Qstack Readers Select | June 2025
Queer Substack favorites - PRIDE Edition with Mr. Troy Ford
Welcome back to Qstack Readers Select, a bi-monthly, curated selection of queer Substacks—chosen by Qstack readers—highlighting and celebrating the enormous talent of our queer writers.
Previous Editions:
For this very special PRIDE edition, yours truly has selected five newsletter writers who display ongoing commitment to the queer community and great writing, and have been very special friends to Qstack with tireless support and encouragement.
Thank you for all you do—you are seen, and most appreciated. ~ MTF
The Queer Art of Surviving Together
Some people say “found family” like it’s a consolation prize, but anyone who's truly found their people knows it’s the real jackpot. These voices—funny, fierce, grieving, healing—form a constellation of connection, showing up on Substack not just with their stories, but with open arms.
They are the ones who pop in through the metaphorical backdoor, pour you a cup of something warm, and say, “I’m here for you.” Each of this month’s Qstack Readers Select honorees offers presence in addition to excellent writing and community.
These excerpts are snapshots from larger stories—stories of resilience, identity, care, and the slow, sacred work of becoming. Some come bearing laughter and sass; others bring the ache of memory or the quiet joy of small spring awakenings. All of them, in their own way, are turning lights back on.
Whether you’re here to cry, laugh, nod in recognition, or sing from the rooftops: Welcome. You’re in very good company.
~ MTF
Clint Collide | Collide Press
I’m not sure which is of us is Lucy and which Ethel, but Clint Collide 🌈✌️ is like that bestie who’s pops in at the backdoor for coffee and a chat every morning (no need to knock) just when you’re ready to sit down for a break. He’ll tell you all the news—whose birthday it is, the happenings last night that you won’t believe, and even who gave him sass and how he served up a big bowl of sass right back—you’ll have a good laugh and get on with your day, revived.
People come for Clint’s beautifully curated montages of vintage photos showing love between men (“celebrating the male gayze” - always in good taste) and stay for the slowly unfolding story of coming into his own after a period of grief and isolation following the deaths of loved ones. It’s been a joy getting to know him and seeing how much light he brings to people’s lives in his Comments.
From Turning My Light Back On: From Dark To Dimly Bright
Three and a half years ago, after several of my nearest and dearest died within a few months, I had what I can only describe as a breakdown.
Long story short, I fell down and haven’t been able to fully get up ever since.
Not only haven’t I been able to, but I began thinking it might not be possible.I don’t need to tell anyone who’s gone through it that grief is a real motherfucker. It doesn’t care about anyone or anything else. It’s totally and unapologetically selfish…
…But something shifted this week.
Nothing huge happened—no single event that flipped a switch. Just a series of small moments. I had a few conversations didn’t leave me completely drained. I unclogged a drain in my kitchen. I remembered my love ones with a smile on my face instead of with tears in my eyes.
For the first time in a long time, I felt a little lighter. My life felt a little brighter.
I’m not saying I’m all better or healed. I’m not saying I won’t still have bad days ahead. But for the first time in a long, long time, I feel like maybe—just maybe—I’m starting to turn back on the light grief turned off. Hopefully, I am becoming someone new who’s been shaped by grief, not someone who has been forever broken by it.
If you’ve been there—or if you’re there now—I see you, boo.
Robin Taylor | That Trans Friend You Didn’t Know You Needed & SmallStack
“Why do you need a trans friend?” Robin Taylor (he/him) asks. “Because it’s so much harder to hate someone when they have a name and a face and they make you laugh.” Not only does Robin fill that need, he does it with such good-natured aplomb it feels like he’s been there all along, and we can’t imagine life (or Substack) without him.
Along with his That Trans Friend newsletter giving us personal stories about his life and gender journey, Robin also has created the SmallStack Library and Community of Substacks with under 500 subscribers, helping those just getting started to find each other and start forming the relationships that are crucial to the support and cheerleading we all need to make this crazy enterprise sustainable. The synergy between the SmallStack and Qstack missions has been electric—Robin is the spark.
From Are we what happens when the cishet world dreams? salt and magic and potential
Why are all the queers born to cishet families? As though we were created to defy. We, the black sheep, the square peg, the fifth wheel. Was it a joke? Was someone being funny when they designed us this way, to emerge so gorgeous and divine amongst such cotton gingham boringness? Such Martha Stewart basicness? Such gravy and potatoes and my-favorite-spice-is-salt-ness?
It's hilarious. It's a little sick. It's high drama. It's a soap opera. It's the ministry of silly walks. It is irony. It's foreboding. It's damn Shakespeare.
Hell, it's Shakespeare's Sister. No question about it, she was definitely queer.
How many times can a mirrored disco ball birth itself out from a hoo-hoo? Birthing is queer. I've done it. Twice. It was queer as hell. You're screaming and pissed and exhausted and suddenly, suddenly everything stops and the world is gorgeous, and you're hungry, and isn't that just a short description of a drag show?
But my mother. And my father. They were so straight-laced they sent the bottle of wine back home with the guest who brought it. And I am the child whose cord was cut from them? Flamboyant, magical, desperately divine me?
Keith Aron | Big Blue Sky Dragonfly
If Keith Aron’s coaching is anything like his Comments, I can assure you it feels like a warm hug from a dear friend who knows exactly what to say just when you need it. We all get busy in this go-go gadget world, but Keith makes the time to really listen and respond. I’ve been so encouraged by his deeply attentive comments on Qstack posts for some time now, and I wanted to make special mention of the gentle reassurance he gives in our community.
His own writing is just as thoughtful and kind, from sharing about how to pause, really pause (for 90 seconds) when we are having a moment, to discovering his own pungent spirit animal, and facing “Mother’s Day” after having given birth and then transitioning (“Other’s Day”.) You will find magic by subscribing to Keith’s Big Blue Sky Dragonfly.
From Probable Cause for Pause: That sense of urgency may just be a plea for pause in disguise
When Clarity showed up on April Fool’s Day, I fetched up my courage and let it enter. And after it said its piece, I begrudgingly conceded that it was no joke. It was making a solid point:
Oh, clarity, you old so and so. The way in which you so often dawn with no apparent rhyme nor reason. Like the way you’re choosing April 1st, of all days, to reveal that after countless hours spent thinking about feelings, thinking about feeling feelings, talking, reading, listening, workshopping, and generally nerding out in every possible way about feelings, I’ve likely spent relatively little time actually feeling them…
…Why subject oneself to the mess of it, the unwieldy, anti-social nuisance of it? Isn’t it a waste of time when there’s so much thinking and hustling to be gotten to, and so many fires to fight? This seems especially true of this chaotic moment in time, when things are shifting so fast, so furiously, so dramatically. Pumping the brakes seems a little like fiddling while Rome burns, doesn’t it? If anything, shouldn’t we be devoting everything we’ve got to constantly contesting Fascist fuckery?
Actually, I think it may mean that it’s more important than ever to slow down, climb back into our bodies and feel things, because … well, THAT is resistance.
Maia Duerr | The Practice of Life
Maia Duerr’s DharmaStack and Qstack were both born under the same sign last year, and I feel a special affinity to Maia’s project of peace and community. We both want to bring people together to share in the joys of life, as well as to lean on each other in the tough times we are facing.
Maia writes beautifully of spiritual journeys, the changing seasons, and domestic disruptions sprinkled with gorgeous photography of nature near her home (also see her other newsletter, Postcards from New Mexico.) And she likens our current political situation to the nascent rebellion in the Star Wars series Andor (in her article Rebellions Are Built On Hope) that resonates all too well. Our callings are aligned, and Hope is our guiding light
From The Things We Leave Undone: writings from a year of grief
Bosque—a word I learned when I moved to New Mexico 13 years ago. The bosque is the forest habitat alongside streams and rivers in the southwest. Cottonwood and mesquite trees, willows and olives, and much more grow in these verdant bands. On this mid-March day, much of the vegetation in the bosque along the Rio Grande is still bare. Huge cottonwood branches reach toward the deep blue sky, no green leaves yet. But we’ve turned the corner on winter and spring is nearly here. Very soon there will be signs of new life. I am so hungry to see that again after this inexorably long fall and winter after Katya’s death, and this first full year since my mom and dad died the winter before.
Feeling the tone and energy of today’s grief in my body: ungrounded, hollow, cutting. These jagged bare brown branches mirror what I am feeling. Every day, every moment, this grief has a different flavor, a different nuance. Some days the loss is sharp as a knife. Other days, the fullness of love and gratitude when I remember these three lost beloveds carries me along into new life. Those days are a relief.
This intimate relationship with impermanence leads me to look more closely at the things I’ve left undone and, as much as I can, to tend to their completion. I know I will not completely succeed. At the end of the day, at the end of my life, something will always be left undone. Meanwhile here in the bosque, life generates and dies away and rises up again. This cycle of doing, of undoing, goes on forever.
Ed Wolf
Although Ed Wolf is new to Substack, he has already cut a mighty swath with the sometimes tender, sometimes anguished vignettes from his 40 years of working as an HIV/AIDS caregiver in San Francisco. Nearly every post he has published from the memoir he is writing has left me in tears.
It’s true they are tales of tragic events and lives lost, but it’s also in the telling: Ed shares the details that show the life behind the statistics, from the homeless patient who just wants to make sure he pays his debts in Calvin’s Salute, to the teenage boy who receives a positive HIV-test result after a single encounter. Ed is a born storyteller, and he’s giving us a remarkable archive of a time that must not be forgotten.
From Positive
Months later I was riding the BART train home from Powell Street station, after having seen my dentist, my lips numb with Novicane as we pulled into Civic Center. The doors opened and a group of noisy students got on and the doors closed and we travelled on again and when I looked up, there he was, whispering into a girl’s ear, who laughed and gently touched his shoulder. I looked down and then lifted my head and he turned and saw me.
“Whatever happened to you?” I said to myself.
We both looked away from each other and then back again.
“Are you all right?” I asked myself, and thought he might make a move towards me, but he didn’t.
He just stood there, holding the bar above his head, whispering into the young girl’s ear and then, just as we were pulling into Church Street Station and I got up to leave, he looked directly at me and nodded his head several times.
“I’m okay,” he seemed to be saying, “I’m okay,” and I so hoped that was true, and then I stepped off the train and the doors closed and the train travelled on through the dark tunnel.
Thanks so much for the curatorial care you always put into these selections, Troy! I'm feeling so honored to be included in this month's issue with this talented, lovely bunch! So happy to be introduced to Clint and Ed, to be reconnected with Maia, and to hang with Robin, who feels not only like the trans friend I *definitely did know* I needed, but my long-lost trans sib. Big, queer Pride blessings to all of us❣️ 🏳️🌈❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🏳️⚧️🩵🩷🤍
Omg ...lol really I did...
You're screaming and pissed and exhausted and suddenly, suddenly everything stops and the world is gorgeous, and you're hungry, and isn't that just a short description of a drag show?