She/Her/Hers
Lesbian
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EMILY PRATT SLATIN | About | Press Kit | Gallery | Notebook | Music Playlist | She/Her/Hers Lesbian |
Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.
Some books begin with a door opening. This one begins with a door closing behind a sixteen-year-old girl who had already learned the difference between being unwanted and being wrong. I was not wrong. I was simply inconvenient to people who needed the world to stay smaller than I was.
Dark Horse—The Diary of Emily Pratt Slatin, Volume 1 is the first record in a diary series built from the raw architecture of my life: queerness, intersex womanhood, autism, family exile, fire/rescue, grief, old houses, rural Vermont, first love, chosen family, photographs, ghosts, and the stubborn fact of survival. Not the polished kind. Not the kind people praise when they want pain to sound respectable. This is the record I kept because no one else was going to tell the story correctly.
I came out as a lesbian in 1996, at sixteen years old, in Stamford, New York—a small town where secrets never had enough room to stay hidden. When my father found out, he threw me out with a beat-up 1991 Honda station wagon, a small amount of money, and the kind of silence that teaches a girl exactly how alone she is. That was the day I stopped waiting for rescue. That was the day I became the girl who knew that if anyone was going to save me, it would have to be myself.
But this is not only a coming-out story. That would be too easy, and my life has never been interested in easy. This is also the story of an intersex woman who was born female, raised as Emily by the people who actually saw her, and forced to defend a body that doctors, paperwork, and one broken man kept trying to translate into something it never was. This is not a transition story. It is a correction of the record. I did not become Emily, I stopped letting the wrong people pretend I wasn't.
The diary entries in this volume move the way memory moves—out of order, uninvited, brutally exact. They return to the houses that raised me and the rooms that nearly erased me. They sit with old photographs, medical records, childhood wounds, dead trees, vanished friends, bad love, impossible love, and the strange ache of realizing that some ghosts are not dead people at all, but the versions of ourselves we had to abandon just to keep breathing.
There are places in this book that still know my name: Greenwich Village, where my story began; Stamford, New York, where childhood became exile; the Adirondacks, where summer camp became refuge, first loves, and broken hearts; New York City, where work and history left their marks; and Middletown Springs, Vermont, where I finally bought land, stood under my own sky, and began to understand that permanence is not something other people give you. It is something you build with your own hands, then defend.
Volume 1 is a diary, but it is not passive. It does not sit quietly and hope to be understood. It names things. It names the father who could not see me, the mother who looked away and later became complicated in the way mothers often do, the lovers who arrived like crows and left feathers behind, the wife and best friend who became a myth I never meant to write, and the fire/rescue years that made me both stronger and more haunted than any woman should have to become.
I spent twenty-two years in public safety—Firefighter, Paramedic, Lieutenant-Specialist—running toward the things most people spend their whole lives trying to avoid. I cut people out of wreckage, stood in burning buildings, trained others to survive horror, carried the dead, saved the living, and kept going long after the job had taken more than it ever gave back. Those years live in this book, not as glory, but as residue. Soot in the lungs. A radio tone in the spine. The quiet knowledge that sometimes the people who seem most unbreakable are the ones who learned very early how not to fall apart in public.
At the center of these pages is Amelia—not as a simple love interest, because nothing in my life has ever been that neat, but as the person who saw me without needing a translation. She arrived in the aftermath, when I had already mistaken endurance for living, and she became the kind of presence that changes the air in a room. This book carries the ache of that bond: wife, best friend, chosen family, mirror, witness, and the human embodiment of a myth I kept trying to create because reality had failed me one too many times.
This is a lesbian memoir, an intersex memoir, a fire/rescue memoir, a rural Vermont memoir, and a diary of becoming—but more than that, it is a record of refusal. Refusal to be erased. Refusal to be mislabeled. Refusal to make the body smaller so the room can stay comfortable. Refusal to turn grief into a polite anecdote. Refusal to apologize for being brilliant, difficult, wounded, funny, sexual, loyal, defiant, and alive all at once.
Anyone looking for a neat little story about overcoming adversity will probably be disappointed, and honestly, that's fine. I did not write this book to be inspirational in the greeting-card sense. I wrote it because paper trails lie, records vanish, people rewrite what they do not want to face, and silence has always been too convenient for everyone but the person forced to live inside it.
Dark Horse, Volume 1 is where the series begins—not gently, not cleanly, and not with permission. It begins with a name. It begins with a body. It begins with the girl everyone who mattered already called Emily. It begins with the woman who survived long enough to sign her own work.
This page isn't yours.
It's mine.
Title: Dark Horse—The Diary of Emily Pratt Slatin, Volume 1 The first volume of Dark Horse is a diary of identity, exile, fire, love, grief, and survival—written by an intersex lesbian woman who stopped asking the world for permission to tell the truth. |
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