Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
Tag: LBGTQ
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Some people are raised by fathers. I was handled like a problem to be solved, a miscalculation to be corrected. It wasn’t parenting; it was a slow, relentless campaign. I was born on July 20, 1979, in New York City. My father, Harvey L. Slatin, was sixty-four years old, with a worldview weathered in the…
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It rained today on my 46th birthday. Not a long, cinematic storm—no thunder, no sky-wide crescendo, no poetic deluge to make it mean something larger. Just one of those sudden summer stutters that slips through the valley like it remembered something it meant to say, then lost interest halfway through. The air shifted like it…
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Every human being who has ever walked this strange, spinning planet has, whether or not they admit it, dreamed of seeing themselves in third person. It’s the secret behind mirrors, behind security cameras, behind every carefully framed selfie and the unspoken popularity of drones. We all want to see ourselves living—not merely existing, but being.…
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“Being a queer girl isn’t something you decide. It’s something you survive, until you get old enough to claim it.”—Emily Pratt Slatin There are days—quiet, ordinary, well-behaved days—when everything is working just as it should. But somewhere in the periphery, somewhere behind the steady cadence of utility and discipline, something far more primitive stirs: the…
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In the fall of 1998, I left New York and dropped straight into the Bible Belt. Rural West Virginia. A small college town where the air on Sunday morning was thick with hymns and everyone’s front porch had a flag—either American, Christian, or Confederate, depending on how honest they were. I was nineteen. A lesbian.…
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I’m out on the porch when the call comes through. The local tractor dealership is on the line, letting me know that my new mower deck—a long-awaited upgrade—is being assembled and will be delivered in the next couple of days. I thank them by name, because by now they answer with Hey Emily, as if…
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When I was little, I used to imagine myself barefoot and wild, running through fields that never ended—thick with tall grass and wildflowers, the air alive with monarch butterflies swarming around me like they knew I belonged there. In those dreams the sky was a fearless blue, the sun gentle on my skin, and I…
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I spent a year in the mouth of a whale. Not literally, of course, but in a place just as dark and confining. Inside, the outside world became a muffled hum, and time lost its meaning. It was a space of suspended existence—quiet, briny, and claustrophobic—where I felt both strangely protected, and painfully trapped. In…
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“Most people fall in love like rain; I fall like wreckage.”—Emily Slatin Most people fall in love like rain—soft, steady, the kind that gently soaks in over time. They ease into it, step by step, trusting that each drop will collect into something nourishing. I never learned that kind of love. I don’t fall like…
