Generation Z Is Gayer, More Anxious and Less Conservative Than Other Generations

How Much of Generation Z Identifies as LGBTQ+?

A new survey from the PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) is making the rounds for its conclusion that Generation Z is gayer than other generations — a conclusion also reached by nearly every study on this topic over the past several years. This rise in affiliation is probably due to the superiority of the queer lifestyle and the rise of JoJo Siwa as well as more objective factors like more LGBTQ+ media visibility, more acceptance of gay people, less fear about identifying as LGBTQ+ and more knowledge that LGBTQ+ identities exist.

According to PRRI, who surveyed 6,014 human beings in total, 28% of Gen Z adults (ages 18-24) identify as LGBTQ+. Meanwhile, 16% of millennials, seven percent of Generation X and 4% of baby boomers identify as LGBTQ+. PRRI also surveyed Gen Z teens (ages 13 – 17) but did not ask them about their LGBTQ+ affiliation.

Other recent polls have delivered similar numbers. In June 2023, Ipsos found 16% of Generation Z and 15% of millennials in the United States identifying as LGBTQ+. In February 2023, Gallup determined that 19.7% of Gen Z and 11% of millennials identified as LGBTQ+. The difference in results between those surveys and the PRRI survey is almost definitely due to differences in the poll structures, samples and methodologies, rather than a year-to-year explosion of sexual deviance amongst Zoomers.

“Generation Z is More Likely To Be Gay Than Republican”

As many gay headlines have declared, the PRRI data also found Generation Z is more likely to identify as LGBTQ than they are as Republicans (21%). Last year, a 2023 Human Rights Campaign report (which cited 27% of Gen-Zers as LGBTQ+) made a similar declaration, warning the GOP that their party will continue declining in popularity as being LGBTQ becomes increasingly popular, and therefore maybe they should chill out with all of their anti-trans legislation!

36% of Gen Z adults are Democrats (similar to other generations), and 43% don’t align with either party. 43% consider themselves liberal, and aside from millennials (24%), Gen Z adults are significantly less likely than other generational cohorts to call themselves conservatives.

But the PRRI survey also showed Generation Z was skeptical of partisan politics and the electoral system in general and that most participants “expressed little faith in the federal government or elected officials in Washington” and felt that “elected officials put the needs of the wealthy or corporations ahead of average Americans.” Zoomers expressed skepticism towards mainstream news media and their ability to find any unbiased sources of information, while also sharing some small hopes about the possibilities of local politicians enacting community change. It’s almost like it would be more important than ever for news outlets to have writers who are recognizable human beings and not AI!

Gen Z adults and Millennials also were less likely than older adults to agree that voting is the most effective way to create change in America and more skeptical of the police, federal government, criminal justice system and the news. Still, somehow, over half of Gen Z adults reported some or a great deal of trust in the police (53%), which was more than expressed trust in any other public institution —  police outpaced news organizations (37%), the federal government (41%) and the criminal justice system (42%).

The demographics least likely to report some or a great deal of trust in the police were non-white Gen Z adults (47%) and Gen Z Democrats (45%). Gen Z Democrats were the only sub-demographic of Generation Z adults who trusted the news and the federal government more than the police, and the only group for which the criminal justice system overall was the least trusted entity. Gen Z Republicans, perhaps because their current devoted leader calls the news “fake” and loves the police, had the lowest levels of faith in the news organizations, and the highest levels of trust in the police.

Generation Z Adults were also the least likely to identify as white Christians (27%) and more likely to be religiously unaffiliated (33%) than every generation aside from millennials, who came in at 36%. I went ahead and dug up PRRI’s 2012 study of millennials — and at that time, only 25% of Millennials identified as religiously unaffiliated, suggesting that these rates may be increasing over time for younger generations, and I’m curious to see how high those numbers will climb in the coming years. I’m sure the Public Religion Research Institute is too!

The people most likely to agree that “college is a smart investment” are the people who went to college for $500 and the people who’ve yet to attend college because they are too young: 56% percent of Gen Z Teens and 57% of Silent Generation members said college is a smart investment, compared to 42% of millennials and around half of every other generational cohort.

Generation Z Adults Are More Likely To Be Anxious, Lonely and Online

Teenagers these days are faring better emotionally than Gen Z adults, who did, we should recall, enter a major stage of adulthood amid the height of a global pandemic. Gen Z adults are consistently more likely than Gen Z teens to report experiencing negative emotions often or almost all the time. For example, they’re more likely to feel anxious (38% vs. 18%) or depressed (24% vs. 8%).

Gen Z Democrats, women and teenage girls were also more likely to be anxious, lonely, depressed and angry than Gen Z Republicans, men, and teen boys. There was also a correlation between being Very Online and experiencing negative emotions — Zoomers who made meaningful connections through in-person activities like sports fared better than those who made their more meaningful connections through social media sites. Correlation and causation is difficult to parse out there — people who feel connected to their local communities and group activities may be happier than those who don’t, and those who don’t are more likely to need to find their community on the internet.

In general, it seemed that negative emotions peak with Gen Z adults and Millennials, with feelings of loneliness, depression and anxiety gradually decreasing across generational lines. It is clear that the best way to be happy is to be retired.

Generation Z Is Skeptical But Engaged

Ultimately, these numbers all tell the same story: Young people in this country — Generation Z and Millennials — are skeptical of it. They’re opting out of the hetero-patriarchy and organized religion. They’ve lost trust in the government, the media, and the criminal justice system. But this research points out that they’re also far more likely than other generations to have participated in some form of activism or direct action in the last 12 months, including volunteering and attending a rally or demonstration — with women more likely to have done so than men.

With surveys like this it’s always hard to draw conclusions by comparing generations, never really entirely sure how much of these results can be attributed to an age group and how much is truly specific to a generation. Historically, college-age humans have always been exceptionally politically engaged compared to younger people (with less independence and knowledge of current events) and older people (who often turn inwards toward familial and work obligations as they get older). In their 2015 survey of Millennials, 15% reported having attended a rally or demonstration in the past 12 months, in line with 14% of Gen Z Adults on this survey. Meanwhile, whereas Gen Z adults are more likely to be out there on the streets, Boomers and Silent Generation members are more likely to have contacted an elected official to express their views.

We’re All Getting Gayer

Although the focus of this survey was on Generation Z, it’s worth noting that numbers are increasing across the board across generations, indicating people coming into their sexual orientations and gender identities later in life. In PRRI’s  2015 survey, 7% of millennials identified as LGBT, and now 16% do. That’s big growth, so good job everybody!

feature image by Dmytro Betsenko via Getty Images.

Data nerds can read PRRI’s 80-page survey report here!

What’s In and Out for 2024

Feature image by timsa via Getty Images

A new year is almost upon us! That means it’s time to declare what’s in and out for 2024. This list is 100% scientific and objective and I’m sure everyone will agree with me on everything, but, okay, fine, it’s also just my “opinion” or whatever and all complaints should be sent to me directly, etc. etc.

Let’s get into it!

IN

• Birds
• Blogs
• Cute little trinkets
• Daily dessert
• Dinner parties
• Eggplant
• Ethical consumption under capitalism
• Ethical Non-Monogamy (the action)
• Going to the sea when ill or tired
• Jigsaw puzzles
• Judgment-free hookups with new queers still figuring shit out
• Lost causes
• Novellas
• Overdressing for events
• Physical media
• Selfies
• Sex scenes
• Shoplifting
• Tipping 30%
• Unconventional sandwiches
• Waffles
• Working on local campaigns

OUT

• Arugula
• Delivery apps
• Ethical Non-Monogamy (the phrase)
• Follow-up emails
• French toast
• Generation wars
• Horror movies about trauma
• Minimalism
• Saying “I’m an abolitionist but (insert very not abolitionist desire)”
• Self-important media that critiques rich people
• Sex scene discourse
• Soft launching
• Subscribing to a dozen streaming services
• Superhero movies
• Therapy speak
• True crime
• Twitter alternatives
• Using they/them pronouns for trans women who use she/her
• Venmo requests
• Voting for the presidency*

*My own actions/beliefs aside I do think the 2024 U.S. presidential election is going to have a very low turnout. But, of course, it’s up to every individual able to vote to decide whether or not they want to and I do acknowledge the stakes are higher for people who live in swing states. Personally, I can acknowledge that another four years of Trump would be worse than another four years of Biden while at the same time struggling to justify voting for a politician who so brazenly supports a genocide against Palestinians — among other failures. I don’t know how we change the system and our world if we continue to have our votes taken for granted by a Democratic party who doesn’t care about our beliefs or our lives or human life in general. At the same time, I understand there’s a practical limit to a protest vote in a presidential election. Mostly what I hope for in 2024 is a de-centering of the U.S. presidential election from our political discussion and an understanding that whether Trump or Biden is president there will be so much work to do to take care of each other domestically and abroad. The United States is an evil empire and always has been regardless of our figurehead. It’s absurd with nearly a year left before the election, we already know our options and that our options are this. I understand making the pragmatic choice in this election. I also understand if you can’t bring yourself to do that. I just hope cynicism is out for 2024, because we have to keep fighting for the improbable possibility of a better world.

Obsessed: Twin Flames Universe, a New Age Cult With a Surprising and Insidious Approach To Turning Gay People Straight

Welcome to OBSESSED, in which I provide you with information and/or a media consumption list that speaks to my primary hobby: doing obsessive amounts of research into a singular topic or story for no reason, usually because I saw a documentary about it. This week I watched the Netflix documentary Escaping Twin Flames, which was an excellent follow-up to the October Prime Video Documentary Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe, about two self-proclaimed spiritual gurus in suburban Michigan who promised their followers that with the right spiritual alignment and self-help therapy and online classes, they would find their soulmates.

What is the Twin Flames Universe and Where is Twin Flames located?

Paul Octavious/Prime Video. Copyright Amazon Studios

The concept of “twin flames” — having a destined, exclusive soulmate — has been around for eons, particularly in spirituality circles, with roots in Hindu teachings. The popular understanding of “twin flames” in American culture seems to have begun with American New Age writer Elizabeth Clare Prophet and her book Soul Mates and Twin Flames: The Spiritual Dimension of Love and Relationships. The concept apparently perhaps reached its online zenith in late 2021, on account of celebrities like Alicia Keys and Megan Fox speaking openly about their own perceived twin flames.

Enter Michigan couple Jeff and Shaleia Divine, creators of the Twin Flames Universe YouTube cult, which promises its followers that abiding TFU principles will absolutely undoubtedly lead to them securing their own harmonious twin flame relationship — entering into a lifetime partnership with their best friend in the entire universe, designed for them by G-d. They feel qualified to lead this group because they found each other and are living in twin flame harmony. Furthermore it appears that Jeff thinks he might be the second coming of Jesus Christ. From their YouTube Channel’s “about” section:

The Twin Flames Universe YouTube Channel represents the collective divine life force that courses through the Twin Flame Ascension School and Life Purpose Class community, as created and loved immensely by our beloved Spiritual Teachers and Twin Flames Jeff and Shaleia…. Some people believe that we must “leave” (a belief of separation from God) in order to experience this NEW EARTH that everyone in the spiritual communities is buzzing about. We, the students of Jeff and Shaleia, believe in Union with God where there is no separation and love is right HERE, NOW.

Jeff and Shaleia of Twin Flames Universe were originally located in Farmington Hills, Michigan, a tony suburb of Detroit, but have since moved to Suttons Bay in Northern Michigan.

The Netflix documentary Escaping Twin Flames has been number one since its debut two weeks ago, and a three-part Prime Video documentary, Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe, narrated by journalist Alice Hines, who initially wrote about the group in Vanity Fair, explored the Twin Flames Universe through the stories of its followers and assorted experts. What’s revealed in these documentaries is not only intriguing to me from the perspective of CULTS but also because of the specific methods they used to recruit and then psychologically destroy their LBGTQ+ followers.

Who are Jeff and Shaleia Divine?

Courtesy of Prime Video

Jeff Ayan and Shaleia (real name Megan Plante) are the self-appointed gurus who, since 2018, have been releasing hundreds of YouTube videos on various New Age topics, most of them focused on finding your Twin Flame. “There is nothing outside of you that prevents you from being with your love,” they instruct. “Only you.” Jeff has a business degree from Western Michigan, and prior to Twin Flames was running a “lifestyle design” company in Hawaii.

Like similar cults, such as NXIVM and Teal Swan’s whole deal, Twin Flame Universe has its own psychobabble philosophies about “mood alignment” and “healing modalities” that promise to help participants overcome past trauma. They present a successful romantic match as the ultimate goal and cure-all to one’s emotional problems, and anybody’s failure to secure their match is framed as a result of their own insufficient spiritual work, lack of obedience to Twin Flames principles, or a lack of financial investment in Twin Flames tools. Followers are often pressured to cut off contact with their families, put in volunteer work for Twin Flames, and travel to exclusive, expensive Twin Flames events. The most dedicated followers can advance far enough in their own trainings to become official “coaches” for others.

Their rapidly-growing community has an extremely active Facebook group and regular Google hangouts, so devotees can easily lose their life to Twin Flame activities.

Students are encouraged to fixate on pursuing their Twin Flame regardless of said Twin Flame’s level of interest in them. This often leads to humiliation and frustration at best and restraining orders and stalking charges at worse. Some students even spent time in jail for actions taken in pursuit of their twin flame. Some were encouraged to remain in abusive relationships, or blamed for their twin flame’s mental illnesses.

The Twin Flames community is, therefore, especially attractive to people distraught over unrequited love who find comfort from others experiencing similar emotions and validation from a group philosophy that discounts mutual desire as relevant to destined romance.

How do Jeff and Shaleia Make Money From Twin Flames Universe?

Jeff and Shaleia have gotten very rich from this work and they are proud of that! They flaunt their luxury cars and are very Prosperity Gospel oriented.

Access to exclusive workshops, courses and individual “mind alignment” therapies (all conducted online) cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars. They’ve sold meal plans through a start-up called “Divine Dish,” which promised customers a reignited sex life by reconnecting with their body through lots of carbs and red meat. One participant in the Netflix documentary gained 70 pounds in 9 months on the diet.

They sell books and meditations. They sell videos of events where they and other Twin Flames couples share the stories of their Harmonious Unions. $333 will teach you how to become irresistible to your Twin Flame and a $777 E-Course will enable you to build the life of your dreams. Ascension coaching, which all members are encouraged to seek out, is cited as “between $20-$200 per session.” Followers were encouraged to max out their credit cards, quit their jobs to focus on Twin Flames and required to have regular, expensive, coaching sessions.

While Hines was visiting the couple to do reporting for her story, there were several Twin Flames followers living in the basement undergoing a “spiritual bootcamp” that seemed to consist primarily of doing chores for Jeff and Shaleia.

The (Formerly) Golden Lesbian Couple

Copyright: Amazon Studio

The Prime Video documentary spends a lot of time with Catrina and Anne Irwin, two lesbian mothers who’d met and fallen for each other while married to men. Twin Flames affirmed their need to leave their marriages for each other at a time when that reassurance was hard for them to find elsewhere.

Catrina and Anne eventually became Twin Flames coaches, earning $120k combined in one year while also taking on the unpaid, laborious positions of VPs of sales and managing their own small cohort of coaches. But in the third part of the documentary, Anne explains the tension that arose when Jeff began pressuring her to adopt a new identity: specifically, Jeff wanted her to begin identifying as a man. When Anne resisted, Jeff sent texts like: “You guys look dumb as fuck hiding behind the lie still. Take a guy’s name and a guy’s pronoun or I will need to put someone else in charge of sales who does respect my work.”

As any trans person can attest, it’s incredibly psychologically grueling to be told by an authority figure that you are wrong about your own gender, and yet this was an approach Jeff was adopting with gusto and paradoxically aiming it at cisgender followers.

How did they end up in this place?

The Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine

Jeff and Shaleia had always believed that every partnership contained a 100% divine feminine and a 100% divine masculine partner. In the Wondery Podcast “Twin Flames,” Jeff is quoted as saying that while homosexuality isn’t a sin, “homosexuality doesn’t even really exist. If you’re two divine masculine energies having sex, you’re just shaking hands ’cause it’s not your twin flame anyway.” They denied the existence of bisexuality, asexuality and nonbinary identities.

Ascension Coach Angie, who identified as cisgender and bisexual, had to pass this idea on to her students, even though it conflicted with who she knew herself to be. But things got even trickier for Angie when Jeff and Shaleia decided that she was actually a man.

As the group kept growing and evolving and its mostly female membership began waning in enthusiasm due to not successfully pairing with their twin flames, Jeff and Shaleia decided to shift their focus to matchmaking within the Twin Flames universe. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a lot of male members to go around.

Thus, a fix arose: matching previously-thought-to-be straight women with each other. Obviously this was met with some skepticism and resistance, so Jeff and Shaleia came up with a different way to make these love matches work: insisting that one of the two women was actually transgender. This also required convincing previous same-sex couples in their community to fall in line with this new approach.

In Alice Hines’ 2020 Vanity Fair piece, she cites meeting three followers who were medically transitioning at Jeff and Shaleia’s urging who felt great about it. They agreed with Jeff’s assessment of their gender and were grateful for the support in pursuing who they knew themselves to truly be. Hines also met five followers who resisted accepting their new genders and therefore ended up leaving the group. This eventually became the reason for Anne and Catrina’s departure as well.

Arcelia, a trans woman former TFU sales manager who appears in both documentaries, felt embraced when she first joined TFU, early in her transition, but said she eventually felt “love-bombed” into being the LGBT+ poster child for the organization. Once Jeff and Shaleia began telling their followers what genders they were, she left the group. “It is not their fucking place to decide what gender somebody is,” she remembered thinking. “That is something people need to do on their own.”

As Hines writes in Vanity Fair, this circumstance, in which cis people are convinced by authority figures that they are trans, does “feel like bait for the anti-trans lobby.” Arcelia described the situation as what might happen “if excessive liberal progressives got drunk and had a baby with conservative Christians.”

Jules Gill-Peterson, a historian of sexuality and gender, also commented on this phenomenon in the Prime Video documentary, noting that the progressive LGBT-accepting language on the surface of the Twin Flames Universe actually masks a practice that is similar to Conservative Christian ideology. She draws a parallel to conversion therapy — it’s not truly acceptable to be queer in the Twin Flames universe. But instead of going the traditional route of convincing you to change your sexuality, they convince people to change their gender.

What Jeff and Shaleia claim in the FAQ of their website is that they “encourage and invite students to gain clarity on their sexual and gender identity through the students’ own self-discovery and exploration.” They are co-opting progressive values to push forward a conservative agenda, making it difficult to push back on these assertions without feeling like we are fighting ourselves. It’s almost the most clever thing these yahoos have ever come up with.

Cassius Adair, a trans writer and researcher who consulted on the Wondery podcast, spoke to this in a bonus episode: “I want to caution everybody when they hear stories like this — that if there are bad actors who want to control people or coerce people, then gender is one axis on which control or coercion can operate. But that’s not the same as this being a kind of microcosm of how trans communities really function.”

One section on the Twin Flame website is devoted to successful Twin Flames relationships, where you can read about each couple’s relationship. Despite Jeff and Shaleia’s claim that they are “a safe and tolerant place for all members of the LGBTQ+ community,” all the couples on this page are couples containing one (1) man and one (1) woman. Several are trans.

More Reading and the Twin Flames Universe Podcast

The first major Twin Flames expose came from Vice in 2020: This YouTube School Promised True Love. Students Say They Got Exploited Instead.

This is the Reddit Thread mentioned in the Netflix documentary: “Twin Flame” Cyber Cult? Concerned for a loved one.

Alice Hines original Vanity Fair piece: Everywhere I Went, They Went With Me, Because They Were on My Phone, uses many of the same sources an stories as the docuseries, but there’s a lot in here that’s not in the document. One of those stories is that of “Katie,” a former devotee who was encouraged by Jeff and Shaleia to pursue an ex who’d repeatedly denied her advances until she ended up in jail. An interesting tidbit from the podcast about this article was that Jeff and Shaleia were confident the article would be flattering and bring an influx of new students, and were preparing actively for that rush. The Twin Flames Universe Website has its very own “media statement” in which it declares all negative media about their group to be the result of disgruntled and malicious former students unable to overcome their own internal blocks through the program.

In early 2022, Wondery released Twin Flames, a seven-part podcast narrated by our very own Stephanie Beatriz. They speak with several former students, including the story of Angie, a then-straight woman who was matched with another woman as her Twin Flame and then was told she had to embrace her divine masculine, which eventually led to her split from the group.

You can also read the unsuccessful case Jeff and Shaleia filed against former members who talked to Vice reporters and posted negative things about TFU on Reddit. It’s a wild ride!

Sou Sou Things: My Queer Caribbean Community Saves Money & Each Other

As I get older, one of my main preoccupations of surviving in a capitalist, colonialist world has been the need for community. Relationships are messy, and many of us didn’t learn conflict resolution skills in our childhoods, so navigating community building has been rocky — especially for an autistic person like me who already has a tendency to miss social cues and can find communication a complex labyrinth. But the more I read of the writers and activists of the previous generations, particularly those from the Caribbean like Kwame Ture, Walter Rodney, and Maurice Bishop; the more I felt that the only chance to withstand the onslaught of capitalism, was through learning how to foster strong community bonds, and to rediscover different ways of living than what had been presented to us as the model for success.

My little group of friends — most of us queer, Neurodivergent activists — began making a concerted effort to become more present in each other’s lives. The stress of being broke was doing a number on all of us, and sometimes all we could do was share some of the little money we had to make sure someone was able to pay a bill and avoid their electricity being cut off, or get cat food for their furbabies. The hardest part was accepting help, especially in the form of money, and not letting pride get in the way of our survival. I remember sitting with a friend in distress and assuring them that, “As long as one of us has, all of us will have.” We had to find ways to regain the communal intimacy that had been stripped away from us by the individualistic nature of our society.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. We were all nursing our own wounds, and many of us had learned that self-isolation was the safest way to cope with times of distress. But we tried to show up for each other however we could. There wasn’t much money between us either, many working in creative fields, freelancing, running small businesses, and otherwise trying to avoid the soul-sucking 9-5. As the pandemic hit, and opportunities shrunk, medical issues began to arise and then the sudden loss of a dear friend had us all gasping for air.

As we processed overwhelming grief and tried to continue forward, we had to find a system to keep us together. Not everyone had the support of family, an unfortunately common experience in the queer community, but we had each other. We ran a Discord, where we would save little notes on our ideas for communal living and garden planting, food, art, and music. Organising events where we would come together and meal prep for the month or just spend time together. There were also pictures of our pets and a space to drop the heavy stuff when we needed to. A few months ago, a friend added a new thread to the Discord — “Sou-Sou Things”.

Sou Sou comes from the Yoruba word Esusu, and has its origins in West Africa, with similar savings systems in Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba culture, then making its way to the Caribbean during the period of African enslavement. Later, in Indentured Indian communities, a similar system known as Chaiteyi was also practiced. It was a way to circumvent the limitations of colonialist economics — those who were excluded from the flow of money found their own way to connect and make ends meet.

I myself had no personal experience with being part of a Sou Sou, but my family has had a long history with it. I sat down with my mother and grandmother one evening, both of whom had used Sou Sou as a means to survive when times were hard. My grandmother shared that her mother had put TT$2 a week into a Sou Sou when they were children (in the 1950s), at a time when women were not able to work and their access to money was limited by whatever their husband saw fit to give them for running the house. At the time, many of them would, without their husband’s knowledge, take a portion of that money and “throw a hand” in a Sou Sou made up of family members and friends in order to make purchases like new curtains. At the time, these networks were primarily, if not all, working-class women.

How it works is on a rotational savings basis. Each person contributes an agreed-upon amount of money weekly, fortnightly, or monthly, and then the full amount would be paid to one member each payout on a rotating basis until everyone had received a lump sum. Often, the person organizing the Sou Sou would receive a small amount per payout for handling logistics. For my grandmother, it was a savings method she turned to at many junctures in her life. She bought bricks to build her family home, and paid off her father’s debt in a timely fashion. When my mother was a teenager, in between jobs and writing exams on her own after dropping out of school, my grandmother encouraged her to start running a Sou Sou as a way to make a little extra money. With a collection of cousins around the same age, she organised a group and ran the Sou Sou herself, being paid one portion or “hand” for each payout as the person who functioned essentially as the treasurer.

Years later, as my friends decided on how we wanted to try out this system, I ended up volunteering to run the cycle. We decided that the treasurer, or as we called it “The Sou Sou Master” (because we all play way too much Dungeons and Dragons) would run one cycle and then the responsibility would move to someone else. That way, even the payment for the administrative aspects would work on a rotational basis.

Of course, trying to get my group of friends to collectively agree on logistics is like trying not to spook a herd of wild horses. Some in the group have an ease with the gentleness and patience needed to ensure everyone feels heard and can work within the limitations of their mental health and energy. I’m not necessarily an expert at that. I’m the one who sends walls of text in the group chat when trying to get something done, which admittedly can be a bit intimidating. But finally, we were able to come together and make a plan, with the help of a handy Google Spreadsheet that I am mercifully not in charge of populating.

Interestingly, there are a number of apps available now to help with the technical side of running a Sou Sou, making notes of how much money is collected and distributed, who gets what and when, etc. Many of them run through some sort of banking institution though, so we decided for our test cycle we would stick to good ol’ cash under the mattress to keep things simple and avoid any extra bank fees creeping up on us.

So far, our little experiment is still on its first legs and it remains to be seen if it will become a mainstay of our group — but it’s worthwhile to have another tool in our arsenal as we continue on our journey of divesting away from capitalistic ideas of how to make it in this strange world, and learn how to trust that there are people out there that we can depend on.

Four Femmes on the Celebrations and Expectations of Being A Trans Woman In Comedy

In my roughly two years doing stand-up, I’ve discovered being trans femme impacts the way I get to exist both on and off stage as a comedian. Everything about my comedy is influenced (and often limited) by transness. My stage persona, the type of material I get to perform, and where I get to tell it. I’ve had to adjust to audiences’ expectations of what it means to be a trans woman, rather than my own sense of who I am outside the gender binary.

The more I performed, the blurrier that line between persona and self became, and the less I felt like the person I became on stage was someone I wanted to be. I don’t have any trans elders in my life (comedians or otherwise) to show me how to walk this performative tightrope of identity. That’s part of the reason I’ve taken a hiatus from standup — I’m afraid of how easy it is to fall.

In pursuit of that guidance, I arranged a conversation with three of the hardest-working women in comedy, Dhalia Belle, Esther Fallick, and KJ Whitehead. Each of them individually has roughly a decade of experience in the industry. Navigating the world of comedy before the idea of transness was widely understood in mainstream American society — let alone the cornerstone of a culture war we didn’t agree to be soldiers in. I wanted to explore our shared, yet unique, experiences of being trans femme in an industry where masculinity is rewarded. As I become more visibly femme, people treat me differently (comics and audiences alike) though I’m unsure how conscious that shift is. For better and worse, they treat me like a woman.

Last year, I had the privilege of performing on an Autostraddle fundraiser show with KJ, a Chicago-based comedian with two specials available, Khaos and The Haggard Unicorn. Esther is a Brooklyn-based musical powerhouse with her one-woman show Esther Fallick Updates Her Book, and the new all-trans-femme show she co-hosts with Riylan Mills, All Doll Bill. The only comic I hadn’t met prior to this conversation was Dhalia Belle, a Portland stand-up and writer best known for her letter in The Guardian to a certain transphobic comedian.

As far as trans comedians go, I’m incredibly lucky. I started doing stand-up in Brooklyn as a masc-leaning nonbinary person. I couldn’t be in a better place to be either trans or a comedian individually, let alone both. Outside of that bubble of community trans comics have created for ourselves, whether it’s in another city, over the river into Manhattan, or even at another show at the same venue, I’m often reminded how vast the distance between our worlds is. The same jokes I tell from night to night land differently depending on how much the room believes not just my own understanding of my gender, but in the concept of transness at all.

The Conversation

In isolation, this was insanity-inducing, a collective gaslighting that I’d always been treated this way. Talking to other trans femmes, I realized how common my experience is. Like me, all three women I spoke to have gone through their transition on stage, in the public eye. Dhalia was using he/him pronouns when she started stand-up. “Then once that became too silly, I switched to they/them pronouns.” Only at the encouragement of Riley Silverman, another trans comic, did she come out. When KJ initially transitioned to using they/them pronouns, the shift in her outward expression forced her to consider how audiences perceive her. “I have to explain myself. That’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned. Now, after almost 10 years of doing this, I still have to explain myself. And it… it gets exhausting.” The call fell quiet for a moment.

In the silence, my mind flipped through every joke that didn’t land, every show I bombed, and every audience member who rolled their eyes and crossed their arms the moment the word trans left my lips. We all know the soul-draining labor of crafting a set that doesn’t just have to be funny, it has to justify our very existence. “That’s so real,” Esther agreed, the relief of validation in our shared experience flooding the call. “It’s frustrating how the first thing you have to do is talk about your transness”

And we do. In stand-up, I’ve gotten advice on how to win over an audience: At the top of your set, point out the weird thing in the room. This helps take a distracting feature most of the audience probably noticed with curiosity or confusion, and turn it into the butt of a joke. It’s more difficult to achieve when the strange, distracting thing isn’t a piece of art on the wall — it’s you. Other comics just get to walk up on stage, but everyone agreed, trans femmes have to reach a certain level of performed gender before we’ll even be listened to. “I just want to get on stage and tell jokes,” Dhalia said. “If I don’t present unquestionably and unmistakably high femme, the jokes just feel weird for [the audience].”

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A post shared by Mx. Dahlia Belle (@mx.dahliabelle)

I agree wholeheartedly. We shouldn’t have to be anything other than a good comedian to be embraced by an audience as easily as any cis person. Going on stage as a trans woman feels like fighting a war on two fronts: proving yourself as a comic and as a woman. If you have an off night on either one, an audience won’t hesitate to turn against you. “You can’t afford to be half-assed,” KJ agreed. “You have to be a master of your craft before you even get on stage.”

This constant hurdle forces comics with marginalized identities to hold ourselves to unreasonable standards. “I try to be so talented anyone who wants to be transphobic says, ‘Well, she’s a once-in-a-generation talent’” said Esther. However, the confidence that comes with accepting yourself can feel paradoxical when you have so few peers. “On the one hand, I have to work a lot harder. On the other, there are so few trans women on stage. I’m already interesting and captivating. [After transitioning] it was easy for me to just be like, ‘I’m enough’.”

Comedy has been a way for Esther to regain a little control of people’s perception of her. “For five to ten minutes I get to control how this audience sees my transness in a way I can’t on the subway.” That control, however, usually depends on how much the audience is willing to accept your personhood — and transphobia is only one barrier to an audience.

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A post shared by Esther Fallick (@estherfallick)

KJ pointed out the unique difficulty for Black trans women both in white queer comedy spaces and Black male-dominated rooms. “Often in cases where I find myself [with a bad audience], it’s not because I’m trans, it’s because I’m Black. If it’s not because I’m Black, it’s because I’m trans.”

Dhalia tried to do a 20-minute set where she didn’t bring up queerness at all. She didn’t have long hair and she wasn’t wearing makeup. “A straight couple in the audience audibly had a conversation throughout my entire set to decide what my gender was. They would just be like, ‘but, it had a purse, but it had a beard shadow, but —’”

The pronoun “it” made us all flinch. It was a harsh reminder some people don’t even consider us human.

However, Dhalia doesn’t just let transphobes go unpunished. “I have a series of jokes where the punchline is technically trans tragedy, but I make it my victory. It tends to break the audience. They’re like, ‘This bitch just does not care. We can be as hostile as we want, and she’s still going to turn it into a celebration for herself.’ I dig that hole as deep as I possibly can until the audience breaks out of sheer humor, shock, or discomfort. I struggled with it for over 30 years — they can handle 20 minutes.”

When I asked how she emotionally navigates those situations, Dhalia said something heartbreaking. ”I’m used to people being shitty. I just focused on the people actually paying attention.”

It’s a mindset I admire deeply, one I’ve been trying to carry off-stage. I find it easier in my daily life, where I’ve built a community of queer people around me. Even still, that focus is something I struggle with and always have. In my short career, this isn’t the first hiatus I’ve taken from comedy. The last time was nearly a year ago after an audience got angrier the longer I stayed on stage. In situations like that, I aspire to be more like Dhalia.

In reality, when a man in the front row start furiously muttering something to the woman next to him, my panic kicked in and I ended my set early. I didn’t do standup for two months after that, too afraid to exist publicly as a trans person. I’m still ashamed of that, of letting hate push me away from something I love — something I’ve found myself caught in again. And though I shouldn’t have to, I’m ashamed of how I represented trans people as a community in front of not just the audience, but the booker and the other comics.

In response to Dhalia’s approach, KJ mentioned this important, representational factor only marginalized comics need to consider. “I get a little nervous to keep [putting down transphobes in the audience] because say that doesn’t go well. [The producers are] gonna hold you to certain standards they wouldn’t hold the cishets to. You’re the first to be outed when it comes to being booked again. That’s why I get nervous.”

Dhalia agreed, noting the potential risk that comes with her response. “You also don’t wanna prevent other trans comics coming up after you from getting booked at that club.”

In all honesty, this is something I usually don’t have to be hyper-aware of when I’m performing live, both because of my privilege as a white trans person, and because I rarely venture outside of Brooklyn anymore. I’m in a progressive comedy scene, where trans people (including myself) run shows, and a lot of cis showrunners are actively booking more trans comedians. On the rare occasion I get booked outside of Brooklyn, I’ve learned to minimize the amount of trans material I do. I feel the need to prove to them trans people are funny for reasons other than our transness.

Even if the audience doesn’t respond well, KJ prides herself on being kind both to the audience and the showrunners. “If it doesn’t work out in front of the audience, at least the producer knows I’m professional and they would book me again. I’m putting on a show on stage and offstage.” This constant performance is exhausting for her to balance. “I still wanna work, but at the same time I have to speak up for myself.” Perhaps it was that exact exhaustion that led her to start her own queer mics and showcases in a world where only cishet white men got stage time. “There was something in me that decided — NO, I’m gonna be here and I’m going to demand the same respect anyone else gets.”

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A post shared by 🌹KJ Whitehead🌹 (@iamkjwhitehead)

Throughout our conversation, each comedian referenced the difficulties of comedy still being primarily dominated by cishet men. Even among other women, queer people, or trans people; stand-up is a field where masculinity is rewarded and femininity is dismissed, if not punished. My charming, playfully awkward persona was embraced when I was masc-presenting, but as I’ve moved into new stages of my career and transition, I’ve found more and more people unwilling to even humor me. Even in left-leaning rooms, the subtle misogyny of being in a male-dominated industry is inescapable. For Black trans women, this is only compounded with misogynoir. “I am a woman before I am trans,” Dhalia said. “I am definitely a Black woman before I am trans. And I am definitely a silly bitch more than I am trans.”

Dhalia started stand-up in Portland in 2013. When she invited trans women to her shows, no one would show up. They wanted to support her, sure, but felt comedy wasn’t a space they would be welcomed in. A decade later, on the other side of the country, Esther is having a similar experience. She has a hard time getting trans people to come to her shows because many still feel like comedy just isn’t for them — even at a one-woman show about being trans.

Wanting to make space for herself and others is also what drove Dhalia to pursue comedy in the first place. “I started doing comedy at 34, when my life expectancy was another two years. Once I hit 37, I officially stopped giving a fuck [about] what anyone [thought]. Outliving your life expectancy makes it real easy to not care.”

I couldn’t help myself but gush in admiration of these women who made it possible for someone like me to even get on stage. “And I appreciate that.” Dhalia playfully waved away my praise. “But it also breaks my heart. We’re not breaking new ground.” During the pandemic over Zoom, Dhalia met other Black trans women who’d been doing comedy for decades. “What troubles me is that ground was broken 30 years ago and no one seems to know, including our own community.”

For the first time since I started doing stand-up, I knew definitively I wasn’t alone. We let the final moments of our conversation breathe, none of us in a rush to leave this rare experience of pure trans joy. Prior to writing this article, I was reluctant to identify as anything other than trans femme, afraid of the expectations that come with being a woman, both on stage and off. Earlier in our conversation, Esther spoke about being “enough” as trans women — Are we feminine enough? Are we pretty enough? Are we funny enough? and KJ had a simple truth on that.

“We are enough. We are all enough by default.”

It’s something I often forget, that being perfect and being enough are not the same. The unreasonable expectations I hold myself to, both in comedy and in life, are products of a world — of an industry — that was created without me in mind. Speaking to these women helped me remember why I wanted to be a comedian. To be understood, to be laughed with rather than laughed at. Even in the face of everything we discussed, our call was filled with laughter, support, and love. We held space for each other to joke about our pain without pity and without shame. And now, I get to share it with you, to bring you in on the joke, in hopes it helps you feel less alone too.

Check out the first part of this conversation where Rowan spoke to three trans masculine folks in comedy about how their transness has informed and influenced their careers.

Four Comedians On How Their Transness Has Informed and Influenced Their Careers

For most of my life, comedy has been a coping mechanism, not a career path. Even before I questioned my gender, I’d been told I was too sensitive for stand-up, that it wasn’t for people like me — until I stumbled into an open mic in 2021 and saw a queer comedian perform for the first time. When I got the courage to do standup that July, I’d only been out as trans for a year. I had no sense of who I was, let alone what kind of comedian I wanted to be.

In March of 2022, a clip I posted went viral. It was a throwaway joke from a show with two audience members: “I’m pansexual, polyamorous, and non-binary; because I’ve never made a single decision in my entire life”:

@rowanzeoli

Ironically, it actually means I make all the decisions all the time #comedy #standup #queercomedy #polyam #nonbinary #pansexual

♬ original sound – Rowan Zeoli

When I posted that clip, I’d been doing standup for eight months, with less than a thousand followers. In the span of days, it got 1.5 million views and I gained an audience of 16,000.

Every day since has been more difficult than the last. Almost two years in, I’m questioning why I’m still doing comedy at all.

Being a comedian is an isolating experience, full of self-doubt and rejection. That’s why stand-up is often described using the language of war. If it’s going well you’re killing, murdering, crushing. If it’s not you’re bombing, dying, and getting buried. Being a trans comedian feels like walking alone through an active war zone, with a pink and blue target strapped to my chest. The cognitive dissonance of telling silly little jokes to strangers who may be on the opposite side of a genocidal culture war is debilitating.

Selfishly, I pitched this interview series for community and guidance — things rarely found in comedy. Clara Olshansky, Max Gross, and Kai are three of the best trans-masc comics working today. Days before this interview Kai recorded his upcoming special, Kaipocolypse Now. Max and Clara — both undefeated roast battle champions — created the only all-queer roast battle, Flamethrowers, looking to create a safe space for queer and trans comics to bully each other. I admire them all not only as writers and performers but as people. With millions of likes, hundreds of thousands of followers, hours of material, and years of collective experience between them, I wanted to know how being trans has informed and influenced their comedy careers.

I started doing standup out of a desire to be understood, to be laughed with rather than laughed at. In the last year, I’ve received comments from thousands of (mostly trans) followers saying I was the first trans comedian they’d ever seen. I felt a new responsibility. I stopped doing comedy for myself, I was doing it for them — for us. Conversely, I’ve gotten just as many comments saying people like me shouldn’t exist.

I want fans of stand-up to see the nuanced reality of being a trans comedian. More importantly, I wanted other trans comedians to know we aren’t alone. That I’m not alone. What we have to say matters, even if it feels like nobody is listening. Comedy at its core is a radical act, a weapon we have to dissect and critique the systems that rule our lives. No revolution can be done in isolation, it inherently requires community. For trans people to collectively exist on stage in defiance of those systems, and to mock their absurdity, can be as traumatizing as it is healing.

The Conversation

Max had recently talked to another comic — who is cisgender — about this contradictory experience. The comedian asked Max something I’ve thought while writing every set I’ve ever done — Why do you have to talk about being trans? For Max, it’s about controlling the audience’s perception of him. I think every good comic does this through their comedic persona, but trans people have the added consideration of how an audience perceives our gender. “If I don’t start with [being trans], I don’t pass,” Max said. “Even if I crushed and people go home saying, ‘Oh, she did great.’ I would rather them say ‘He bombed.’” I feel the same as a trans femme who doesn’t pass.

However, if I address it too quickly, the audience pulls away the moment I say trans. If I don’t address my gender at all, most audiences assume I’m a cis gay man, which is as invalidating as it is insurmountable as a comedian. If the audience and I don’t agree on who I am, my material won’t work. I have to acknowledge my transness subtly or it feels like I’m keeping some unspoken secret, a puzzle the audience has to solve before they can even listen to my jokes.

That’s why Clara also tends to start their sets with nonbinary material. ”I can’t have someone not understanding on the most basic level who I am.” When Clara started stand-up they were “working hard to be a woman” — and not succeeding in either arena, of comedy or gender. “It was hard to perform with a constant internal critic saying, ‘You don’t sound pretty enough. Clara, sound more like a girl.’”

A handful of gender jokes from @Feldfrog and @RACH4_theSTARZ 's Live Forever show at Life World

🎥 : @mariah_oxley pic.twitter.com/6c2kcbF2a3

— Carson Olshansky (@carsonolshansky) March 15, 2022

After coming out, I catch myself with this same hypervigilance, making sure I look and act “trans enough” on and off stage. Even when I do present more femme to match people’s binary expectations of transness, I feel a disconnect between my comedic persona and who I really am. Imposter syndrome surrounding my gender presentation kept me from coming out in the first place. Now, doing stand-up, scrutinizing every facet of myself for content, has only put that under a microscope. In some ways that has helped me figure out how I really feel through all the anxiety and self-doubt. This pre-pandemic joke from Clara shows how exactly how comedy can be a catharsis for that insecurity: “I’m cis, I think. But if I heard someone say the things I’ve said in a movie, I would turn to the person next to me and go, they’re gonna come out as nonbinary before the end of this movie.”

Performing comedy about their gender provided Clara with confidence in their identity that they couldn’t get in isolation. “Being nonbinary on stage [and] talking about who I actually was, [is when] things started going a little better.”

Kai came out pre-pandemic and had conflicting feelings about his craft after doing so. Although he was being told he now looked more at ease on stage, he felt that coming out as a trans man made his comedic persona less interesting. “I became more comfortable on stage because I was more comfortable with how I existed within myself. [But] Everyone who does well in standup has a hook. Being a binary trans man is hard because now I’m just some dude. Boring! What do I talk about now?”

That led us into talking about the writing process. In the months since the video, I shifted from long-form storytelling to writing almost exclusively with Tiktok in mind. I exploited every private corner of my trans experience — regardless of how traumatic — for a twenty-second sound bite I could share with the trans people on the other side of my phone screen. It wasn’t sustainable, and it left me chronically drained. I needed them to tell me a better way was possible. Despite their large online following, Clara and Max won’t allow themselves to write material geared toward social media content. “You get the thing that you set your sights on,” Clara said. “If you write to TikTok, you could go viral on TikTok, but that’s what you’re pointing yourself in the direction of.”

I wanted to know who it is they’re writing for, if not for social media who in their mind is laughing? “My answer is not what it should be,” Clara says, before one of the most wholesome sentences I’ve ever heard. “I really just picture doing the joke at mics with our friends.” Though they might not think that’s the right answer, having that community is what has kept me going through it all. Very few people understand what it’s like to be trans or a comedian individually, and even fewer can truly empathize with both. If I can make them laugh, I know I’ve found something. Max says having a large online platform as a trans comic can be good and bad for your material. “On one hand [writing for the internet] is writing to reach other queer and trans people. [On the other] writing for a massive, faceless internet inherently comes with considering online backlash”

@maxgotj0kes

its mento iwness luv. one day i’ll get another tape to pull clips from but today is not that day #comedian #standupcomedy

♬ original sound – Max Gross

Kai laughed knowingly, having experienced an internet pile-on himself. “Oh no, everyone’s always gonna be mad at you.”

“I’m learning. I don’t think this is avoidable.” Max reflected on a clip he’d posted earlier that week, which went viral. While half the comments were from other trans people, the other half was filled with hate. The transphobic hate compiled at such an exponential rate, it was safer to delete the video altogether than keep the post up. Kai’s right, this is a universal experience for not just trans comics, but every person on the internet — though trans people are disproportionately targeted. Clara doesn’t even respond to compliments from people they don’t know. “I can’t have mean people seeing that I engage with comments. I just can’t open up the door to spending mental energy on this.”

After two years of responding to every comment, I’ve blocked hundreds of people and deleted countless clips trapped on the “wrong side of TikTok,” because the algorithms on these platforms have no desire to protect us. They thrive on engagement, regardless of what that engagement is. Each time this happens, I feel trapped.

Do I keep the video up so trans people can see themselves in comedy while subjecting myself and them to the onslaught of transphobic hate? Or do I preserve my own mental health and delete a high-performing video, damaging my career, robbing trans people of representation, and allowing the transphobic trolls to feel victorious? This emotional danger can become very tangible during a live set. Max told a story of something that’s happened to every trans comic I’ve met. While he was doing his set, the “People at the front table were having a very unhappy conversation about [my] identity.”

When I asked how the comics have navigated this, Kai offered genuine advice I’ve been given by every successful marginalized comedian I know: Get Funnier. “If it’s a good enough joke, even if people don’t like you or agree with you, they’re still gonna laugh.” If it sounds like harsh advice, it’s because you haven’t been a comedian. Though it’s starting to change, stand-up comedy is largely an unforgiving boys club dominated by white, cishet men who only laugh at their friends, if they laugh at all. While I want my comedy to be for trans people, there is no stronger validation of my craft than when I force a group of transphobes to laugh in spite of themselves.

Max emphatically agreed, turning his wrist to show the word UNDENIABLE in bold American Traditional lettering. “I got this tattoo after my first time headlining. I don’t just have to be good to get people on my side, I have to be undeniable. My jokes have to be so good, even people who fundamentally disagree with who I am as a person still laugh.”

Even just getting stage time is difficult for any marginalized comic who isn’t trying to appeal to a cishet white audience. The success of a stand-up comic largely depends on how much an audience can relate to their experience, which is easier when you share identities with most of the audience. It’s not just transphobes though, I’ve had some of my worst shows in front of supposedly liberal audiences. I think the politicization of transness, and how comedy has been weaponized against it, has made many well-intentioned allies idealize us as brave, inspirational victims rather than what we are: comedians. Max, who is also chronically ill, resents how dehumanizing being an inspiration can be. “I would rather be funny than inspirational.” Kai experiences this from white audiences as a Black trans man. “When people clap after a joke. I’m like, oh God.”

https://twitter.com/kaicomedy/status/1634659599738613760?s=20

I’ve found that regardless of how much a liberal-leaning audience supports transness in theory if they aren’t at least a little queer, many won’t laugh at all. Having a queer or trans audience is a precious gift. You don’t need to waste minutes of your set with a quick Gender 101 course. Just having trans people in the audience can change the entire dynamic. Clara shared a joke that gets a different response depending on the Kinsey Scale of the crowd: “I used to be so worried people weren’t gonna see me as enough of a woman. And then I came out as nonbinary and I learned, no, people see you as a woman.” When Clara tells that to straight people, they usually get silence and sympathetic awes. “When I tell it to queer people, they laugh.”

Audiences who get it all are few and far between. Even for those who do, there’s so little representation, trans comics often get forced into being a monolith for the trans experience. As artists, we use our marginalized identities to inform our work, but we shouldn’t be required to speak for anyone’s perspective besides our own. I craft material with the intention of sharing my experience with other trans people and educating cis people about trans issues, but I shouldn’t have to. If and when we do decide to speak on them, we shouldn’t be held to unreasonable standards, especially by members of our own community. Kai urges not just cis audiences, but younger trans people, not to view individual comics or public figures as the representative for all trans experiences. “Being trans is a very private experience [that] we make very public through comedy. The entire conversation is still relatively new. A lot of young people don’t understand the [trans] experience has nuance. Different people are coming at it from all types of places. Just because your experience doesn’t mirror theirs, doesn’t mean one of you is doing it the wrong way.”

As we were nearing the end of the call, Clara offered me a gift — a full-circle closing thought. “I’ve talked about how my transness informed my comedy,” they said. “I haven’t really talked about how my comedy informed my transness.“ Before coming out, comedy helped Clara build confidence, even if they weren’t sure the feelings behind the material would make sense to other people. “Having people laugh was huge for feeling secure in my identity. Which is maybe a bad take,” Clara joked. “You should feel secure in your identity, even if you’re not funny.”

It was a perfect conclusion, but I was reluctant to end this conversation I’d so desperately needed. In my two years of comedy, I’d only ever had a handful of conversations like this, and none so honest about how painful being even a marginally successful trans comedian can be. It was healing to find other people who understand what it means to love comedy, even if comedy is hesitant to love us back. This is my community. This is who I do comedy for. I don’t know if I found an answer on how to make it easier. I don’t know if it will ever be easier. If nothing else, even if it was just for an hour, we got to laugh about a world we’d only ever tried to suffer through alone.

The conversation continues in Part Two, where Rowan speaks with three femmes on the celebrations and expectations of being a trans woman in comedy.

Moon Lesbian Flag, Explained

Recently, I was doing some research (scrolling on TikTok in bed at 7 a.m.) and happened across some lesbian information previously unknown to me, a lesbian. Apparently, there is a Pride flag called the Moon Lesbian Flag, meant as a contrast to the Sun Lesbian Flag, which is different entirely from the standard Lesbian Pride Flag I was familiar with. Have a look:

Exhibit A: The only Lesbian Pride Flag I knew of up until this week.

Exhibit B: Moon Lesbian Flag

Exhibit C: Sun Lesbian Flag

I simply had to do an investigaytion into these celestial lesbian flag offerings. The results? Pretty inconclusive and incoherent. You see, a lot of these riffs on various Pride flags are just done for fun. People have put their own spins on a slew of lesbian flags. I even found a TikTok that displays a “Mean Lesbian Flag” and a “Nice Lesbian Flag.” If anyone would like to design a Mommi Lesbian Flag and a Daddy Lesbian Flag, I’m listening!

As far as the Moon Lesbian Flag goes, there’s a bounty of explanations for why it exists. Some say it’s for closeted lesbians, others claim it for femme lesbians, others assign it to lesbians who possess lunar energy. The bulk of explanations I found — largely on the unimpeachable platforms of Tumblr and TikTok, where a lot of these flag riffs originate — say the Moon Lesbian Flag and Sun Lesbian Flag exist merely as aesthetic alternatives to the Lesbian Pride Flag.

While there are a lot of discrepancies as to the meaning behind the Moon Lesbian Flag, one barely related but also important thing I learned on my journey into Lesbian Flag Discourse is that we’ve moved beyond the Lipstick Lesbian Flag due to its original designer making butchphobic, transphobic, and racist remarks on a now-deleted blog.

I originally entered this investigaytion seeking a direct answer to my inquiry, wound up going down a rabbit hole of colorful stripes, and ended up learning a lot about the sort of chaotic and lovely semiotics of Pride flags. Sure, there is a specific history to the lesbian flag and other Pride flags (and to queer symbols in general), but I’m newly obsessed with how this history has been — in my opinion — not necessarily co-opted on social media but expanded on into infinitum. A galaxy of flags has been born, and its vastness is both somewhat humorous and fascinating.

On TikTok, Tumblr, and Pinterest, there’s basically an endless meaning-making machine churning out new Pride flags all the time. Individual users can come up with new color combinations and assign whatever meanings they wish. There are flags that celebrate neurodivergent lesbians, nonbinary lesbians, and yeah lesbians who prefer the moon versus the sun. People chime in in the comments, often, to express kinship with these new flags. Skeptics lament their utility. What’s the point of so many flags? It feels worth noting that these aren’t even literal flags but rather flattened digital simulacra of flags — just blocks of color in a rectangular shape. They are, by design, mostly just decoration, so of course they’re endlessly mutable.

Does there need to be a point?

It got me thinking a lot about the rainbow flag itself and how it’s so easily co-opted and stripped of its meaning when in the hands of heteronormative institutions. Here in Orlando, businesses sport signs with the Pride flag on them that, if you look a little closer, express enthusiastic support for cops. Rainbow flags do not automatically indicate that a space is safe for all. At the same time, efforts to ban Pride flags are frightening. Here’s the Pride flag double bind: I don’t want to lose the flag, but I also don’t want to invest too much in its meaning.

So yeah, maybe one answer is to just inject anarchy into flag meaning-making. Straight people certainly can’t get their hands on these flags; I don’t think they’d really understand them at all. Because there isn’t much to understand! It’s just freak flag fun. So now, the Moon Lesbian Flag isn’t necessarily doing much. But doesn’t its nonsensicality make it, ironically, symbolize freedom in a pure form? I did not mean to get this deep in this investigaytion, but here we are.

My Queer Return to Trinbagonian Carnival

*Background image in photos from Safiyah Ganpat via Unsplash

Many cultures celebrate the new year at different times, as a fresh start, or a new cycle. For me, the new year begins at 2 am on the streets of Port of Spain Trinidad, on Carnival Monday morning. This is J’ouvay — the Trinbagonian Creole word from the French jour ouvert — also known as the opening of the day. Many of our Creole words reflect our colonial ancestry, and although we were never a French colony, we had a large influx of immigration from the French Caribbean islands in the 1700s that left its mark on our language. But J’ouvay is more than a simple day-opening ceremony. It is a ritual. Revelers gather in the streets with buckets or bottles of mud, paint, or oil and cover each other, dancing to the sound of soca music or percussive bands. Paint, bodies, mud, and darkness wash my soul clean and I begin again. I am just one moving shape of many, covered, like a dark sea rolling through the streets.

Trinidad hasn’t held Carnival celebrations since 2020, for obvious reasons. But this February we are back on the road and there’s tension in the air as we prepare. There has been grief for the past two years, and there is a yearning to release it.

As I reflect on the rite that has bookmarked my life for so long, I wonder — where does my queerness fit in this story of our culture?

Although Trinbagonian Carnival has been a part of my life since childhood, there was no classroom teaching the impact of the queer community on Carnival culture. The older I got, the more I learned how meaningful that impact has been. Even in a sometimes hostile space, LGBTQ artists continued to create. I came out as queer as a teenager, and it would take me nearly another decade to come to terms with my gender fluidity, but there were always breadcrumbs. Gender rules that I couldn’t seem to follow or understand the need for, a fascination with people who were able to break free of those rules, and a small shivering want of breaking them myself. I look back at the parts of Carnival I was always drawn to, and I see it was my childhood self yearning for queer culture.

A historian at heart (just ask my super useful and definitely financially viable degree), I have long been fascinated with the history of Trinbagonian Carnival and how it informs the shape of our celebration today. As a young child — no older than 5 or 6 — I would be spellbound by the fire-breathing and “blood” spitting Blue Devils, the towering Moko Jumbies on 15ft stilts, and the loud and intimidating Midnight Robbers dressed all in black.

The beautiful displays of “pretty mas” (the term “mas” a synonym for Carnival which comes from the French Creole masquerades of the 1700s — and pretty meaning pretty) were nice sure, but there was something about the darker portrayals that took up space, and even challenged the crowds around them to sit with the discomfort of their presence, that spoke to me. They weren’t just there for everyone’s visual consumption. They were there to make you hear their story and acknowledge their existence whether you wanted to or not. They moved through the audience — demanding attention, invoking fear and excitement — and sometimes even requesting money before moving on. The antithesis of the cleaner and more commercialised parts of the festival that have become less and less accessible to the working class, who were the people that created this whole affair to begin with. It’s no surprise that this year’s new Carnival regulations trying to curb the rawness of these portrayals as “lewd and immoral behaviour” have been faced with an uproar — the project of gentrifying Trinbagonian Carnival continues.

Resisting the erasure of our roots and the commodifying of our culture is more intertwined with the struggle of our LGBTQ community than I realised. As we reject the colonialist ideals that have scarred our landscape, we reject the gender and sexual norms that have been foisted onto our ancestors. So these older art forms carry within them the memories of the ancestral roots of where Trinbagonian Carnival came from. The struggles of our people. Rebellion against subjugation. Laughing in the face of our oppressors. Making magic out of nothing. These traditions in many ways represented a freedom that could not be stolen away. The closer I looked, the more of my own queer culture and history I found.

Queerness exists in a paradoxical space in Carnival culture — ever-present but still hidden. Our most famous Carnival creations were born out of queer minds, and yet they were rarely truly able to loudly embrace their identity without a risk to their safety. Some of our oldest traditional characters are essentially drag — Baby Dolls and Dame Lorraines in flowing colourful gowns and bonnets, which are usually played and worn by men. Even though Trinidad and Tobago is still hesitant to embrace its vibrant queer community, our influence on the culture cannot be erased.

That’s not to say there aren’t queer artists making statements about their identity in Carnival. One of the iconic names in Trinbagonian Carnival artistry, Peter Minshall, designed a breathtaking Moko Jumbie ballerina for the 2016 Carnival King presentation, “The Dying Swan— Ras Nijinsky in Drag as Pavlova”. Our first Pride parade, hosted in 2018, played out like a Carnival event, people were dancing through the same streets that we would walk on Carnival Monday and Tuesday celebrations. While society is more willing to accept us in costume — on designated days— being out can still be dangerous. With Carnival approaching, I felt a need to express my own queerness and honour those that came before. I joined a traditional Carnival band called Tradition Reimagined, headed by local & vocal LGBTQ activist Cherisse Berkeley, niece of queer icon and winner of the most Carnival presentations EVER, Wayne Berkeley — and I knew exactly what I wanted to portray.

One of my treasured memories is a picture of my grandmother in her youth (around the 1950s), posing alongside a truck on the road. She is dressed in a fancy milkmaid costume for her band’s presentation that year. Of course, a milkmaid didn’t really suit my vibe, so I decided that instead — I would be The Cow. One of the oldest portrayals in our culture, Cow Mas, is rarely seen on the roads nowadays. With origins harkening back to African traditions brought here by the enslaved people, workers from the abattoir (another French linguistic remnant, meaning slaughterhouse) would dress in dried plantain leaves — with cow horns or full-headed cow masks —and charge through the streets embodying the animal form they were taking on. A usually male-dominated portrayal, the cow just felt right for me. Covered from head to toe with all identifying features obscured, I could be whoever I wanted to be.

There is gender euphoria in presenting as an otherworldly being, without the distractions of my body leaving people guessing about my identity. Paradoxically, behind a mask, I would be free to shed the metaphorical mask that had been fashioned for me by society. As I built it, slowly, with hanger wires, paper mache, and stolen banana leaves, it was like I was constructing myself. An act of pure self-love and self-creation.

This Carnival I will decide how I was seen.
I will not be afraid on the streets of my country.
I will take up space and reclaim my visage.

And for anyone who aims to get in my way — you know what they say about messing with the bull.

Photo Credit: Catherine Sforza

What Embracing My Soft Life Era Really Means

By my definition, the “Soft Life” is based on emotional honesty and the preservation of one’s self in regard to health. It’s done while maintaining a commitment to surrounding yourself with people who love and want what’s best for you in a way that is supportive and respectful of your autonomy, and your human journey.

It’s also a trending lifestyle that started picking up major steam in early 2021 on apps such as Tik Tok and Instagram. Its rise can be attributed to the collective fatigue so many people were experiencing. We were living lives that were nothing more than a conduit for burnout, emotional repression, and self-sacrifice, and doing so in the name of family, friends, partners, and workplaces.

I don’t mean to sound like some pretentious hipster but, I actually started using the term “Soft Life”, or “Soft Girl” before it rose to fame. When I heard it on TikTok, I remember being excited to see someone else using the term because I had already been trying to live it. The ideology behind it spoke to me so strongly, it was asking me to embrace what I’d been taught to hate about myself and as a reward of sorts — maybe I’d begin to love and accept it. Prior to any internal shift, I had always been considered a crybaby due to being a very sensitive child. I would tear up at a moment’s notice, And as a young Black girl that behavior was very rarely met with kindness or understanding. Instead, I was told to grow a thicker skin or else how would I manage? The world isn’t known to be receptive to a Black woman with big emotions, and they were trying to protect me not knowing that they ultimately made me feel ashamed for having perceivably larger and deeper emotions than those around me.

I learned that I had to hide my emotions in order to survive or not make those around me feel uncomfortable, which ultimately made my emotions harder to manage. I built up feelings of shame around them. My skin didn’t grow thicker I just grew older, and as I did I continued to emote, but now I was just actively hating myself for doing so. At that point, I just knew that the way that I was living in relation to my emotions was not working and that I needed to change. I desired a life where I was not only free to feel what I needed to, but one where I was surrounded by people, places, and even jobs that allowed that vulnerability to grow safely.

I started doing my best to preach vulnerability and transparency in all areas of my life, not just to myself but to friends, employees, and lovers. By immediately being open and honest, I created a space where other people were doing the same. I was so invested in curating this new safe and calmer life, that I wasn’t ready for the adverse effects it may have on me. I was going all in, and perhaps I was doing so far too fast. I soon began to realize that, for me at least, perhaps there was such a thing as being too vulnerable.

While on this journey for a softer life, I found myself in a new job where vulnerability very quickly became my strength. Heart, empathy, and connection were the basis of what was — for a while — a very rewarding job. I was freely giving so much of myself in this new position, all in the name of vulnerability, that I failed to realize that not everyone was on the same path as me. It was part of my journey that I hadn’t gotten quite right. My new vulnerability was taken advantage of, and I was beginning to feel used and tokenized instead of free. Ultimately I lost the job, and parts of myself along with it, and at that moment, I felt betrayed by my open softness, not empowered by it.

I had to re-evaluate. I let myself feel everything, but was learning not to do it everywhere or all at once. I had to learn what space and people were actually safe for me to feel. That meant opening up even when it felt hard, and that wasn’t always easy. First, I opened up about the hardships I had been through in the hopes of finding a connection. While I did find some, I also found others who didn’t care and I made it a point to learn from them. I would go into new environments, places, and friendships with those reactions in mind, ready to be wary of those who had them. I created stronger boundaries for the pre-existing people in my life and believed the red flags when I saw them. It was slow and gradual, and I relapsed a lot, but by doing these things it really pointed out where I was safe to be soft and somewhat more importantly, where I wasn’t.

I’ve been tested, yes, but the trials and tribulations caused me to assess what I really wanted and needed. I realized I was reacting to my own trauma in search of what my inner child lacked, which was a safe space to feel and simply exist. Now I’ve been feeling the closest thing to emotionally free and happy that I ever have in my life, but it’s only because I’ve learned to honor my emotions by being a little more possessive of who gets to experience them.

I’ve never felt more in tune with having a soft life than I do now. The boundaries I’ve created are honored, and I find myself creating more time to be in the moment. The people around me aren’t only supportive of me when I’m being there for them, but provide that support when I need it too. I feel genuinely and deeply loved and supported at my best and my worst, and prior to the work I put in, I didn’t feel that way.

Living a soft life doesn’t mean I’ll live one free from strife or pain, rather I’m living a life that invites those emotions in. It’s from sitting with the discomfort of some of my emotions, creating solid boundaries, and investing in the people and relationships that were healthy, that unlocked the door to a true and genuine soft life. These feelings — security, love, and above all things, peace — are emotions that I never believed I’d be able to feel. Being able to not dislike life, but rather embrace it was worth all the pain it took to get here. It feels nice to finally feel like I have a requited love for life and emotional safety, and be able to truly feel for the first time without complication.

Queer Archivists and Library Workers on Archival Materials That Meant a Lot to Them

feature image contributed by the Gerber/Hart Library & Archives

When Lindsay Eanet initially pitched ‘Learning From Queer Libraries and Archives in a Time of Erasure,’ which we published today, I knew it would be an amazing deep dive. Lindsay is particularly skilled when it comes to research, interviews, and digging through meaningful archival material (as evidenced by her feature on FaT GiRL Zine that we published last year) and I was really excited to hear from queer archivists and library workers about their work, especially in this time of attempted queer erasure that we are living through.

Lindsay filed her original piece and then followed up with this note: “I also had an idea about a sidebar of sorts for the article — I have a lot more of people talking about archival items that have meant a lot to them and they’re really sweet. Thoughts?” My thoughts? HELL YES, I WANT THAT. So here you have it — if you were flipping through a magazine, the following would be a really juicy and lovely sidebar. Enjoy! — Vanessa, Community Editor

Erin Bell, Gerber/Hart Library & Archives:

“One of the collections I keep talking about was an artist named John Hagenhofer. He was a gay man whose collection begins with a series of photographs from the 1930s Chicago Century of Progress. And just the thing that I really love about his pictures, he also has several works of art from the WPA projects, he would take these small photographs and write captions underneath some of them, so his personality was coming through, and there’s just not much about him other than a letter from his niece that was included in the donation.”

Robin Gow, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center:

“Another thing I love is Lehigh-ho, another gay organization in the Valley. Their newsletters would always have a gay joke, and it was so fun. It was an older organization, and seeing the jokes they made up… we’ve always struggled but we’ve also always had culture and community, I think that those just mean a lot to me, also that we’ve always been funny.”

Krü Maekdo, Black Lesbian Archives:

“The Aché Project was just, it was just different. I’ve talked to many collectives and women in different organizations, but the future forward thinking that this collective had of not only just meeting together in certain spots but also having these publications to connect women with each other, and women going from Oakland, California to Berlin and women coming from Berlin to Oakland and having this camaraderie and these communities that formed, writing letters to each other and things like that. Especially at that time, that was so next-level to me. We can have these phones to connect with each other. We can instantly send a DM to each other; that was a lot of work… writing these postcards and these letters and organizing for people to come from the whole other side of the world. Some of these women have never been in the US in their entire lives, and some of the women have never been to Berlin in their entire lives. That was an inspiration to me because it allowed people to not only connect through their idea of thought and their poetry and their artwork and things like that, but being able to use the written word and written text to solidify concrete archival material with each other.”

Whit Sadusky, Gerber/Hart Library & Archives:

“I always stop and highlight this one larger piece from our special collection, the Carol’s Speakeasy Tongue. It’s this large piece of art that hung in Carol’s Speakeasy, which was a bar and drag show venue and this wonderful queer space in the ‘70s and ‘80s. When we got the piece, it was so heavily caked in cigarette smoke and ash that we had to clean it with a toothbrush. But whenever I walk past, and I have thought about it a lot since I worked on the last exhibit, which is about queers etching out their own space, and working against the police and also working with each other, thinking about Carol’s Speakeasy and the friends that I have now who are trans and work in the drag community, I think of all the work that’s been done throughout the generations, specifically by trans women, to make these spaces that queers end up inhabiting safe and happy and joyful and full of art and interest. That’s what I think of now when I look at that tongue and it brings me a lot of joy. Many of the things you see regarding trans people not in our own little trans bubble is just so terrible, and so knowing that that was a space that was here in Chicago and that piece is in a collection in a space that I get to inhabit every day is special.”

Paola Sierra, Stonewall National Museum & Archives:

“I actually found something this summer where I had an internal ‘yay’ moment, and that was a pamphlet from an organization called Las Salamandras de Ambiente, and it was a local support group in Miami formed to support Lesbian Latina communities. It was started in 1991 by six women, and the meetings covered all sorts of things, lesbian music, coming out, women and oppression and this is all listed on the pamphlet. It was all in Spanish, so la espiritualidad, spirituality, como conquistar una mujer, how to conquest a woman, they talk about all sorts of things, internal homophobia, letting go. I think what resonated the most with me is I think we need organizations like this even if they’re niche. When we bring those together, it helps us form a community. It would have been a lot easier for me to be a part of a community like that, coming out and seeing other women like me and having support from community, from people, especially having them locally.”

Ben Smith, Stonewall National Museum & Archives:

“A public affairs pamphlet that was put out by the Public Affairs Committee of the United States Department of the Interior in 1978 titled ‘Changing Views of Homosexuality.’ It’s only about 30 pages, it’s not a very big booklet, but it was published in 1978 with the US government as the publisher essentially and it very much is in favor of homosexuality and talks about the misconceptions and even has the phrase ‘born this way.’ And this was something that was printed in 1978! And so to just see this and feel understood by someone in 1978, really provides this sense of comfort, like, okay, there is hope.”

Maxine Wolfe, Lesbian Herstory Archives:

“I think any time that material comes in, it’s touching, especially the special collections, because someone has decided to give us something of their life. It always moves me when people do that. And I’ve had lots of wonderful stories. Once I had a woman who showed up and she said that she only had a certain amount of time, but she wanted to make sure that the story of her life was taken care of, that somebody would know about it. And she had a little cart and she put it into these boxes. She came from Rhode Island that morning and said she had to catch a bus to get back. Then she said to me, ‘As long as I know my life is safe,’ and she left. I started looking through the papers, and she was a nun. She had been assigned to a convent in Germany and there were these photos of all these other nuns, and she wanted it to be in a closed section for 25 years… this was more than 25 years ago.”

Learning From Queer Libraries and Archives in a Time of Erasure

all photos contributed by the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives

A giant, fabric tongue that once hung in a Chicago gay bar in the 70s and 80s. A magazine created by a group of trans women in rural Pennsylvania. A pamphlet from a lesbian Latina collective in Miami discussing everything from sex to music to spirituality. A collection of photographs of nuns in a convent in Germany. A vial of menstrual blood, given by a partner.

These are just a few of the items given to LGBTQ+ libraries and archives, alongside decades’ worth of photographs, writings, posters, artworks, cherished personal correspondences and more documenting the multitudes of queer life. As legislatures and hate groups seek to censor and erase queer and trans lives and experiences, these spaces, be they physical or digital, housed in universities or grassroots-led, are perhaps more important than ever.

“In my wildest dreams, I would want to have LGBTQ+ history incorporated into mainstream education, and have that be the norm,” says Paola Sierra, Digital Asset Manager at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives in Florida. “I know that when I started at Stonewall, last June, I knew very little. I learned from volunteers talking, just hearing stories. I learned from the archive. I learned from just exposure, and there’s still so much that I have to learn. But it just showed me how absent LGBTQ history is in mainstream context.“

In addition to providing community programming and access to queer texts, these archives create opportunities for LGBTQ+ people to engage with our past, present, ourselves and each other, and can serve as a roadmap for the challenges ahead. They challenge the popular right-wing assertion that queer and trans identity are somehow new, and remind us we have always been here, and always will be.

“Our role as queer librarians, queer educators, queer archivists, is to make sure this information is kept not just safely, but also in a way that people and young people especially can access it, because a lot of these histories are not found as widely as you’d want them,” says Whit Sadusky, an archivist at the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives. There’s historical precedent for the urgency of preserving this history and culture — Sadusky says these histories have been erased before, such as the burning of sex and gender research in Nazi Germany.

Queer archiving efforts are nothing new — and they’ve always faced obstacles. In 1972, the Gay Academic Union, who advocated for the inclusion of gay topics in course content, held their first conference, which went on despite being interrupted by a bomb threat. One of the members of the GAU, Joan Nestle, would go on to help found the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York, originally housing the collection in her Upper West Side apartment. Today, the intergenerational space provides a transformative experience for visitors from all over the world.

“People send us the hair they cut off when they first came out, the shoes that someone wore for 10 years being a marshal at the Dyke March, all the little things you don’t think are going to matter,” says Lesbian Herstory Archives coordinator Maxine Wolfe. “We had a woman who came once with this little book, it was a replica of something, but when she picked it up, she saw it was from Colombia, which is where she’s from. And she just started crying. People do this all the time. People come and don’t expect their life to be there and their life is there.”

A lesbian pulp novel from the Gerber/Hart special collections

One important function of queer and trans archive efforts is to tell the full, nuanced stories of LGBTQ+ history, aspects of even well-known stories that may be erased, making space for joy as well as rage. One such multifaceted effort is the Toronto-based LGBTQ History Digital Collaboratory’s Pussy Palace Oral History Project, which tells the story of the titular sex party and bathhouse event for queer women and trans people, also the site of the last known police raid on a queer bathhouse space in Canadian history. Collaboratory Research Manager Alisha Stranges says the ongoing immersive multimedia project, for which the team interviewed dozens of former patrons, is about restoring the queer joy, sense memory and sense of place to the historical record about the Pussy Palace, and giving something back to the narrators as well as those who would benefit from access to the archive.

“The Pussy Palace has been documented, but it’s all focused on the police raid,” Stranges says. “There was 10+ years of history of pleasure there. We’re amplifying what we learned about the police raid, but it’s like 20-30%, and the rest has been about bringing forth a more nuanced experience, what people loved about their experience there.”

There is political utility in the collection and dissemination of queer stories, and the team at the Collaboratory say they hope the histories become “raw material for people in the present to create new futures.”

“There are a lot of people who really like ScotiaBank with a rainbow flag in June, and I think by getting in touch with these radical and not-so-radical pasts, we get a little bit closer to what our liberation really means and looks like,” says Elio Colavito, who served as Co-Oral Historian and Research Assistant on the Pussy Palace Oral History Project. “And as this new crisis is brewing, especially around trans livelihood in the States, [but also] certainly in Canada and elsewhere, if we can get back in touch with some of those [histories], we might have an answer for some problem-solving down the line.”

Loni Shibuyama, archivist and librarian at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles, says LGBTQ+ archives can illuminate the historic parallels between the current moment and anti-gay movements throughout the 20th century, most notably the emphasis on “save our children” rhetoric that was popular in the 1970s. “When you work in an archive, you see these anti-gay movements and you see the ways the LGBT movement have fought back, through protest, through advocacy work, through political, economic, artistic means,” she says. “It’s documenting how that struggle is from all different sides, all different ways.”

For Krü Maekdo, who founded the Black Lesbian Archives, a digital and traveling archival project after struggling to find information about Black lesbian history online, queer archives can be an important tool for self-discovery. “When you don’t have a semblance of where you’ve been, it’s hard to presently connect to who you are,” she says. “Those physical and digital archives and oral stories that we tell each other bring us and bridge us together. Some of those experiences that our elders might have gone through, you can relate to those stories, even if they’re not your exact origin story.”

Materials from a pop up exhibit for Black History Month that the Gerber/Hart Archive did at the Center on Halsted in Chicago

Although many of the best known physical LGBTQ+ libraries and archives exist in larger metro areas like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, they also exist everywhere, a reminder that we exist everywhere, too. Robin Gow, Associate Director of Community Programs at the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, which houses an LGBT library and an LGBT Community Archive in partnership with Mulhlenberg College, says the archive documents up to 150 years of LGBTQ+ life in the region. Some of the collection has national touchstones, like people from the area who attended Stonewall-era uprisings, but there was a homophile society in the Lehigh Valley even pre-Stonewall doing advocacy and community building. They say having a space for local people to have a connection to their local communities is essential — the study of history in this country has been so gatekept that people may not realize there’s queer history everywhere.

Gow grew up in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, outside of the Lehigh Valley. Kutztown is also the hometown of iconic queer artist Keith Haring, whose work can still be seen around town, although Gow says the town doesn’t really claim Haring’s queerness. Gow didn’t know Haring was gay until he graduated. “I didn’t have a lot of people to look up to, and knowing that people who come from your communities are queer and successful and creative and contributing is really valuable, and I think that it’s purposeful that those parts of themselves are kept from us,” ze says.

Loni Shibuyama says some of the material she finds the most meaningful isn’t from activists, but from people who documented their day-to-day lives with their partners and chosen families. “I get inspired by seeing those photo albums and those letters, those gay bar flyers and materials that show people building community at a time where it was more dangerous to be out than it is now,” Shibuyama says. “When I see photo albums from the ‘50s and ‘60s of people hanging out with their friends or their partners, I get very inspired by people who were just finding their way and finding their own sexuality and a way to connect with other people.”

Yvonne Zipter and Toni Armstrong Jr photographed in 2019 in front of a poster of themselves from the 1980s with the other founders of HOT WIRE – The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture. From the Gerber/Hart Archives 2019 exhibit “Lavender Women & Killer Dykes: Lesbians, Feminism, and Community in Chicago.”

Seeing the everyday joys of queer and trans people that came before can be life-affirming. One of Gow’s favorite pieces in the Bradbury-Sullivan archive is Panzee Press, a magazine created by a collective of trans women in rural Pennsylvania, where writers share coming out stories and other slice-of-life experiences. “I think the political organizing, documents and stuff are great, but I really like seeing when people are building community and doing silly things,” they say. “That’s a part of being alive that feels necessary.”

One of Sadusky’s favorite pieces in the Gerber/Hart collections also speaks to queer joy — the giant tongue from Carol’s Speakeasy, a bar and drag venue from the ‘70s and ‘80s. When the library first received it, it was so heavily caked in cigarette smoke and ash that the team had to clean it with a toothbrush. “Whenever I walk past, I think of all the work that’s been done throughout the generations, specifically by trans women, to make these spaces that queers end up inhabiting safe and happy and joyful and full of art and interest and that’s what I think of now when I look at that tongue, and it brings me a lot of joy,” they say.

Volunteer Curators at 2018 exhibit “The City that Werqs” about the history of drag in Chicago

Compiling and preserving queer stories and histories are one thing, but stewards of these archives are also challenged with making them accessible and presenting them to those who may need them. The Collaboratory team has experimented with Instagram stories, audiograms, and video clips to tell an immersive, sensory story of the Pussy Palace, and is working to spread this to TikTok. They’re also in the process of curating a digital exhibit, where people can enter a website and even visit the Pussy Palace as virtual patrons, traverse nine interior locations, and click on different items in the room to hear stories compiled from the oral histories, compiled from 36 “narrators”—event organizers, bathhouse security volunteers and service providers, patrons, journalists, scholars, and community activists. “I thought we were making this for the general public, but then we demoed this for the narrators and they just seemed so moved and touched by it, that anyone would care this much to preserve their history,” Stranges says.

Making these stories accessible requires archivists to consider new media to share their work, especially for people who cannot physically visit the space. The Gerber/Hart team, with audio producer Ariel Mejia, launched Unboxing Queer History, a podcast that takes a multi-sensory deep dive into the archives’ collections. The podcast creates an intimate experience, from hearing the rush of the water while getting fish stories from the Great Angling Lesbian Society to a conversation with Lorrainne Sade Baskerville, the founder of Chicago’s first social services organization by and for trans people. The ONE Archives Foundation also has a podcast project, Periodically Queer, along with YouSpeak Radio, an audio project of intergenerational conversations led by LGBTQ+ youth.

Exploring queer history has even moved some archivists to not just document queer history, but create new conversations. The Black Lesbian Archives features a virtual exhibit about Aché: A Journal for Black Lesbians, a publication featuring artwork, poetry, events listings, essays, discussions, and more by and for Black lesbian creators, and the subsequent nonprofit organization, The Aché Project. Maekdo found the group’s forward-thinking to be an inspiration, particularly around their building the camaraderie between the women of Aché in Oakland and a community in Berlin, including written correspondence, conversation, and organizing transatlantic visits. “It allowed people to not only connect through their idea of thought and their poetry and their artwork and things like that, but being able to use the written word and written text to solidify concrete archival material with each other,” Maekdo says.

Inspired by the work of Aché, Maekdo launched her own publication, Oyé, centered on uplifting the voices of Black lesbians of the African diaspora. She says while she doesn’t want Oyé to be the same thing as The Aché Project, she hopes it will create opportunities for more conversation and global connection in that same spirit.

Via collaborations with artists and other creatives, these archives become spaces for creativity and conversation. For an exhibition for the ONE Archives, textile artist Sarah-Joy Ford created a quilt using pictures of covers from lesbian pulp novels. A team of Chicago artists is currently working with the Gerber/Hart’s Amigas Latinas collection. The Bradbury-Sullivan Center encourages the community to make art from the material through found poetry nights, where they take scans of archival materials and create from that. “What was really cool was it was a really intergenerational event, we had folks 60s+ and people as young as 13 and a lot of the material was around the AIDS epidemic, and it led to a lot of conversations about what it meant to be alive during that time and older people reflecting on loss and younger people having a chance to talk to older LGBTQ people about their experiences through these archival materials,” Gow says. “It was really beautiful and I think it meant a lot to everyone involved.”

LGBTQ+ archives also fight back against the erasure of queer and trans stories by actively building community. Maxine Wolfe says the Lesbian Herstory Archives has “always been outward-looking,” a legacy that dates back to Joan Nestle and Deb Edel hosting the archives in their apartment, where a group of women launched the archives’ first program, a Black lesbian study group. Now, their programs include a children’s reading series called Little Rainbows, the Lez Create Dyke Arts Workshop and LHA’s regular Zoom meetings with other archives to discuss issues in the field and offer mutual support.

“[The library is] a safe place when you’re figuring yourself out,” says Jen Dentel, Programs and Social Media Coordinator for the Gerber/Hart Library. “If I was too shy to go somewhere like a bar, I could go here.”

Gerber/Hart’s reading room

At the Bradbury-Sullivan Center, the team has added a lot of youth books in response to book bannings, as well as being more intentional about seeking out books by authors of color and trans and nonbinary authors. They’ve received upwards of 40 donations of youth books from authors, and host youth programs and reading groups, many of which are hybrid so people outside the Lehigh Valley can participate. The library doesn’t have library cards for an added layer of anonymity should readers need it. “Books walk away all the time, but our mentality around it is if you really needed that book, I guess you needed it, although we would really like it if people gave them back,” Gow says.

A practical way this commitment to community manifests is through educational programs that counteract the efforts by the right to censor and erase LGBTQ+ experiences and attack queer and trans youth. The ONE Archives and Stonewall National Museum & Archives have both hosted programs for educators on topics like LGBT history for high school teachers and the needs and safety issues of LGBTQ youth. To increase access to reading materials for LGBTQ+ youth, especially those living in areas with regular book bans and censorship of LGBTQ+ topics, the Stonewall Archives recently received a grant from Safe Schools South Florida to begin the process of enacting a digital library where people can check out new books. “It really democratizes access to the library,” Smith says.

Since the passage of the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida, the Stonewall National Museum & Archives has been louder and more explicit about fighting back against this censorship and erasure, from creating merch like “Say Gay” buttons to an exhibition examining the use of code words like “groomer” to marginalize and villainize LGBTQ+ people, to plans for a rally at the old Capitol building in Tallahassee on January 21st in response to attacks on LGBTQ+ people.

The recent moral panic and violent backlash to queer books and family-friendly events does create additional stress and safety concerns for the stewards of these spaces. Although Gow says the Bradbury-Sullivan Center has a lot of support from within the community, their first drag story hour was protested, including protesters physically coming into the event and attempting to question children. “Not only is it terrible having to manage that situation, but [we’ve had] to rebuild trust with families because we couldn’t physically bar this person from barging into our event,” they say. “It does hurt our programs and people feel unsafe sometimes, like I know people will ask us ‘what are all your safety procedures’ before they even come to the library.”

For Gow, the best response is to continue programming and deepen those community connections. “Movements against us have power because we feel separated, isolated, all those things,” they say, “but by being able to create these spaces where people feel connected and able to build connections, [we create] a network of support that can kind of combat a lot of these things.”

The Bradbury-Sullivan Center’s next archival exhibit, due in February 2023, is about Allentown’s nondiscrimination clause, the first in Pennsylvania to include sexual orientation and gender identity, the result of a grassroots effort led by a couple whose primary resource was not money, but community connections. “Being able to see how people have organized helps break down that large sense of dread,” Gow says.

Even digitally, there are concerns about safety, especially as the most vulnerable members of the community often bear the brunt of the right-wing backlash to more queer and trans representation. “The question of who can access these materials becomes really complicated because once things go online, you can’t necessarily control who has access to the materials,” says Collaboratory Faculty Lead Elspeth Brown. “We have a very robust consent process and have a lot of things on the back end, but you can’t control it like in the old days when someone was physically coming into a space.”

“What we come up against a lot is the echo chamber, where we speak to the people who are already on our side over and over again because they’re already with us,” says Ben Smith, a Digital Collections Specialist at the Stonewall National Museum & Archives. “I think our next steps of getting to a better place is to try and get our voices outside of the echo chamber and convince those not within the community to see what we’re going through and further assist us.”

There are a host of other challenges beyond physical and digital safety to building and sustaining archives of LGBTQ+ history and culture, among them the increasingly online nature of, well, everything. It’s important to continue collecting queer history as it happens, but as technology changes so fast, and people create so much media, so rapidly and constantly, Shibuyama says it requires people to be more proactive about saving things.

“There’s very little knowledge out there about how to save that permanently,” she says. “If you create a website, for example, [and] that website goes defunct… then finding the owner of that website becomes harder and harder. Whether it’s chat groups or social media sites, unless you take the time to proactively save them yourself, they just get stored by these companies, and the companies can decide to take it down for whatever reason.”

Shibuyama encourages those looking to preserve their work to save a couple of copies of the photographs or writings or other work you do on your phone or digitally, including on a hard drive, and to organize them in a way you can find them.

Paola Sierra, who has been working with digitizing the Stonewall Archives, says there are challenges with standardization. The Library of Congress system is not as inclusive to queer experiences as they would hope, so they’re filling the gap using the Homosaurus data vocabulary database. The Stonewall Archives also received a grant in 2021 to assist with digitization to help make the archives more accessible and findable.

Even with physical archives and collections, there are quirks and idiosyncrasies that create challenges. Smith says that due to the criminalization and marginalization of LGBTQ+ creators and topics historically and today, some material may come without publisher information or the creator’s name, especially for articles prior to the 1980s, making it hard to pin down exact accurate information.

Oftentimes, pieces of queer and trans history that could be preserved get lost because people saving them pass away or don’t know their ephemera is valuable to the community. “[Our scholar-in-residence] will come into somebody’s house who’s like a figure in the community and they’ll have a box of discs of all the Gay Men’s Chorus for like 10 years and they’ll be like, ‘Ah, do you want this?’ and she’ll be like ‘Oh my god, this is history,’” Gow says.

Oklahomo VHS tape from the Gerber/Hart erotica collection

One key ongoing conversation and challenge facing many LGBTQ+ archives and libraries is the reality that their collections, like most mainstream archives, tend to skew towards wealthier cis, white gay men. Archivists and library workers emphasized the importance of building community relationships and trust as an essential step, to ensure any efforts to archive trans, BIPOC and other marginalized queer histories benefit the community rather than just function as an act of extraction.

“We can’t just go out and beg for these collections because there’s a lot of historical harm that white institutions and cis institutions have done to people in those communities,” Sadusky says in the introduction to the Unboxing Queer History episode with Lorrainne Sade Baskerville. “There needs to be some kind of continued connection and collective care.”

The Gerber/Hart team has been working to build those connections, hosting community meetings with LGBTQ+ organizers, and Sadusky says they would love to expand their partnerships to other cultural institutions in Chicago like the National Museum of Mexican Art and the DuSable Museum of African-American History. Interim Gerber/Hart CEO Erin Bell says something she has struggled with is striking the balance between ensuring the archives represent and celebrate the stories of historically marginalized members of the community and strengthening grassroots, community-driven archiving efforts.

Anthony Wright de Hernandez, a Community Collections Archivist at Virginia Tech University, is the coordinator of the Virginia Tech QTPOC Oral History Project, an initiative to collect the stories of queer and trans people of color in the New River Valley and Southwest Virginia “as part of a committed effort to tell the full and diverse story of Virginia Tech’s history.” This effort was born out of another oral history effort, to tell the story of the first on-campus Gay Awareness Week, culminating in “Denim Day,” where students, faculty, and staff were asked to wear denim to show their support of gay rights. The result was an oral history of an important event in LGBTQ+ history in that community, but the voices included were exclusively white and cisgender.

In teaching future archivists, Wright de Hernandez emphasizes that they must consider whose voices and perspectives are missing as much as those presented. “When you’re reading history, you have to keep in mind that somebody chose to preserve that, somebody chose to interpret that, somebody chose what was included and what was excluded, and generally that means whoever is in power is included,” they say. “It’s still the rich white guys who are most likely to get their stuff preserved.”

For Wright de Hernandez, the most important way to begin to build trust is to be an active part of the community, participating in events and getting to know people. To spread the word and build partnerships for the QTPOC stories project, they connect with the LGBTQ+ community center on campus, as well as other cultural and community centers and alumni groups. “I would also love it if they were like, ‘No, I had such a bad time at Virginia Tech, I would never give my stuff to them,’ as long as they tell their story somewhere else, because these perspectives are missing from our history and it’s really important that they be documented,” he says.

materials from the Amigas Latinas collection in the Gerber/Hart Archives

Krü Maekdo is seeking to respond to the accessibility challenges she found in researching Black lesbian history with a plan to bring the archives directly to the people. Over the past several years, she has been working on a mobile herstory bus tour, which she envisions involving community-led engagement with archives, storytelling, media creation and podcasting, and even markets with local vendors.

“The bus project actually allows us to go directly to people in their homes, in their towns, and interact with the archives themselves, and the people, the elders in some of these locations who can tell the tale about the things that actually happened within their own communities,” she says. “Since we don’t have this access in these libraries or on the Internet, we can actually bring it to people and show them what that looks like.”

The Black Lesbian Archives Mobile Herstory project is “under construction” — plans to launch the tour have been repeatedly derailed by the pandemic. Maekdo is looking for support to bring the tour to life, including securing a bus, tools, and weatherproof storage for archival materials, but also people power, especially Black lesbian storytellers from the African diaspora.

Most of these archives are powered by the work of donors and volunteers. The Lesbian Herstory Archive is an all-volunteer operation; Gow says 90% of the books at the Bradbury-Sullivan Center’s library are donated.

There is power, too, in ongoing personal and communal archives. Krü Maekdo encourages people to get curious and stay connected, creating spaces and projects that share and connect personal, family, and community stories. The more we stay connected, share stories and histories, and build community around them, the harder we are to erase. “You can never erase something that is just so concrete, like the foundation of who we are as a people,” she says. “You can never take that away. You can never erase that.”

Unboxing Queer History is Gerber/Hart’s eight episode 2022 podcast

During Times Like This, We All Need Somewhere Good

Feature image by We Are via Getty Images

As I watched the slow and steady decline of Twitter last month, I compiled a non-exhaustive list of other on/offline hubs for queer tweeters like me looking for connection. To be honest, I have serious doubts that anything will be able to replace Twitter’s significance in our cultural and political landscape, but I tried to offer something. When your world feels like it’s ending, something always feels better than nothing.

When the story launched on our Instagram feed, one of our followers (rightfully) called me out. I’d forgotten something (or somewhere) that offers connection in a totally different way than most other spaces I’ve been in: Somewhere Good, a (mostly) audio social connection platform launched in 2020 by Ethel’s Club founder, Naj Austin. Somewhere Good is designed by and for people of color. I first found out about this cool app through a hometown homie, Van Newman. When Van started posting teasers and information about Somewhere Good, I was already hooked — an app designed and built by queer people of color for folks who need it most? YES PLEASE.

But when I think about Somewhere Good, I don’t consider it social media. The app (and the worlds in it) provides an unusually intimate experience of connection for BIPOC, particularly QTPOC that we don’t often get in this world. Unlike the big social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and yes even Tumblr), the ethos of Somewhere Good is rooted in intentional, opt-in conversation and connection-building. There is no scrolling aimlessly while on the toilet, train, or in that boring Zoom meeting. Instead, the platform demands your full time, energy, and attention for one minute at a time (which is harder to give than one might think). To be honest, as a grad student and educator I don’t always have the time/energy to engage deeply with folks I don’t know well — my mind is racing 10,000 miles a minute. For example, in the last minute, I’ve thought about Kehlani and Letitia, lunch plans, my to-do list, a final paper I am avoiding, my dog’s Christmas pajamas, and lunch again — ALL WHILE TYPING THIS!

I know I need to slow down. I know deep breaths and deeper conversations help me ground myself best. I know I deserve to engage in intentional connection-building and community — we all do.

Before I jump into my return to Somewhere Good, let me explain the platform for the not-yet-hip. Somewhere Good brands itself as “an app that feels less like a feed and more like a kickback through voice notes.” So, if you’re not a voice note person (I know some of us hate them), this may not be the app for you. Signing into the app, users are greeted by a variety of user-seeded (and perhaps also company-originated) worlds. Each world has a name and a theme. For example, the world “WavyWMN” invites conversations around “shifting conversations around the beauty of natural hair” while “Black Utopias” is designed as “a space for Black folks to dream thrive; feel joyful and free.” Worlds with active conversations are “open” and those that don’t have active conversations are listed as “away.” Unlike feed-focused apps, the app eases you into engagement. The home page isn’t overwhelming with content. The top features a warm invitation, “Hey friend. Join a conversation” followed by a timer counting down how much time each world has for the current conversations. The rest of the home page is a simple carousel of the conversations happening in active worlds. To “join,” users simply tap the world to view the prompt and then tap again to “Enter World.” In the world, you’ll see a path of other users’  profile pictures accompanied by respective voice notes and existing replies. Users can create a new response to the prompt and/or reply to others’ already recorded experiences. To increase accessibility, computer-generated transcripts can be edited and attached to your voice note (Not everyone does it, but I always do it to ensure more folks may engage).

I logged on on a gray Monday afternoon after reading all the transphobic chatter on Twitter. Dave Chappelle was being Dave Chappelle — still problematic, still transphobic, still trash. Elon was being Elon — still rich, problematic, transphobic, and now in charge of what once was my favorite digital platform. When I opened Somewhere Good, my mood instantly shifted. The Explore Page greeted me with the typical “hey friend” and the clouds moved across the sky behind the carousel of conversations happening. I noticed my breathing slowed and I felt lighter. I hadn’t even joined a conversation and already this place felt like exactly what I needed.

There were several conversations happening on Monday afternoon when I logged in. In WavyWmn, users were responding to the prompt, “Durags, Head Scarves, or Bonnets?” In the conversation in Griot Galaxy, a world about the power of storytelling, users created a path by sharing one song that always gets them out of a bad mood. One user offered Ari Lennox’s “New Apartment.” Another user added Chance the Rapper’s “Favorite Song” and the original path starter replied in gratitude. The last user in the path shared that she didn’t have just one song but said anything with a “smooth beat” or “anything about Jesus.” I thought about adding my current pump-up song, Demi Lovato’s “Sorry Not Sorry,” but I worried that people might think it wasn’t rich or deep enough so I didn’t and moved on to the next worlds. I scrolled through three other worlds with open conversations:

The Sustainable Chats world, asked “sea or mountains? Countryside or city?”

The prompt for FutureVision, a world that invites exploration of ideas was great: “What’s another way to say ‘I care for you?’”

Both had the potential to be enriching conversations but the paths hadn’t been started — no users had responded to the prompts. In the thick of finals season, I just didn’t have the bandwidth or desire to kick off conversations. Sometimes, it feels like the app requires a level of vulnerability and connection I’m not always ready to offer the world. The lack of engagement from others (and myself), particularly on that day, was disheartening, especially when I think back to how good I felt when I logged in. The truth is Somewhere Good is good. Sure, there are things I wish it had, like the ability to message other users and connect with them one-on-one. But as an imaginative rethinking of how we engage digitally, it is a beautiful, necessary space. When I went back to Somewhere Good, what I found was that it was exactly what I needed; what I learned, however, was that I did not have the time or energy to engage with what I needed at that moment. I imagine that’s how a lot of us feel right now — still mid-pandemic and struggling to survive in a capitalist world that demands all of us all of the time.

How do we make time and space for goodness, especially in the digital sphere? As Twitter crumbles, I hope we all end up somewhere where we feel affirmed and joyful. Maybe that place is Somewhere Good but even if it’s not, I hope we find (and make time and space) for all of the goodness we deserve.

A Close Look at the Ridiculously Sweet Trans Whiskey Commercial

Listen, this viral whiskey ad may be old-ish, at least in terms of the internet, but it’s significant for a few reasons:

1. The company that made it apparently has a history of supporting LGBTQ initiatives (hey, support AS!),
2. It came out for the holigays of 2022 after a year of devastating anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans legislation in the US and around the world, and
3. It made everyone on the Autostraddle team cry when they saw it.

Okay so first, before we get to the analysis, go watch the ad!

It’s also, being a largely wordless advert, up to some interpretation. I feel like it can go one of two ways. For one, there is the idea that the grandpa, aware his grandkid will be arriving, sets out on a quest to ensure that his trans grandchild will be welcome and accepted. In this interpretation, obviously, the grandfather has heard anything from a whisper to something more explicit through the family grapevine about the trans grandchild. So, he sets out on a quest to learn the ways of femme makeup and presentation. When his grandkid arrives for a holiday family gathering, a beautiful warm dinner with a table set with candles and plenty of food, he beckons the grandkid into a bathroom where he helps the grandkid to do their makeup. You might think, then, that this grandfather has been practicing, all this time, after all, not because he is trans himself, but because he wanted to show his grandkid love and acceptance. It is an important moment, in either interpretation, when the patriarch of the family emerges with the grandkid and stands with them (or maybe her?) in front of the family, in full support. In the parents’ eyes, I don’t see understanding for the first time, but relief and love, because they know. They know their kid is trans, but now they know the whole family stands with their kid. Now, everyone can have a beautiful holiday.

In the other interpretation, it is not just an altruistic act, but one of seeking connection. In this version, the grandparent is transfem and is learning to apply makeup not just so she can be a supportive grandparent to her grandkid, but for herself. There are many small choices that support this, from the minute acting decisions where the expressions of the actor show a poignant longing, disappointment at less practiced lipstick application and deep satisfaction at more adept application of eye shadow. Then, there is the final moment, when the grandparent(transparent?) is applying makeup to her grandkid and you realize that there is just a touch of glitter on her eyelids. Perhaps she is not quite ready to shine, but she’ll allow herself a little sparkle while she supports her grandkid.

And that’s important, too, and something that I very much feel as a queer person in my thirties sometimes, that as an older person, maybe you are more tired, more set in your ways, but that doesn’t mean you can’t clear the heck out of a path, and support the heck out of queer and trans youth. Maybe the grandparent wants to take her time exploring her gender identity, but she is ready to support her grandkid who is ready, and the complexity in this representation, if this is the intent, is a really beautiful sentiment.

And, because I paused, because I think I saw the glitter, I am willing to believe that’s the real message, that this is a commercial, of all things, about inter-generational, intra-familial queer and trans connection, in 2022, in a hostile political environment for trans people, just ahead of when family will be coming together for the holidays. It’s made by a company, a commercial entity, but in a world where just anyone might see this ad on TV, I’ll take it.

Instagram’s New Away Message Feature Got Me in My Middle-Aged Feels

Earlier this week, Meta rolled out some new features (that absolutely no one asked for) on Instagram. Group Profiles allow users to create a collaborative profile with others in their circle while the new Candid feature (in beta) reflects Meta’s efforts to compete with BeReal. In this feature, users will be invited to post a photo of what they’re doing in the moment and be able to view the same from others (but only after posting).

The most ridiculous feature, however, is Meta’s introduction of Notes to Instagram messaging. When describing the feature on their website, Meta says the Notes “are short posts of up to 60 characters using just text and emojis.” This roll-out of concise blurbs is interestingly timed given Twitter’s recent announcement that tweet limits will soon move from 240 characters to 4000 words. On Instagram, Notes show up at the top of our Direct Messages screen as speech bubbles next to users’ profile pictures. Instagram users have two options when sharing their notes — either let everyone they follow back see them or just their close friends. When I first noticed the feature, I probably had the same reaction as most other users:

What the hell is this?
Why is this here?
This is annoying.
NO ONE ASKED FOR THIS. PLEASE STOP ADDING MORE TO MY FEEDS!

But then I scrolled across the Notes from my mutuals and cackled. My former student posted, “Keep it earnest on here, y’all.” A friend from back home wrote, “Oh my goodness. This is a mess.” One mutual posted her Venmo for fun pics. Another mutual posted song lyrics and I instantly felt a huge pang of nostalgia — Meta has brought back the away message in the most annoying way possible. 

I don’t want to like it, but damn — these notes got me in my middle-aged feels. I’ve spent the past two days longing to lock myself in my bedroom, turn on my old Gateway desktop, and patiently wait for the AOL to load while praying my mom doesn’t need to use the phone. I know we’re supposed to be too old for away messages, but growing up is overrated. In case you need some help dusty off those away message chops, here are 10 “Notes” (Read: Away Messages in 2022) I’ve crafted for all of us to use in the coming weeks.

For those who are feeling frisky, free, and in the holiday spirit:
Seasons Greetings, B*tches! I’m just ho-ho-ho-ing!!!

For those of us who hate our jobs: 

Cuffing season is here and I need a change. Let’s link up…on LinkedIn.

For those of us with parents as mutuals:

Yo mama is not as cool as mine. Xoxo mom!

For those of us trying to holla at mutuals but be (not-so) discreet:

Just here to doom-scroll, watch dog videos, and chat with cute girls/boys/enbys.

For those of us who miss the chat rooms and like to be weird:

ASLLP? Age, Sign, Location of Last Poop

For the music/movie nerds:

Now Playing: [Insert Song]

For the emo kids all grown up:

FMLINAD [F*CK MY LIFE. I NEED A DRINK.]. Student loans and grocery bills are killing me slowly.

For us with no shame and bills to pay:

[Insert Venmo/CashApp] for the best present this season

For the corny olds:

My mom’s gotta make a call. I’ll be right back.

For the shady AstroQueers who love a good horoscope:

The universe told me to tell you that outfit is not working, boo.

For the old school L Word fans out there: 

Actually, I killed Jenny Schechter.

For us just trying to get our sh*t together:

My life is a mess. BRB cleaning it up.

I could go on for days (and probably will on Instagram) but I’ll leave some space here for you to dream and craft your own. Meanwhile, leave your funniest (or wittiest) “Note” (read: Instagram away message) in the comments — we all could use more joy these days!

A Convo on the Queer & Trans Takeover of Skateboarding

A few months ago, we asked some of the Autostraddle crew if any of them had a connection to skateboarding. A few said they tried it when they were younger, others said they never really got into it at all, and some said not only were they into it but they were in the middle of picking it back up—or looking for a sign to start to.

So we asked a.Tony, Niko, and Abeni if they would be down to not only chat about their history with skateboarding and the queer future of it all, but if they would be down to try out new boards! The homies over at Magneto Boards sent them over a skateboard of their choice to help in reconnecting with skating!

So they rode their boards, took lots of cute queer pics, and had a chat about how skateboarding—is pretty fucking queer.

Our Intro To Skateboarding

Abeni: I skated probably every day from age 12 to age 20. In my twenties, I slowed down a lot, but still skated infrequently. After I transitioned, I barely skated at all but I kept following skateboarding.

a.Tony: As anyone will tell you, I am not a skateboarder by any means, I wanted to be one when I was a kid. I followed skateboarding too but, let me be clear. I followed it like the nerd who goes to the library and checks out fifteen books on skateboarding and eavesdrops on boys’ conversations about it—the days before social media were something, huh?

Niko: I skated when I was young, there was another kid around the corner from me who would ride his board up and down the street all day on one of those big boards we had in the late 80s that was like a small car.

a. Tony: I only had that like, weird skateboard/scooter combo that worked better as a boat for the cement sidewalk seas than either of the things they were emulating.

Niko: I kept skating with friends though until we started getting older, and then skating began to feel very masculine in a way that made me uncomfortable. The more it became about like, pushing myself to be some version of strong that felt very coded in something else—I just kind of fell out of the habit.

Abeni: When the pandemic hit I moved alone to a smaller town—it had a skatepark and I needed something to do. I was really inspired by Leo Baker’s story, and I even got to interview him! and speaking then I got on social media, and was inspired by this trans skater who started to blow up on IG named Arin. She got sponsored by Jerry Hsu’s company Sci-Fi Fantasy, and with all of that happening—I decided to pick skateboarding back up.

a.Tony: I actually decided to try skateboarding again when the pandemic started too. I came across Braille Skateboarding and there was a huge “anyone can skateboard!” vibe and I was like “I’m an anyone! Let me try!” I had looked up skateboards for fat people, but was really discouraged that a lot of protective equipment probably wouldn’t fit me, and gave up for like two days. Then, I went to a Zumiez and asked for help getting a board. I had a Black kid (it is completely possible we were the same age, sometimes I see us as kids still), who was really helpful and I walked out feeling very accomplished.

Abeni: When I picked it back up, I relearned a few tricks, but I’m 35 now and I’m out of shape. It’s tough when you’re old, falls hurt a lot more! Now I get winded pushing down the street.

a.Tony: I had been super dedicated to it in my lil neighborhood for a couple of months, watching a couple of Braille Skateboarding videos and just trying to get on the damn thing without fear. I had ridiculously, tried in my garage first, but didn’t know how little resistance there’d be and immediately fell in a way that if I hadn’t had a helmet on, would’ve been much worse than a concussion. That scared me for a while, so I looked up videos on how to properly fall just to like, make my anxiety better about the inevitability of falling, and that helped me get back on the board and try again. 

Niko: I transitioned when I was already in my 30s and I feel that “Oh no I’m old and my body isn’t in great shape” vibe a lot. Also, I wrote about Leo Baker too when that doc came out on Netflix! It was SO heartwarming to watch that doc and see a struggle that I felt in my heart. I kind of put it away as a sport I participated in, It’s been nice to watch skating become a sport that is trying to bring in more queer and trans folks. It’s always just been a very aesthetically pleasing sport to watch, the same as basketball which I am also very bad at.

a.Tony: Wait Niko! I love basketball too! We should watch it together.

Niko: The more poetic the movement in a sport the better the vibes, IMO. Also—Honestly I am here for the queer takeover of skating.

On Skateboarding & Queerness

Abeni: I have a story that is ABSOLUTELY TRUE:

When I was about 17, I went on vacation to Mexico with my family and some family friends. One night, some of the other teens wanted to go drinking and dancing, and we walked to El Squid Roe or someplace like that, and I couldn’t get in. The other teens either were 18 or had a fake ID, so they went and partied, and I hung out in the parking lot feeling left out. Then a man and his little entourage walked by, and I couldn’t believe it – it was Anthony Van Engelen, a legendary skater who was huge at the time; Photosynthesis hadn’t been out too long, and that was one of the videos I had on VHS.

For some reason, he let me talk to him. I don’t know if they were on tour, or why he was there, and I don’t remember our conversation, but I do remember lamenting that I was outside the club and the other kids were inside. I’ll never forget what he told me: “I can have more fun out here in the parking lot than I would ever have inside a place like that.” This was extremely inspirational to young me. I was never very cool. Skateboarding wasn’t cool back then; it was for losers and outcasts and burnouts, but I wasn’t that either, so I was always kind of an outsider even among the skaters.

I think skateboarding has always been counter-cultural and is very unique among sports in that way. Every other sport you engage in is at a park or in some kind of defined area or with defined rules, but for skateboarding, the whole point of it is basically that you’re destroying public property! You’re grinding handrails and benches and curbs. It’s basically illegal. There’s a common adage: you can build an amazing skate park, but there will always be kids skating in the empty lot next door.

Niko: I grew up really remote, so mainstream media is kind of all we got, there was no underground or anything of that nature. Skating seemed like this, very heterosexual masculine thing,  because that is what was packaged and sold to me when I was young and impressionable and looking for definition in myself.

I think you nail it really well Abeni, it’s always been this symbol of counterculture and yet, like so many things, the dominant vision of that culture can still be so homogenous. I think about punk rock and skate culture as these interesting analogs to each other, forces that speak at length about a system of oppression that they are standing against. The dare to be different of it all. And yet, especially in mainstream media, so much of the lens on these scenes is “look at all these cishet white guys.”

It’s something I mentioned in my write-up on the Leo Baker doc, and I think it holds true: skating feels very queer, very trans to me. A sport in which you push yourself and fail and falter only to dust yourself off and push again until you make it. There’s something in that that feels—at least to me—how queerness and being trans came to me. Not all at once but a push and a fall and further attempts until it became natural and fluid.

Abeni: When I transitioned, there wasn’t much of a space in skateboarding for women, let alone trans women. But there didn’t need to be, necessarily; skateboarding has always been about making your own space. Still, I was inspired when queer and trans skaters started making space. And I’m really excited about how big women’s skateboarding is getting. I wish OGs like Alexis Sablone and Elissa Steamer had access to the resources today’s young women skaters do so they didn’t have to have other full-time jobs to make ends meet, but the progress is exciting.

Niko: I think skating as a culture is getting more and more visibly queer. There was the AMAZING series Betty (based on the film Skate Kitchen) which ran for two seasons on HBO before it was canceled (boo) that I loved following a group of women in NY that felt like the door opening wider still.

a.Tony: I agree with you Niko about Betty and Skate Kitchen! One of the things that really got me excited about skateboarding was Skate Kitchen, then mid-90s—which if you decide to check out, just like, skip the first ten minutes because that is one of the most triggering conversations I’ve ever heard—then Betty. Black queer girls skateboarding is absolutely a facet of my sexuality and I didn’t even know Black girls were out here doing it like that. Though I shouldn’t be surprised because we’re everywhere and contain multitudes even when others refuse to acknowledge them.

One of the things I love love love about skateboarding culture is the filmmaking—and I mean outside of the scripted shows. Many of the documentaries and films I see amaze me not just because of their kind of DIY nature, but because there are really poignant moments that stick with me long after.

After watching Minding the Gap, Keire said “Today, they’d probably call that child abuse.” when talking about how his family treated him, and there was a  little bit of silence afterward. There is so much around how our families raised us, that doesn’t fall in line with what we know now. It’s disconcerting, dizzying, and mostly terrible, and just in that one moment—I felt understood. I cannot imagine any other piece of media that has done so much work for me in less than thirty seconds, and that wasn’t even necessarily its goal.

Niko: When I look at pop culture, for instance, skaters on Instagram, I see more and more trans folks and queer folks. It feels like the needle is moving closer to where it always should have been. It’s really exciting to watch it change, to see queer scenes emerge in skating culture, and to wonder where this is all going to go. I think about my three nieces who are rapidly turning into teenagers and exploring sports and one of them the other day told me she bought a skate deck and I just thought—sometimes life is surprising and fucking rad—and sometimes things change in ways that surprise and delight you still, even after all this time.

Skating is queer as fuck, and I hope we continue to support it, push it, and watch it become bigger and gayer.

Picking A Board

Abeni: I’ve never really had a cruiser board before. It was smaller than I expected! Because I’m huge and have large feet I usually go with an 8.5″ board, but this one was 7.5″ and was much shorter than I expected. But for a cruiser that doesn’t matter as much, and I’ve enjoyed the quick control I’ve been getting.

I’ve only taken it out for a couple spins because it’s been raining where I live, but it feels pretty smooth. I like the clear grip tape because the design of the board is pretty cute. I like the wood grain. The board came assembled, which was fine even though it came with a skate tool.

When I was young, building one’s own skateboard was a pretty important activity—selecting the bearings, the deck, applying the grip tape, etc.—but I don’t have time anymore! I’m happy it was just a complete.

Niko: When I unpacked the board in the house the first thing I noticed was just that it was so beautiful. Like, I want to hang this on the wall in my office beautiful. I had never heard of Magneto, and I sent a photo to some friends that are better and cooler skaters than me and they were like “Oh fuck, that’s sick, I can’t believe you got one of those”. So that felt nice too.

I took it out on the street and went for a ride while my fiance walked along and took photos and every time we stopped it was “I feel bad for scuffing up this beautiful board!”

I was glad it came complete too Abeni! but with a tool to tighten and loosen when I needed to, which I did. I felt young again, and also like the version of myself I wanted to be when I was a teenager.

I got the SUV board, and it was so comfortable for me as a taller woman (6’2”) with big feet. Honestly, this became my daily rider. I don’t commute anywhere on a daily basis but if I did I would ride this. As it is, when I have little errands to run? This board is gonna be under my feet.

a.Tony: I’d never heard of Magneto til now! I got the same board as you Niko and it is so damn pretty I gotta practice a whole lot before I can just go around with it. I gotta be able to back up the reason I have such a gorgeous board. It came already assembled and with a free skate tool too! I am learning about Magneto as a company, and going through their Instagram I know I’ve seen more Black people skateboarding and talking about their love of it in a five-minute scroll than I have looking through the #skateboarding tag alone.

Although there is a constant, “Skateboarding is for everybody!” kind of tagline attached to the sport, I’ve found it a little harder to find Black people, especially Black queer people—especially Black Fat queer people—who skateboard. It’s been difficult to even take up the hobby because I didn’t see a lot of people like me even trying it.

Even though I haven’t seen fat Black people on there (yet, I’m still scrolling!), I already appreciate Magneto’s presence just because I’ve seen so many more people like me. Seeing Black people just full of joy and enjoying themselves is a gift I do not take lightly. So, Magneto was already a follow and top of my list favorite just because of that. This board and the socials make me want to get skate shoes again and just go out there and try. I really thought I’d given up on skateboarding but I’m really thankful to Magneto Skateboards for giving me a reason to make “Skateboarding is for everybody!” apply to me too.

On Skateboarding Today

Abeni: I am out of shape and as such skateboarding is difficult. I get tired so fast! But hopefully, as I get back into it—using the Magneto board which is a cruiser—to get around instead of driving, I can start to build my strength back up.

The activities I like the best—like hiking, camping, rock climbing, cycling, and skateboarding—are really embodied and help me to love and feel at home in my body. Rock climbing and skateboarding are the best because they’re also creative and bring my brain and my body together. They’re excellent mental health activities for me.

Niko: I’m just starting to get back into it after an absence, and it’s a lot of stopping and starting. But getting back on a board and feeling that movement under my feet, and feeling free for just the briefest of moments is so nice. My life is very busy these days, and it feels like I’m so rarely afforded any time to just be. I like skating to allow myself to just be for just a minute.

Also, like I said earlier, I’m 40 and a bit in rough shape. The other day I went for a quick ride and came home and my shins hurt. BUT it’s honestly so incredible to think that my shin muscles (i don’t know if that’s what they are) are sore from skating.

a.Tony: One of the things I’d really love to do is attend Chub Rollz’ virtual skate sesh. I wanna like, somehow get to a point where I can just cruise without fear. I definitely have to wait a bit because I’m just getting back to a little bit of shape after months of terrible asthma attacks and I don’t want to fuck things up. I am a very end-of-the-journey-focused person and it keeps me from trying a lot of things. Skateboarding was definitely something that I knew I wouldn’t be good at and it was a lot of fun being able to celebrate even the (seemingly) tiniest victories.

Knowing that the only way I can really move (on a skateboard, in life) is by chilling out, has made a big difference. Having calming techniques and talking to myself in kinder ways—both on and off the board—is great. I want to keep that going, that understanding that the end isn’t really a place we want to race to because “when you get there, there is no there“—so I may as well enjoy the ride.

Today I Wondered Why AFAB Was Trending on Twitter

Twitter likes to recommend niche trends to me, based on the fact that I am gay. It — it here being the cold, conflict-loving lizard brain of an algorithm — has also figured out that TERFs are good for business. Is it a TERF thing, I wondered to myself as I tried to click the AFAB trend on Twitter. My finger was too cold, though, so after remembering an old boss who at 88 would chuckle “it’s because I’m dead” when her iPhone would not respond to her touch, warmed my undead nonbinary flesh on my mug of coffee and successfully pressed down upon the trending topic, summoning this Tweet which I immediately shared in our editorial Slack channel with “I think I’m gonna pass out.”

LOOK AT WHAT MY COWORKER THOUGHT AFAB MEANT pic.twitter.com/uMIhDJwvPn

— burgie (@dolltwtghost) October 27, 2022

Then I found out it’s something about an AFAB transfem discourse that started just before October 26, or Intersex Awareness Day. And that it is in fact NOT a TERF thing but is about a particular gender identity, of which we all know there are myriad and many. I scoured the tweet threads until I found one that made sense to me, so, here it is for you, friends. It’s a whole thread in case you want to click it and read through:

https://twitter.com/spaceysoupy/status/1584615179022499840?t=CCSYQN7u-AWzm53zt6VgSA&s=19

As someone whose gender and gender expression is best described as twisty-wisty, or potentially moon-influenced as though it were literally a fluid (apologies to those with gas or solid-based gender situations), the concept of having a certain assignment and then having a trans relationship to the gender expression typically conflated with said assignment makes a lot of sense to me. Ultimately, though, this is a story about the hellsite known at Twitter dot com, a website I am personally not very good at, and about inter-fighting and specifically transmisogyny within already marginalized communities.

How was I any different from the people who made their bad faith assessments out loud, I have to ask? After all, I clicked on the tag looking for a fight, expecting J.K. Rowling had said something else immeasurably harmful. Instead, I found three distinct things: sober explanations about transmisogyny and perisexism, people tearing each other apart and also defending themselves and hurt feelings and discourse and such, and some clever little jokes. It made me further reflect on something I was doing yesterday, which was revisiting Riese’s incredible interview with Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair.

“On the internet, there’s not much room for nuance. Within social justice communities, there’s this sense that there are bad guys and good guys, and we’re the good guys, and it’s our job to inform the entirety of “good guys” the Right Way To Think and Act… even within the queer feminist left, so many different approaches to things, and we should be able to engage with them and consider them and even disagree vehemently about them without resorting to shunning, lashing-out, taking material out of context and wielding it like a weapon, name-calling, massive overstatements of harm and projecting our anger at the world onto each other because well, underneath all that is a lot of love.”

And while I do have to do things like check trending Twitter tags for work sometimes, I do also sometimes wish everyone were required to get off the app and have a book club instead.

But, I love you, and so I will leave you with some of my favorite little jokes that sprang up from the AFAB Twitter trend:

Neither AFAB nor AMAB, but a secret third thing (ACAB)

— Jasmine('s boobs hurt) (@Ranting_Trans) October 26, 2022

https://twitter.com/FinntasticMrFox/status/1585310201275904000

https://twitter.com/eridanebooks/status/1582754549785190400

Queer Athens Is the First Greek LGBTQ Oral History Project

Four months ago, in one of our typical long-winded and circular conversations bemoaning the state of queer politics, my friend Vagia (rhymes with playa in Spanish) Georgali and I had one of those half-crazed lightbulb moments: we could, we were sure, create something that the LGBTQ community in Athens, Greece deeply needed. It would be a ton of work, no question, but we were convinced that we could pull it off and that it would be well worth the effort.

What was our vision? Never ones to dream small, Vagia and I wanted to launch the first Greek LGBTQ oral history project. We had noticed that a many LGBT+ people in Athens know surprisingly little about the history of LGBTQ activism and organizing in Greece. Younger people, too, don’t have an easy way to learn about the personal experiences and lives of LGBTQ people who have come before them and paved the way for greater social acceptance. Potential allies who want to self-educate about queer issues don’t have an obvious resource to look to. We also knew that LGBTQ people and allies abroad know even less about the fascinating and impressive history of queer history and culture within Greece, nor about the current state of LGBTQ rights and protections. For example, I’ve had countless conversations with American and Canadian queer people who are shocked to find out that same-sex marriage is not legal in Greece. In fact, neither is joint adoption by same-sex couples. Not until 2015 were civil partnerships amongst same-sex couples legally recognized In Greece. It was also in 2015 that Syriza, the progressive political party, passed the first legislation establishing name and gender change procedures for trans people.

Vagia and I are both elder millennials who, culturally, have never quite felt in sync with that generation. Vagia is a lifelong Athenian and I’m a Greek American who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In terms of political geography, class, and cultural influences, our respective self-discovery experiences as young queers in the early 2000s couldn’t have been more different. Yet we also share some formative experiences. We both came out as lesbians very young and wasted no time in getting involved in LGBTQ community. Vagia and I each have stories of having been, well, initiated into gay life, and righteously schooled, by older women. Because of that, we were both lucky enough to get to know a diverse set of activists and community members early on in our own gay lives and ultimately to gain an understanding and context for LGBTQ histories, both locally and broadly, that a lot of other folks our age or younger didn’t necessarily have access to. And let’s be honest: we’re also huge nerds who are convinced that learning queer history is a crucial tactic for cultural progress and of course, political liberation.

Vagia spent her 20s committed to queer activism and community building work in Athens and I spent mine studying and then teaching LGBTQ history, feminism, and queer theory in academic spaces. Informed by these backgrounds, and our shared political and cultural sensibility, we’re invested in the project of archiving living history and creating a more formal yet widely accessible resource that people can use in a number of ways: to reduce stigma, increase acceptance, educate people, and build community. We ultimately decided that the most effective and practical way to share the personal and political stories we are collecting is by recording our community members’ stories in their own words and sharing them through the podcast medium.

This summer, we announced our project, built a website, assembled a team, and began recording interviews with prominent Greek activists and LGBTQ community members, some of whom have been involved in gay life in Athens since the 1970s.

We’ve been absolutely humbled by the supportive response. People have been eager to donate their time and skills to help make the project a reality. The exuberant reactions we hear when we talk to people about the project confirm what we thought when we decided to start working in the first place: this is something that the LGBTQ community in Greece wants and needs.

The most challenging aspect of launching and building Queer Athens has been securing funds to cover our material needs — equipment, software, web hosting and development — and to compensate the people who are spending hours on design, web development, recording interviews, audio editing, transcription, translation, and sound engineering. We’re researching grants and funding options, which are very limited within Greece and complicated by pesky things like institutional homophobia. Until that’s sorted, we’ve been humbled to receive support directly from our community.

The first episode of Queer Athens will air on November 9, 2022. Go find us now on Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Apple Podcasts, and you’ll be sure to catch the episode as soon as it drops. In the meantime, you can follow us on Instagram, where we regularly post content about LGBTQ history in Greece. You can learn about our project in more detail on our website.

Horror Is So Gay

Horror Is So Gay // Header by Viv Le

Let me, for a moment, become Fright Dyke, the name I’ve given to my alter ego as a horror host, a job I believe I’d excel at. Get ready. Something’s coming. Something that will ask you to look at your fears and the fears of others. Something that will blur the lines between fear and desire. Something monstrous and lovely. Horror Is So Gay is coming, and it’s going to surprise you, maybe unsettle you, maybe make you see ghosts you couldn’t see before, maybe reveal something to you in the mirror, like a sleepover game of Bloody Mary.

To say that “queer horror” is having a moment is, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, a wilful ignorance of not only film history but also queer history and theory. Yes, this October brings with it buzzy and expansive critical works examining queerness in the horror genre. There’s the Feminist Press collection of essays It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, edited by Joe Vallese and featuring an essay by Carmen Maria Machado about the movie Jennifer’s Body and the limits and losses of accusing art and people of queerbaiting that we we were lucky enough to provide a sneak preview of here on Autostraddle. There’s also the new four-part Shudder documentary Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror, airing throughout the month. I’ll certainly be tuning in. But I think if someone were to say to me queer horror is having a moment, I’d think to myself: where have you been? Because horror has always been very, very, very queer, and queer scholars, film archivists, critics, writers, artists, and viewers have long laid claim to the genre.

But don’t take my word for it.

It’s with this core belief that horror is quite possibly the queerest genre there is that I conceived of Horror Is So Gay, a package of horror essays, lists, and criticism that dissects, guts, and consumes horror. Its name is meant to be a bit cheeky, a bit goading. When I say it in my head, it’s like Horror is So0ooo0oooo0oo Gay in my best affected horror host voice. The books, films, television series, and works that will be touched on over the next few weeks as part of this package are not necessarily explicitly textually queer. But, to me, calling a work queer has never been about the question of does it have gay people in it.

The recent Scream reboot, for example, features a queer character who wears a Pride pin, but the movie is starkly normative within its own criteria, failing to imagine anything beyond the rules and structures already determined by the other films in its franchise. Can it really, then, be queer? More recently, They/Them promised a “queer slasher,” but the resulting product feels like someone just going Let’s Make a Slasher With Queer Characters which is, I’m afraid, not the same. And positing They/Them as groundbreaking within the slasher subgenre erases two films that came before it that ultimately do more interesting things: Hellbent (2004) and Knife + Heart (2018). Both will be featured in pieces as Horror Is So Gay unfolds, along so many other movies, shows, and books across a range of horror subgenres and styles.

But I’ve wandered too far into the swamp. And I don’t want to give everything away too quickly. Horror is about the wait, isn’t it? The wait, the shadows, the absences.

Let’s just put it this way: The works of horror excavated in Horror Is So Gay count as queer horror because we say so. Because the queer and trans writers contributing to this series have found fragmented pieces of their flesh in these works or think there’s something bloody and meaty to chew on within their stories, characters, worlds.

We’ll be talking monsters, metaphors, and the macabre. Knives, fangs, and all sorts of sharp edges. I hope you’ll find at least one sentence that’ll haunt you in the pieces to come. Crawl into these dark corridors with us. Let yourself be possessed.

See you around xx
Fright Dyke

Horror Is So Gay is a series on queer and trans horror edited by Autostraddle Managing Editor Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya running throughout October.

Fall in Love With Dyke Queen Issue 3: Recipes from Queerantine!

Have you heard of Dyke Queen, the zine turned magazine created by Yezmin Villarreal based on “the vision of creating a platform for BIPOC queer and trans artists and writers”? If you have, get excited, because we’re revealing the cover of Dyke Queen Issue 3: Recipes from Queerantine right here and right now on Autostraddle dot com!

And if you haven’t yet? Oh WOW, you are in for a treat. To celebrate the release of Dyke Queen Issue 3: Recipes from Queerantine, we are not only revealing the cover, we are also publishing an interview with Yezmin so they can tell you all about the publication’s origin story, evolution, and incredible third issue in their own words.

You can buy your very own copy of Dyke Queen Issue 3: Recipes from Queerantine right this very instant — what are you waiting for?!

How did you conceive of Dyke Queen? What was the inspiration to start it?

Dyke Queen started out as a note on my iPhone notes app. In 2017, I went to Printed Matter’s L.A. Art Book Fair and was so blown away by the queer zines, art books, magazines and prints I saw everywhere I looked. I was in love.

Although there was a lot of queer representation at the fair, I felt a little let down that I didn’t see many publications for or by queer women. I remember opening my iPhone and typing “Dyke Queen – imaginary dyke mag that I wish existed.” I kept it stored in my phone as a cute idea for later, but to be honest, I had no plans on turning it into anything.

I started writing essays and poems with no agenda. I was writing them to reflect on all the big, queer changes that happened in my life that year. A couple months later, my friend Melissa Ramirez, the creator of the video zine Stumble on Tapes, contacted me to ask if I wanted to create a queer culture zine because she was going to be tabling at L.A. Zine Fest and she wanted to showcase queer creators.

I had never made a zine before, but of course I said yes. Those pieces I wrote eventually came to form the content for our first issue.

I decided to take Toni Morrison’s words to heart: “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Inspired by her vision, I applied it to my idea for creating a dyke/lez/queer publication for us by us.

What has the evolution of Dyke Queen looked like? Where did you begin and where are you now?

This is the cover of Dyke Queen Issue 1

The first issue was made in collaboration with my friend Bridget Ore, who contributed original illustrations and designed the layout of the zine.

It featured an essay about meeting Eileen Myles and feeling inspired by them, a dyke diagram of all the dyke connections in my life, a piece about buzzing my hair, a poem about the significance of the month of JUNE, and a couple more essays/poems. You know, gay stuff.

It was a DIY personal essay/poetry zine and neither of us ever thought we would make another one or that it was going to become a continuous project.

That was until I saw a post about a zine residency from Hello Mr. Bridget and I applied for the Issues Residency with Dyke Queen as our concept. We wanted to transition Dyke Queen from a DIY personal essay/poetry zine into a magazine.

We got the residency and it was a dream come true. We worked with Ryan Fitzgibbon, Trish Bendix, and Gwen O’Brien as our mentors. Grindr and Into sponsored the residency.

This is the cover of Dyke Queen Issue 2

The issue featured the fashion designer Barbara Sanchez Kane, the multidisciplinary artist Salvador de la Torre, the poet Alex Hall, and a photo editorial about queer platonic intimacy.

Making that issue was an amazing experience. I learned a ton from our mentors about what goes into making a magazine. Once the issue was complete, Dyke Queen was published as an insert in the last issue of Hello Mr. and we had a big, fun release party on the rooftop of the Freehand Hotel in Los Angeles to celebrate.

Our third (just released!) issue is Recipes from Queerantine. We started working on it in December of 2020. Given the intense isolation of quarantine and the pandemic, I wanted to make an issue about how queer people coped during the pandemic.

I know a lot of queer people are still processing 2020 and to honor all the changes that everyone went through during that time, we created Recipes from Queerantine. I think it’s important to commemorate quarantine because it had an enormous impact on our personal lives. And to acknowledge that although quarantine was hard, we each found our own way through our specific challenges.

All of our amazing contributors contributed a piece about what comforted them during quarantine. Our contributors are photographer Naima Green, New York Times Magazine writer J Wortham, White Feminism author Koa Beck, former Autostraddle Editor-in-Chief Kamala Puligandla, CEO of Domino Sound Alexandra DiPalma, and illustrator Bridget Ore.

What is your favorite part of publishing Dyke Queen?

My favorite part is curating the issue. Once we have a theme picked out, we work from there and solicit contributors. It all happens organically. From figuring out the theme to reaching out to our dream contributors, we take each step seriously.

I like to think of Dyke Queen as a queer ecosystem and once you’re published, you’re part of our growing community. Dyke Queen alums are always welcome back, whether to recommend ideas or to grace our pages once again in the future.

For example, Salvador de la Torre was published in our second issue and although he’s not in our new issue, he did design a special limited-edition t-shirt that features illustrations inspired by Recipes from Queerantine.

Do you have any favorite pieces in this issue of Dyke Queen? Or pieces that you think will particularly appeal to Autostraddle readers?

I love everything in Recipes from Queerantine! One piece that for sure Autostraddle readers will love is the essay by a writer that may be familiar to you all — Kamala Puligandla, your former Editor-in-Chief. She wrote a beautiful essay about how she fell in love over Zoom during quarantine.

Apart from Kamala’s piece, J Wortham contributed a soothing recipe for a meditation. Alexandra DiPalma, inspired by Frank Ocean, provided a recipe for magic mushroom tea. Koa Beck gives an insider’s look into her personal homemade scone recipe. And Bridget Ore illustrated a comic about what 24 hours during quarantine was like for her.

Can you tell us about the cover of this issue?

Yes, OMG, I love our cover. The image is titled “juicy fruit” and it’s by Naima Green. She’s my favorite queer photographer and it’s incredible to have two of her photographs in our issue. Her work graces both the front and back covers.

Naima’s image fits perfectly with the theme of the issue—it’s about finding pleasure and joy and communion with food through ritual.

What does the future of Dyke Queen look like?

Well, for now I’m hoping to enjoy the moment. Recipes from Queerantine took two years to complete from start to finish. I’m very excited for it to be out in the world.

I feel an immense amount of gratitude for every single person that contributed to this project, from friends/mentors who gave advice, to our designer, to all our amazing contributors.

As far as future issues of Dyke Queen, I have some exciting ideas. There’s a few more themes that have been running through my head I’d love to explore. That’s TBD for now.

Apart from the new issues, my dream is to turn Dyke Queen into a publisher of queer and trans books. Dyke Queen started as a zine, evolved into a magazine, but at its heart its remained true to the vision of creating a platform for BIPOC queer and trans artists and writers. I’d like to see the project evolve into working to bring book-length projects into the world.

Who is the quintessential Dyke Queen reader?

I think part of why I wanted to start Dyke Queen was because I felt so inspired by LGBTQ historical accounts like @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y and @lgbt_history.

I’ve always been drawn to queer and lesbian history because I never learned anything about queer history when I was growing up. As an adult, once I came out, I was hungry to learn as much as I could.

The @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y Instagram account would post all these beautiful vintage photographs from the 80’s and 70’s of queer women at marches or in magazines like On Our Backs (iconic). I loved all the photographs from those era’s and learning about queer historical figures I’d never heard of before. I looked at photos of women from that time and thought that they weren’t that much different from us and that was the beautiful thing that connected us through time. Who were these people? Where are they now?

The thing about following those accounts is that I thought it was amazing to be able to learn about my history for the first time, but I also didn’t want to just look back nostalgically. I wanted to be a part of creating and documenting lesbian/queer culture in the present.

When I started Dyke Queen, I was so inspired by all of my friends. I had never been a part of a queer community that had so many lesbians/queer women in it until I moved to Los Angeles. It truly was a turning point in my life and Dyke Queen in a way was created to honor all those friendships.

So, I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying that it’s for people who are interested in queer culture, art, literature and style. Whoever’s looking to read a smart, sexy, fun and touching magazine—DQ is here for you.

You’ve Heard of Cat Twitter, But Have You Heard of Nonbinary Popeye Twitter?

“I ain’t use pronouns on account o’ all me nouns are amateurs!” — the Popeye Official Twitter account

It was an innocent weekday when I chased the Google trends results for “nonbinary” to various alt-right websites, desperately traveling further and further down this wormhole in search of the original source of their ire. The reason? They had some news I was suddenly, deeply interested in: as it turns out, I’m late to the nonbinary Popeye party!

On July 14, 2021, Popeye’s official Twitter account tweeted out a comic panel and a message celebrating Nonbinary Day.

It'sk Nonbinary Day! Happy skelebration to all me amphibious pals! pic.twitter.com/8YT2QlxZIP

— Popeye the Sailorman (@PopeyeTweetsk) July 14, 2021

But Popeye doesn’t call themself (does Popeye actually use any pronouns? See tweet above) nonbinary, no. Popeye uses the term AMPHIBIOUS! Amphibious! It’s perfect and sourced, in actuality, from older comic panels. It’s also, exactly something Popeye would say.

In July of this year, cartoonist Randy Milholland told D.D. Leng of The Daily Cartoonist “If you go by today’s definition, Popeye was gender fluid.”From the article:

“During the strip’s early days, for example, Popeye once met an orphaned girl who lamented that she didn’t have a mother.

So Popeye dresses up as a woman and says, ‘I’m your mom now,’”

While Milholland says, “I don’t live in that purely straight white world, and I don’t think a lot of other people do either,” various alt-right publications then began to lament:

“Beloved comic gets ‘woke’ facelift” — bizcapreview dot com [lol I am not linking to it]

“‘Popeye’ Comic Strip Getting Woke Makeover with ‘More Characters Who Aren’t Heterosexual’” — Breitbart [also not linking to Breitbart]

Or, as this Redditor put it [the below is a joke]:

Listen, when they’re mad, we’re usually glad. Here’s the thing: the cartoonist is expanding the world of Popeye to better align with the world we actually live in. That’s admirable, but, I for one would like to argue that Popeye really has always been gender fluid. THIS gender fluid person’s love of Popeye from a young age, in addition to the evidence in the comics themselves, is proof positive that there always was something to Popeye’s gender queerness.

Wishin' anudder happy skelebration to all me amphibious frens this Nonbinary Day! pic.twitter.com/6vch6ilVaQ

— Popeye the Sailorman (@PopeyeTweetsk) July 14, 2022

I used to pull the dial out of our wood-paneled television set (RIP to the remote I threw, demonically, into the bathtub when I was three years old which we never replaced) and tune into the old Paramount cartoons. Popeye is, objectively, a small skinny person with tattooed arms who somehow gains strength by ingesting something, not just by having a body that was inherently strong. I loved it. Often, the plot hinges around Olive Oyl and Popeye’s ward, Swee’pea, getting into all kinds of trouble, with the baby often literally crawling into animals mouths or onto ledges — you get it. Classic stuff. Usually, Olive Oyl was kidnapped by Bluto, but on the rare occasion she fought back. I watched with rapture when Olive Oyl ate the spinach and became just as strong as Popeye, just as muscly.

In the cartoons, masculinity and strength and the ability to be a protector and beat up a total cishet Chad-type like Bluto depended not on any assigned sex at birth, but on a vegetable, in a can that anyone — Swee’pea included — could take. Popeye wasn’t just a salty sailor punching people. Strength was fluid, gender was fluid and the spinach flowed freely.

I ain't use pronouns on account o' all me nouns are amateurs!

— Popeye the Sailorman (@PopeyeTweetsk) July 16, 2021

You can now find people celebrating Popeye as a nonbinary icon across Twitter and Reddit. What brings the most light to my day, honestly, is that this isn’t a retcon. No, this theory is seaworthy, based in some of the oldest of these comics. I can’t wait to see what the current creators of Popeye have to say next Nonbinary Day.