Strange Fruit

Lambda Award-winning writer and activist Michelle Tea has always considered herself “radical queer,” – those outside-of-the-mainstream LGBTQ folks who have nothing left to lose and make their own rules about everything. As she describes it in an essay for Buzzfeed, for Tea and the queer friends she shared a radical subculture with, “that meant prioritizing freedom, glorifying poverty, experimenting with our bodies in every way possible. The possibility of having children was raised only to highlight how absurd that would be….[we] mostly viewed kids as a potential drag on [our] liberties, or simply an impossibility.” Which is why almost everyone who knew her was shocked when she suddenly decided to get pregnant and become a parent at 40 years old – while single, uninsured, and living in an expensive city and working a somewhat unstable job. Spoiler alert: It’s now several years later and parenthood has ultimately worked out well for Tea and she’s learned some important lessons and made some unexpected (straig