I have vivid memories from my childhood of sloppily smearing her lips pinker, pinkest, inaccurate with laughter. I didn't know why I felt so pink about it later. Have you ever felt a color? Do you know what I mean? What I mean is that I loved sleepovers, the safe intimacy of girlhood before I knew that's what I'd want, forever. To hold another girl's face, the trust and control implied in the gesture. The power another girl can give you. It's such a fragile, precious thing.

Makeup is that power: the manipulation of it, the result of it. It's always been a way for me to redeem power that was never supposed to be mine in the first place. According to some, I wasn't supposed to like girls, let alone fall in love with them and steal their lipstick. But makeup is a love letter as much as a tool or warning: red eyeshadow to scare men from me walking home from a party, black lipstick for goth girls, being drawn to the toughest-looking woman in the room. It's a homing beacon and a warning sign.

Makeup is by no means natural. That's the point. If I work hard to survive, you will pay attention when you see me, and you will see the work. Because it is work: to survive, when others would wish otherwise. They want us to disappear if we can't be what they want. But beauty lets me see myself the way I need to be seen; it is redemptive in ways that I often don't have the courage to be verbally. I let it speak for me, at least the preliminaries of getting to know me: This is weird, you might not like it, but if you do — come here, you see me as I am. Hello.

That's what fascinates me about makeup: its ability to help you actively become, however temporarily. It's making what you need to survive out of what you have to work with. Ask the girls who don't feel quite themselves without doing routine, filled eyebrows before they leave the house. This processing of potential, pushing past the point of expectation of who you have to be for other people to reach who you want to be for yourself — that's beauty, gone queer. Because queerness is sexuality, yes, but it's also an identity that implies resistance and reaching for something else. Something better for us than what we've found in a society that would have us be anyone but ourselves.