CRAWL's first Pride Month
reflections + dreams
I thought I would write a Substack post when CRAWL had been out for 6 months, but as April 21st approached I felt completely unmoved by the idea. It felt arbitrary to commemorate the six month mark, at best; at worst, it felt like a reinforcement of an idea that I’ve worked hard not to internalize: that the most important part of a book’s life is the first year, or the first six months, or the first six weeks. As I said in a previous newsletter, I wrote CRAWL for trans people, and I wrote it in the hopes it will endure. I feel fortunate that CRAWL has already found so many trans readers and readers in general. Whether CRAWL will endure or not still largely remains to be seen.
It’s hard to imagine what you want from publishing a book before you’ve done it. It is hard to imagine just how different it will be than publishing in only journals and anthologies. I’ve spent a lot of the past several months trying to piece together a sense of “how/what the book is doing,” which involves looking at sales, yes, as well as reviews and Goodreads and social media, but—and this turns out to be the most wonderful and most infuriating part—it’s impossible for me, or for anyone, to fully account for how or what a book is doing in the world. Sometimes I’ll hear from someone about what they thought of CRAWL—sometimes a stranger, sometimes an old friend I haven’t spoken to in years, sometimes a close writing buddy who’s only just now gotten around to reading it—and they reconfigure my understanding of the book all over again. Most people buy physical copies of CRAWL (rather than the eBook), which doesn’t surprise me—one reason I fell in love with Graywolf Press, nearly fifteen years ago now, is the physical beauty of the books themselves. But I have also been deeply moved to see CRAWL stocked in so many libraries, and how often I hear from people who have gifted/loaned out their copies of CRAWL to friends. A book is an object that moves in ways we can only sometimes see.
Pride Month is all about visibility, though, right? Pride Sunday, in particular, makes an appearance in one of CRAWL’s stories, “Moon Over Denny-Blaine,” which is based on my experiences going to the titular queer/trans nude beach on many Pride Sundays during the 2010s. That story in particular reflects a major concern my friends and I had back then, not just for Denny-Blaine but several queer spaces in Seattle—an influx of straight people who threatened to outnumber us and make the space their own1. This week, here in 2026, is the beginning of the trial to keep Denny-Blaine park open, thanks to a lawsuit that argues all this queer/trans nudity is a “public nuisance.” It is a testament to Denny-Blaine’s cultural power that, rather than becoming a place that straight people can trample over and remake it into whatever they want it to be2, the desire has shifted into total eradication. May these rich freaks never de-gay Denny-Blaine.
I love living in Los Angeles, but this Pride Month, it feels hard not to be in Seattle. I just wish I could be there. The Seattle LGBTQ Commission is asking for Mayor Wilson to declare a civil emergency to deliver resources to community organizations struggling to accommodate the influx of trans refugees coming from red states. At the same time, trans people everywhere are mourning the horrific murder of Juniper Blessing, a 19-year old trans woman and UW student, in her off-campus apartment complex’s laundry room. I wish I could be there to mourn our dead and to welcome our new neighbors. I wish I could be there to fight for Denny-Blaine to stay open and to stay what it is, what it has been.
If you’ve read CRAWL, you know that it is does not have a happy ending. It is overall pessimistic in its view of what Seattle can be for trans people in particular. The Denny-Blaine story is meant to be one small, utopian glimmer amidst a lot of absurdity and disappointment. So my dream is that, sometime this Pride Month, there’s a naked trans person reading CRAWL at Denny-Blaine. I hope someone new to Seattle gets given a CRAWL to get a sense of what the city was like a few years back, when pronouns were still in the bio, yeah, but rainbow capitalism poisoned everything it touched and queer bashing in even our gayest districts surged. I hope someone’s seen reading CRAWL on the bus this Pride Month—and the light rail, sure, and the streetcar, if people are actually using that now? I hope someone’s reading it on the grass or the turf at Cal on an especially sunny afternoon. I hope someone spills a Buttery Nipple all over their copy at Pony just before last call, or does a line of K off their copy at [redacted]3. I hope CRAWL is out in the city this Pride Month; I hope you see it in the hands of readers. I hope CRAWL helps someone make a new friend or get laid or get in an overdue argument with a cis loved one. I hope this happens this Pride Month and for many Pride Months to come. I am not my book and my book is not me and I do not live in Seattle anymore. But I hope it keeps moving there. I hope it keeps moving.
Did TACOCAT say it best?
I won’t name names, but anyone who has lived in Seattle for a while has a few bars that just came to mind.
See footnote #2.