Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. What does it mean to be American, Californian, queer, even creative, in an era of tweeted populism and hashtags? Miah Jeffra examines our new and rapidly changing public life by questioning a few fundamentals--perception, memory, identity, violence, love--in all their complexity, and in their relationship to one other. THE FIRST CHURCH OF WHAT'S HAPPENING is a love letter to humanity and its resilience, even as it wades through divisive politics, social media and technological disassociation. "Miah Jeffra does not use his imagination to protect himself or to protect us. Instead, he gives us stories of reckless tenderness and anger and sorrow and lust--that overflow with images of wonder and desire. How wonderful "--Robert Gl ck "Miah Jeffra writes somewhere between a scream and a growl, in short energetic essays that queer the language in exciting ways. In a letter to the late Keith Haring, Jeffra writes 'I want to feel like a bandit, a punk, a renegade.' And indeed he takes us on an outlaw's journey, provocateur and picador; flaunt and flirt. Here is a writer who grabs the reader by the balls in all the ways one hopes to be testicularly taken."--D.A. Powell "Through these dexterously choreographed essays, Miah Jeffra perfects a grim exuberance that comes to suggest a new optimism. He writes: 'We made the Titanic, we made the Hindenburg, we made the Challenger Shuttle. We made Fukushima. We make love.' Certainly, the blood kinship of love and disaster-each here driven by human ambition for more self-animates this passage. But what deepens it is the breadth of Jeffra's 'we.' There is generosity here despite our capacities for self- righteousness, predation, and social inequity. I leave THE FIRST CHURCH OF WHAT'S HAPPENING believing that what Jeffra evangelizes is resilience as a necessity, not a virtue."--Douglas Kearney "A gem of an essay collection, shot through with humor, anger, and a deep, d