Lio Min has listened to, played and performed, and written about music for most of their life. Their novel Beating Heart Baby is about boys, bands, and Los Angeles.
I fear it and I dream of it: total honesty with my family, opening the door of my personhood and letting them see all of me.
I love new wave music for the way it makes me feel—like the cups of my interior and exterior worlds are overflowing. Turns out I’m not the only one.
What a joy it is—a singular joy, an occasion for jubilee—to allow your art’s translation through another point of view.
This is the deal I’d make with God: my devotion in exchange for acceptance of the past, peace with the present, and assurances about the future.
I love my parents because they are in me, but I wonder if, when they look at me, they see those parts or instead a shapeshifter who’s slowly taken over the person they thought they’d raised.
Transition begins by insisting that you can want more. It’s a dream in the sense that it reveals the version of you that wants, above all, to be here.
She’s loved and lost and lost and lost and yet still loves, and I root for this assertion to take root. Every sweetheart deserves their summers.
I could live inauthentically if it meant I could live with him. But my body kept betraying me with panic, and of course he noticed.
It was the first time I’d ever pointed at myself and claimed “boy,” even jokingly.
Since voicing my intention to transition, I’ve been revisiting my favorite love-as-a-woman songs and reorienting myself within them.
