of historical queerness seems to be this: The culture was hostile to homosexuality, they say. Sodomy was illegal, they write. Homosexuality is unlikely in such a climate. As if that stopped James Barry. As if that stopped the mollies and the men that were their clientele. As if that stopped Oscar Wilde from being gloriously gay and loving men. As if that stopped sharp-shooter, author, and feminist Joseph Lobdell from living as the man he was and marrying his wife Marie Louise Perry.
Both Wilde and Lobdell would be arrested for their “crimes,” Wilde for “gross indecency” and Lobdell for “cross-dressing.” Both would be imprisoned. Both knew the dangers of being who they were in a society that criminalized their existence. Both existed anyway.
Social attitudes and religious restrictions lead to the rejection of any hypothesis of deliberate manifestation of homosexual relationship.
As if I didn’t look down at my phone screen just now, illuminated by a notification from
, an alert: “Wyoming Bill Could Take Trans Kids From Parents.” Below it, one from Friday reads: “Protestors Stage Die-Ins At Several Florida DMVs Over Trans Drivers License Ban.” From two days before that: “Indiana Launches Anti-LGBTQ ‘Snitch Line.’”As if we don’t exist right now in a society hostile to our existence. As if we don’t exist in a religious state that attempts to legislate our erasure, today. A new bill almost every day.
And yet, here we are, existing. We are here. We are real.
“[Q]ueer evidence: an evidence that has been queered in relation to the laws of what counts as proof. Queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence. Historically, evidence of queerness has been used to penalize and discipline queer desires, connections, and acts. When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present, who will labor to invalidate the historical fact of queer lives—present, past, and future. Queerness is rarely complemented by evidence, or at least by traditional understandings of the term. The key to queering evidence, and by that I mean the ways in which we prove queerness and read queerness, is by suturing it to the concept of ephemera. Think of ephemera as trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor.”
—José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia6
The day before the dream, needing a break from the Christianity-heavy research, I started reading Blackouts by Justin Torres. Blackouts is called historical fiction, which is one of those cases where a label cannot come close to adequately describing its subject. Blackouts is a densely layered, queer enmeshment of historical texts, archival photos, and creative biography. It engages with real historical people, most centrally the queer sex researcher Jan Gay who worked with Magnus Hirschfeld and was a member of the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants in the 1930s. Gay’s contributions to the committee’s study were massive and essential—she recruited voluntary subjects from the gay community and took their oral histories. Eventually, though, she was removed from the committee, possibly for objecting to the nature of their findings (which were, with boring predictability, that homosexuality was a perversion). When the results of the study were published as the two-volume Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, Gay was barely mentioned in the acknowledgements, erased.
Blackouts includes actual pages from that study, redacted by Torres with marker to form blackout poems. The words float from the redacted gaps, perhaps unearthing a queer essence of the individual occluded by the pathologizing conclusions of the committee.
Erasure of the erasure. A queer act of creation if ever there was one.
Two days before my dream, a report came across my screen from Librarians and Archivists with Palestine. It compiles a devastating, partial list of the archives, libraries, and museums destroyed and damaged in Gaza since October 7th. Some of the libraries held rare and irreplaceable manuscripts. One of the completely destroyed archives held 150 years of records pertaining to Gaza’s history. The report also names six librarians, archivists, and information workers who have been killed in the ongoing Israeli bombardment.
The list is incomplete, the authors note, because it is difficult to measure the extent of the damage and loss while bombs continue to fall.
The dream was saturated in emotion. Sorrow. Grief. Anguish. Disbelief. Devastation.
I wasn’t in the dream—wasn’t a character or participant. Instead, it was like I was watching a movie. Watching other people, sometimes inside their heads, sharing their consciousness, and other times outside, observing. The strangest thing, I suppose, is that the people were strangers. Usually, you dream of yourself or people you know, right?
About a young woman in my dream—a different woman than the singer—I wrote:
Through her eyes, the world was mostly beautiful. And sad. Dew clinging to bare branches and power lines. The winter sun through steam rising off a rooftop. Without much else, I suppose you have the strange beauty of things. Everything had the wooly, underwater, slo-mo quality of a film, or of the world after grief, after loss, when you have been born into a brand-new, horrible world but have not acclimated yet, the caul still over your eyes, the amniotic fluid still plugging your ears and nose.
Another reason for the supposed lack of trans historicity is the fact that up until very recently, the history books have largely been written by cisgender, heterosexual, upper class, white men.7
I’ve recently started reading Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam. So far, I highly recommend it. In the introduction, Heyam makes an argument for “the value of a trans gaze in historical research.” Quoting curator Margaret Middleton, they write that “this means valuing ‘queer experience as expertise and gaydar as epistemology.’” They continue: “Simply put, trans people can pick up on hints and signals in the historical record that others might overlook. This community recognition also provides an ethical alternative to subjecting historical figures to the same kind of diagnostic process that both disabled people and trans people have to go through in the present day to prove our ‘realness.’”8 (emphasis mine)
In other words, the hints and traces of queerness and transness that do exist in the archives of history cannot be read by those who do not know the language.
Yet when we dare to read the record for our own presence in history, when we dare to find our reflections in the past, we are too often accused of bias. Heyam continues:
“[T]rans people who write about our own history are—like many other marginalised groups—often accused of bias. To anyone who accuses me of rereading the past from a perspective that’s biased towards finding trans history, I would say: you’re absolutely right! But I would also say that I'm no less objective than any other historian. Because we live in a society that sees cis people as the default, the majority of histories are biased against finding trans history even when they try not to be. But funnily enough, it tends to only be marginalised groups who are accused of lacking objectivity.”9
Mere months after the Nazi party came to power in Germany, they sacked Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. Hirschfeld was a gay Jewish man, a renowned sexologist, and an advocate for homosexual and transgender rights. The Nazis pulled out all his books, all the records, all the oral histories of trans women and trans men and genderqueer people, and burned them on the street.
The day before the dream, I turned a page of Blackouts to find an image from the pages of Sex Variants. The image is of eight black-and-white photographs of the study’s subjects. All face forward. Seven are naked. One shows a masculine form wearing feminine undergarments. Their bodies are in sharp focus. Their faces, all of them, blurred.
I felt rage, and then tears.
Their faces are hidden for their privacy and protection, I know. But something about their exposed nudity, something about the camera’s clinical gaze, something about the ghostly, blurred ovals of their faces—like a memory fading, like the cottony gag of silence—felt dehumanizing. Felt violent.
And it was. These queer women and men—some of whom, Torres notes, described themselves in ways similar to transgender or nonbinary people today—were stripped (literally) of their identities and reduced to a diagnosis. No longer individuals, no longer people, but Homosexuals. Sex variants.
Torres is aware of this. On the page before this image, the page you have to turn to first see it, he writes of the study subjects: “And when they were asked to strip, they obliged, and their names were anonymized, and their faces blurred, until they were confined to the realm of the symbolic, naked and labeled: Narcissistic, Homosexual, Hoodlum—determined and erased.”10
The violence of colonialism runs deep and runs backward. The colonizer bombs the libraries, the universities, the archives, the museums, because that is how you erase a people: uproot them from history. When there’s no evidence left, when the archives are ashes, when their historicity is robbed and plundered, they will no longer be “real.”
Another way to erase a people is to label them. Heretic. Terrorist. Pervert. Hoodlum. Sex Variant. Their humanity will then be subsumed by the label. Defined, anonymized.
Ghosts in the archive, wailing.
Diane J. Rayor’s translation of the collected works of Sappho is my favorite translation I’ve come across so far. I admire the intentionality with which Rayor chooses her translations—selecting “sweetbitter” instead of the more common “bittersweet,” for instance, because it is Sappho’s word order in the original Greek and because, as Rayor explains, “The sweet comes first, luring us back to Eros once again.”11
Once again Love, that loosener of limbs,
seizes me —
sweetbitter, inescapable, crawling thing.— Sappho fragment 13012
The introduction and notes to Rayor’s translation are written by professor of Greek language and literature André Lardinois. In the introduction, Lardinois illuminates evidence that Sappho may not have, in fact, been a lesbian. Lesbians are called lesbians because of Sappho, the Original Mother of Homoerotic Same-Sex Female Love, who lived on the isle of Lesbos. But Lardinois suggests that Sappho was more of a den-mother, shepherding the young ladies in her tutelage toward dutiful heterosexual marriage. He writes that Sappho’s homoerotic love poetry was meant to be performed to a group or as part of a wedding banquet, meant to praise a young woman’s beauty in a ceremonial, public way rather than a private, personal way. At one point, Lardinois writes that Plutarch’s claim that Sappho had sexual relationships with her female students is “very unlikely, given the restrictions Greek society placed on female sexuality in general.”13 (As the reference for these restrictions, Lardinois cites himself.)
(Social attitudes and religious restrictions lead to the rejection of any hypothesis of deliberate manifestation of homosexual relationship.)
The information on Sappho’s life is sketchy, it’s true. Many accounts come from hundreds of years after her death, probably as much rumor and scandal as truth, prey to the inaccuracies of repeated repetition like a game of telephone. (Think of ephemera as trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor.) In order to illustrate the difficulty of ascertaining truth from fiction in accounts of Sappho’s life, Lardinois excerpts a passage from the Suda, a 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia. He proceeds to thoroughly pick apart the cited names and details for three pages, pointing out issues with the name of Sappho’s purported husband, “Kerkylas of Andros,” for instance, which he notes is dubious due to its literal translation as “Little Prick from the Isle of Man.”14 (I do enjoy that detail.) As I read, I waited for him to comment on the one phrase from the Suda that seemed most significant to me:
“[Sappho] had three companions or friends, Atthis, Telesippa and Megara, through whom she got a bad name because of her shameful friendship with them.”15
Bad reputation. Shameful friendship. Veritable code words for homosexual tendencies. (Or maybe I’m projecting from my adolescence as an Alabama bisexual.)
I was left waiting.
While Lardinois makes passing comment on the names of Sappho’s companions, he says nothing about the rest of the sentence. Of Sappho’s “bad name,” of her “shameful friendship,” not a whisper. Not a word.
If not, let me remind you
*
... the lovely times we shared.
Many crowns of violets,
roses, and crocuses together
... you put on by my side
and many scented wreaths
woven from blossoms
around your delicate throat.
And... with pure, sweet oil
[for a queen] ...
you anointed ...
and on soft beds
... delicate ...
you quenched your desire.
Not any ...
no holy site ...
we left uncovered,
no grove ... dance
... sound— from Sappho Fragment 9416
Key: * denotes a missing line, . . . a missing word(s), [ ] editorial suppositions
Lardinois tells us that these accounts of Sappho’s life are called the testimonia, or “testimony,” from the Latin word for “evidence” or “witness.”17 In Before We Were Trans, Heyam identifies another flaw in the historical record of trans-ness:
“[I]n the present day, our structures for validating trans experience are all built around testimony. Trans people access medical treatment through our testimony; and any attempt to convince the general public to support trans rights includes a personal narrative, a story of what it feels like to be trans that attempts to win sympathy by ‘humanising’ us… The problem with this emphasis on testimony is not just that it demands trans people cede our right to privacy, exposing our vulnerabilities in order to prove that we deserve basic human rights: it’s that it creates an expectation of testimony… And when we look at historical records and can’t find that testimony… we conclude that we can’t find any trans people, because our standard of evidence hasn’t been reached.”18
The other problem is this: Even when we testify; even when we declare ourselves to be trans, queer, nonbinary, agender, gay, lesbian; even when we are forced to give our evidence, our witness in the face of persecution, our testimony of who we are—we are not believed.
Andrew responded, addressing the brothers and sisters, “Say what you will about the things she has said, but I do not believe that the Savior said these things, for indeed these teachings are strange ideas.”
Peter responded, bringing up similar concerns. He questioned them about the Savior, “Did he, then, speak with a woman in private without our knowing about it? Are we to turn around and listen to her? Did he choose her over us?”
— The Gospel of Mary Magdalene ( 17,10—19,5)
I learned recently that the word martyr, like testimonium, also means “witness,” from the Greek martus (“witness”).19 I learned this from reading about the persecution of Jews and Christians under the Roman Empire. In The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels writes, “For those caught [under government suspicion] then, as now, the choice was often simple: either to speak out, risking arrest, torture, the formality of a futile trial, and exile or death—or to keep silent and remain safe. Their fellow [Christian] believers revered those who spoke out as ‘confessors’ and regarded only those who actually endured through death as ‘witnesses’ (martyres).”20
Imagine my surprise when I came across the same distinction one week later in Blackouts, in conversation between two main characters:
“Do you know the difference between a confessor and a martyr?”
“Tell me.”
“Well, a confessor is persecuted for his faith, tortured, but lives. A martyr is killed.”
“Both are saints, is that right?”
“I’m not sure it’s automatic; I think it takes some time. It has to do with miracles.”
“And the way we choose to remember them?”
“The way we choose to forget—the human part.”21
Martyrs. Testimony. Witnesses. Subjects. [Redacted.]
From my journal with the moss-green cover, from what I wrote about the dream:
As night fell, she wandered back toward where she had awoken, a warehouse area of town, all cement and brick and metal, dim streetlights and padlocked buildings. Dumpsters and trash. A chill in the air. The sour smell of milk. She passes an alley and sees that the patio she woke on that morning is still empty. She thinks about sleeping there again tonight. Then she orients her gaze back to the street and in front of her, hanging over the street somehow on a very long, very thin stem, is a flower. A peace lily. But fleshier, the thickness and texture of skin over tissue, muscle. Its color is rose-mauve-grey, lush and sexual and somehow horrible all at once. The cone-like protrusion (stamen?) that rises from between the petal-lips is also fleshy, like a de-gloved finger or a swollen clit. It is beautiful and horrible. It is death and life.
In a personal essay from 2022, I wrote about the problem of the archive, which, in short, is that what gets remembered is inherently privileged and political. I also wrote about the queer experience of realization, that thing that happens when you are finally given the words and the context, when you are initiated—baptized—into your own erased history of queerness and transness:
When you have this realization at 30 years old, after three decades of forcing yourself to live as someone you never were, a strange kind of time-travel happens, like a river forking in reverse. A backwards confluence opens up from the moment of realization back through your life, and then suddenly you have two. Two pasts. Two lives.
One is the life you were conscious of, with the stories you told yourself, the rationalizations you made, the things you convinced yourself you wanted, the choices you swallowed in order to survive. The other is the life you were unconscious of, the thoughts you wouldn’t let yourself think, the reasons under the reasons for the choices you made, and the feelings you didn’t understand because you lacked the context, vocabulary, and awareness to understand them for what they were or because you thought you were impossible.
But you’re not impossible. You’re here.
And now you’re one river, the truth of you streaming unquenchably beneath your surface, seeping always upward.
And now you become a spring, a flood.
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
— The Gospel of Thomas 70: 1
Against the obliterating tide of forgetting, we must yearn to remember.
I remember when I first met Aaron, now my spouse, and he taught me so much of our queer and trans cultural heritage to which I never before had access. It felt magical, mystical, like being initiated into an esoteric knowledge tradition. The first time we were together, it felt like the first time I read Starhawk’s Spiral Dance in that it was an epiphany, an unveiling. (No holy site.. we left uncovered.) I stepped through a membrane into a new, beautiful world, still glossed and lovely behind the caul.22
The feeling was familiarity, recognition: Here was the knowledge I had always known; here were the things I had always felt to be true, deeply, thoroughly. Here is the self I never thought possible because I had no precedent, no role models, no historicity.
But here they are. Here I am. Here we are.
We wait beneath the dust of the archives. We haunt the manuscript margins with the monsters and saints. We slip into the space between fragments, twirl in the whispers and rumors, pant in the tantalizing gaps.
His followers said to Jesus: “When will the realm come?” [Jesus said to them:] “It will not come by looking for it. It will not be a matter of saying, ‘Here it is!’ or ‘Look! There it is.’ Rather, the realm of the Father is spread out upon the earth, but people don’t see it.”
— Gospel of Thomas 113: 1-3
When Aaron finally woke (late; it was a Saturday) and I told him about the dream, I cried throughout and sobbed into my hands at the end. Ingesting all those stories, from the gnostics to Sappho to Blackouts to Gaza, all those writings, all those realities, all those testimonies redacted and buried, rationalized and excused and rejected and burned—the dream was my psyche’s attempt to process the unbearable weight of that historicity of grief, I think.
I am still not very good at believing myself. Thirty-eight years of being told I’m not real have taken their toll. I’ve considered deleting the dream from this post at least half a dozen times. What’s the point? I ask myself. It’s just a dream.
A few days before the dream, I wrote these notes in my moss-green covered journal, from a post by
:“Father of Medicine” Hippocrates said, “Any man who judges well the signs given by dreams will feel their extreme importance; the intelligence of dreams is a great part of wisdom.”
The god of medicine Asclepius tended to visit patients in dreams—healing power of dreams?
Perhaps paying attention to dreams (as well as to signs, coincidences, the images that rise into my mind’s eye in prayer or meditation, synchronicities) and trying to believe in them is a way to listen to our own queer evidence. To erase our self-erasures. To suture the ephemera, the rumors, the trace. To heal a hidden archive. I don’t believe all dreams are prophetic—most dreams are the unconscious mind filing its archival paperwork—but I do believe that dreams have meaning. Dreams tell us something about ourselves. Even if that something is just that I’m sad, I’m angry, and I’ve been reading a lot about God. (Or, perhaps, something much more.)
The song the woman sang in my dream—God is changing—recalled Octavia Butler, of course. Those famous lines from Parable of the Sower: “All that you touch / You Change. / All that you Change / Changes you. / The only lasting truth / Is Change. / God Is Change.”23
Maybe God is changing. My God is changing, at least. Maybe yours is too.
Queer stories, trans testimonies, heretical histories—all are suppressed and attacked because they are powerful. Because they can change the story. Or not change the story, but reveal the story that has been there all along, hidden in a jar in the ground, tucked beneath the redactions, behind our self-denials, amongst queer dreams, holding skeletal hands, fragmented, resurfacing. Touched, touching. Changing, changed.
(The Greek word for apocalypse means uncovering.)
We are birthed from the blackouts, and yet we live.
We are bringing forth what is within us.
We are becoming ourselves.
We are entering History.24
God is changing.
[Wake up.]
[His followers] said to him: “Will we enter the [Kingdom] as little children?” Jesus said to them: “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below. And when you make the male and the female into a solitary one, so that the male is not male not the female female. And when you make eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and an image in place of an image, then you will enter the [Kingdom].”
— Gospel of Thomas 22: 2-3
Passages from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene are from The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition, edited by Marvin Meyer, Gospel of Mary translated by Karen L. King (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 737-47.
Unless otherwise noted, passages from the Gospel of Thomas are from The New New Testament: A Bible for the 21st Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts, edited with commentary by Hal Taussig (New York: Harper One, 2013), 11-23.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 51.
Ibid, 51.
People are trans if they say they’re trans. Unfortunately, many of us have to officially “qualify” as trans as diagnosed by a psychiatrist or doctor in order to access gender-affirming healthcare. These same diagnostic criteria are then (bizarrely) applied backwards into the past in a jarring example of anachronism if there ever was one. When we cannot find individuals self-reporting gender dysphoria or living full-time as the opposite sex in the historical record, then they do not meet the burden of “proof” to qualify as trans. In order to be cis, however, one need not meet a burden of proof at all.
Quoted in Matt Baume, “Ancient ‘Lovers’ Skeletons Were Two Men, Study Reveals,” Out Magazine, Sept. 13, 2019, https://www.out.com/news/2019/9/13/ancient-lovers-skeletons-were-two-men-study-reveals
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 10th anniversary edition (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 65.
The gender binary itself is a racist invention of whiteness with roots in eugenics, created to uphold white supremacy and colonialism as much as the patriarchal superiority of (white) men over (white) women.
Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (New York: Seal Press, 2022), 20.
Ibid.
Justin Torres, Blackouts: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023), 77.
Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works, trans. Diane J. Rayor, introduction and notes by André Lardinois (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 22.
Ibid, 95.
Ibid, 14.
Ibid, 4.
Ibid, 3.
Ibid, 78.
Ibid, 2.
Heyam, 21.
Pagels, 81.
Ibid, 81-2.
Torres, 248.
The day I started to fall in love with him, on the drive to meet him, I felt myself pass through the membrane between the dragging inertia of what has been and the potential of what might be. I drove through it and it made me dizzy. I almost pulled the car over.
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (London: Headline, 2019), 3.
“Whatever Blur he’d lived in for every year and every moment up to this one, was lifting and sparkling into Nothingness like fog in the sun. All of Jack’s molecules were scrambled and rearranged, and something new was taking shape. Someone new.
“He was becoming Jack Sheppard. He was entering History.”
— From Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox: A Novel (New York: One World, 2018), 44.
this is so damn beautiful, charlie. thank you.
oh lord, Charlie, the syncs in this with my life at this moment are WILD. You know I started the Palestine candle spell group because of my own dreams, lately. Have also been working daily with Asclepius, who was mentioned here. My dissertation has a whole article on Hirschfeld. There's more, but this whole writing shook me to my core. Your work is so beautiful. Thank you for sharing this and good LORD I am excited for your book!