David Minerva Clover

David Minerva Clover

Bio

David Minerva Clover is a queer and transgender writer, covering everything from parenting to why dinosaurs are awesome. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, New York Mag, The Establishment, and many other places. He lives in beautiful Detroit Michigan with his spouse, one child, and an embarrassment of animals. Check out his blog at Postnuclear Era or follow him on twitter at @dm_clover.

David Minerva Clover Articles

In this family, those figures traditionally made of three snowballs stacked atop each other — they’re called snowpeople.

In This Family, We Say Snowperson 

People might raise their eyebrows when they hear me say “snowperson” for the first time. But it makes perfect sense. A man is just a kind of person.

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Despite conservative fears, when many people picture what “marriage” is, marriages like mine simply aren’t a part of it. Image: Thinkstock.

I Challenge You To Love Your Spouse — As Long As He's A Heterosexual Man.

I expected it was only a matter of time until someone sent it my way. I mean... friends have even called my relationship with my wife “inspirational.” [...] [O]nce I noticed that I still hadn’t been invited, I started to notice something else: Everyone that I saw posting “love your spouse” pictures was straight....

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Once I realized that I could embrace the parts of femme that I liked (lipstick! frilly skirts!) and reject the ones that didn’t work for me (shaving! heels!) things got a hell of a lot easier.

I'm A Queer Femme — And It Only Took Me 30 Years To Embrace It

Faced by the extreme pressure to conform to impossible beauty ideals, I followed my instincts (and my budding feminism) and rejected them wholesale. I wasn’t going to play like that; I wasn’t going to let my gender require that I wear makeup or perform a certain way.

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When subtle homophobia meets the three of us out in public, it looks back and forth from face to face and eventually just asks, “So, whose kid?” Image: Thinkstock.

It's The Casual Homophobia That Hurts My Family Most

Despite our relative insulation from homophobia, my wife and I are not unaware of the situation. There are plenty of people in this country who don’t believe that we have the right to exist, to be married, or to raise a child together.

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The baby is on the outside. Image: Thinkstock.

The Shower, PTSD, And My Traumatic Labor

[CN: PTSD, pregnancy, birth] Something snapped inside me and I was transported backwards in time.

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For now, I’m a boy, and I’m a mama, and those seemingly contradictory truths are things I can accept about myself.

When I Realized I Was Trans, I Still Wanted To Be Mama

When I finally realized I was trans, it was after almost a year and a half of therapy, a lot of trauma, and after becoming a parent.

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Photo by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash

We All Liked Problematic Stuff As Kids, But We Don’t Have To Pass Them On

To knowingly include stories with deeply problematic themes strikes me as just adding fuel to the fire.

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What I love, what I’m most interested in (at least in terms of written and spoken word), is the telling of stories.

Selling Yourself For Scraps: Why I Love Personal Essays

But what I did write, and write constantly, were diaries and journals. I kept notebooks and three-ring binders filled with observations about my life that I thought were interesting. Sometimes I worried that these personal stories were too naval-gazing, but I still held on to them, hoping that someday someone would want them.

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These days, I’m lucky if a thrifting ‘adventure’ yields two semi-wearable tops; even then, odds are that one of them is going to be cut funny... Image: Steve Snodgrass (CC BY 2.0)

Sizeism Makes It Expensive To Be Fat And Wear Clothes

Although the hunt for the perfect outfit at the thrift store was a thrill when I was thin, as a fat person, the hunt was just downright depressing.

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Who's allowed to have kids?

Life At The Intersections: Class, Shame, And Queer Parenting

In today’s world, children may be a financial liability, but that shouldn’t make them a luxury item.

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