Searching for intelligent signs of liberation.
AND! Max Delsohn joins the Being Alive Book Club Mon Nov 17 to talk "Crawl."
The canon of coming-of-age cinema is overflowing with finding yourself on the sports field or miraculously surviving to adulthood after copious amounts of substances. Far fewer stories center the intrepid teen who begs their parents to drop them at the Metro so they could go to the big city and… browse the womyn’s bookstore. 👋 🙋♂️
For a time, Lammas on 17th Street in Washington, D.C. was my sanctuary, and a time travel portal where I studied up on radical feminist teachings of the recent past and projected myself into a progressive, feminist future adulthood. Almost thirty years later, the reality is both more beautiful and more complicated than I could have ever imagined.
I’m the child of a liberated woman who played basketball for her college (pre-Title IX!) and upset her own parents when she refused to take my father’s name. My mom taught me there are many ways to be a radical, that conscientious resistance and the work for justice happens in the classroom as well as the streets. My mom, the radical Catholic, studied alongside Betty Shabazz, regularly quoted Lucille Clifton, and worked tirelessly to practice what she preached in the Alexandria City Public Schools.
I thought about my mom, of course, throughout all 150 minutes of Bess Wohl’s Liberation last night. In the memory play, a daughter in our present timeline steps back into her mother’s 1970s consciousness raising group to witness with her own eyes how the personal messed around with the political. She’s trying to answer the question so many of us ask ourselves in the mirror now: “What went wrong?” I’m grateful the play helped me, through tears, remember what also went right.
Tickets on sale through Jan 11, 2026 and, in B’way terms, affordable.
Speaking of signs of life—the election of Zohrhan Mamdani as my next Mayor and Abigail Spanberger as the next Governor of my home state of Virginia is downright thrilling. I’m a progressive-leaning political pragmatist who believes we need to roll up our sleeves and revive the big tent in order to continue the work our foremothers started.
The yardstick cannot be perfection or purity. None of us will ever agree with a politician’s every soundbite or an administration’s every decision. But working together, I still believe we can amplify our ideals, wrestle with contradictions, and pull lessons from the past to find our way forward.
Politicians say a lot of things to get elected, but on a very personal note, it feels really good right now to have two people riding a groundswell and unafraid to recognize and celebrate the LGB and the T.
ICYMI, watch this incredibly remarkable video of Zohran sharing the legacy of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson while committing to allocate millions for youth and adult housing programs and gender-affirming care.
Onward…
xx Kyle
Being Alive Book Club x Max Delsohn
We’re reading Crawl this month—Max Delsohn’s new collection of saucy in Seattle stories.
Max is as funny and charming IRL as his sentences read on the page. Come hang with me, Max, and BABC on Monday, November 17th on Zoom. No need to read the book in advance, though if you pick it up this week I promise you won’t want to put it down.
ALSO! Max is on book tour right now—you can see him IRL this week in Ann Arbor, Madison, Chicago and in Las Vegas early Dec.
Credit Check
“Can I have the envelope please, so I can push it?”
—Lily Tomlin (by way of Jane Wagner)
Thanks, mom, for also introducing me to this eureka experience:
Bookmarks
Book four of our house’s favorite graphic novel series launched this past week: The First Cat in Space and the Baby Pirate’s Revenge. Highly recommend for the middle-grader in your life (or still in you?) Special shoutout to the four accompanying albums of singable-for-the-whole-family music from Shawn and Mac.
Watch them read the entire first book with sound effects, silly voices, and sea shanties.
Street-inspo
The Being Alive Book Club is an open invitation to read trans authors.
BABC is open to ALL— there are many ways to participate, none of which absolutely require reading the (entire) book. We do, though, highly endorse the reading. More questions? New here? Check out the Being Alive Book Club FAQ!