Gay Mag

A new magazine from Roxane Gay offering some of the most interesting and thoughtful cultural criticism to be found on the Web. Our first quarterly is coming in June 2019. We value deep explorations, timelessness, and challenging conventional thinking without being cheap and lazy.

Member-only story

American (Indian) Dirt

Tiffany Midge @TiffanyMidge
Gay Mag
Published in
7 min readApr 6, 2020

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Illustration by Carmen Johns

You are seated at a mass signing as part of a midwestern book festival. A celebrated author sits at the table adjacent to you. His most famous book is about a white man’s journey of self-discovery guided by a Lakota elder on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

You can’t help noticing that the “action” at your table is significantly less compared to the author’s, not that you’re keeping count. His many fans stream to him, queue up to his table carrying armloads of books for him to sign. You overhear them asking things like, “What are Native Americans like?” And “how are your books being received by the Lakota?” Clearly, you are invisible, and you think that maybe you’d attract more attention if you wore a jingle dress.

You resolve to write an essay about this experience. But not because it is unfamiliar to you — white writers co-opting Native stories and profiting off of Native culture is as commonplace as the sun setting in the evening — but moreover because you are amid this particular intersection at this particular place and time. The irony is both unsettling and hysterical.

You are a little-known Lakota writer situated in your people’s traditional homelands, a spiritual “epicenter,”…

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Gay Mag
Gay Mag

Published in Gay Mag

A new magazine from Roxane Gay offering some of the most interesting and thoughtful cultural criticism to be found on the Web. Our first quarterly is coming in June 2019. We value deep explorations, timelessness, and challenging conventional thinking without being cheap and lazy.

Tiffany Midge @TiffanyMidge
Tiffany Midge @TiffanyMidge

Written by Tiffany Midge @TiffanyMidge

Artisanally crafted, 100% Organic, Free Range writer, Author of memoir “Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s.” https://tiffanymidge.wixsite.com/website

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