Kissing Sadness from Her Lips

[ABSTRACT ONLY; NO FULL TEXT] Kissing Sadness From Her Lips By Hannah Kiernan Master of Arts in English As someone who exists in the LGTBQ+ community, I wanted to write a queer fiction piece about a young woman discovering her sexuality in a community of other queer individuals. Kissing Sadness From Her Lips is a poetry-prose hybrid project that explores the life of a bisexual woman who comes out of the closet at an inopportune time. The main character grew up in a heteronormative environment, but she becomes immersed in a world that she didn't realize existed when she and her long-time boyfriend break up and she must move out of their shared home. Through the story, she remembers times when she was younger and she was met with light homophobia from her dad, who only wanted her to date women so that she wouldn't date men, and the existence of bisexual women was fetishized by men. But since she left her hometown and began to discover another world where other people's sexual orientation didn't matter, she began to notice that she had found her community somewhat accidentally. The story shows her life from the moment she comes out to her serious boyfriend. It then ventures into the turbulence of an abusive relationship, stemmed from insecurities and lack of trust. Finally when she begins to find herself within the queer community, she meets new friends as well as a new love interest along the way. Kissing Sadness From Her Lips covers serious topics from homophobia to rape, but also sheds light on the more positive aspects of life that are, at times, easy to overlook. Having realized that she is bisexual, she must traverse a high tightrope between the heteronormative path that she knew so well and this new identity that she has just met. The main character experiences heartache, friendship, and new confidence in her unique identity within this story. The objective of this story is not to scare the audience from coming out of the closet, but to demonstrate the hardships that many people in the LGBTQ+ community must go through on a daily basis. As the author, I wanted to make sure the story is as accurate as possible, without exploiting the queer experience. Therefore, many experiences of the main character are taken from my own and, in my opinion, accurately portrayed.