Tomorrow (June 21) marks the official launch of Queer Issue 2017, The Stranger’s biggest issue of the year. Its focus is as much about what it means to be queer in modern America (the theme is “My First Time…”) as it is about the people who are experiencing it and telling their stories. We have a total of 17 essays to share. Here’s one by author, poet and journalist, Alexander Chee.
On one of our first dates—we lasted for about two weeks in July of 1998—we met up in New York’s West Village for dinner.
I walked West 11th Street to get here, he said. Do you think it’s out of our reach, to live there?
My heart caught in my ribs. Oh, I said, without explaining. It’s not out of our reach. It’s our destiny. He seemed to accept this. We were both drunk.
For a long time, living on West 11th was my dream—and while its power over me came from Grace Paley having lived there, the brick buildings were low, so there was beautiful light, and from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson Highway, these beautiful rooms full of books and art suggested lives that mesmerized me as I walked by. One of my very favorite writers once did me the compliment of naming someone in one of her stories, published in the New Yorker, after me—and giving him a home on West 11th. The closest I will ever get to this dream.