Mandy Gardner

So I'm walking through the cemetery, and I have been for quite some time.

I just assumed that there would be a sign that would point me to where she lay.

She was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet.

But I found signs that pointed the way to Eugene O'Neill, but no Anne Sexton.

And I'd been walking around the cemetery for quite some time when I finally found a little guard shack.

It was actually a little visitor center, but it was closed because it was Sunday, and the cemetery was mostly shut down that day.

But I walked around the outside of the building.

I had traveled all the way to Boston from my home in Atlanta and I really wanted to pay my respects.

But I just couldn't find her.

So I came upon the office and I found a door that was propped open by a mop bucket.

And I am not the kind of person who just

breaks into places.

I'd never done this before, but I'm staring at this mop bucket and I'm thinking about why I'm there.

And why I'm there is because when I was in high school in the early 1990s in South Carolina, they didn't have a law that was about not talking about gay people or the existence of queer or trans people.

They just didn't.

And the school board in my town actually banned the book The Grapes of Wrath because it took the name of the Lord in vain.

So you can imagine there were no queer stories told at all.

So when I was 15 years old and starting to realize that this was my life, I thought it meant that I was going to be lonely.

for the rest of my life, and then probably hell awaited me on the other side of that, because I had no other stories that told me anything different.

So like many other queer and trans kids, I had to go looking for my own stories that would give me some sort of glimmer of what my future life might be like.