David Minerva Clover

I think kids and parents need old school trick-or-treating. I think it has a value far greater than the sum of its candy. I love trick-or-treating!

Straight people, it isn’t that you aren’t awesome; so many of you are! It’s just that, while you enjoy the numerous advantages that your straight privilege allows you, I’d like to celebrate the little things that make being queer totally rad.

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....

My kid, who turned three the day after Mary the duckling died, wasn’t old enough to get any of it. Yet talking to toddlers about death is part of life.

My family relies on having our food delivered specifically because of our less-than-ideal financial situation. We don't do this because we're rich.

We’re trying to raise him with a lot of options and very few assumptions, but I won’t be mad at you if you call my kid “handsome little boy” or something. It’s fine. People have a hard time talking about babies without gendered labels. Even I have a hard time with it, and I’ve put a kind of ridiculous amount of energy into analyzing this stuff.

However, I do have one favor to ask. Please, for the love of everything that is good in this world, stop calling him “little man.”

Something had clicked in my head. Suddenly I didn't give a shit when life began or whether or not a fetus counts as a “baby.” I was overwhelmed by the new-found knowledge that pregnancy is unfairly invasive in every single way.

If you believe in bodily autonomy and consent, folks should get to consent (or not) to the process of gestation. Full stop. No caveats.

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.

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.

I learned binge-watching Mister Rogers that he wasn’t just being comforting, he was rephrasing many of the things I was hearing in therapy.