Laurie McKane > Recent Status Updates

"I had hoped this would be one of those times, those lovely times, where the excitement turns into exhaustion, but then turns again, into gratitude, to myself for forcing my thighs out to one of those glorious nights, when moods soar and people are nice and you fall a little bit in love with everybody."

"What surprised me was not Hanna having read it because she seemed like a person who would. What surprised me was her view of me as someone who would also read this book, and enjoy it."

"Socialising is an activity that drains me both before and after the event. Before is then struggle to leave home...Returning home after I feel bulldozed, skin tense from aggressive smiling. The morning after, I get the hangover, an anxiety so acute as to be life changing, methodically going over the evening's word-for-word dialogue. The faults I find in my behaviour, I will convince myself to be apocalyptic."

"...queer people can create a reality that may help them survive in a world that erases or vilifies their authentic selves. This is especially true of trans, non binary, and gender nonconforming people, for whom existing in a bio-essentialist and binary gendered society may be unpleasant, dysphoric, or simply unbearable. Through kink, trans people can write themselves into the bodies and roles they wish to occupy..."

"What relief to have a moment outside of hating the thing you are...I felt such gratitude that I was me because I could touch this perfect thing."

""It's like when you're listening to a favourite song and there's this one part you love-- a guitar riff or the way the singer says something. And you wait and wait, enjoying it all, but just fucking dying for that moment. And when the moment comes, it's like you can let go and finally be happy. That's how people-- that's how I-- feel around you. "

"And in a moment of wisdom so incisive it almost harmed, she grabbed my hand and told me, 'All I know is I've never missed anything I didn't love'."

I didn't want to fuck him because it seemed beneath what I felt for him. In the very spare moments where I allowed sex and Jake to exist in the same mental sentence...I felt I'd tarnished something. I wanted Jake as much as I wanted to be Jake as much as I wanted to be his friend as much as I wanted to be his brother."

"I was used to that strange pining then, where I was more interested in the beauty of boys than girls because I wished so badly that I were them."

"Love might be made of things that couldn't happen, or things noone knows or intends."

"...his attention fell on her in a way that suggested love could be instant and precise, without desire or consummation but just as ardent as those things."

""...while.gender reassignment surgeries are indeed medically necessary to a great number of trans people, they're not, nor should they be, a prerequisite for membership in the trans and non binary communities. A person is trans if they don't consistently identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, and what they do about it from there is up to them."

"A great deal of the dysphoria and the destructive behaviours that can come from it stem from a feeling that one doesn't have control over the way one looks, and over ones life in general."

""the idea that control over one's presentation can have an ameliorating effect on dysphoria, and allow a person to more readily adapt their own presentation in response to a changing identity...I suspect this sense of control is important not just in the sense of having more control over gender presentation in response to a dynamic and fluctuating gender, but in the sense.of having more bodily autonomy in general."

"...the sociologist and writer Angela Jones understands queerness as an ongoing process of becoming, one that demands repeated 'explorations of alterity". We may not arrive at queerness, but it might be what allows us to turn again and again towards those we are supposed to disavow, in defiance of the predetermined trajectories our bodies are supposed to inherit."

"...the sociologist and writer Angela Jones understands queerness as an ongoing process of becoming, one that demands repeated "experimentations with alterity". We may not arrive at queerness, but it might be what allows us to turn again and again towards those we are supposed to disavow, in defiance of the predetermined trajectories our bodies are supposed to inhabit".

"Some of the most important encounters with my identity and my desires have been granted to me by the sex scene, through the way it speaks to my body at the same time as my imagination, to proximity as well as distance: the distance that allows desire to exist. The sex scene can provide so much imagery, language and possibly where we have none."

"I hate speaking of her in this way, in the way that I hate speaking of anyone, because whatever I might say will draw a picture, and the picture is wrong.  There is no way to describe a person that is not a reduction."

"It's suicidal to crave nourishment from a fruit known only for its poison, but have I not come by this madness honestly?"

"History repeats and repeats because history is people, and we can reproduce only what we know, and we get what we know from our elders. The same mechanisms that facilitate language facilitate the passing on of pain."

"And what of my father? Where is my ire for him? Okay, but like, what of anyone's father. Goodness, we can't be disappointed by men we never once believed in."

SUBLET, RIVER MACASKILL:

"I also knew how to feign the learned amnesia of gay people, where we act like sex never happened in order to continue to coexist."

SUBLET, RIVER MACASKILL:

"When I fancied men, it was in terms of a punch-up reverse objectification that I never followed through on. I thought maybe I wanted to inhabit their bodies, not fuck them. Of course, those two desires aren't so different. "