by Celeste Chan

Aurora stays in a youth hostel on Market Street. She’s 19. Black & blue flags wave outside. She sees her friends, dildo girl, and then this sea of 50,000 women, staggering in sequins and mini-skirts, cowboy boots and dildo gun, swimsuits and roller skates. Fisting on the playground. Topless. Sex. Drinking 7-up bottles mixed with vodka. Dykes on bikes flood by, all heat and machinery. Large and lovely femmes, butches, skinny leathery ones. Red lips, long hair, boots everywhere. Aurora opens her mouth and swallows them in this city of metallic heat.

Celeste Chan is a Hedgebrook, Lambda Literary, and VONA fellow. She is a hybrid artist, writer, filmmaker, and organizer. A queer student of experimentation, she is schooled by DIY and immigrant parents from Malaysia and the Bronx, NY. Her writing can be found in Ada, As/us journal, cream city review, Feminist Wire, Glitterwolf, Hyphen, Matador, and Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices (Trans-Genre Press). Her experimental films have screened in CAAMFest, Digital Desperados, Entzaubert, Frameline, Imperfectu, Leeds Queer Film Festival, MIX NYC, National Queer Arts Festival, Queeristan, and Vancouver Queer Film Festival, among others. Alongside KB Boyce, she co-directs Queer Rebels, a queer and trans people of color arts project. She has curated and shared work in the SF Bay Area, New York, Montreal, Mexico, Seoul, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Berlin, and beyond. Celestechan.com