Lena Chen

An update from the abyss: this past summer, I contributed to “IGLYO on…”, the quarterly periodical published by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Youth and Student Organization. I wrote an article about the use of Internet communities and forums and their impact on identity formation among queer youth, particularly those marginalized by lack of access, resources, or role models in their community. It appeared in IGLYO’s June 2012 quarterly on social media.

I’ll be moving to Berlin at the end of February, and though I’ll be spending most of the following months settling in and finishing up book research, I hope to spend much of my free time meeting youth activists and others engaged in progressive work in Europe. If you plan on passing through Germany, shoot me a note! Am always interested in hearing the stories of strangers and playing biographer to vagabonds.

IGLYO on… is written by volunteers and enables young people across Europe to contribute their perspective to the LGBTQ movement. The publication is distributed to all member organisations and partners in hard copy, and is published four times a year. Peers are invited to contribute to a range of topics. Contact office@iglyo.com to order print publications to be sent by post.

Catch me on the above HuffPost Live segment talking about the United Nations declaring contraception a human right. To which extent are nations like the United States fulfilling this so-called “right”? Has health care reform alleviated reproductive health costs or do people continue to make compromises on their sexual health?

This winter, I’m working on a series of articles related to the impact of the Affordable Care Act on the sexual life and health of Americans. Have you benefited as a result of the new provisions or are you still struggling to find affordable, reliable reproductive health services? What kind of trade-offs do you make as a consumer (generic vs. brand-name birth control)? If you’d like to share your experiences on paying for and accessing reproductive care (including but not limited to birth control, emergency contraception, STI testing, vaccination for HPV, and preventative screenings such as those for cancer), please get in touch with me at lena [at] lenachen [dot] com. I’d love to chat!

(Source: The Huffington Post, via lenachen)

Virginity at Harvard | The Harvard Crimson

The Harvard Crimson’s magazine quoted me in this week’s cover story on student perceptions of virginity and the state of campus sexual politics. Sadly, I think that there’s still a tendency to think of sexuality in terms of an all-or-nothing/virgin-whore dichotomy, which is exactly how people end up being shamed no matter what their sexual practices actually consist of.

My stance has always been that these misconceptions and prejudices arise out of a collective unwillingness to talk about sex and our own desires (as well as our inner conflicts). In hyper-competitive environments, the self-consciousness and fear of failure that students feel toward academic achievement is totally reflected in how they negotiate their interpersonal relationships as well. It’s easier to judge others when we aren’t comfortable with our own sexuality. And in the end, that lack of transparency is what breeds insecurity in everyone, regardless of whether they’ve decided to stay abstinent or hook up,

Check out the whole piece for a sense of what sexual activity is actually like at Harvard today.

(via lenachen)

a·mok   [uh-muhk, uh-mok] noun

(among members of certain Southeast Asian cultures) a psychic disturbance characterized by depression followed by a manic urge to murder, a state of murderous frenzy.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer an orange-haired joker gunned down the fourth wall of a Colorado cinema, and I didn’t know what I was still doing in Boston. I’m weird about shootings. The idea of killing people makes me sick, but when confronted with the rampages, the national tragedies, my impulse is to empathize not with mourning families or fallen victims, but with the perpetrator. He’s usually one of the losers or freaks, a social outcast, the kind of role I had always been assigned no matter my environment. What happened in Aurora had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering who I would’ve become if luck hadn’t intervened, if it would’ve been me pulling the trigger instead, only in a different place at a different time.

Frank said it was the most morbid thought in the world. (But of course, how could he relate to the character of the underdog?)

Boston was bad enough. The sun rose at 6 in the morning, warming the black-tarred streets and mansard-roofed homes of a noiseless city. By the time I woke hours later, the temperature in our centrally air-conditioned penthouse unit had risen above 80 degrees, a result of leaving the windows open overnight for fresh air. A heatwave was sweeping through the country, its rays as indiscriminate as the aim of the joker, ravaging residents of coast and country alike. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything, least of all to write…

            –Excerpt from “REAL ESTATE CURES FOR WRITER’S BLOCK”

I haven’t read The Bell Jar from cover to cover in years. This fall, I’m going to take a page from Hunter S. Thompson and retype the entire thing by hand. I figure I might learn a thing or two given a few years of distance, and either way, it’ll be better than pitching thinly disguised stories about a writing professional who hates the professionalization of writing. All of my writer friends feel the same about their jobs, but none of them are passive-aggressive or ironic enough to actually approach their editors with such a story idea. I guess I should say “most” and not “all”, especially since I sleep beside a German academic with an appreciation for specificity, but come to think of it, all of my writer friends really do share my rapidly dwindling faith in the media and publishing industry.

Earlier this August, the Hound and I were in Fire Island for ten days with ten books. The only one that got cracked open was The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath was my sole like-minded companion in the darkest hours of my adolescence. She was the author who defined my girlhood by defying hers, and after I discovered her memoir at the age of 15, I had an annual habit of revisiting its pages. I don’t know why I ever stopped. Plath makes me think about a part of myself that I haven’t had opportunity to consider anymore, especially as the topics of my writing have become more professional, legitimate, closer to the mainstream. Look at my portfolio; I never really wanted any of this for myself. I wanted to write, yes, and I like “networking” if what you mean is finger food and compliments from strangers, but the travel, events, business cards, etc.? I spend more time on my Twitter stream than I do on stream-of-consciousness.

I knew by the time I graduated college in 2010 that I didn’t want any of the things I thought I wanted all through my undergraduate years at Harvard. The only reason I pursued any sort of career in the traditional sense was because I needed to insulate myself from cyber bullies who couldn’t get over the fact that I wrote a sex blog when I was 19. Why should I have to encourage people to forget that I ever appeared naked on the Internet in order to have them take my writing seriously? Moreover, my genius plot didn’t even fucking work. I’m 25 now, and they are still not bored of stalking and defaming me or my friends or my boyfriend or my family. And last year, they moved on to stalking my readers by outing anyone who commented on, reblogged, or liked my posts. I felt like I gave up a part of myself for nothing. Ever since the harassment has escalated, I have lost any desire to blog most days - and I’m sure my lack of enthusiasm showed in less frequent and less substantial updates this year. I felt the walls creeping up and the confines of my career closing in every time I signed another contract for another gig I didn’t really want to take.

I burned out. I put away my unfinished memoir. I started a novel. I decided I needed to get the hell out of America. I wanted to break up with my life. I read the first page of The Bell Jar.

On Fire Island, I spent the first half of my vacation being mildly irritated that there was no Internet or cell phone reception, despite the fact that I specifically wanted to visit Fire Island to escape Internet and cell phone reception. I was generally displeased by my then-unresolved housing situation, my two-week separation from Patrick (who was obtaining a visa in Germany to stay in the U.S.), and my utter inability to make progress on my novel and the three or four creative writing pieces I’ve been working on since the beginning of 2012.

Then Patrick arrived (by ferry) and brought with him foodstuffs, supplies, and the best birthday present ever. But I cannot reveal the latter for fear that it will not come to past! So, instead on this 25th year of life, I am belatedly sharing the above photograph (taken by Patrick) and the excerpt (written by me). The latter comes from an unfinished short story about six people trying to find a home during an unusually hot summer. It’s my first adult attempt at writing fiction, and I’ll think about trying to get it published somewhere when it’s complete, but mostly, I’m just curious to see how the writing process plays out. I’m writing this one for me, and the mere notion of trying to price something like this, to figure out its market value - well, it’s absurd, but so is the rest of capitalism.

I know now for certain that my writer’s block is over, because I know that I can and I will and I want to finish writing this story. I need to, because it not only tells the tale of this summer, but the story of my young adulthood, the story of this entire year and my entire life, the story of The Bell Jar and what it means to me. If I can finish this, I can finish my book. There are things I want to accomplish here, things I want to say about literature in general, and things I have wanted to say about myself but have always been too scared to reveal. Writing this short story is both personal challenge and tribute. How better else to thank the poet whose single novel saved my life countless times over than by proving with text the suspicion that she must have always nursed, the contradiction that marked her career - that in the end, genre is just a state of mind, and the truth - or what it is we call “the truth” - lies not in words but in the spaces between the lines.