Eva Hayward

Clacking away at my laptop, chunky Dior glasses sliding to the end of my nose and lips pursed in concentration, with a lifted finger I momentarily held off the doctor while I crafted a last sentence. Surely a well-rendered sentence matters as much as a steady heart rate. I was writing my February opinion column […]

With Valentine’s Day approaching, I have been thinking about the relationship between love and desire. When does desire become love? Can you have love without desire? Agnolo Bronzino’s beautiful painting “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time” depicts the ambivalences between lust and love, with Venus and Cupid forbiddingly embracing. Cupid, the winged god of desire, is […]

In 1897, filled with patriotic verve, Swedish explorer Salomon August Andrée attempted to float to the North Pole in a balloon inflated with hydrogen gas. He lifted off from Svalbard, Norway, and headed north over the pole to Canada. Tethered to a bubble of possibility, he shouldered against the Arctic. Andrée knew the insurmountable odds […]

If watching folks gobbling down turkey on Thanksgiving caused me to further lose faith in America, the sharing of lighted candles at the Transgender Day of Remembrance restored it. Several weeks ago, I went to Raleigh with my husband to attend the international Transgender Day of Remembrance vigil hosted by Equality North Carolina. The event […]

Why did some audience members at a recent GOP debate yell “yeah!” when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, “Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him [an uninsured man in a coma] die?” What does it mean when people cheer for the vulnerable to die? Of all the troubling revelations […]

I am in rural Vermont, on the Canadian border. Woods everywhere, and in the night, this lush landscape is gothic. All the forests go deep dark and only stars brighten the sky. Sitting in the blackness, I listen for the tiptoe walk of deer, or maybe even the call of Eastern coyoteswe called them “coydogs” […]

Equality North Carolina, an organization devoted to securing rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender North Carolinians, is holding a vigil on Monday, Sept. 12, at 7 p.m., in Bicentennial Plaza, 1 East Edenton St., to protest proposed anti-LGBT legislation—House Bill 777 and Senate Bill 106—to amend the state constitution. A rally featuring country music […]

Over the last several years, National Geographic published a spate of articles with titles such as “Female Fish Develop ‘Testes’ in Gulf Dead Zone,” “Sex-Changing Chemicals Found in Potomac River,” “Mercury Poisoning Makes Birds Act Homosexual,” “Animals’ Sexual Changes Linked to Waste, Chemicals” that connect pollution to the undermining of sexual differences. The issues in […]

I was sitting close enough to Justin Vivian Bond, performing at the ArtsCenter in Carrboro last month, to look into her mouth and marvel at its unbolted reveal, its size, its fearless ability to stretch open. Her throat curled around the cries, rasps, whispers and stops of “22nd Century,” a Nina Simone song she covers […]

A love affair broke out between a transsexual womanmale to femaleand a transgender manfemale to male. I have lived as a woman for years, and he had recently transitioned from female to male. I define as transsexualsomeone who feels an essential need to modify her bodyand he is transgendernot necessarily wanting sex reassignment. I always […]