The Fixed Stars Read online

  13. I overlooked this in high school, because it confused me, but the methodology and conclusions of such studies were widely questioned. In fact, there is much evidence to contradict these findings. Most researchers today reject theories that posit a simple origin of homosexuality, such as a “gay gene.” It’s likely that we’ll never know, on a scientifically verifiable level, what, if anything, determines sexual orientation.

  14. A. K. Summers, Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2014), 12.

  15. It is now California College of the Arts.

  16. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 32.

  17. Esther Perel, “As Marriage Standards Change, A Therapist Recommends ‘Rethinking Infidelity,’” interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, December 13, 2017, https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=570131890.

  18. André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 43.

  19. Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2016), 155.

  20. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519–31, http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/TimarAndrea/17a.Butler,performative%5B1%5D.pdf.

  21. D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 89–97.

  22. Truitt, Daybook, 74.

  23. Mary Oliver and Molly Malone Cook, Our World (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 73.

  24. Pratt, S/HE, 35.

  25. Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work (New York: Picador, 2001), 7.

  26. Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy (New York: Harper Wave, 2018), 10.

  27. Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017), 82–83.

  28. Ibid., 36.

  29. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 22–25.

  30. Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, I’m Very into You (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2015), 86.

  31. Thomas Leopold, “Gender Differences in the Consequences of Divorce: A Study of Multiple Outcomes,” Demography 55, no. 3 (June 2018): 769–97, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5992251.

  32. Manguso, 300 Arguments, 21.

  33. Andrea Long Chu, “On Liking Women,” n+1, issue 30 (Winter 2018), https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women.

  34. “Catalyst,” Def. 1, Lexico.com, July 29, 2019, https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/catalyst.

  35. Krista Tippett, “Richard Rohr: Growing Up Men,” On Being, April 13, 2017, https://onbeing.org/programs/richard-rohr-growing-up-men/#transcript.

  36. Nelson, The Argonauts, 70.

  37. Cusk, Aftermath, 82.

  38. C. G. Jung, “Paracelsus,” trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung vol. 15, para. 4, series eds. H. Read et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966, original work published 1934).

  39. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Bryn Mawr Commencement Address,” Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 147–60.

  40. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 7–16.

  41. Publisher description. Lisa M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), retrieved from http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674032262.

  42. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity, 2.

  43. Ibid., 8.

  44. Ibid., 24.

  45. Ibid., 25–28.

  46. Ibid., 28.

  47. Ibid., 3.

  48. Michael Gold, “The ABCs of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+,” New York Times, June 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/style/lgbtq-gender-language.html.

  49. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity, 46.

  50. Ibid., 84.

  51. Ibid., 88.

  52. Ibid., 89–90.

  53. Ibid., 15.

  54. Ibid., 170.

  55. Zadie Smith, “The Bathroom,” Feel Free: Essays (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), 361.

  56. Mandy Len Catron, “Mixed Feelings: Your Divorce Won’t Ruin Your Kids,” Rumpus, May 29, 2018, https://therumpus.net/2018/05/mixed-feelings-your-divorce-wont-ruin-your-kids.

  57. Linda Nielsen, “10 Surprising Findings on Shared Parenting After Divorce or Separation,” Institute for Family Studies, June 20, 2017, https://ifstudies.org/blog/10-surprising-findings-on-shared-parenting-after-divorce-or-separation.

  58. Catron, “Mixed Feelings.”

  59. Smith, Feel Free, 362–64.

  60. Ariel Levy, “Elizabeth Strout’s Long Homecoming,” New Yorker, May 1, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/elizabeth-strouts-long-homecoming.

  61. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 7.

  62. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 177–82.

  63. Daniel C. Dennett, “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” in Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, eds. F. Kessel, P. Cole, and D. Johnson (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992), https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/selfctr.pdf.

  64. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity, 165.

  65. Masha Gessen, “Martin Duberman on What the Gay-Rights Movement Has Lost,” New Yorker, July 9, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/martin-duberman-on-what-the-gay-rights-movement-has-lost.

  66. The Trevor Project, “Facts about suicide,” https://www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/preventing-suicide/facts-about-suicide/.

  67. Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters,” No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 102–3.

  68. Nelson, The Argonauts.

  69. Hilton Als, “A Pioneer of Gender Performance,” New Yorker, February 6, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/06/a-film-on-a-pioneer-of-gender-performance.

  70. Daniel W. Graham, “Heraclitus,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/heraclitus/.

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  Credits

  This page: “The Frog King” from Cleanness by Garth Greenwell. Copyright © 2020 Garth Greenwell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  This page: Esther Perel, “As Marriage Standards Change, a Therapist Recommends ‘Rethinking Infidelity,’” interview by Terry Gross, NPR, Fresh Air, December 13, 2017, reprinted with permission of WHYY.