Hello! And welcome to City Dreams
Hello! If you are reading this email, thank you – this is edition one of City Dreams, an email newsletter I’m hoping to get started to keep people interested in my work updated on the many different things I’m working on. Doing an email newsletter in this way is something I’ve been mulling over for quite a while, and between the slow, miserable demise of Twitter and Instagram being incredibly annoying to use as a writer to promote my work, I figured an email blast would be the best mechanism to share recent articles, talk about upcoming projects, and otherwise let people know ~what’s happening~. I appreciate you for taking an interest in what I’m doing and I hope this can be a useful way for me to keep people in my life up to speed with everything going on – life is so busy right now and I’m also probably going to appreciate having this as a space to keep all of it in perspective!
Twenty-twenty-three has been a whirlwind of a year! Between getting round one of Facial Feminization Surgery in March, traveling with Elise and their family to Europe in May, and then a lot of other writing and organizing and other big life events, this year has flown by in a way that I haven’t fully processed. (If you have any advice on slowing time down, short of developing a consistent meditation practice, which has been happening again for me lately, please let me know.) There are more exciting things coming up on the horizon, including another round of FFS at the end of December, and I’m really excited to keep people looped in through this newsletter. Thank you to everyone who has made this year special so far, and looking forward to so much more to come soon!
When it comes to my writing work, I’ve been especially grateful for how things have developed this year. I’m hard at work on building the foundations for my first published book, something that I’ve been dreaming of for many years. The elevator pitch is simple: queer and trans people have long relied on cities to make their lives possible, yet cities and queer and trans people are under attack from interrelated and distinct forces. By looking at case studies of groups of people in cities around the US and abroad, I hope to show what needs to happen to create cities that are better for queer people, in ways that will improve city living for everyone. These themes have been central in my writing for several years, and they’ve been focal points in some recent articles, which will serve as the foundation for the book!
While recovering from face surgery in March, I was lucky to spend significant time with the release of a 500-page book and double album of material from the Blacklips Performance Cult, a weirdo queer performance group that put on shows every Monday night at 1 am at the Pyramid on the Lower East Side. That resulted in a review of these projects in the Baffler, followed by a wonderful opportunity to interview ANOHNI, who co-founded the group, about her latest album, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, at Bandcamp. Without realizing it, ANOHNI pointed me towards so many feelings and emotions as a teenager that I was many years from articulating, and getting to talk with her was a dream come true. While I was recovering, I also wrote a poem to ANOHNI, 60s Factory scene superstar Candy Darling, and Chloe Dzubilo, another trans woman on the 90s New York scene that I’ll be writing more about soon. Spending time with those who came before and have my life and the lives of so many others possible is always something that I feel grateful for, and was especially meaningful as my body put itself back together in recovery from face surgery!
Speaking of trans history, I also had a chance to publish “The True Transsexuals: A Medical and Linguistic History of Social Deviance” with Majuscule Lit in August. This is a story I’ve been working on all year, written in honor of the 100th anniversary of the term ‘transsexual’ being coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin in 1923! There’s so much rich history of the concept of transsexuality, from the lives of those in Berlin in the early 20thcentury who risked arrest to live honestly and openly, and were some of the first to receive gender-affirming care, and then into the many years of struggle to make trans healthcare more available and less stigmatizing for those seeking it. The term ‘transsexual’ is also one you probably don’t see much of anymore (unless you’re trans yourself and terminally online, as I am), and the history of the shift towards using ‘transgender’ as the dominant framework is fascinating and quite messy! I’m so glad I got to write this story, and in an effort to share some of the source materials for the piece, I also created this Are.na channel that links to books, articles, and archives that informed my writing.
Moving forward, I hope to keep this newsletter active and updated every few weeks or so. In the meantime, there are a few upcoming events that I’m either hosting or involved in that I wanted to share.
Upcoming events:
Next Saturday, September 16 at 7 pm, I’ll be speaking at Dmitry Samarov’s book release event at Tangible Books, located at 3324 S. Halsted Street in Bridgeport! Dmitry is a lovely writer and artist and I’ve been lucky to get to know while living in Bridgeport, and I’m excited to read some of my poetry for the first time in public next weekend!
On Monday, September 18, we’ll be hosting the second edition of Dyke Night at Bernice’s Tavern, also in Bridgeport at 3238 S. Halsted Street. This is a chill, low-expectation chance to hang with other South Side sapphics, something that was very fun the last time we did it! Should start around 7, and if you get there early, Elise will probably order pizza…
Finally, on Wednesday, September 20, I’ll be co-facilitating an evening meeting event with my day job on the Just Cause for Eviction campaign in Chicago! The work to stop evictions in Chicago has been the main focus of my work since I started in the role two and a half years ago, and this will be a great way to share this with more people. You can register at tinyurl.com/JustCauseSep20, and we’ll be meeting online and in person at the National Public Housing Museum at 625 N. Kingsbury from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm!
Thanks for reading! I know this edition was a bit of an info dump with all of the upcoming events happening next week, and if you've made it this far, hell yeah! Hope to see you at any of the above events, and if you enjoyed what you read here, keep your eyes peeled for the next edition sometime soon :)
With love, Annie