Katherine Fallon’s Comments

These poems are part of a series inspired by Sinister Wisdom’s call for work fitting the theme of Lesbians in the City. It opened a floodgate for me, and I began to write poems about each person I’d ever been on a date or in a relationship with, earmarked by year and location. Half of these are poems about significant relationships, and the other half are about one-time encounters, primarily based on first-and-only dates through PlanetOut. PlanetOut was a weird and wondrous space of queer connection as the internet first became a real socializing tool; it was basically OKCupid for queer people before internet dating was a socially acceptable behavior. It kept me sane, and ushered me into a much bigger world than I knew existed. Even some of the poems about long-term relationships have an element of the internet in them, but it is so hard to communicate the impact the sudden advent of the web had on those of us who grew up queer, and aware of our queerness, in rural areas, and for those of us who continued to spend time in those rural areas as young adults. Sudden access to the World Wide Web was a balm for that isolation.

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