Today on the site I’m delighted to welcome a number of the queer contributors of Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection ed. by Samantha Paige Rosen, a brand-new nonfiction anthology from Beacon Press! Before we get to the insider peek from the contributors, here’s a little more about the book:
21 writers and organizers on chosen family, hacking adulthood, and other lessons communal living can teach us about the future of housing in America
At age 29, when Samantha Paige Rosen made an unexpected move back home, she was surprised to find how much she loved living with her parents again. Inspired and curious, she began searching for others who had redefined home and community.
The essays and Q&As in Living, Together are about carving out spaces of communal connection and joy in our 3-bed, 2-bath starter home culture. Although they recount life at different stages and in different regions, these stories showcase the delights and tradeoffs of more dynamic shapes of “home.” Across sections on family, intentional community, and what lies beyond housing, readers will hear from voices like:
- Kristen Arnett, whose found family kept her afloat, from weddings to hurricane season and everything in between
- Kim Stanley Robinson, who describes the magic of communities that are led by everyone
- Sarah Thankam Mathews, who founded a pandemic mutual aid group and discovered, like so many of us, how essential connection and care are in times of crisis
- Rodney M. Bordeaux, who explores how strength and unity are inextricably tied to life on First Nations reservations
Communal living isn’t just for cults or millennials with a pipe dream. Amidst the climate crisis, a hostile housing market, and the loneliness epidemic, Living, Together opens a window into how people in the US are thriving through collective care. This book invites us to imagine what new opportunities for connection exist when we push through the walls society has built for us.
And here’s a selection of the contributors to talk about their essays!
“Home Is Other People” by Samantha Paige Rosen (editor)
This is my introduction to the book, the goal of which is to share my personal journey of communal living that led me to come up with the anthology, as well as to provide a sense of the topics the book covers, why they’re urgent, and what I hope readers take away from the collection. Early in the piece, I mention I bought into the nuclear family, American Dream, white picket fence thing growing up, and I was surprised when, well, life didn’t work out that way; I’m glad it didn’t. What I tried to bring out in the book by including so many queer contributors and stories is that queerness is so much of what has allowed us to see beyond the conformity of the nuclear family and single-family household, and to connect with our communities in ways that feel life-sustaining. There are many systems in place that are designed to keep us from succeeding outside of traditional family and housing structures, but I hope we keep talking with each other, sharing ideas, and working to choose happiness, resilience, and interdependence over whatever else we’ve been taught was important.
“Hello to All This” by Gabrielle Korn
My essay in this wonderful anthology is about rethinking what a home can be. A few years ago, I took a job across the country—the kind of job that allowed me to buy my first house. Within two years, though, I was laid off, and stuck with a mortgage I could no longer afford. To make ends meet, I started renting out the part of the house I’d been using for my office. Because of the great location (and the cute house, if I do say so myself), the rental unit immediately became lucrative, which allowed my wife and I to stay where we were. And it also allowed us to start reimagining what we used the space for—with money coming in, we had more flexibility, so we started letting artists and writers come and stay for free for a few days each month. This DIY residency opened up a whole world, and led me to reimagine the purpose of my house as something much bigger than just us.
“The Opposite of Loneliness” by Sarah Thankam Mathews
For years I had observed a separation between my writing life, where I wrote fiction and some nonfiction, and the organizing projects I was a part of. For this anthology I made a first attempt at writing about one of them, my founding of a 6000 person mutual aid collective in Brooklyn that did many things, including redistribute over a million dollars for the survival needs of our neighbors inside and outside the collective. Bed-Stuy Strong materially supported nearly 30,000 people in its first years, and then I stepped down from its leadership. The essay is my first, likely flawed and partial attempt, at looking back on this time in my life, and thinking about what it meant to me.
“A Polyamorous Commitment” by Alex Alberto
My essay, “A Polyamorous Commitment,” traces my journey from feeling stifled by traditional coupledom, to discovering polyamory as a way to be both free and deeply committed, to longing for a shared home with multiple partners and metamours, and finally to building one with my partner, his partner, and her children. But the central question of the piece is what to make of the inevitable challenges and failures along the way. When an early attempt at a polyamorous household falls apart, or when the reality of co-parenting and cohabiting with more than one adult becomes harder than I imagined, does that mean the model itself doesn’t work? Or does it mean I have not yet found the right people, at the right time in all of our lives? I wanted to write about the particular uncertainty polyamorous people face when there are so few models to look to.
“The Life and Afterlife of a Shared Home” by Rhaina Cohen
My most defining living arrangement as an adult lasted just three years. I shared a house with my husband, a couple we’d been friends with for years, and their kids (one when we moved in, two by the time we left). All four adults knew from the start that the arrangement would almost certainly be temporary because our friends’ jobs would likely take them elsewhere. That built-in expiration date pushed me to think harder about what commitment actually means. We had committed to one another — prioritizing time together, supporting each other — without any illusion that we’d be sharing that house for decades. But I was aware that, in our society, commitment is equated with permanence, a standard that didn’t fit what we had. I remembered reading about similar tensions in books like Rewriting the Rules, which challenge the dominant assumption that a relationship only counts as successful if it lasts until death. If permanence isn’t the measure of commitment, what is? That question followed me as our friends prepared to move — and it’s what the essay tries to answer: what our commitment meant once we were no longer in the same place.
“The Myth of Stable Ground” by Amanda E. Machado
This essay is about the complexity of building a sense of home and community as a queer person of color, and what it takes to feel “grounded” within a constantly unstable and unjust world. I wrote my essay about my experience living in a house in West Oakland, with all queer people of color from 2021-2024. I wanted to write an essay that was personal to my experience in communal living within the Bay Area, and how it healed so much of my trauma around the search for “home,” while also being honest about how the search for home is not only a personal struggle but a systemic one, and our struggle to feel at home is a very real and intentional consequence of oppressive systems that want to consistently displace us and disconnect us. Through the essay, I explore how I have come to accept that “home” then must become something as fluid and ever-changing as our queer and trans lives.
“Come With Us” by Hannah Grieco
I wasn’t sure what to write at first. My essay, like much of my suburban life, is hetero-facing. I am married to a cis man, drive a minivan, take care of three kids (and my parents), and haven’t kissed a hot woman at a club in decades. And yet, my life is deeply queer. Sometimes painfully, like at the school bus stop where I am the only mom who looks like me, talks like me, etc. Sometimes defiantly, like choosing to hang the trans flag outside my front door, less than twenty yards from a series of MAGA signs.
Sometimes flushed with horniness, like in the poems and short stories I write about different timelines I’ve traveled or imagine traveling. All of that, and more, are within me as I write about caregiving. And as I sit bedside and grocery shop and do all the so-very suburban mom things I do. I am a better caregiver because I’m bisexual. I’m a better mother to my nonbinary child because I’ve never conformed to feminine stereotypes. And I’m a better daughter to my parents because they giggled when I came out at 20. They knew, of course. They still know.
“Survival of the Connected” by Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom
My essay in this anthology is about my chronic illness and my connection to the natural world. This connection starts with the five senses—this month I’m listening to a bluebird singing, smelling the sweet scent of peony flowers in the garden, and watching bumblebees buzz from flower to flower until they’re heavy with pollen. This connection also veers into my nerdy bookworm side, so I was thrilled this essay gave me an excuse to go down rabbit holes of reading articles on Wikipedia and in scientific journals. My piece draws threads from animals like bumblebees, ravens, and red foxes to humans and the parallel ways we take care of each other and live together. Although my essay doesn’t get into queer ecology, it’s another topic I love going down rabbit holes reading about. I’ve known I was queer since I was a teenager, and at sixteen I had to edit a pro/con opinion piece in my school newspaper about same-sex marriage. I wrote the pro side, while my classmate who wrote the con side made flimsy arguments that didn’t hold water no matter how diplomatically I tried to edit them. She claimed queer people were “perverted” and “unnatural.” But the truth is, queerness exists all over the place in nature, too, from sex-changing fish to penguins and lions and dolphins and tortoises who have same-sex relationships. And although we don’t have to be natural to be worthy of respect and love, to fight for our fundamental human rights, queerness is a natural part of the world and a longstanding part of human history. As we work to build bonds of love, friendship, and chosen families—in a world where it’s often terrifying just to try to survive as a queer person—I want to remind myself and you that trans and queer people have always existed, and we always will.
“Drag in this House” by Jake Montano aka Imelda Glucose
I was amidst preparations to compete in a drag pageant at the onset of writing this essay, gathering garments and practicing dance routines while also thinking about narrative arcs and word choice. And, months before, I had also experienced a homophobic assault. I was already carrying tremendously complex feelings all through this era of my life: feeling severe disorientation and fear and wanting to abandon all projects and gigs in an act of self-preserving retreat, but also wanting to remain in the competition on the year of my tenth anniversary as a drag queen in San Francisco. Exhaustion, unworthiness, pride, and pain – quite a cocktail. The abyss beckoned to me, wishing for me to crawl under a rock of despair and to never leave, and so often I considered it. Writing this essay was a way to actively entangle, disentangle, and unpack these experiences, beginning with memories of childhood, and tracing the history of my drag family, the Rice Rockettes, to try and find healing and purpose again. History is like the hairline of a drag artist — it goes way back – and this writing journey also brought me to visions of the house ballroom scene, to the wild days of early-aughts San Francisco, and the ways chosen families have been places of safety and explosive creativity through all this time. Tip your drag performers, and read this book.
