Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

So I'm writing a romance novel about gay mormon missionaries and it started as me cackling over my keyboard: "heheheh, this is quite scandalous, the church leaders say 'grab your muskets to defend yourselves from the gays? I'ma make missionaries *Kiiiissss* and touch each others' BUTTS, So there!! " It started as a thumb to nose at the church, neener neener. Well, really at the specific homophobia of the church in the early 2000s. That's when I was marinating in it. Pfff, I knew I was queer when I went on a mission. I fell in love with girls since middle school! (Hi Elly! I love you!!!! You're literally the coolest person in the world!!!) but I also fell in love with boys and I kinda... hoped that would cancel it out (sorry Elly. I'm the worst. You deserved better and I'm glad you got it. Still love you, though.) I even put words to it-- I bought bisexual pins for my paisley flute case! I was out! And also Mormon! What the fuck!! So then I went...

When I was 10, I got my period. A black smeary embarrassing surprise in my panties, discovered after the long walk back from the Takoma Park Folk Festival. I hid the soiled panties, threw them away.  What did this onset mean? What kind of person did this determine I would be? I had some alarming ideas about immaculate conception. Perhaps God, someone who seemed terrifyingly real and literally potent, would want me to be the special chosen vessel for the next of his sacred seed. In my room, amid the hoarded little boxes of shells and peach pits and candy wrappers and coins and stickers and fruity smelling erasers, a pile of ruined underwear grew, ignored, a testament to a kind of hostile takeover of my body, over my life. * When my daughter Rosie Jo was 9, her dad died. With her stunned big hazel eyes in her round white face, she told me seriously that she was scared she had to be the man of the family now. I said, no honey. We don't replace the people we've lost. They...