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Frisson (FREE-son): a psychophysiological response to rewarding auditory and/or visual stimuli that often induces skin tingling or chills. Frisson is of short duration, lasting only a few seconds. While frisson is usually known for being evoked by experiences with music, the phenomenon can additionally be triggered with poetry, videos, beauty in nature or art, or even by eloquent speeches.

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Queerness is often underrepresented in the media. The goal of Frisson Zine is to create space for queer people to read and share queer stories. 

A Denim Jacket
By Ryan Nivus

I own a denim jacket with 43 pins, 7 patches, and an embroidered cloud and slogan on the back. The jacket was my mom's. I added all of the pins and patches and embroidery myself.

 

At least 23 of the pins and 3 of the patches are pride flags or queer slogans.

 

The jacket is very heavy. When I’m wearing it, it is a comforting weight, but when I take it off and hold it, it seems as though it will fall from my hand at any minute.

 

Sometimes, this jacket reminds me of being queer. 

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Being queer is comforting. Having the labels to describe myself with and the community to connect with, it’s wonderful. It’s constantly there, a comforting reminder, a weight on my shoulders reminding me, “You are loved. You are not alone. You will never be alone,” and I love it. How could I not?

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But sometimes I have to take the jacket off. Sometimes my parents ask me to not wear anything with rainbows on it, because they don’t know the views of the people we’re visiting. Sometimes they’ll remind me that “not everyone in Western Maine is okay with that kind of stuff”. Or, “We’re going on a trip, and not everyone has the same views as you” and I have to take off my jacket, leave behind my labels for a night, a week, and wait it out. And it’s heavy in my hands, to have to hold my jacket, a part of my self, and know that not everyone accepts that or likes that or is ok with that. I don’t like holding my jacket for long periods of time. I’d much rather wear it, have it’s comforting weight on my shoulders. If people see it and dislike it, then I know they dislike it, and I can avoid them. It’s easier, I think.

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My jacket reminds me of being queer. 

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Earlier, I was adding a pin to my jacket, one that my friend painted for me. It’s a night sky and mountain range overlooking a lake, done in the asexual pride colors. Black, gray, white, and purple. It’s very well done, and I was excited to add it, but nervous. My parents (somehow) don’t know about my asexuality, and I’m not sure how to tell them. They haven’t commented on the 3x5 ace pride flag I hung up, so I’m not sure what else will alert them to the whole asexual thing. I’m not really looking foward to talking about my asexuality with them, or anyone who is not close to me. Sometimes, I don’t want to explain my asexuality, and sometimes I don’t want to explain the pin my friend painted. Sometimes, I am content to let people think it’s just a mountain range and a lake done in unusual colors.

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My jacket reminds me of being queer.

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When I was adding the ace pin, I kept redoing it. I kept trying to get it perfect. And as I did, I kept looking at the jacket and going, “Oh, I could move this one over here, and this one a bit to the right, and I’ll be able to fit another two pins. I could straighten this one, and move this one down”. This reminds me of two things: being queer enough and being palatable enough.

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I want to be queer enough sometimes. Online, people are so focused on “being queer enough” and I hate it. It’s a stupid notion, but it still affects me. Am I really trans if I don’t actively try to pass? I never actually correct people on my pronouns. I can’t take testosterone and don’t plan on getting top surgery. Furthermore, is my idea of gender really trans, or just weird? I don’t really look bi. I don’t wear flannel or cuff my jeans, I don’t have a nose ring, I hate all coffee, not just iced, and I don’t wear Converse or Doc Martens often. Am I queer enough?

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Obviously, these ideas aren’t true. I’m trans because I say I am, and that can’t be diminished by how well I pass or my plans for transitioning. And stereotypes aren’t for everyone. I am queer in my own way— and my jacket helps with that. It is my way of saying, “I’m here and I’m queer”. 

Redoing the pins also reminded me of being palatable enough.

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I could move the pins on my jacket around so they all fit perfectly. So I can maximize the amount of pins I have. I could make them all perfectly straight, so the pictures aren’t lopsided. But I don’t want to.

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I could change myself for straight people. I could make myself palatable, make myself fit into the boxes they’ve constructed out of stereotypes and the same coming out story that is repeated over and over again. I could make myself into a form that they’d understand me in. But I don’t like that. I’ve embraced not being understood. I’ve made it into a game. “How confused can I make these people? How much can I make them question?” It’s become fun, instead of painful. I’m not fitting into a box that they’ve made, I’m making my own box, and they don’t get why. I’ve crafted my own jacket with my heart on the sleeve and if they can’t understand it, then it’s not my problem.

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Sometimes I feel like straight people don’t want to see me in mainstream media. They can’t understand me. The only time they understand my identity is when it’s reduced down to stereotypes or the exact same story told over and over again.

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And the story that’s being told over and over again does happen. But it’s not the only story that happens.

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I think I’d like to see some other stories.

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Ryan is a junior in high school who enjoys playing music, playing D&D adventures, classical literature, sewing, and collecting pins. He is in his school's theater club, chorus, and civil rights team. They are pretty loud about being queer, having at least 7 pride flags in their room, and advocating for other queer people in their school. His piece, "A Denim Jacket", was inspired by the jacket he got in 8th grade, that he has been adding to ever since. They enjoy writing all sorts of things, and are currently working on a podcast, though it's still in the early stages. 

Perplexity 
By Alex Seymour

As people grow older, they learn new things and forget old things. In a new age of technology more people are learning more, things that they might have never known if it wasn’t for the internet. People are introduced to things that aren’t taught in school and can help them find their true selves. It may be exciting, but it can also be confusing and frustrating, trying to understand yourself in a way that you have never known. What would happen if someone was coming to the conclusion that they were not who they were told they were?

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They were told since the day that they were born that they were a girl, that they were to wear pretty dresses and have their hair down to their waist. That’s all they’ve known, they’ve been told to not question it because they already know what they are, they’re a girl. But as they grow older and learn new things, discover new things, they start to question their identity. Are they actually a girl, or are they maybe something else? They do research, looking for an answer to their questions but they’re not met with answers, at least not complete ones. As they continue to research, they soon realize they don’t like boys, at least not in the way they see other people do. So they look into that too, but still, they aren’t given one solid answer. They continue to look for an answer. They try out different ways of identifying but none of them quite fit. 

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At least, none of them did until one fateful day. Their friend told them about two things, demiboy and neptunic. Demiboy, someone who partially identifies as a boy but not fully, and neptunic, an attraction to female and non-binary people. They didn’t know what those were, so they looked it up like they had done time and time again. It sounded right, it felt right. They finally felt happy, he finally felt happy. Of course, figuring out who you are is one thing, telling people is another. He told his friends first since they knew that they would accept them as he was. Then it moved onto the harder part, family. He had already told his mum about their identity but he was still nervous, but in the end, it all worked out. He didn’t have the guts to tell their father, terrified of what he would say if he would say anything at all. After family came teachers, which was slightly easier but just as terrifying. It was all working in his favour, he could finally be themself without worrying or hiding. 

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He was free.

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Alex Seymour is a 13 year old who likes to draw, write, and play guitar (sometimes). He plans to become a streamer/youtuber later in life but right now is focusing on school and writing. The inspiration for this piece is his own story of discovering his identity and coming out.

Squid Season
By Leigh Ellis

I can’t remember when I realized I was trans exactly, 

But it was probably sometime during squid season. 

Either July or August, 

I can’t remember. 

They only come to the surface to feed at night, 

The squid. 

Summer nights always feel more infinite, 

A blackness you can disappear into

A blackness you can lose your body in. 

The silken surface of the ocean 

Was a portal to another dimension,

A dimension where things like squid existed. 

 

Three things that could be found on the dock (any midnight during squid season): 

 

  1. The briny t-shirts of whichever cousins were around that day, shed in the darkness

to prove something (I don’t know what). 

  1. The disemboweled squid, spoils from the other dimension. 

  2. My feet. 

 

Five characteristics of a squid catcher: 

 

  1. Never afraid of the all-encompassing darkness. I lost my soul in that squid-catching darkness. The boys never lost anything. 

  2. Ribcages like rungs of a ladder. 

  3. Jawlines that could cut (everything about a squid catcher could cut). 

  4. A special sweaty sheen rendering them glow-in-the-dark under the moonlight.

  5. Must be able to become one with the squid. 

 

Reflections: 

 

I never was much of a squid catcher. Instead, I was a squid watcher. I watched as blood spilled on reflective countertops and olive oil was heated past its boiling point and I thought about how my sweat didn’t smell like the sweat of the squid catchers. 

 

There are many boys who I would gladly gut, like one of their squid spoils, just to exist within their

sun-soaked 

sweat-marinated 

moonlit 

skin. 

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Leigh Ellis is a senior in high school and the author of young adult magical realism novel, Bach in the Barn. They are also the editor of this zine. Leigh plans to study creative writing in college to tell more stories like this one and help others tell their stories. When not writing, Leigh can be found spending time with family, listening to music too loud, and making strange art.

Because I Choose To
By Rylan Hynes

“Why?” sneers Hugo Weaving in the rain. “Why, why? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting?”

 

Why indeed? We know we are the anomaly. We are those with the audacity to oppose a binary system, to challenge the codes of predestination. We defy definition. 

 

Why? Why, why, why?

 

The answer is simple:

 

Because I choose to. 

 

*

 

Let’s take a minute just to celebrate the divine trans experience that are the Matrixes. 

 

There is supreme androgyny of the casting, screenwriting, and production design. Trinity kicking ass in latex with slicked back short hair and no time for bullshit. The gender nonconforming Charra who slays the game at the Dock of Zion. Niobe’s 2Fast2Furious self taking names all the way down the mechanical shaft. Neo’s understated, unassuming softness throughout. And need I mention the character whose literal name is SWITCH in the first film? The list, mercifully, goes on. 

 

This is all to say nothing of Lilly and Lana Wachowski, who are themselves a testament to choice — the choice to exist as you are. 

 

In The Matrix Reloaded, we learn that there’s been more than one One. Neo is part of a lineage, of previous failed attempts at abolition. At first this news may seem discouraging, but I, as a queer viewer, embrace and welcome this information. To me, it affirms a legacy of change, of creativity, of persistent existence stretching as far back as the human experience can remember. And this is a story that is deeply familiar to me.

 

Each generation of queers gets the next generation a little further along, opens more possibilities, the capacity for change increases. We hold our breath for a few seconds more below the waves, creep along the shoreline and out of the water and gasp long enough to breath in our own advantage.

 

We adapt. We evolve. We do not die. We do not die out. 

 

And hopefully we leave the world a little better for those to come. 

 

Which leads me to my next question — what if trans folks are the next phase of human evolution? What if more people were like us? What if a gender rebellion is our species’ mechanism to save our planet? 

 

I can already hear the TERFs screaming from the back, so here’s a joke to lighten the mood.

 

*

 

A thread on social media:

 

The title of the last film you watched is the name for your vagina. Go. 

 

Me: The Matrix.

 

*

 

(Well, my trans masculine friends and I thought it was funny. Maybe you did or didn’t, but here me out.)


 

When feminism is tied to reproduction, an innate ability to reproduce, it has devolved into capitalism’s plaything where productivity is the definition of success. It becomes reductive, exclusive, and so myopic it’s a miracle that can even look backwards, which is all that trans exclusionary radical feminists (the aforementioned TERFs) are able to do — look misty-eyed with nostalgia at a past where they viewed themselves as superior. 

 

This is not to say that trans and queer people do not have biological children (because some of us sure do, and that’s a neat, beautiful thing) but we also have the ability to create nonlinear, concentric circles of family. Either way, we are doing our best to create a better future for these generations, and sometimes the most effective way to do that is simply by being who we are.

 

In such a system so focused on productivity, to do something purely out of joy, out of love, especially self-love, is defiant. To transition, to love another with the same parts of you, or to be ambivalent about your partner(s)’s parts at all, and to forsake the onward perpetuation of your species by the traditional, preordained, and acceptable means is erratic. Something to be rejected. What the agents might call “The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose.”

 

Because there anything more radical than to reject your coding, to make a choice, to have lived one way and see a path laid out before you and to say, no thank you, I know that’s not for me, I want and need something different? Not necessarily better or worse, but different. What I know to be right for me. For what is this body, if not the avatar by which others perceive me? And is it so wrong or wild to think that I might want to adjust it so that my appearance aligns with my mind, my soul, my spirit? I think not.

 

*

 

Transitioning is not the end of the journey, and nor is it the only important choice we as trans people make. Every day we make a choice to live, to persist, to continue on in the face of a system whose mechanics are against us, a system that actively seeks to eradicate us from the mainframe. 

 

I always have a choice, and my choice is not to succumb to system that rejects me, that tells me I should not exist as I am or want to be. The system that tells me the way I am is a disease, that I am ill, a virus plaguing an otherwise perfect circuit. I was only recognized as not being a disease by the World Health Organization in 2019. Homosexuality was decriminalized in the United States in 2003. According to the system, I have been ill and illegal longer than I have been alive. 

 

Yet my choice is to remain, to be here, to defy that green, flickering 0 on the screen, and instead to defy the odds, in the face of statistics that tell me I should not even attempt to survive, I am here. I remain. 

 

Even that, the most basic, binary question — “To be, or not to be” — does not have only two answers. Between zero and one lies an infinite spectrum of decimals and degrees, a sliding scale of maybe. Today, my answer is to be. Tomorrow, I may feel differently.  The most powerful of which I believe to be I will do what I need to do to survive. And each time I make that choice, I edge closer towards that full, whole, prime number one. Each time I make that choice, I opt not just to survive, but to thrive. 

 

In doing so, I affirm my control over my own body, control over my fate, my what turns me on, my own unique capacity for reproduction, or lack thereof. If we define ourselves by that which we accept to be beyond our control, the rules of a machine, do we really have an identity at all? 

 

*

 

The only reason anyone or anything can believe that it is somehow superior to another is because that idea was programmed into existence, planted there by some patriarchal hand so deft that you didn’t even know it was a hack, that you were infected by a virus, until presented with something as incomprehensible as us. 

 

I can treat this part of myself like a virus, or I can embrace it, acknowledge who I am and celebrate my identity. Instead of being constantly at war, I can be at love with myself. In spite of everything. In spite of the hate speech, fear, transphobia, violence, internalized hate, I will rise from the ground — drenched and hurting — but persisting. 

 

Why?

 

Because I choose to.

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Rylan Hynes is a queer writer living in central Maine with their hedgehog and husband. Rylan enjoys gardening, writing fiction, horror, dabbling in essays, and using their voice for queer advocacy. They are a sci-fi fantasy nerd, and this essay is inspired by the divine trans experience of re-watching The Matrix films, as well as musings on AI and feminist theory.

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