At a rummage sale yesterday, I snagged a couple of Red Star Lilies. When I asked Google to tell me about the plant, what I got was sellers who shared some information along with their big fat click-here-to-order ads. The same happened with browser DuckDuckGo, but at least no companies grabbed my height, weight, and IQ to use in further marketing. You really have to know to use sites like Wikipedia and WikiHow (and support them directly with donations) so they don’t have to push ads or sell your information to survive.

Some of my favorite lines from the poet Wordsworth can be found at www.poetryfoundation.org. “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/ We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Now, doesn’t that just sound like Facebook, which has been carelessly selling our affectional and political preferences for years and years? I used to think, what the heck, I have nothing to hide. I can’t get much more out than being a lesbian writer who proudly uses her legal name. As the internet has gotten more powerful, though, anyone who’s read George Orwell’s prophetic 1984, is noticing the potential for extremely sordid uses of our information.

Like electing the Unfortunate Current Occupant (UCO). Unfortunate for us, that is.

And now, the census wants us to bare all. According to pewresearch.org, the US Census will ask if we’re married to or in a domestic relationship with a person of the same binary gender. Given that UCO, his all too “competent” V.P., his narrow-minded Attorney General, and the wacko conservatives in Congress, are in power, this data, whether in the hands of Snapchat or the federal government, is especially fraught for gays and other target groups. I’m going to fess up on the census, but not without feeling like I’m signing up for Saddam Hussein’s Golden Hit List.

It’s like a neighbor said of our community newsletter, “No religion! No politics!” From the state of our planet, getting along is not something we’ve got down pat at all. I was brought up by parents who considered both subjects to be private. I’m of a generation which shouts our politics and spiritual beliefs on bumper stickers and t-shirts. Who knows what’s next? If we don’t at least try to vote, we’ll be forced to show our colors: pink or black triangle badges and tattooed ID numbers.

If our votes count any more. How about, in this consumerist society, we get receipts—paper ones—for our votes so no one gets into office through a back door. If little mom and pop stores can manage this, if the cash register industry has made it so very easy… Never mind, just because we pull the right levers and get accurate receipts, doesn’t mean the hackers won’t hack us over into the column that pays the most.

My sweetheart and I, a bit despairing, switched obsessing about the state of the world to spiffing up our home a little, making equipment more accessible and shrinking our footprint. Not that it can get much smaller, as we own an infinitesimal fraction of an acre just large enough for our manufactured home, a one-car garage, and a margin of space for the birdbath, some bushes and young trees.

We’re quite excited about our shiny new faucets, though. They have lever handles that don’t require twisting and grasping. It’s much easier now to decrease the flow of water. One is deliciously art deco. After that, my sweetheart tackled what we came to affectionately call our bathroom fixture, with a nod to Norman Lear’s Archie Bunker: the terlet. With back and knee problems, it’s not as easy as it once was to sit down and get up from anything.

Manufactured homes are notorious for small bathrooms. Not as small as the one in the twenty-seven-foot trailer I used to live in, but palatial it ain’t. The terlet is lower than the standard fifteen inches tall, a so-called normal height designed to accommodate everyone from kids to basketball players, all able-bodied. Ridiculous! To our good fortune, a friend down the street, who recently fractured his leg in a few places, extolled his seventeen-inch commode. Ours is now on order.

Then there’s the outside. We added cinderblock pavers to the driveway, so passengers will no longer step out into the Oregon mud. We moved the birdbath to replant, in a sunnier spot, the three-foot Western hemlock we’ve been nurturing since it wasn’t much more than a twig. Now that I can’t use a shovel anymore, we’ve been scouting garage and store sales for big, colorful flower pots our Red Star Lilies can inhabit.

Our little toothpick house, as my sweetheart named it, is shaping up, maybe not a showplace, but a homey, lived-in, always-in-progress, sometimes higgledy-piggledy, much beloved Pacific Northwest homestead.

Making all these decisions has given us months of distraction from the UCO. Advertising had not a whit of influence on us; we did it all without resorting to internet coaxing. We did use the web to comparison shop and order what we needed since nothing we wanted was available in our rural community. The internet, like the government, should belong to the people, not corporations and marketers who offer top dollar for our consumer profiles.

Commodifying everything from the halls of Congress, to supposedly private messages to loved ones, to “The Lone Ranger,” “we lay waste our powers.” When our very identities are for sale, really, so little is ours.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2018 // April 2008

The post The Amazon Trail: The Terlet first appeared on Lesbian.com.

She concocted this scheme with our friend Heather, who lives in Vegas and knows all the cool things to do. I have a feeling this trip will be a lot different than the one I took to the Lambda Literary Conference back in the early 1990s.

Before my sweetheart and Heather, I traveled alone, so there was no chance of doing anything riskier than surviving the unexpected snowstorm I hit in the mountains of Northern California. But truly, I was more petrified of attending the Lammys than I was of mountain passes or ziplines.

I knew Jennifer Abod, producer of “The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen,” back in New Haven in the 1970s. When I ran into her this summer, she said she remembered me as “very, very shy and very, very skinny.” I mumbled something about being fifty pounds more substantial now, and she may have recognized that the shyness has endured. Or else thought I had the verbal skills of a feral banana.

The truth is that I’m just as shy and timid around people as I was in the seventies. And in the nineties. The easiest part of that Lammys trip for me was walking from my backstreet motel along the fabled “Strip” to the awards ceremony. When I entered the massive room of white table cloths and strangers, I had to about face and find a toilet immediately.

A while later, I found the Naiad Press table and assumed I belonged there, in the one empty seat I saw. This wasn’t long before Naiad changed direction, remaindering books and returning rights to poorly selling writers, but I didn’t know that yet. Nobody but me was freezing me out. Everyone was proper and I was my usual bump on a log self with no conversation in me. Fortunately, I was next to Naiad Press and “Poets and Writers” editor Christie Cassidy, a playful femme who valued my work and gave me the courage to make a brief presentation on stage—to an award winner who wasn’t in the audience and hadn’t sent a proxy. What could be worse for someone like me than to find myself alone on a stage with an unclaimed trophy?

After the lengthy program ended, I felt as isolated as when I’d arrived. I didn’t know who to talk to and was scared someone might talk to me. I slunk through the glamorized halls of the casino, breathing ghastly amounts of cigarette smoke, feeling like a feral banana, an invisible one at that.

That doesn’t change. I go to literary events now, like Saints and Sinners, where I’m warmly welcomed, know my way around a podium, and still quake in my shoes in crowded rooms without my sweetheart. Sometimes I come away from a conference with little memory of it because it takes so much of my spirit to participate.

I know I’m not alone. Even with improved social skills it takes everything I have to start a conversation, or to join a group of laughing, talking people. I’ve been accused of snobbery when I’m actually hiding out. Or people think I don’t like them because I seem standoffish, when I’m actually dying inside, ashamed of my shell of reticence and not knowing how to emerge from it. Or maybe I am snooty, having missed any lessons on small talk.

Thank goodness for women like Mercedes Lewis, who created “Con Virgin” programs at The Golden Crown Literary Society conferences—Vegas being the site of this year’s conference. New attendees get special attention. There are events just for them, if they choose to participate. If they’re not too nervous to accept. I’m one of the latter, more likely to go off in my miserable, lonely corner and become more self-consciously obvious than I would be if I could blend into a group.

In the end, it’s all about ego. I’ll do almost anything, apparently, to protect my ego from being bruised. But, I have learned how unfair that is to others. I’m one of millions; when I hide, when I won’t risk being tongue-tied, I could instead be making life easier for someone as shy as myself.

I’m still the same person inside, and it’s punishing every time I reach out, but I’ve learned, if I’m not adept at talking, I’m a pretty good listener. If I can manage a few seconds of greetings and questions, if I can get out of myself and show interest, I’ve found that people are generally quick to tell their stories, dreams, ambitions.

Not as quick as my sweetheart and Heather will be, high above the theme park called Las Vegas, but no feral banana either.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2018 / January 2018

The post The Amazon Trail: Zipline Vegas first appeared on Lesbian.com.

We’ve spent the past few days galavanting up and down the Oregon Coast with friends visiting from the U.K. Two months ago, we were doing the same with a couple up from Palm Springs. Last year, it was my family from Massachusetts, the year before, my sweetheart’s sister from New Jersey, and in two weeks, long-time friends from the southern part of the state will join us, gasping for sea air after a summer surrounded by wildfires.

Every visitor has brought sunshine, literally. Those who’ve stopped by for an hour or two on their way through town have had a magical effect on our storied dreary weather. While Phyllis and Nancy may have brought good weather from Southern California with them, we can’t say that Jane Fletcher, the brilliantly imaginative fantasy fiction writer from England, and Joanie Bassler, her lively American wife, brought good weather with them. The British endure Oregon-style precipitation levels and coastal storms at home. Yet, their time here could not have been brighter, drier, calmer.

Under such circumstances my sweetheart and I could do nothing but enjoy a spate of convivial visits.

Our small commercial fishing town can’t brag of Broadway lights, ancient ruins, or vast museums. We are not high on the destination vacation list. Mother Nature is the draw here and we are fortunate to have friends who enjoy her many glories.

Take the whales, for example. We spent most of one day with the pond-crossers, waiting breathlessly for signs of whales. Jane found a pod of six leviathans not far from us, timed their progress, and we watched as they swam in a straight line, like an old steam train with six engines spouting along their watery tracks, perfectly synchronized. This was no fantasy.

With Nancy and Phyllis, the elks provided the thrill. We took back roads home from an excellent Mexican restaurant and lucked out. Perhaps a dozen or more elk were having siestas within sight of the road. Nature offers such cheap plentiful entertainment. The back roads also afforded views of ramshackle barns with caved-in roofs, palomino and pinto and chestnut-colored horses, baby lambs gamboling, placid cows chewing their cud. A little waterfall at the side of the road, old farm houses, and a sparkly tidal river.

It’s a gift, spending time with friends whose wild days, like mine, are behind them. Who get excited talking about birds and searching them out. Whose enthusiasm rises when comparing the birds of England, of the desert, of the coast. The colors of feathers, the patterns of flight, our imitations of calls. Where we saw them, which ones we’d like to see. Watching the cormorants settle in the for night on immense, craggy, exposed rocks, and the grebes when they bob over waves. The sudden dart of a small bird through the sea grasses and a line of pelicans flying low. We went out to see the sunset and got entangled in the lives of birds.

And the talking. We seem to make friends with writers and readers. None of us can go ten minutes without some literary reference. I don’t read fantasy novels or any speculative fiction, but listening to Jane Fletcher talk with fervor about world-building and monsters and sorcerers, turned everything fantastical. I felt as if we lived on a magical floating ball where a group of old-hippy-like beings who called themselves Wanders colored the sky with gigantic wands akin to the ones we use to create bubbles.

After Kajmeister and her daughter stopped on their way from Portland south to get together for lunch, I became a devotee of her blog. She is a smart, witty raconteur on subjects that range from homey to cinematic to political. These lesbian friendships that come with age are rich with experience and the certainty of uncertainty, a sort of we’re-all-together-in-this-brief-thing-called-life-let’s-enjoy-one-another.

Next week our sailing friend will be driving south. She figures it’s her last long trip away from home as her physical abilities decline. We’ll be foraging for organic salad at the food co-op with her, reminiscing about the gay rights battles we’ve been through, and the days we’d fax each other hourly just for the excitement of that new technology.

The sunset tonight is gray and peach, altogether different from the palette of the Wanders two nights ago. It’s their warning: our friends have left, the rains are coming in. The sailor and the Southern Oregonians are Northwesterners, they’ll arrive with clouds in their wakes and raindrops on their wet weather jackets.

Then, like the visitors, the goldfinches will be gone, the sunflowers will make their last bows, and my sweetheart and I will cuddle up to listen to the rain on our roof.

Copyright Lee Lynch 2017

The post The Amazon Trail: Friends & other wonders first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Rainbow cake was sitting on the kitchen table, not Funfetti, but Party Rainbow Chip with matching frosting. Iced on the cake were the words, “I’m gay!” with a smiley face, and bouquets of rainbow balloons were tied to each chair.

I wanted my coming out experience to be a joyful occasion, even humorous. I imagined jumping out of a huge rainbow stripper cake, confetti flying everywhere, my arms raised in the air, gleefully shouting, “I’m gay!”

That was Christmas night eight years ago. I was 19-years-old, home from college for winter break.
This is what actually happened.

My family and I got back home from our annual Christmas night movie, and I went to my room, closed the door, crouched on the floor in the corner by my bed, and cried. I wanted to come out, but I was terrified.

I had made a pact with some of my college friends that we would all come out to our families. Two of my friends came out before I did, and their experiences weren’t ideal, one was actually quiet horrible. I sat on my bedroom floor, calling different friends, trying to get the courage to come out to my family, and going over different ways that I could do it. The rainbow cake was one idea.

As I heard my siblings getting ready to leave to their friends for the night, I knew I had to do it soon while everyone was still home.

I stood up, opened my bedroom door, walked down the hallway into my kitchen (there was no rainbow cake), and I started crying. In between sobs, with my head down, I said, “I’m gay.”

The response that I got from my family was amazing. They threw me a coming out party, and there was a rainbow cake. There were also rainbow balloons, rainbow and lesbian-themed gifts (my grandma Emmy painted me rainbow wine glasses), and even a coming out mixed CD with Dianna Ross’ “I’m Coming Out.”

I knew I was attracted to women when I was 5-years-old. I came out to my best friend when I was 18. I was never not out at college, and I started the coming out process to my huge Mexican-American family at 19 (like 500 plus cousins huge – on one side of the family).

Coming out of the closet was an ongoing experience for me. After college, when my aunts, uncles and cousins asked me what I was doing, almost everything I did was gay. Every time I opened my mouth, I was coming out.

“What have you been up to?”

“I’ve been writing. I started writing for Curve Magazine.

“You write for Curves? The women’s fitness magazine? I love that one!”

“I actually write for Curve. They’re a lesbian magazine.”

Once I turned 24, I stopped coming out of the closet about my sexuality. I didn’t hide my work or the gay things in my life. I just stopped caring about people’s reactions to what I said. I had no more fear about my sexual orientation.

What changed? Five years ago, I made the New Year’s resolution to love myself unconditionally, and I started by writing.

I kept a lot of journals throughout elementary school to early high school, and I was ashamed of them. I wasn’t ashamed because of society’s gendered and childlike take on journaling. I was ashamed because aside from my goals of being a WMBA player, tallying my sports card collections and writing ideas on making money, my pages were filled with my isolation and fear around my sexual orientation. I even wrote in code in case anyone stumbled upon my journals so that they would just think I was lonely, and not that I was attracted to women. I often thought about burning my journals so no one would ever find them.

My shame from 5-years-old to 18-years-old was packaged neatly between the pages of blue sparkling journals, black and white bespeckled composition notebooks, green 70-sheet, wide-rule subject notebooks, and various other journals I received over the years for Christmas and birthdays.

Writing can be scary, especially when you share it, but writing can also be powerful.

I have always been more aware of my self and my surroundings than most people my age, but when it came to journaling about my sexual orientation when I was younger, I had very little self-awareness. At 10, 14, 16 — it was hard for me to take a step back and view my emotions and my experiences from an outside perspective. Instead, I let them swallow me whole.

Isolation, silence and ignoring aspects of my identity — those were my go-to coping mechanisms. I was living in fear, and I was blind to how much support I had.

Self-love writing is different from regularly journaling, and self-love writing is what I have been doing for the past 5 years. It’s different in that it asks you to foster your self-awareness. It’s different in that no self-critical talk is allowed, unless you’re addressing it to confront it, challenge it and change it. It’s different in that it gives you an avenue to explore your emotions and the messages they’re trying to tell you without getting lost in them. Self-Love writing is a tool that I use to explore any aspect of myself that I want to learn more about or that I want to learn to love unconditionally.

Self-love writing is one aspect and one tool of my Self-Love Diet practice, which is cultivating love for myself through exploring my relationship with my spirit, body, thoughts, feelings, relationships, culture and world.
I’m now 27, and I have very little shame about any aspect of my identity. When it comes to self-love writing, I don’t write about my sexual orientation anymore. It’s no longer something that I need to work through.

The biggest thing I struggle with now is living with bipolar disorder and paranoia, but through self-love writing and my Self-Love Diet practice, I’ve even let go of most of the shame and fear with those experiences. Although either are no walk in the park, I now see them as gifts, and I see how working through them I have been able to strengthen my love for myself.

With bipolar disorder, I’ve worked a lot on creating structure and creating a stronger relationship with my emotions. Although certain emotions can be difficult to experience, I see each emotion as a gift with a message to tell me, and I now have the skills to decipher those messages and act accordingly in the most loving way possible in each moment.

Paranoia can be terrifying, and sometimes like a living hell. I struggled a lot to find the positives within paranoia, but about six months ago, I realized the gift in it. Working through it helped me to release my anxiety, to become adept at self-soothing, to confront my fears and to live life with more peace and joy.

Through my Self-Love Diet practice, as well as a support system I’ve created for myself and seeing a psychiatrist, I don’t cycle into either as frequently, and when I do, I know I can handle it.
Through my Self-Love Diet practice, I can honestly say that I love all of myself. Loving myself doesn’t mean that I never have self-doubts, insecurities or negative thoughts, but it does mean that I’m equipped to become aware of them, confront them and try to change them. Loving myself doesn’t mean that life will always be easy, but it does mean that I’ll be able to navigate it in the most loving way. Loving myself doesn’t mean that I will always choose the most loving thing for myself in each moment, but it does mean that I will be kind and patient with myself.

Every January, for the past 5 years, I have recommitted myself to love, and I encouraged myself to do that through co-creating a 31-Day Self-Love Diet Writing Challenge with my mom, Michelle Minero, a therapist who specializes in eating disorder recovery.

This year marks the 5th Annual 31-Day Self-Love Diet Writing Challenge. Last year, 100 people participated, submitting over 500 self-love posts, from the US, the UK, Australia and Costa Rica.
I’m inviting you to join us.

We’re born into a society that teaches us that we’re not okay as we are, and not just relating to our sexual orientation. In school, self-love isn’t in the curriculum. It’s not something that’s taught by society. If we feel flawed, we’ll pay money for diets, for clothes, for whatever to fill the void and the feeling that we’re not enough.

Everyone has a self-love journey; you just have to discover it. Once you discover it, you can choose to explore it. I’m inviting you to explore yours.

This January, instead of following a traditional New Year’s resolution, choose to commit yourself to love.

My mom and I will share 31 Self-Love Diet writing prompts, one for each day this January. You can share your writing on the 31-Day Self-Love Diet Writing Challenge Facebook event page. You can write in your own journal. You can also submit your writing to be published on the Love Warrior Community, where we will be publishing each writing prompt. The Love Warrior Community is an online community that we co-founded that uses creative expression to foster healing, self-acceptance, body acceptance and self-love.

Last year, one woman shared her journey of coming out of the closet at 52, with kids, and navigating dating.

Another participant shared, “I have discovered that I have a fear of succeeding, its easier to rationalize not achieving goals when we don’t try, but it’s harder to accept when you work really hard and it doesn’t work out. I want to find a way to get past this. I feel there are a lot of things that I am holding back on but I should be able to accomplish. I’m tired of looking at the ‘what it’s’ and not going for it. I am jumping and I hope I can handle what ever comes.”

Another woman shared, “I am aggressively pro me. I will not limit my options based on my insecurity.”

My New Year’s resolution for 2015 is to recommit myself to loving myself. I’m excited to further explore my self-love journey and to strengthen my Self-Love Diet practice. It may not always be easy, but it’s definitely worthwhile.

I hope you join me.

Join the Facebook event to find out more about the 31-Day Self-Love Diet Writing Challenge or if you’re not on Facebook, you can read more about it on the Love Warrior Community.

Emelina Minero is a self-love enthusiast, passion supporter, mental health and LGBTQ advocate and feminist who does freelance writing, editing, social media and publicity. Follow her on Twitter @CommKr8veWriter.

The post How my new year’s resolution five years ago changed my life first appeared on Lesbian.com.

BY SARA PALMER

“How’d ya sleep last night?” my oldest sister, Shannon asked in a sarcastic tone.

“Fine.” I replied, a little confused.

My middle sister, Heather was chuckling a little as she washed a dish in the sink, “birds,” she muttered under her breath.

It was at that moment that two things simultaneously happened. One, I immediately remembered the dream I had had the night before, and two, my mother was entering the kitchen.

“Good morning honey, did you get those birds out of your room?” she joked with a little smirk on her face.

“Real funny, mom, and you had to tell these two about it didn’t you?” I said, shooting my thumb in the direction of my sisters.

“So, how’d it go again?” questioned Shannon, “A bird was attacking you?”

“No!” I exclaimed, “It ran into my chest. I was trying to get out of my room and it hit me right in the chest.” My voice trailed off as I tried explaining; mostly because I was realizing I should have just kept my mouth shut.

As expected, everyone began to laugh as my ego stepped forward, and I nobly tried to further explain, “I think when I got out of bed, I ran into my door. It hit me right here,” I exclaimed tapping my fingers on my sternum.

“I can’t believe you still sleepwalk.” Said Heather finishing the dishes she had been rinsing off.

She was right though; I had been sleepwalking for years. I’m not sure exactly when it all started, but from the time I was out of a crib and had my own bed, I remember — or technically don’t remember — sleepwalking.

It became sort of a thing in one house we lived in, that my mother would wake up in the morning check my room, see that I wasn’t there, and go immediately down to the basement and find me sleeping on the couch down there. This was a little nerve-racking for her because, at such a young age and as unconscious as one is when sleepwalking. This meant that I was walking down two flights of stairs and passing the front door each night. It was a rarity that I would be found in my bed on any given morning.

As the years passed, the dreams would, of course, change to what was relevant in my life at the time. One experience that’s been mentioned from time to time, was of a morning when I got up at 3am, walked to the bathroom and began brushing my teeth. My mother heard me, got up to check on me and upon questioning what I was doing, found that I was convinced it was much later and we were all late for school. I was also apparently very upset about this due to the fact that no one else in the house seemed to care that we were going to be late for school. My mother then let me know that it was three in the morning, and that I had nothing to worry about and to go back to bed. I headed toward my room, but not before taking a sharp right, one door too soon, right into my sister Heather’s room, where I proceeded to curled up in her closet, door opened, feet hanging out and spend the rest of the evening there.

I do remember one dream pretty vividly; it was a reoccurring dream. It would always start out with me waking up and as my eyes began to open and fix on the ceiling, I would realize the ceiling was covered by a giant spider hanging upside down with its head right above mine. My first thought was always to run, to get out of my room, but I new I had to creep out slowly trying not to disturb the giant hanging above me. I would begin slithering out of my bed and just before my feet would hit the ground I would notice that the floor was covered in tiny little black spiders. So many that they were crawling all over each other and not one spot of the floor was showing through. I was stuck, trapped in my own bed, with the giant ceiling spider beginning to descend, because of course, it had sensed my movements. The dream never went any further than this before I would wake up scared, and immediately check the floor for spiders. Needless to say, I have a touch of arachnophobia to this day.

I don’t remember, the day, year, or how old I was when the sleepwalking suddenly stopped. But I will say that although some of the dreams were scary, even paralyzing at times, they were always extremely vivid and threw me into wildly imaginative worlds — and I do miss that.

Sara Palmer is a an improviser-writer-storyteller based in the Phoenix, Arizona, area. Share your ideas for her next blog in the comments below.

The post A dream goes to the birds first appeared on Lesbian.com.

This diverse anthology is a wildly seductive ride. The stories are written for us, by us, about us. They are hungry and they are satisfying; they are edgy and vanilla; they are tender and filthy hot. And, according to Margaret Cho, they are all-around “incredible.”

Introduced by superstar Sister Spit performer Ali Liebegott, “When She Was Good” goes beyond the ordinary, pushing boundaries in a breathtakingly bold look at lesbian desire.

“As queer people, we have already challenged one powerful norm by claiming our queerness. So when we tell stories of longing, desire, love, affection and sex, those stories are, by definition, outside of dominant mainstream culture. But the college kid, upper-crust society lady, pro-domme, bootblack boi, female cop, butch Daddy, grocery store clerk, and others who inhabit the twenty-two stories in this book go way past the point of queer lust … These writers have given us vibrant characters who defy roles and expectations and challenge traditions and norms.”

— From the Foreword by Tristan Taormino, “When She Was Good: Best Lesbian Erotica”

Find more lesbian books at CleisPress.com.

The post Tristan Taormino’s ‘When She Was Good’ first appeared on Lesbian.com.

She’s found tremendous success, in spite of her seventh grade aptitude test that said she was most qualified to be a coin machine repairman, a bowling pin mechanic or a wig stylist. She started acting at age six because she “wanted to be on ‘Saved By The Bell’.” See, Screech served a purpose beyond annoying you.

Ryan earned an honors degree from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She’s a self-described introvert who “prefers the privacy of her at-home office, which she shares with a litter box and occasionally two cats that poop in it.”

She opened up to Lesbian.com about her latest play, “One in the Chamber,” for which she’s raising funds via IndieGoGo.

How did you get started writing screenplays and play plays?
First of all “play plays” is the best thing ever.

Secondly, I wrote my first play play when I was thirteen. It was about a piano prodigy with alcoholic parents. (I’m laughing as I’m writing this because I was such a dramatic child. I would do anything to do a public stage reading of that play.)

But I really started writing in high school, writing monologues. Then, in college, I wrote scenes, then one-acts (you get it, baby steps) until I wrote my first play at 21, which I then adapted into a screenplay and that became the feature film “The Four-Faced Liar.”

As that was coming out, I was working on my first full-length play “Dysnomia,” which I produced two summers ago in Los Angeles. It got me an Ovation Nomination for Best Playwright, so that was nice.

Where will your new play be staged?
“One in the Chamber” opens July 12 and runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 7pm through August 17 at The Lounge Theater, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, CA 90038.

Also, I just got a bite to have it produced in DC this fall. Ooh.

What inspired you to write this play?
This play was inspired by the September 28 expose in the New York Times: “Children and Guns, the Hidden Toll,” which explored the rates of gun-related homicides versus accidental shootings in America.

There were all kinds of eye-popping facts and gruesome real-life scenarios, but the one that I keep coming back to is this study that was conducted in Atlanta and cited in the article. Researchers took 64 boys (all with at least some gun safety training) and let them into a room with an inoperative .38 caliber handgun concealed in a drawer. They watched as two-thirds of the boys handled it, one-third pulled the trigger and only one boy out of 64 actually reported the gun to an adult.

We have all heard a lot of truly horrific events related to gun violence. I just thought that if I could take the statistics and turn them into a family with a real heart beat, then that would be worthwhile.

Who are you working with on this play? How did that come about?
It’s like a “best of” crew, which I’m sure will include even more familiar faces as we get into production.

Emily Peck, who co-produced and co-starred in “The Four-Faced Liar” and is also my best friend from college. She is co-producing and starring in “One in the Chamber.”

Dan Carlisle, who I’ve also been best friends with since NYU. He co-produced and co-starred in “The Four-Faced Liar.” He is assisting with PR.

Heidi Sulzman, who co-produced and starred in my last play “Dysnomia” will be doing the same in this show.

Michael Fitzgerald, who designed the sets for “The Four-Faced Liar” and “Dysnomia,” was over last night designing this set, too.

Are you working on anything else?
Oh, yes. Some highlights are “There’s a Book for That,” which is based on my play “Dysnomia.” It’s a comedy about a middle-aged housewife and mother of two who comes out of the closet, set up with One Zero Films; “The Onlys,” with Black Label Media, about a 10-year-old transgender kid; and last year, I optioned the book “Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold” about the queer community in Buffalo, New York, in the middle of the last century.

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