Christine Stoddard

I recently spent some time in Freddie Gray's West Baltimore neighborhood asking local women for their thoughts on police reform. I was curious because, as the Freddie Gray trials drag on, I can't help but feel that city and state officials are failing to ask everyday people what needs to change.

In art school, conversations about the merits of polyamory thrived, but hearing anyone express a genuine desire to get married almost never happened. It was almost taboo. The implication was, how could you want something so traditional? So suburban and unimaginative?

Most of my friends are my age or slightly older and yet virtually none of them want children… ever. They argue that women deserve respect and autonomy over their bodies. I passionately agree. A few of these friends are, like me, engaged or married, but even they don’t want kids. One of my engaged friends says she and her fiancé may want to adopt children later in life, after they’ve had the chance to travel extensively.

My now-husband was stunned the first time I told him what I do while walking alone. I mentioned behavior typical of so many city-dwelling women: carrying pepper spray, checking my back every block, trying to look confident while struggling to properly breathe. After a moment of silence, he teared up and said, “I don’t want you to have to worry.”

Though I was raised in an interdenominational household, my upbringing could at best be described as vaguely Christian.

Some people think that the size and budget of your wedding reflect how much love you and your partner have for each other: The bigger the wedding, the bigger the love. On the other hand, my father likes to joke, “The bigger the wedding, the bigger the divorce.”

Drag queens, like Lady Bunny, teach outsiders to embrace ourselves and to embrace others. That means doing more than demonstrating tolerance.

Indigenous people throughout the world already face so many challenges; they don’t need non-Indigenous people appropriating their cultures and championing family lore as fact. The genocide of Indigenous people is an ongoing travesty throughout the world

[CN: mention of intimate partner violence] Patsy Cline sang with such a beautiful range of emotion because she had experienced so many ups and downs in her own life.

For years, my white father called my mother’s beauty an “exotic” beauty. When I started to come into my own, he began calling me “exotic,” too. It wasn’t until high school that I began to understand why this word bothered me. Though my father meant it as a compliment, the word “othered” my mother, younger sisters, and me.