THE BOOK
Growing up gay in the small-town South, Waymon Hudson was raised by two people pulling in opposite directions. His father set about breaking him into a shape the world would accept. His grandmother, Mimmie, spent those same years quietly building him into someone who could survive being exactly who he was.
​
She hid the records that could start a fight, read tarot at the kitchen table, and taught him to read a room before it turned dangerous. And when his parents couldn't agree on what to name him, she settled it: she gave him, in secret, the name of the artist she loved most in the world, a love she could never say out loud in that house. He was fourteen before he understood what she had handed him.
​
In the braided tradition of Brian Broome's Punch Me Up to the Gods and Saeed Jones's How We Fight for Our Lives, Notes from a Sissy tells a Southern queer childhood in three voices: comic chapters, the trauma fragments that interrupt them the way memory actually behaves, and a grandmother who answers back.
​
It is funny the way survival is funny. It does not ask to be pitied, and it does not ask permission.
FROM THE OPENING PAGES
Make no mistake, Central Florida is the Deep South. Not the quaint, antebellum, sweet-tea-on-the-porch kind, either. Think of it as the frayed hem of the Bible Belt: slightly moldy, always damp. Where the humidity clings to your skin and the past clings to your soul.
​
Right in the middle of the state, close enough to Disney World to smell the magic but far enough to never touch it, lies the small town of Apopka. Apopka is a small, working-class town stuck somewhere between a John Deere catalog and an episode of Cops.
​
And in a poetic flourish only Florida could pull off, the town's name comes from a Native American word that, no joke, translates to "Big Potato." Move over, New York. Our tuber-themed metropolis is coming for your title.
FROM THE PAGES
Move over, New York… our tuber-themed metropolis is coming for your title."
Chapter One
ABOUT WAYMON
Waymon Hudson is a Deaf, queer writer, musician, and keynote speaker whose work returns, again and again, to the stories we carry in the body. The deafness is how he makes the work: he composes and sings through vibration, sensation, memory, and touch. The queerness is what the work is about, and has been since he was a boy in a small Southern town that had opinions about both.
​
His essays have appeared in the Huffington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Encyclopedia Britannica blog, and The Bilerico Project, and two personal essays are forthcoming this fall in the LGBTQ anthology Proud Outtakes (The Center for Contemporary Relationships). He founded the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Fight Out Loud, whose work was covered by CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times, and served as Midwest Regional Co-Chair of The Trevor Project. He writes the Substack publications Messy Reinvention and Silent Horrors.
​
Notes from a Sissy is his first memoir. He wrote it as a Deaf man, remembering a childhood he could still hear.
