New DIY Documentary Honors AIDS Media Activism, Love, Loss, and Queer Community

Last March, I met filmmaker and scholar Alexandra Juhasz outside the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. She was in the middle of a Film/Video Studio Residency at the Wex, as it’s known as here in Columbus, working closely with an editor on post-production of her experimental documentary Please Hold.

Please Hold, which premiered earlier this March, explores the intersections of activism, memory, and media via a profoundly personal yet communal lens. It is anchored by videos of two of Juhasz’s closest collaborators and late friends in the last stages of their lives. Shot on a mix of consumer-grade recording devices — iPhone, Zoom, VHS camcorder, and Super-8 film — the documentary is an homage to grassroots AIDS mediamaking across decades and its ability to capture intimate, honest communication about hope and loss.

I was profoundly moved that Juhasz invited me into the studio with her to watch a cut of the film. A prolific writer and filmmaker, Juhasz is a Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She produced and acted in the renowned feature documentaries The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996, and its remaster, 2016) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). For decades, Juhasz has written, directed, and produced her own documentary features and shorts, which have screened widely in feminist, queer, and experimental documentary festivals. She has written extensively on HIV/AIDS, including the recent publications We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production with Ted Kerr and AIDS and the Distribution of Crises, edited with Jih-Fei Cheng and Nishant Shahani.

I first encountered Juhasz’s writing in grad school while studying LGBTQ media, history, and activism. Her book AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video, deeply shaped the way I theorized about LGBTQ local television in my own work. While preparing to begin my dissertation, I emailed Juhasz for advice about how best to write about these topics. I was looking for possibility-models, other scholar-activists who do research in the service of social justice and queer community. Since then, Juhasz has supported my work in many ways, including connecting me with media makers I interviewed for my dissertation.

As we watched the documentary together in the studio at the Wex, I realized that Please Hold honors one of these same media makers: Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski, a Black disabled queer feminist media activist who died in 2022. I spoke with Szczepanski years earlier about her work creating AIDS education media for the Audio-Visual Department of the Gay Men Health Crisis in the 1990s, after Juhasz connected us. I hadn’t realized the film would document Szczepanski’s last days. Watching the film next to Juhasz and her editor, I realized we were both holding Szczepanski’s memory, and our connections to her, in different ways. To know Alex Juhasz is to be held in community, a privilege and an honor that connects you to her own deeply felt responsibility to making the world a more livable place for marginalized people.

It was a pleasure to speak with Juhasz more about the film’s production, how it explores grief and loss, her approach to activist media making and distribution, and the importance of LGBTQ communities of care. Our conversation below has been lightly edited and condensed. Please Hold is available to watch for free on the film’s website and you can book a screening of it here.

Lauren: Could tell me about the origins of this project and what inspired you to create it?

Alex: Thank you for asking. This video began because, during the COVID pandemic, my very good friend and a collaborator of mine on AIDS activist media, Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski, asked me to shoot video tape of her in the process of dying. She more or less chose the terms of her own death because she stopped receiving dialysis.

I came to videotape her twice in rehab centers in New York. And after that, I made a video that she had wanted from those materials called I Want to Leave a Legacy. When I was making that video, I realized that at a previous moment in my life, another very close person to me had asked me to make a video with him in the late stages of his life. That was my best friend, James Robert Lamb.

I wanted to think about the responsibility of holding those two documents, but also how they produced this very clear arc about some histories of HIV/AIDS in the United States, which is to say, my friend Jim is a sort of poster boy from the first years of the pandemic: gay white man, very pretty, an actor. He died when he was 29 years old. There was no medication, and he had a very painful death. The videotape that I shot of him all those years ago when we were young was very strange actually, because I think his mental state was affected by his impending death.

And then fast forward 30 or so years: Juanita is a Black disabled woman who’s a lifelong AIDS activist, who doesn’t die of HIV, but dies in community that’s been produced around collaborative art making and is really committed to disability justice and dies within the time of COVID and because of health inequalities that were escalated because of COVID.

My responsibility, what I can learn from those tapes, what they tell me about HIV/AIDS, and also what they tell me about living through dying, and making community even as people are dying — that’s what started it.

Lauren: Can you tell me how the film itself explores grief, memory, loss, and those relationships?

Alex: The video wants to think about technologies of memory, various receptacles that hold something of a person that you loved after they die. It could be a trace of them, but it could be work you’ve done together. This is very important to this project. They are people that I engage in art making and activism with. I know that various technologies shape memory and shape grief differently.

So, it really wants to think about how VHS, which is what I shot Jim on, has a different almost metabolism than an iPhone video, which is what I shot Juanita on. While they are both media that are holding traces and memories and conversations and activity with these people, I think that they’re held differently.

I was thinking about those two media to think about material things, like in the case of the film, a sweater and a scarf that emerge. Then I extend that to my own body and I think about the fact that I’ve aged. Grief changes as the body holds it. I think about neighborhoods, so places that one returns to and how they trigger memories, but they change, so they hold memory differently as well.

I think the other thing I would want to say, just from having screened it quite a bit in small groups at this point: It doesn’t work with grief quite like we expect movies to. It’s not triumphant, it’s not organized around catharsis necessarily. It doesn’t have music that tells you when to feel bad or good. It doesn’t have the typical beats that cinema is organized around, but I think it has the typical beats that life is organized around, which is this kind of pulsing.

Sometimes grief feels like celebration. Sometimes grief feels like connection. And sometimes it’s very hard to process. Jim died when I was a girl, and I’ve lived with his death longer than he was alive. My grief for him is very different than my grief for Juanita, who died only a few years ago.

We’re in a time organized by grief and mourning. Even if it’s not for the loss of people, it’s for the loss of our democracy and the loss of structures that made sense to us. It lets you come in where you are and acknowledges that’s changing. It might even change over those 70 minutes of the video.

Lauren: You mentioned that iPhones metabolize grief differently than VHS. I’m wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about the mixed media approach to this film, how you decided to combine all these different types of film making, and why that was important for you.

Alex: What it feels like to make media with different technologies, that’s always for me part of thinking of what medium is. A camcorder is actually heavy, and there’s a kind of commitment that to work with heavy equipment demands. iPhones are very light and they are very easy to use and they’re extremely easy to shoot things with and extremely easy to take that footage and put it somewhere else and distribute it and share it and see it.

And therefore, one of the ways that they’re different is that we’re constantly shooting video that is completely expendable. It’s hard to know the difference between the important things you shoot and the not important things you shoot. It’s interchangeable. So that lightness of the iPhone material, the lightness of social media, and I mean that literally but also metaphorically, is part of what I’m thinking about. When Juanita asked me to come shoot her on her deathbed, she had wanted me to shoot her on a camcorder and she didn’t have the power cord, so I took out my iPhone.

But it’s not just the technology. Watching someone die is a cosmic shift. If someone asks you to be part of that, that’s an incredible responsibility and it’s a heavy responsibility. It’s a beautiful responsibility. So, it’s not just that I had the iPhone. I had made this agreement. She had asked me and I didn’t even know why she had asked me initially. It’s in the footage, she tells me, but she’d asked me to do this. I wanted to mark the heaviness of the weight of it, the beauty of it.

This is where the project is about what it means to be in community and collaboration. It’s a very different kind of relationship to media making. It’s activist media making.

In Please Hold, I use video compositing a lot. I think it’s the visual and media language that defines this moment in history. It’s very desktop-looking on purpose and very collage-y. The collage holds VHS and iPhone videos next to each other, or digital video and iPhone video and then text on top of that. I’m interested in that collage aesthetic that flattens the discrete technologies. Then I work very hard to keep reminding you that they are discrete technologies.

In every shot of video, I tell you what kind of camera it was shot on and when it was shot because, again, I think that the computer screen that you and I are looking at right now equalizes, flattens things. I’m both interested in seeing that as an aesthetic and thinking about what it does.

The film is about grief, it’s about memory, but it’s also about communication. It’s also about me talking to people who have died and me talking about people who are very much alive, who I’m in activist community with. I’m trying to think visually about the sort of flatness of the screen and the depth of the interaction. That’s what that compositing does to me. But that’s also having the Zoom interviews where you see two people, like we’re doing right now, as opposed to a more traditional talking head. You’re constantly aware of the depth, the third dimension of the screen, because the listener produces that.

Lauren: I wanted to ask you about the Zoom interviews. How did you decide to incorporate these conversations with folks that you’re in activist community with?

Alex: Video Remains is the video that I made with my footage from my friend Jim’s and my one hour on the beach together in the last year of his life. It took me a long time to make that video and it’s very important to me. I think it has a place within the history of AIDS media that is a critical place.

This video [Please Hold] is referring to it in many ways and thinking about technological shifts. In Video Remains, I talked to my fellow AIDS activists, they were all women and lesbians, on the phone. That’s cut into the long take footage that Jim had asked that I shoot of him on the beach when he was telling the story of his life.

Fast forward to now, with these new technologies, I’m like, we wouldn’t talk on the phone, we would talk on Zoom. It parallels that method of sharing space and knowledge with collaborators and my activist community. The video that I made now is thinking about how COVID, and our experiences during lockdown in particular, rejiggered our expectations and relationships to communications technology.

It’s a recognition that that’s a new form of media making. I’m an activist media maker. I make things for nothing. I shoot them with whatever is at hand. I distribute them that way. And Zoom is an amazing, inexpensive form of technology to interview people. The interviews look and sound pretty good.

I am also trying to think about these different formats of connection, what it is to live together in a place, what it is to use a phone or Zoom, what it is to be in a place or be with a person who has been, that was recorded and you revisit.

The film really believes that we can continue to collaborate with the people we love after they die, or that I can, because I’m still asking the questions and working on projects and trying to make the changes that were very important to both me and Jim. I’m still committed. I need their voices. I need who they were to me and what they know and what we could make together. I can still use that, even when they’re no longer here, because we made these videos together. I’m so lucky.

Lauren: How else has this work impacted your life?

Alex: Right now I’m starting DIY and activist distribution, which I’m doing by myself. I’m trying to get it out in the world, but trying to get out in the world under the terms that seem right for me.

In the book that I wrote with Ted Kerr, [we write about] the idea of “trigger films” or “trigger videos,” [videos] from the early part of the AIDS crisis that you would show, stop the video in the middle of a scene, and then people would talk about it. We use the word “trigger” now differently. We talk about this in the book, but both uses of “trigger” are about setting terms for healthy conversation.

I think that Please Hold is also a trigger film. I think that what it’s best for is to spark conversation. And I think that, like so much on the internet, it shouldn’t be watched alone by yourself, with two other things on your screen. That’s probably true of a lot of art films. But I’m saying, it’s not just any art film. It’s a film that holds the traces of two people who died, who ask to be seen. It takes a lot from us as contemporary media viewers to change the way we’ve been taught to watch to be more human and to be more caring and to be more present.

I’ve tried to put a tiny scrim between getting the film for free, which I’m letting you do, and watching it with more care. You have to fill out a little form that says, “I’m going to watch it by myself. I’m going to watch it with some people. I’m going to set up a screening.” Then I send you the link. I don’t know if that’s going to work. But I’ve never really cared how many people see things that I make. I care about the context in which things are seen. That’s true of activist media more generally.

I want that context to be respectful and contemplative and interpersonal and give people space to talk afterwards, which so little viewing does now, especially when things are digital. The main thing I’m doing is trying to move it in the world and have conversations where I can be present with other people with what it brings up.

Lauren: That’s beautiful. That’s such an interesting way to experiment with distribution. I love that. As you’re talking about care, I was even thinking about your film We Care that I’ve showed in class a number of times, that is also about care and dying, so I can see those through lines in your work.

Alex: I think that the norms of dominant cinema push to the edge a lot of the things that actually can and do happen when we consume media together. One of those is the idea of care. That’s something you could build around screenings.

I think people do it, but you need to think about, in what conditions do you do that? Because the consumption of media now that we’re all on our laptops, it’s just violent and hurtful. It doesn’t matter if you’re consuming something you like. It doesn’t make you feel good. It’s the opposite of care, even if you’re watching something beautiful. The extratextual conditions of making and screening activist media are as important as the piece of media itself. And that’s what I’m doing by building out my own distribution.

The reason I made this was to talk to people about AIDS, and to talk to people about HIV, and to talk to people about memory, and to talk to people about dying, and to talk to people about community, and to talk to people about all the ways we love each other and all the ways we help each other, and how beautiful it is to be in community. I want to have that conversation every time it’s screened.  I hope other people will talk to each other about those things. That’s why we make art, certainly activist art.

What we want from activist media is that you’re transformed, that you feel a transformation and you feel that you can interact, not just consume.

Lauren: That brings me to another question I wanted to ask. Can you tell me about the title Please Hold?

Alex: The first shot of the film — well it’s not the first shot anymore, it’s deeper into the film now — is me riding up an escalator at the Delansancy/Essex Street stop on the Lower East Side, the F train. It’s a long take, and I go up the staircase. I think it’s beautiful. It’s so dirty, and makes all this noise. It’s so industrial and of this other era and it evokes that neighborhood in New York City.

As you get to the top, you see this boy wearing this powder blue sweatshirt, and he’s on his phone, and he’s almost dancing. It’s like choreography. But if you look above him, there’s a LED sign and it’s saying, “Please hold the handrail.”

I was deep into editing the film and I’m like, “Oh my god, that sign says please hold!” If you listen to the film, I talk about holding all the time. The word “hold” is used in it over and over and over again. And I’ve already talked about it like that with you. I’m holding these memories, I’m holding these tapes. A lot of the people in the film help me think about holding things together.

My friend Ted [Kerr] talks about holding a sweatshirt of Jim’s that I had given him. That’s a way for Jim to stay with us, we hold it together. And then holding the Parkside, which is a gay bar, queer bar, and you’re holding that space. Jih-Fei [one of the interviewees in the film] talks about holding spaces when nobody will let you, which is very much about what we’re in right now. What it means to hold the space of trans identity or gender non-conforming identity or a bathroom that’s become dangerous territory, and they say you can’t use it, and you hold it. That is something that political people do.

The Parkside also holds ghosts, it holds porn magazines. So holding just constantly emerged in the process. But then the title was given to me by the Lower East Side. And of course, “please hold” is also what someone says on the phone in a not nice way, so it has that register as well. It makes you wait when you’re not ready to wait.

The film is also about walking as a technology of memory, how the world presents information to you when you’re ready to receive it. Walking can wake you up to take in input that you wouldn’t see. So the fact that the title is there because I’m walking in the neighborhood is very much an idea of the film that the world can help you too, if your body is open.

I’ve had the great luck to stay alive this whole time and my body is so different. There’s a lot of seeing me young and seeing me now in the split screens. There’s a lot seeing Juanita young and seeing Juanita now in split screens. There’s not that of Jim because I only have the images from that one period of his life and he didn’t get to live to be older.

My body at this age, I just turned 60, takes in the world differently than my body did when I was 29. And in a lot of the footage that you see, I’m 29. I actually understand the world differently through this technology. I think in a sexist world in particular, I say this as a cisgender woman, I think I understand the world much better in this body than I did when I was 29, and that’s why there’s so much ageism, especially against women, because people don’t want women to be smart in that way. They want to tell us these bodies are not useful tools and not intelligent receptacles. Quite the opposite, as we age, our bodies become smarter if we’re lucky, or wiser, or deeper, or more sophisticated. I do not need to be the 29 old girl that I see there. I’m very glad that I’m not.

Lauren: Thanks for sharing that. Is there anything else that you want to share, or that you want Autostraddle readers to know?

Alex: One of the things that I love about this movie is how queer it is. It is my definition of queer, everyone can have their own. What I love about it is that the characters that you meet are every kind of different. They’re every kind of deviant. They’re every kind of edge. And sure, you can say they’re lesbian, trans, gay, Jewish, Black, Asian, young, old.

But the movie is not committed to a particular slice of the queer world. It’s expansive about how queer love and queer community, queer analysis, queer ways of living and family and being political and caring and making relationships of care. That has been everything to me. And that’s true in my nuclear family, lesbian family, that’s very extended into other parental roles. It’s true in my queer romance with Jim. We lived together for many years.

It’s true in my very queer friendship with Juanita that crossed race and class and brought us together in an overt analysis that came from the celebration of gay and lesbian life and trans life.  So I want the readers of Autostraddle to behold a feminist queerness that is my community and is me. I love being in this community. I love being seen by this community.

I love speaking to this community. I love the way the film stretches that inclusion and also its limits. That’s the queer lifeworld that I draw from in that video.

Lauren: Since it has been a couple months since Trump’s inauguration, I’m wondering how you feel about the film coming out right now and what you feel the film has to say about this contemporary moment.

Alex: I am as confused and hurt and angry and afraid and uncertain as anybody. I don’t have any answers right now at all. Many of the things that I thought were answers don’t seem to be. That’s super scary.

But what I just said to you about queer community and queer love that is connected to activism — not just who you have sex with or who you want to go to a party with, although that’s part of it, but connected to working together to make the world better for the most disenfranchised, the people who are the most weak and the most threatened at any particular moment. And sometimes, like right now, that is trans people, right now that is people in our world with HIV and AIDS who are truly about to be decimated by the end of PEPFAR and threats to Americans’ access to free medication.

Queer love and queer community that’s organized around wanting to help each other and help the most disenfranchised — that is always a goodness. The minutes you can spend in it or the hours you can spend in it are worldbuilding. They’re being in the world that we want and we deserve and we can make, and even if we can’t right now respond to the huge threats, and even as they will be endangering people we love, or killing people. Killing people in Africa via [the end of] PEPFAR, killing people in Gaza, killing people in the Ukraine, killing people in the Congo, I could go on.

We as humans can make little reprieves, little pockets, little sparks of beauty and dignity and decency. And queer people have always done that. We’ve had to. And so watching the film together, talking together, that’s just an example of knowing that we can make moments of power. It might not be big. We talked about how how many people watch something is not a register that matters to me. Smallness is often what you need to have deep impact. We can be in community and learn with each other. And so we will do that. We can do that. We are doing that. We have done that. And it might not change the badness, but it is itself a goodness.

Lauren Herold: Thank you. That’s a beautiful way to end this conversation and also I feel like I needed to hear that today. So, thank you for saying that.

Alex: But see, this conversation is that, Lauren. It’s like, I see you. I heard what was happening in your life. Thank you for listening to me so much about my film. It’s simple, but we can and should and have to do that for each other all the time right now.

The History of the Color Purple Kiss

This article includes spoilers for the lesbian storyline in 2023’s The Color Purple. If you have not yet seen the film, you might enjoy a spoiler-free review instead.

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Premiering this week, more than 40 years after Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize book in 1982 and just shy of 20 years after its original 20025 Broadway debut, audiences have been promised a version of The Color Purple that will be a “bold new take on the beloved classic.”

But, what does “bold” mean? In all versions of The Color Purple, the beats of which are familiar to most audiences, Celie, the protagonist, is severely abused by both her stepfather and then later, her husband, Mister. Throughout her life, Celie’s memories of her sister Nettie, along with friendships made with other women along the way, teach her how to be strong in ways she never knew possible. Key to those relationships is Celie’s romantic awakening with her husband’s mistress, Shug Avery. In Alice Walker’s novel, Shug and Celie become lovers to one another and, even after decades, we have yet to see their relationship met with the same ferocity of which Walker first penned them.

In 1982 Alice Walker wrote a Black queer text so ahead of its time, that 40 years later we’re still fighting to catch up. Here is a history of the most famous Black lesbian kiss in our lifetime.

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1979: Before The Color Purple

I’d argue that the history of queerness in The Color Purple begins roughly three years before the book even published. In 1979, Black feminist lesbian scholar and activist Barbara Smith wrote “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” a pivotal work in feminist theory that continues to be studied for decades. It’s widely accepted as the “the first explicit statement of Black feminist criticism.” At the time, Smith was already considered a leading voice in Black feminist pedagogy, having been a member of the National Black Feminist Organization, the Combahee River Collective, and would go on to found the famed Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press (at her friend Audre Lorde’s suggestion, no less).

Most directly related to our interests, in “Toward a Black a Black Feminist Criticism” Smith argues that all the “segments of the literary world-whether establishment, progressive, Black, female, or lesbian — do not know, or at least act as if they do not know, that Black women writers and Black lesbian writers exist.” This is a rallying call. Black queer and lesbian writers were already building generation-defining careers at the time, but as Dr. Christopher S. Lewis writes in “Cultivating Black Lesbian Shamelessness: Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple'” there is one particular trend to note — three years later, in 1982, four seminal Black lesbian texts were all published at the same time: Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cyprus, & Indigo, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. 

Of those books — each important in their own way — The Color Purple would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize, becoming the first and still only novel to do so with a Black queer protagonist (Walker never names Celie’s identity directly, though the character is often read as a lesbian). Alice Walker would also become the first queer Black woman writer to win the award.

Taken in that context, it’s not difficult to draw a line directly between Smith’s original lament and what follows. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is written amidst a wave of other Black queer women writers who are staking a claim. These are women who socialized together, who were each other’s writing partners, creating deeply personal and intellectual overlapping circles. So much of The Color Purple is tied to Alice Walker’s family history, some of which we will talk about in a bit — but it’s also impossible to divorce it from the feminist, queer, political landscape of where it lands.

1982: The Color Purple Is Published

When Alice Walker published The Color Purple, first and foremost she was interested in writing a tribute to grandmother. Her grandmother, Rachel, as described by Walker, was “a kind and loving woman brutally abused by my grandfather.” This description came in in 2019, after an actor in a regional production of The Color Purple refused to play the role of Celie. Based on Walker’s written response, I presume that the actor objected in part to Celie’s queerness:

“It is safe to say, after a frightful life serving and obeying abusive men, who raped in place of ‘making love,’ my grandmother, like Celie, was not attracted to men. She was, in fact, very drawn to my grandfather’s lover, a beautiful woman who was kind to her, the only grown person who ever seemed to notice how remarkable and creative she was. In giving Celie the love of this woman, in every way love can be expressed, I was clear in my intention to demonstrate that she too, like all of us, deserved to be seen, appreciated, and deeply loved by someone who saw her as whole and worthy.”

In writing Celie’s relationship with Shug, Walker felt as if she was paying her grandmother back a gift, providing something in a fictional realm that perhaps her grandmother was or was not able to fulfill in her life. A Black queer granddaughter, finding a connection through her words to the her (likely queer) Black grandmother, who had always been kind to her.

The Color Purple is known for its spirituality, framed by Celie’s letters to God, a fact that has been underscored by the heavy presence of gospel in its musical adaptations. Those Black Christian traditions are often used to distance The Color Purple from its queerness when for Walker they were always knotted together as one and the same, “I believe, and know, that sexual love can be extraordinarily holy, whoever might be engaging in it, I felt I had been able to return a blessing of love to a grandmother who had always offered only blessing and love, when I was a child, to me.” To express love is, intrinsically, an expression of holiness.

When we talk about The Color Purple novel in comparison to the adaptations that follow it, often — especially as gay people — we zero in on how gay the book is. And when we say “how gay the book is” we’re talking about the sex (I’ve also been guilty of this). The fabric of what Walker was painting was so much more.

It’s purposefully Shug who tells Celie “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it,” marrying the book’s two central themes, its spirituality and its queerness, into a single sentence. The literal color purple, of course, has historically been used as a code for queerness, a fact that I am sure was not lost on Walker when she wrote both that sentence and the book’s title. At one point in the novel, Celie says that to her all men look like frogs. Walker’s decision to write Shug as a blues singer pulls from a well-known history queer blues singers during the early 20th century; though I’d argue most prominently Bessie Smith, whose biography had just published in the decade prior, explicitly naming her bisexuality, and like Shug often get lovers of both genders at the same time. Celie’s chosen career path towards financial independence is to make pants — which is certainly a small note within the broader themes of the book, but has been read as a symbol of her queerness by quite a few gay readers. There are so many ways that queerness in The Color Purple is about wholeness far beyond sex.

But also, there is the sex. Celie washing Shug’s body becomes a moment of awakening, Shug is the first person to teach Celie about her clitoris, that sex can feel good, and the first person to guide her through masturbation and oral sex. Theirs is the only time that Celie experiences caring, loving, consensual sex. In fact, at the time of its publishing, The Color Purple contained one of the most vibrant and explicitly described sex scenes — between partners of any gender — up to that point in history. Celie becomes insatiable, writing in her letters “I am like a bee. Shug likes honey. I am after her all the time.” Their relationship spans decades.

Still, it is about what their sex teaches Celie. Walker uses Shug to help Celie regain her voice, her courage, her self-worth, her independence. In her 1997 book The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, Walker reflected that she wrote The Color Purple because she “wanted to give my family and friends an opportunity to see women-loving women — lesbian, heterosexual, bi-sexual, ‘two-spirited’ — womanist women in a recognizable context. I wanted them, I suppose, to see me.”

1985: The Color Purple (dir. Steven Spielberg) Is Released

In Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of The Color Purple, Shug’s and Celie’s nuanced, layered queer love story is reduced to a single ambiguous scene, changing the course of all the adaptations that come after.

In it, Celie cries that no one loves her. Shug – who’s first words to Celie upon meeting her are famously “you sho is ugly!” — assures Celie that she loves her, before gently kissing her. First on her right cheek, then her forehead, her left cheek, and finally, her mouth. The camera follows Shug’s hand as it caresses Celie’s shoulder. Then, Celie’s hand as it reaches out to clasp Shug’s. Their faces are reflected back across the room’s mirrors. The camera pans to the bed they are sitting on, before cutting away to a wind chime carrying a tune.

The work with color here is also of note. As opposed of signature purple (the color that Shug tells Celie is from God), as María Frías points out in Walker-Spielberg Tandem and Lesbianism in The Color Purple, “Walker’s verbal and sexual passion is replaced by the predominance of the color red — both Celie and Shug wear sophisticated red clothes — and the lighting, together with a sensual music, give an atmosphere of intimacy, warmth, and complicity.”

Still, whatever subtext might be gleamed from the scene, it’s also a part of clear decision to eliminate the novel’s prominent lesbian themes. Spielberg admits as much in a 2011 retrospective of his work with Entertainment Weekly, saying “There were certain things in the [lesbian] relationship between Shug Avery and Celie that were finely detailed in Alice’s book, that I didn’t feel could get a [PG-13] rating.”

In The Same River Twice, Walker similarly recalls hearing from The Color Purple producer Quincy Jones that there had been numerous letters from people who were “adamantly opposed to any display of sexual affection between Celie and Shug,” including threats of boycotting the film if those scenes were included.

This also aligns with Whoopi Goldberg’s memory. In a career retrospective with The Television Academy, Goldberg names the NAACP’s attempted boycott campaign as being one of the reasons that The Color Purple, nominated for 11 Oscars, walked away with none. The NAACP’s protests, and surrounding conversations, focused largely on the character of Mister and what that role said about Black masculinity. Still, the hot point of the film’s potential queerness was not lost on conservative audiences. As Goldberg jokes, in the mid-1980s saying the word “lesbian” on screen was barely permissible, let alone being able to depict a multi-faceted queer sexuality.

The small scene in 1985’s The Color Purple we were provided with came at Alice Walker’s instance. Even still, as Walker looked back, “I knew the passion of Celie and Shug’s relationship would be sacrificed when, on the day ‘the kiss’ was shot, Quincy reassured me that Steven had shot it ‘five or six’ different ways, all of them ‘tasteful.'” (Italicizing my own.)

That decision has ultimately haunted Spielberg’s career. He’s acknowledged, “I was shy about it. In that sense, perhaps I was the wrong director to acquit some of the more sexually honest encounters between Shug and Celie.” But when pressed if, given the benefit of time, would he change that decision, Spielberg holds firm: “I wouldn’t, no. That kiss is consistent with the tonality, from beginning to end, of The Color Purple that I adapted.”

While that might be true, it’s not consistent with the novel that Alice Walker wrote.

2005 and 2015: The Color Purple (And Its Revival) Premiere on Broadway

Walker’s unease with Spielberg’s adaptation led Scott Sanders, producer of The Color Purple musical, to approach her with care and caution about his interest in adapting her work for the stage. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times (a piece which, in full disclosure, also cited my recent review of The Color Purple — a fact I discovered while conducting research for this article), Sanders reflected that Walker told him, “‘The relationship between Celie and Shug is very important to me.'” In return, Sanders promised that he wanted to expand their relationship beyond what was depicted in the film, saying “‘This is Broadway, we can touch on subjects like this, it’s not an issue.'”

And, despite the fact that various interpretations of the musical and its revival over the years (based on individual stagings, director’s choices, or companies) still often attempt downplay Shug and Celie’s relationship, Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray’s lyrics hold true to Sanders’ word. They crystalize two women in love, and the subsequent impact that love story has on every other part of Celie’s life.

In “Dear God — Shug,” Celie washes Shug while Shug recuperates from her overuse of alcohol. Celie compares witnessing Shug’s naked form to worship (“I wash her body and it feel like I’m prayin’/ Try not to look, but my eyes ain’t obeyin'”). Later, when Shug overhears the verbal abuse that Mister spews at Celie, she has a love confession of her own in “Too Beautiful for Words.” When the pair first met, Shug said “you sho is ugly,” but now? Shug tells Celie, “The grace you bring into this world’s / Too beautiful for words… Oh, don’t you know you’re beautiful / Too beautiful for words.”

It’s the first time anyone in Celie’s life (besides her sister, Nettie) has seen beauty in her.

After Shug performs at Harpo’s Juke Joint (a song called “Push Da Button,” most certainly a reference to the fact that in the 1982 novel, Shug teaches Celie about the pleasure brought forth by her own anatomy through referring to her clitoris as a button), Shug and Celie steal away to spend the evening together. In the privacy of Celie’s bedroom they kiss, and in “What About Love” they proclaim not only their love for each other, but their vulnerability.

Celie can’t believe it, “Is that me who’s floating away / Lifted up to the clouds by a kiss / Never felt nothing like this.” While Shug, despite being far more experienced, finds herself stunned at the dawning of this new relationship. “Is that me I don’t recognize / …I had it all figured out.”

They ask each other:

“But what about trust? /
What about tenderness?

What about tears when I’m happy?
What about wings when I fall?
I want you to be a story for me that I can believe in
Forever”

It is, to the best of my knowledge and research, the only love song between two Black women to have ever been performed on Broadway.

When Shug asks Celie what she wants, Celie admits that more than anything, she just wants to be with Shug. This sets the plan in motion for Celie to leave her abusive home to live with Shug in Memphis. Once settled at Shug’s home the couple, along with Shug’s husband, Grady, and Harpo’s ex-girlfriend, Squeak, form a kind of queer domesticity. Grady and Squeak eventually decide to become a couple on their own; Shug and Celie stay together.

Ultimately, Celie and Shug break up. Shug wants Celie’s permission to run away into a short affair with a 19-year-old blues flutist in her band. Celie refuses, singing back their original promise to each other through her tears (this is called the “What About Love (Reprise)”). In their own way, in their own time period, Celie and Shug took vows. While its painful, Celie lets Shug go because in their relationship she saw and found value in her own self-worth.

From their breakup comes Celie’s “I’m Here,” a barn burner of a ballad that has brought every house I’ve ever seen it performed in to tears. It’s there that Celie finally repeats back the words that Shug first sang to her, “I’m beautiful.. yes, I’m beautiful.” This time, she believes it.

As the show comes to a close, Celie sings another refrain in her reprise of the titular “The Color Purple”:

“God is inside me and everyone else
That was or ever will be
I came into this world with God
And when I finally looked inside

I found it.”

Those are words that, once again, Celie first heard on Shug’s lips. It’s the last memory given to the audience. That through Shug, Celie learns to love herself, to find her beauty, and to find her God.

2023: The Color Purple (dir. Blitz Bazawule) Is Released

For his take on the work, now four decades in the making, director Blitz Bazawule was tasked with joining together both Spielberg’s adaptation of The Color Purple that is familiar to most audiences, along with its musical partner, and Walker’s own source material.

Specifically, producer Scott Sanders has said “it was important for us to make it abundantly clear to audiences that these two women had both a sexual relationship and a loving relationship, and that Celie had one love in this entire story.” That sentiment is echoed by screenwriter Marcus Gardley, who noted ahead of the film’s premiere that “I wanted the love story to be prominent and didn’t want to brush over that these two women are in love.”

In Bazawule’s version, Shug no longer calls Celie “ugly” when first meeting her, but in exchange she also never gets to sing her first love song to Celie, she never gets to tell her that she is “too beautiful for words.” That decision undercuts the foundation of their relationship; it’s in the reflection of Shug’s warmth that Celie is supposed to find herself for the first time.

Instead, the majority of Shug and Celie’s relationship occurs in Celie’s imagination, as opposed to within the main text of the film. Throughout The Color Purple, Bazawule inserts stylized asides to bring forth some of the musical elements, particularly (though not only) as it relates to Celie’s inner thoughts. These choices directly impact Shug and Celie. Instead of Celie and Shug’s romance existing as a part of our lived reality, they now find each other inside of a small world of Celie’s own creation.

There are moments where this magical realism approach strengthens the narrative, such as when Celie washes Shug’s body for the first time and the world melts away around them. There are others, such as musical’s signature love song “What About Love,” where Bazawule’s direction feels less clear.

In this version of “What About Love,” Shug sweeps Celie away on a private date to an empty theater, and Celie imagines the two of them together in the style of an old Broadway musical, proclaiming their love. However, since the song now takes place in Celie’s imagination, the audience is left wondering if their love declarations and vows are even real or long-lasting. Worse, while singing a song about lovers who are learning what it means to trust in each other, both Fantasia Barrino and Taraji P. Henson are puzzlingly directed to walk away from each other, rather than become close.

The two do still kiss, a chaste and closed mouth one (though, admittedly, long). The camera slowly pulls away from the couple, instead of inviting the audience into their intimacy. Bazawule confusingly also chooses to backlight their silhouettes in this moment, one that queer audiences in particular have waited nearly 40 years for, leaving Shug and Celie in shadows — as if to say that theirs is a love that is meant to hide.

“Celie’s mind goes into this incredible place of what she believes love is, and when she comes back into reality, it has happened to her,” Bazawule explained to the Los Angeles Times.

But we’re never given a full sense of what this moment means to Shug. The next morning, presumably following their first time together (the actual sex scene in question is cut away), we see Shug’s hand graze Celie’s waist. Mere seconds later, Shug is already out of bed and never looks back at the woman she spent the night with? Their long-term relationship is not established and their time together is never directly mentioned again, almost as if to apologize to film audiences for its inclusion at all. It’s not made clear that Celie later moves to Memphis to be in a relationship with Shug. Their break up song (a return to “What About Love”) is cut entirely, thus robbing Celie’s most famous ballad, “I’m Here,” of its key queer catalyst.

The team behind the new Color Purple has argued that the decision to divorce “I’m Here” from Shug and Celie’s breakup is to recenter it on Celie’s own self-definition and self-creation, rather than have it be in response to a broken heart. They see this is Celie coming into her own, on her own terms.

But of course, Celie coming into her own in the context of her relationship with Shug is… what the story is supposed to be about. It is from Shug that Celie that learns she is beautiful. It is from Shug’s heartbreak that Celie learns that “I don’t need you to love me” because she can love herself. In the setup of the newest The Color Purple, she learns neither.

In his interview with the The Los Angeles Times, Scott Sanders responded to similar criticisms of the new adaptation, stating “There was nothing intentional to soften the relationship and, quite frankly, we thought we did a beautiful job with it… We show that they kissed, that they were romantic, that they slept together at least once. But how many scenes do you want to keep going back to the bedroom?”

While it’s true that an awkwardly backlit kiss, two fantasy sequences, and a suggested night together moves the needle on this latest The Color Purple film closer than the last time the story was depicted on screen, it’s simultaneously still a far cry from what Walker actually wrote and the reasons why she wrote it.

Brooke Obie put it well for Andscape, Blitz Bazawule “makes a choice to show us the bed shaking as Celie is raped by Mister. And he also makes a choice not to show us Celie’s consensual, sexual romance with Shug that’s foundational to who she becomes. It matters that Celie’s relationship with God and herself are discovered and explored through the lens of her lesbianism. It’s a necessary testament to the liberating force and inherent holiness of queerness.”

(Sanders wondered, “how many scenes do you want to keep going back to the bedroom?” I’d argue, at least as many times as Celie is shown being raped. But that’s just me, personally.)

Notably, the new Color Purple also neglects to make it clear that it is Shug, along with Mister, who helps bring Nettie home to Celie after all their years apart. Thus depriving Shug of the final moment where she shows her love for Celie by reuniting her with the greatest love in her life, her sister. This changes the tone of Celie singing the film’s concluding “Color Purple (Reprise)” lyrics altogether, removing direct context of Shug from Celie’s final words.

Funny how that worked out.

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I don’t know where The Color Purple will go from here. I hope that one day, maybe in time for its next revival in 2040, we’ll finally be able to match the complexity and beauty of a love story between two Black Southern queer woman that Alice Walker wrote back in 1982. It will have been a long, hard fought, winding road — a history of half-truths and choked silences, of two steps forward and one step back, but one with a destination of hope. And I believe that seeing our wholeness and holiness will have been worth it.

Lisa Ben: Lesbian Media Pioneer, Cat Lady, and Hometown Buffet Superfan

In 1947, Edythe Eyde, writing under the pseudonym “Lisa Ben,” launched the country’s first-ever lesbian magazine, Vice Versa. Her boss at RKO Pictures in Burbank wanted her to look busy even when she had no work to do, so she’d use her office’s manual typewriter to write the magazine and carbon paper to print 12 issues of each issue, which she distributed for free, imploring readers to pass it on to another lesbian when they finished. The goal of Vice Versa was to provide information and visibility, but Ben also really hoped it’d be a way for her to connect with other gay girls.

Vice Versa shuttered when Edythe got a different job at which she lacked private access to a typewriter and carbon paper, but her passion for writing began before Vice Versa and continued after it. She continued to write sci-fi/fantasy (she was an early and active member of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society), poetry (including a series devoted to her 22 cats), and gay-themed (but “not dirty or demeaning to us”) parodies of popular songs, which she performed at gay clubs in Los Angeles throughout the 50s. She published as “Lisa Ben” in the Daughters of Bilitis’ seminal lesbian publication The Ladder and hung out on the fringes of the nascent lesbian activist movement, but she never considered herself an activist. After a relationship in her thirties ended with her girlfriend losing all their money through gambling, she swore off serious relationships for life.

Edythe eventually retired and hunkered down with her cats in the Burbank bungalow she’d bought in 1960. In the 1970s, in true lesbian cat lady fashion, she fought the city of Burbank’s attempt to get her to give up all but three of her 32 cats and won.

07 Oct 1973, Sun The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, California) Newspapers.com

Throughout the 80s, she was frequently interviewed by various historians and writers for anthologies and documentaries. By the 90s, she had “gone into seclusion,” and much of her personal correspondence during this time are copies of refusals to attend events she’d been invited to.

And then, at the turn of the century, heading into her eighties, Edythe Eyde found a new focus that had nothing to do with lesbian media or visibility: her local Hometown Buffet.

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Buffets came to America via Sweden, who brought a smorgasbord to the 1939 World’s Fair inside the Three Crows Restaurant, inspiring a few buffet-style restaurants to crop up in the 50s. America’s first All-You-Can-Eat Buffet was launched in, of course, Las Vegas, at El Rancho, one of the Strip’s first hotels. After becoming all the rage in Vegas, buffet restaurants spread across the country, peaking in the 1980s. Chains like Sizzler, Golden Corral, and Ponderosa were especially popular in the suburbs, where they targeted big families looking for a cheap meal that’d please all involved parties.

Buffets Inc. was founded in 1983, with its founders splitting in 1986 to start their own chains which included, in 1989, the Hometown Buffet. In 1996, Hometown re-merged with Buffets Inc, a company that would come to own Ryan’s Buffet, Old Country Buffet, HomeTown Buffets and Country Buffet — thus creating the country’s 25th-largest restaurant chain, with combined sales of $661 million in 1996.

These restaurants were abundant throughout the 1990s, writes Eater, who describes them as “a value proposition: why pay for one plate of food when, for a few extra dollars, the restaurant will serve up an unlimited amount of food?” Buffets have always been most beloved by children and senior citizens. Every year on Valentine’s Day, Hometown Buffet sweetens the deal with free lunch and a portrait photo to couples who’ve been together 50 years or more.

As a kid, I loved buffets — at Ponderosa, at hotels, and eventually the new Old Country Buffet that moved in to the strip mall out by the highway. Creamy artificial macaroni and cheese, Jell-O salad, bowls of fried shrimp and cafeteria-chopped spaghetti, iceberg lettuce drenched in ranch, anemic slices of greasy pizza, slivers of cheesecake. I could eat all of these things I never ate at home, all at once, on the very same plate, if I wanted to.

Buffets, like much of hospitality history, is a pet interest of mine, so when an archivist at the One Archives at the University of Southern California told me that in retirement, Edythe had become a superfan of her local Hometown Buffet, I was drawn by forces larger than myself to spend a few ays in the archives, reading everything I could from the Lisa Ben Papers. And indeed, nobody loved buffets like Edythe loved her local Hometown Buffet.

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Edythe loved writing letters on her typewriter to her friends around the country, and they are long and detailed and misanthropic and delightful.

Prior to the opening of the Hometown Buffet, Edythe’s letters to her friends detailed issues including the ordeal of closing one’s MasterCard account, finding a good pair of shoes at Mervyn’s, the high price of movies, the low price of artichokes at Trader Joe’s, the priceless pleasure of reading entire books at Barnes & Noble (but not eating the soup there, which she had on good authority arrived frozen), the new practice of Baskin-Robbins employees putting out tip jars, the extensive trials and triumphs of her numerous “pussy-cats” and feral cat rescues, the extensive trials and triumphs of various kitchen appliances, and her affection or lack thereof for the many restaurants within a safe driving distance from her home. (She didn’t like driving too far, as it meant being away from her cats.) On Wednesday mornings, she went to the American Thrift Shop to look for shirts with cats on them. Her home-cooked meals, as described in her letters, were budget-friendly affairs: marked down meat with Lipton’s noodles and sauce, or Wilson Fully Cooked Roasts.

In December of 2001, Edythe wrote to her friend Kay Kidd — they’d met through a cat newsletter — about a new shopping center opening in Burbank that would contain a Hometown Buffet. “To my delight, a Hometown Buffet has sprung up,” she typed. However, she lamented its inadequacies compared to a former Burbank buffet, Furr’s (specifically, Hometown lacked Furrs’ carved meat selection, and did not allow patrons to seat themselves) and derided “the waitress’ ploy to coax tips” by serving beverages she was perfectly capable of obtaining herself.

That sentiment would soon take a significant turn. By February of 2002, Edythe reported that Hometown “has improved its food choice since I first visited there” and that she’d taken to eating lunch there every day. “Today they offered Chinese chicken livers,” she recalled. “Yesterday, among many selections, was Cheese Enchiladas. I tucked away three of them! Oink-oink.”

Edythe learned of Hometown’s opening via a television advertisement, featuring “a little child running to its mama with an overloaded dessert plate, with an array of food in the background.”

She was disappointed that the ad didn’t reveal the restaurant’s location. (Two years prior, she’d written to her local TV station to complain that their Applebee’s ad also played coy with the restaurant’s address, requesting they reconsider this tactic so she could visit what appeared to be a very good restaurant.), but also felt strongly that what Hometown really needed was a jingle. “It’s time for one of these eating places to use a catchy tune in their ads,” she wrote. “None of them do and the competition is fierce here in Burbank.”

She’d been writing songs for decades, so it’s no surprise that the Buffet Advertising Muse struck her on one of her daily drives to Hometown, gifting her with a melody and words, an experience she described as “good gracious, it was tenacious!”

“I think children watching TV will pick up on the tune and will be signing ‘We’re Hungry, We’re Hungry,’ which will automatically remind parents, and everybody else, of The Hometown Buffet,” she wrote to Kay.

That day at lunch, she’d introduced herself to the manager and secured the address of the company head in charge of their TV advertising. “If I just send it to the agency,” she explained, “Someone there will take credit for MY music and lyrics. After all, it was MY dream and I deserve the recognition!”

She wrote a long letter to the company, enclosing sheet music, lyrics and a short treatment for the television ad, pointing out how none of her local restaurants were using music in their TV ads, and a compelling jingle could worm its way into the minds of children.

Debbie Tucker, the senior Director of Marketing for Buffets, Inc, rejected Edythe’s submission on the following grounds:

First, we have just finished shooting our television commercials for the year 2002. We won’t produce any new spots until 2003. In addition, our advertising agencies’ policy is to always create commercials that are based on concepts developed through the year by the creative, research and strategic departments of the agency, as opposed to being based on individual non-strategic ideas. Our advertising agency also has a policy of using music in our TV and radio commercials that is composed and performed by union talent only.

After this rejection, Edythe decided to stop eating at HomeTown, instead choosing to patronize El Pollo Loco, Honey-Baked Ham and Boston Market. She had “one last meal” at the restaurant and left the manager, Tom Neuzil, a stack of her cat poems for his wife, a vet.

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By 2003, however, Edythe was back at Hometown Buffet, and her relationship with Neuzil apparently grew deeper, as revealed through extensive correspondences between the two from 2004 through 2008, as well as brief correspondences with other managers and employees of the Burbank Hometown Buffet. She often referenced time they spent together in the store drinking coffee with nutmeg. Edythe and Neuzil kept in touch even after he was transferred to a Ventura County store, while he was hospitalized, and while he was living in Illinois to be closer to his family.

She wrote him long letters about her life and shared stories of her evangelicalism for Hometown Buffet, like the “Honk If You Love Hometown Buffet” sign and Hometown Buffet t-shirt she’d printed for herself. Her local store rewarded her with gift cards and a pin. She published a poem in their corporate newsletter, but the poem was full of errors, which in true editorial spirit, she wrote them a letter detailing. (Sample correction: “The chicken liver should have an S on it (as I originally wrote it) to go with the verb “are.” One can’t just say chicken liver ‘are’!”)

Neuzil sent Edythe framed photographs of herself and the Hometown staff from her trips to Hometown Buffet, musical Christmas cards, a “Cute Kittens” stationary set. She sent him seeds for his garden and recordings of herself performing the Hometown Buffet jingle. She informed him of the inadequacies of her local store’s coupon strategies, detailed her bus trips to Hometown Buffet (she’d decided against the hassle of renewing her driver’s license), and of course as always, talked about her cats.

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Edythe seemingly struggled with depression and isolation throughout her life, although she never names it. Long letters from her early twenties detail fights with her parents, shame over living with a man who cheated on her, her loss of faith in God, and her desire to end it all. Her early fascination with and connection to written media is clear, even then: She submitted a question about her parents’ financial demands and her father’s temper to the advice column of a local newspaper and saw it published. She was proud of her self-sufficiency, her job and that she bought her car in cash — but often lamented that something sadder still tugged at her.

Although later communications indicate a change of heart about her affiliation with the lesbian community, in a letter to Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon from the 1960s she declares she had no interest in attending the Daughters of Bilitis conference as she’d lost her passion for “that way of life” after a hospitalization two years prior and her disastrous three-year relationship. She wrote that she’d become convinced she would “never find the security and stability I crave so much in the half-world I used to champion so wholeheartedly.”

Undated letters from the ensuing years indicate periods of time when she’d lost interest in everything besides “eating, certain television programs and in sleeping.” She had health issues, felt tired and listless, and was distressed by the concept of making herself presentable enough to go out.

In 1987, she attended an Old Lesbians Organizing for Change convention in Carson, which she complained left her “depressed for days” afterwards, having been regaled by stories of women with bowel incompetence and losing their partners. But in 1988, she was recorded for The Daughters of Bilitis Video Project, cheerfully speaking about her early gay life, Vice Versa, and performing her songs.

Edythe comes alive when she’s discussing the topics she’s most passionate about: her music, her writing, her cats, and her Hometown Buffet.

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When Edythe started her “little gay magazine” in the 1950s, she didn’t have an agenda. She didn’t want to be famous or turn her magazine into a proper, professional publication. She didn’t even know she was the first lesbian to start a magazine, or that it would be illegal to send it through the mail, and she certainly had no idea that her name would be written in the annals of lesbian history forever. She simply loved to write: poems, jingles, reviews, long personal stories. She wanted people to know, just as we do now, if there was a movie or a book with something gay in it. She loved getting letters and writing letters, hearing about someone’s life and sharing the intricate details of her own. Her happiest correspondences are those in which a friend has expressed enthusiasm or excitement for a song or poem she shared with them.

In 2002, she told queer historian JD Doyle reaching out about her work that she’d gone into seclusion: No, I have not gone over to the other side, but I no longer actively participate in the gay lifestyle. To do so at this stage of my life would be inappropriate. But when the same historian reached out in 2003 for information on another musician, she wrote three pages of joyful memories of her life in Los Angeles lesbian scene in the 1950s and enclosed some of her song parodies for him to enjoy.

“It was just some writing that I wanted to do to get it off my chest and I was a very lonely person and I could sort of fantasize this way by writing the magazine, you see,” she told historian Eric Marcus about Vice Versa in an interview later used for his podcast, Making Gay History. She wrote an author who wanted to reprint Vice Versa pieces in a gay anthology that she was amazed people were still interested in her “little endeavors of so long ago” when “there are so many gay-oriented magazines, newspapers, plays, etc., now that surpass my humble ‘publication,’ which actually was never printed, but typed on an ordinary typewriter!”

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Edythe Eyde wrote to connect, to feel a part of something larger. In the last years of her life, in her correspondence with the management of Hometown Buffet and her affection for the employees who recognized her on her visits, it’s all there, too: a desire to connect, to see how much more we have in common than we have at odds, to keep in touch, to let people in. Certainly, nobody associated with Hometown Buffet knew that Edythe once created a lesbian magazine. She was just a friendly retired woman with a bunch of cats. It’s silly, because Hometown Buffet is a terrible restaurant. But it’s also so undeniably human, and so sweet. It’s all there in those letters, just like it was back then, too.

The last bit of correspondence available from Edythe to her Hometown Buffet friends is dated December 2008, and the entirety of her paper records (donated to the One Archives by her neighbor in November 2014) conclude in 2009.

In 2010, she was inducted into the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association’s Hall of Fame.

In 2015, she passed away in an assisted living facility.

In 2020, The Burbank Hometown Buffet, along with all remaining stores in the floundering chain, shuttered permanently.

Revisit Lani Kaʻahumanu’s Moving 1993 Speech on Bisexuality

The March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation took place on April 25, 1993. Bi folks were explicitly included in the official name of the march thanks to bisexual and feminist activist and writer Lani Kaʻahumanu, who organized and fought for bisexual inclusion in the march and rally. Of the many speakers at the march’s rally, Kaʻahumanu was the only out bisexual and the only person to speak explicitly about bisexuality. The ways she loudly and proudly celebrated bisexuality on that stage are just as powerful and moving today — during 2023’s Bi Week — as they were back then in 1993, when bisexual folks were often excluded from mainstream events and conversations about queer liberation.

Her speech can be viewed in full on C-Span and starts around the 5:44:31 timestamp. “Aloha, my name is Lani Kaʻahumanu” she begins as she takes the mic, “and it ain’t over til the bisexual speaks.” What follows is an eloquent speech that sounds like part essay, part spoken word poetry on bisexual identity, pride, and love. Kaʻahumanu also urgently and sharply critiques mainstream gay politics that exclude bisexual and transgender people. “Recognition of bisexual orientation and transgender issues presents a challenge to assumptions not previously explored within the politics of gay liberation,” she says. “What will it take for the gayristocracy to realize that bisexual, lesbian, transgender, and gay people are in this together, and together we can and will move the agenda forward. But this will not happen until public recognition of our common issues is made, and a sincere effort to confront biphobia and transphobia is made by the established gay and lesbian leadership in this country.”

Thirty years later, her words — especially about trans folks — still hold so much truth and resonance.

A transcription of the full speech lives on Kaʻahumanu’s website and is formatted like a gorgeous poem. Here’s an excerpt:

Bisexual pride
speaks to the truth
of behavior and identity.

No simple either/or divisions
fluid – ambiguous – subversive
bisexual pride challenges both
the heterosexual and the homosexual assumption.

Ten years before she gave this speech, Kaʻahumanu co-founded BiPOL, the country’s first bisexual political action group. A year later, Kaʻahumanu was at the center of a major action by BiPOL at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in an effort to increase bisexual visibility. As a publicity stunt, BiPOL nominated Kaʻahumanu for the office of Vice President. The day before the DNC, BiPOL hosted the country’s first official bisexual rights rally. Kaʻahumanu’s 1993 speech is the culmination of the decade plus of work she was already doing in the name of bisexual people.

Though the full video of the 1993 rally is over six hours, it’s worth watching other parts as well. In many ways, it’s a fun time capsule of queer culture and history. The band Betty! Eartha Kitt! Judith Light! There’s quite the crew of performers and speakers. But Lani Kaʻahumanu‘s speech really does stand out in the ways it centers and celebrates bisexual people. It’s a great slice of history to look back on thirty years later during a week meant to bolster bisexual visibility and pride.

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Happy Bi Week 2023 from Autostraddle!

Remembering Deborah Sundahl, Lesbian Porn Pioneer

all images courtesy of the author

Two months ago, we lost Deborah Sundahl — a fierce, compassionate, and prolific queer elder. Despite having revolutionized lesbian culture in the 1980s, paving the way for contemporary queer sexuality and the many ways we express and enjoy it now (including through community spaces like Autostraddle), few of us know Debi’s name.

In 1984, Debi did what was, at the time, unthinkable. Together with her then-partner Nan Kinney and a group of like-minded dykes, she put on a strip show at a San Francisco lesbian bar and used the profits to launch one of the first lesbian sex magazines, On Our Backs. A year later, she and her collaborators put out one of the first hardcore lesbian sex videos, Private Pleasure/Shadows, made by lesbians, featuring real-life lesbian lovers, and intended for a lesbian audience.

It was the first time in history that lesbians created commercial sex media for themselves, and it marked a crucial turning point in both the evolution of feminism and the adult film industry. It also had a global ripple effect, encouraging women in communities across North America, Europe, and even Australia to not just explore their own sexual desires but launch their own commercial sex projects, resulting in a small but tenacious lesbian sex industry that included magazines, hardcore videos, erotic audio cassette tapes, personal ads and hotlines, live strip and sex shows, and more.

Debi’s projects — and all those that followed — were primarily an offering to the lesbian community she loved, an attempt to provide it with sexual entertainment and affirmation. But the projects were also an important political statement. Since the 1970s, the lesbian community had been dominated by conservative feminist politics that vilified any sexual practice seeming to mimic heterosexual power dynamics, including butch/femme gender expressions and relationships, the use of dildos or other sex toys, and — especially — BDSM. Many women involved in the women’s movement attempted to discipline their desires, making them conform to “politically correct” feminist sexual politics. But desires are unruly and rarely submit to our attempts to control them. As a result, many lesbians — including Debi — developed intense sexual shame, unable to feel or not feel the things they’d been told they should.

But at the height of the 1980s feminist sex wars, when antipornography feminists were picketing academic conferences on sexuality and outing leatherdykes to their employers, when butch and femme lesbians were being shunned by their communities, and when all queer people were being targeted by Evangelical Christians for eroding the moral fabric of American society — Debi dared to make pornography.

First, she made a sex magazine that featured a butch dyke centerfold. She had ads for sex toy stores and strip theaters, and she featured erotic fiction about power exchange, fetishes, and intergenerational fantasies. Then, she made a video that featured two dykes fucking in a penthouse and a dungeon, the butch bottom fisting her femme top in both scenes. For the next ten years, she continued to push the boundaries of lesbian sexual representation, showing queers of all gender expressions having every kind of sex imaginable: sweet, nasty, tender, tough, scary, nurturing, submissive, dominating, mutual. No one had ever seen lesbian sex represented like this before.

Debi didn’t make history just once. She made it over and over again — not because she sought a legacy but because she dedicated her life to serving her community’s unmet needs. She was relentlessly curious about how we experience gender, where our desires come from, and how we come to express those desires.

She was also acutely aware of the many systems of control and violence that both inform and regulate our sexuality, and she believed — because she had experienced it herself — that shedding sexual shame and fully embracing one’s sexuality was a form of resistance and a step toward liberation for both the individual and the broader community.

Debi was born in 1954 and raised in Minnesota, where she married at 18 and had a son with the husband she later divorced. In the early 1980s, she enrolled in the University of Minnesota, where she was a double major in History and Women’s Studies. She was heavily involved in the local women’s movement, working as an advocate for a shelter from domestic violence and organizing Take Back the Night marches with the local chapter of Women Against Violence Against Women.

Through her work in the women’s movement, she met her longtime partner Nan Kinney, with whom she went on to found On Our Backs and Fatale Video. In 1982, when they both became disillusioned with the direction in which the women’s movement was headed, they moved to San Francisco seeking a more sexually liberal community in which they could explore their desires and live freely. Shortly after arriving, Debi answered an ad in the paper soliciting dancers for the legendary Lusty Lady peep show theater, where she performed for years before moving to the equally legendary Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre. She was a celebrated performer at both venues.

In her journals, housed in the Cornell University archives, Debi describes this period as one of sexual discovery, during which she shed the values of both her working-class, Catholic upbringing and her earlier radical feminist political identity. Finding and then exploring her sexual desire for women opened up a door for her, making her curious not just about her own sexuality but human sexuality as a whole. Her sex work allowed her to not only explore and express herself as a sexual being but witness how others did the same in a space that actively welcomed that journey and discovery.

What Debi learned from these experiences was that sex work was not, as antipornography feminists had framed it, inherently degrading. With good labor conditions and fair pay, it could be fun, fulfilling, and educational. She also learned there was a significant disparity in who provided sexual entertainment and who consumed it. Reflecting on her time at the O’Farrell Theatre, she noted that over half of the dancers were lesbian but the audience was almost entirely men. Shortly thereafter, she poached lesbian dancers from both the Lusty Lady and the O’Farrell Theatre for the lesbian strip shows that funded her lesbian sex magazines and videos.

Debi’s time as publisher of On Our Backs and co-owner of Fatale Video was a complex period in her life, one marked by significant achievement, creative expression, and close connection with her collaborators. It was also marked by struggle and strife. She directed and performed in multiple videos, photographed and modeled in multiple magazine spreads, and authored dozens of articles and interviews, but she was also suffocated by the day-to-day difficulties of keeping afloat a business endeavor that had no outside support. She developed close personal and creative partnerships with some of the greatest queer artists of her time, but many of those relationships grew strained or fell apart as a result of differences in personal, creative, or business interests.

By 1996, Debi had relinquished her stake in both On Our Backs and Fatale Video, but she continued her work as a champion of sexual self-expression by becoming an educator, teaching workshops on vaginal ejaculation around the world up until her passing. Recognizing a gap in scientific research on the clitorial structure and the mechanisms of vaginal ejaculation, Debi sought to provide others with both the knowledge and skills to fully access their entire sexual capacity. Her work on this subject is still the most comprehensive to date.

Debi made history because she looked for the things that didn’t exist, either because no one had imagined them yet or they didn’t have the courage to make them. She looked for those things, she found them, and then she found comrades as passionate — and as punk — as she was. Together, they scraped together the necessary resources and threw themselves entirely into projects meant to help us all be a little bit freer.

And they succeeded in their efforts. Because of Debi and her collaborators, we have the queer dating service Lex, which was explicitly modeled off On Our Backs’ personal ads. We also have a more robust, diverse queer pornographic market than has ever existed before, both because of the groundwork laid by lesbian porn pioneers like Debi Sundahl and changing technologies that have made production and distribution cheaper and, therefore, more accessible to marginalized people.

Pink & White Productions has been at the forefront of this change, but they have also been stewards of this history — Debi’s history. Until a couple years ago, there was no way to watch Debi’s films, but in the past few years, Pink & White (owned by queer porn producer Shine Louise Houston) has worked to collect, digitize, and then offer Fatale Video’s masters through their streaming service PinkLabel.tv so that they can find a new audience. When I asked Shine why she felt it was important to preserve this history, she said:

These videos are queer and feminist before there was queer and feminist porn. Fatale, a lesbian run company, was making successful commercial work by lesbian directors in a time where that was incredibly rare and that needs to be remembered… I’m here because she was there.

Debi not only pioneered queer and feminist adult filmmaking itself. She also expanded queer representation. Jiz Lee, one of the most prolific and respected queer adult film performers today, credits their own career in part to Debi’s work: “Were it not for Debi’s work, I might not have thought that my gender expression or sexuality had a place in porn.”

While Debi’s film work can be streamed on PinkLabel.tv, it’s harder to read her writings. Most of her work — which included everything from erotic fiction to political analysis to cultural reporting — was featured in On Our Backs, which has yet to be digitized and made available online. Only a few archives in the U.S. have copies of On Our Backs, and as far as I know, only two have the complete run of issues that Debi published. In my last communication with her, Debi asked me if I thought that anyone would be interested in her publishing a regular newsletter, but sadly, she never did.

Debi lived long enough to see the fruits of her labor. She watched the lesbian pornography market she’d dedicated so much of her life to grow and evolve as new technologies and new communities followed in her footsteps. She also lived to see the sex positive queer culture she worked so hard to cultivate absolutely bloom in the decades following her work. But there is so much more recognition owed to her, so much more celebration that she deserves. Hopefully her passing marks the beginning of this.

41 Super-Hot Butches and Tomboys of the Early 20th Century

This article was originally written in 2017 and has been re-published for this special holiday, Butch and Stud Appreciation Day.

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There’s no day like today to cast our eyes upon some hot butch women and tomboys and otherwise-identified human beings who are unfortunately dead, but fortunately looked good and (in most cases) did cool shit while they still roamed the fields and valleys of this scorched earth. Before Shane McCutcheon was even a glimmer in Ilene’s eye, these people were putting on their top hats and/or trousers and giving the ladies something to whisper about in their journals.

Please note that not everybody in this was a lesbian or bisexual. Nor is everybody on this list a certified masc-of-center, butch or tomboy identified woman. Some of the women included herein didn’t typically dress “masculine-of-center” or exude a “butch vibe” but did for the picture I have included. Back in the day, women obviously had much less freedom regarding what they wore and how they presented, so it’s not always clear from archival photographs what anybody’s “authentic” gender presentation was.

I have included an asterisk before the names of the women who I’m pretty damn sure were lesbian, bisexual, or otherwise into the ladies. This is important in case any of you are into dating ghosts, which makes about as much sense as anything else these days, you know?

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*Ella Wesner (1851-1917)

Vaudeville Entertainer / Male Impersonator

Wesner’s popular stage routine included plucky monologues that imparted advice to male audience members on how to treat and/or seduce a lady.

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Vesta Tilley (1864-1952)

English Music Hall Performer, Male Impersonator

Vesta made her debut playing a male role onstage at the age of six, by which point her father, a successful performer himself, had already gifted her the custom-tailored suit she’d begged for as a child.

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*Maude Adams (1872-1953)

American Actress

Adams is best known for playing Peter Pan on Broadway.

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*Cicely Hamilton (1872-1952)

English Actress, Writer, Journalist, Suffragist

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*Romaine Brooks (1874-1970)

American painter

Romaine Brooks is best-known for her paintings of women in androgynous or “masculine” attire.

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Ella Shields (1879-1952)

Vaudeville Performer, Music Hall Singer, Male Impersonator

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Hetty King (1883-1972)

Entertainer/Male Impersonator

Hetty King was an asshole to her lesbian fans, telling an interviewer that she was “sickened” by letters she got from women in which “they declare that they can’t eat or sleep or are going to kill themselves for the love of me.”

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Lillyn Brown (1885-1969)

African-American/Native American Singer, Vaudeville Entertainer, Teacher and Actress

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*Agnes Smedley 1892-1950

American Journalist, Novelist, Activist & Socialist

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*Mercedes De Acosta (1893-1968)

Writer, Lover to the Stars

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Selika Lazevski (1890s – Unknown)

African Princess / 19th Century High Society Equestrian

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*Beatrice Lillie (1894 – 1989)

Canadian-born British actress, Singer and Comedic Performer

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*Moms Mabley (1894-1975)

American Standup Comedian

Mabley wore housedresses onstage, but in her off-time she presented butch, in tailored suits.

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Kitty Doner (1895-1988)

American Actress and Producer

Kitty’s parents were performers, too, and thus Kitty began performing onstage in male attire while she was a very young girl.

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*Alice DeLamar (1895-1983)

American Heiress

When her father died in 1918, DeLamar inherited $10 million, giving her the title of “richest bachelor girl.”

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*Nobuko Yoshiya (1896-1973)

Japanese Writer

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*Ethel Waters (1896-1977)

American Singer and Actress

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*Hope Williams (1897 – 1992)

American Actress

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*Dorothy Arzner (1897 – 1979)

American Film Director

Arzner was the only female film director working during her era, which was a tenuous position to be in — it’s why she wore dresses and skirts to work instead of the pants she wanted to wear.

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*Eva Le Gallienne (1899-1991)

British-born American Stage Actress

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*Marion Barbara “Joe” Carstairs (1900 -1993)

Wealthy British Powerboat Racer

Carstairs wore men’s clothing, covered her arms in tattoos, drove ambulances during World War I, and, in the 1920s, started a womens-only car-hire and chauffering service staffed by women she met working during the war.

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*Thelma Wood (1901-1970)

American Sculptor

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*Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992)

German-American Actress and Singer

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*Greta Garbo (1905 – 1990)

Swedish-born American Film Actress

Her 1933 film Queen Christina won critical acclaim and slayed at the box office, but censors were disturbed by a scene in which Garbo dressed like a man in order to kiss a woman she wanted to kiss.

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*Anna May Wong (1905-1961)

Chinese-American Movie Star

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*Valentine Ackland (1906-1969)

English Poet

Born “Mary” and nicknamed “Molly,” Valentine’s father raised her like a son, and as an adult, she cut her hair short, wore men’s clothing, and adopted an androgynous name in order to be taken seriously as a poet.

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*Josephine Baker (1906-1975)

American Entertainer, Activist and French Resistance Agent of African and Native American descent

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*Louisa D’Andelot Carpenter (1907-1976)

DuPont Heiress

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*Gladys Bentley (1907 – 1960)

American Blues Singer, Pianist and Entertainer

At Harry Hansberry’s Clam House, Bentley performed in her signature tuxedo and top hat, sang racy versions of popular songs in a gravely deep voice, and flirted with ladies in the audience.

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*Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003)

American Actress

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*Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954)

Mexican Painter

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*Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942)

Swiss Writer, Journalist, Photographer and Traveler

Sidenote, this woman is a fashion icon and I am obsessed with her.

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*Tiny Davis (1909-1994)

American jazz Trumpeter and Vocalist

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*Beverly Shaw (1910-1990)

Nightclub Singer

The successful torch singer / male impersonator bought her own club in North Hollywood, called Club Laurel, which succeeded as a popular upscale gay night spot for 14 years.

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*Babe Didrikson Zaharias (1911-1956)

American Athlete (golf, basketball, baseball, track & field), Olympic gold medalist

In addition to excelling at athletics, Babe was a fantastic seamstress who made her own golfing outfits and won the sewing championship at the Texas State Fair.

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*Esther Eng (1914-1970)

Chinese-American Film Director

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*Stormé DeLarverie (1920-2014)

Bouncer, Drag King, MC, Civil Rights Icon, Entertainer

99 Years Ago, a Queer/Trans Magazine Was Born — Nine Years Later, Fascism Killed It

feature image photo by suteishi via Getty Images

The subway ride from Potsdam to Berlin lasts around an hour. The S7 hugs the autobahn, but if you sit on the left side of the subway car, you can see the tall pines and trees with circular growths of mistletoe. It’s a parasitic plant, which I felt never tracked well with the romantic connotations it has around the holidays. From far away, though, the growths look like rounded bulbs, natural ornaments adorning the trees.

I am on my way to the Grimm Zentrum to see some originals of the early 20th century lesbian magazine Die Freundin [The Girlfriend]. I had seen this magazine in microfilm, studied and catalogued it from PDF scans scattered with unknown hairs and dust. This magazine had captured my imagination for three years, but I had yet to see it in person. In fact, I was a bit lucky to have this opportunity. The librarian had slit open one envelope filled with issues from one year of the magazine. She told me the issues were too delicate and she would not open any more envelopes. But, if I would like, I could see those from the one she had opened.

Die Freundin ran from 1924 to 1933, with some breaks in publication due to bans and censures. This happened to many magazines that dealt with queer and trans life during the Weimar era in Germany. Die Freundin was one of the most popular lesbian magazines of its time, and often it contained a special section for “transvestites.” This special section would discuss new laws around dress, medical advancements, or the best places to go for clothes and haircuts — places that wouldn’t ask too many questions.

The main section of the magazine contained short stories, serialized novels, poems, letters from readers, news stories, advertisements for clubs and bars, and personal ads. My dissertation focuses on the poems, but I always found myself flipping to the personal ads. I would wonder about the people who placed these ads. If I saw the same ad issue after issue suddenly stop, I would wonder: Did they find what they were looking for? Or did they give up? The magazine’s final issue came on March 8, 1933. There is no editor’s letter to inform readers this is the last issue. Indeed, the final article on corsets and trans people ends with the phrase, “Fortsetzung folgt” [To be continued]. A lie, but one the editors didn’t know was a lie. The Nazi government would go on to promptly shutdown all queer and trans publications days later.

The S7 pulls into the Friedrichstraße station. In the 1920s, the streets and alleys around this stop were common sites of sex work, frequented by queer men. Now, they are filled with cafés, restaurants, and tourist shops. I walk quickly. The November air cuts through me, and I hope the library will be warmer.

In the reading room, I exchange my library card for a heavy white envelope. The librarian indicates I should take a seat at one the of the tables, and the damp soles of my boots squeak loudly as I cross the room. I set the envelope down on the table, trying my best to not let it slip from my fingers while the librarian gazes at me from her desk. It’s a bound collection, hard cover, with the fake marble pattern of any good composition notebook. I wonder: who collected these? Who bound them together? Where did they find the issues? But I am more anxious to see the magazine, so I push these questions aside and open the cover.

I open the cover and see the originals. I do not know how to describe this moment. It was like coming home and simultaneously arriving at a strange place you’d only heard about from others.

The images are clean and crisp — not darkened by conversion to microfilm, not flecked with hair and dust from the scanning of microfilm to PDF. I can see the images of barely clothed women, where for the past three years I had only seen dark silhouettes. And, in a few images, someone had inked in with red pen the lips and nipples of some of the women — but who? Who had done this? I can feel the grittiness of the page. And here — someone had creased the page, folded it into four. I can imagine a magazine of this size, with images like this on the front cover, you might want to slip it into the pocket of your coat before taking it home. Are these creases from 1930? Or later? I trace them with my fingertips and imagine and continue to imagine.

I told Fulbright I needed to come and see these magazines because I was going to write about their materiality. To an extent, this is true. But I also just wanted to see them and feel and touch and remember that other queer and trans people might have touched these once, folded and slipped them into a coat pocket. The terminology and communities were different. I perhaps would have been unrecognizable to them with my queerness and transness, but I still long to know them.

I come across a poem from an author known only as Eny¹:

She loves only Emil

I can’t be like the others…
I really can’t, I’d rather remain alone!
I think, they are brutal, the guys…
What’s nice about such a pearl of a man?
First you’re conquered with all-out flattery,
Then Sundays sometimes you go dancing with one,
And he goes for your breasts and then kicks your bum to the curb,
And that might suit you all, you stupid idiots!

My Emil is different,
My Emil is kind!
She is in love with me
And never lets me down!
She is my everything!
No one can buy her, not even with money!
And on Sundays when I go out with Emil,
Then we really get away…
And when I go home with her,
The goodbye hurts before it comes.—

Oh, Emil, that’s a real man,
He comes at everything the right way.
How happy I am, that I have him!
Emil, my Emil, true until the grave!

(Year 6, Number 42)
October 15, 1930

The switch in pronouns — from she/her to he/him for Emil — is often what most notice about this poem. Emil does not fit well into categories of queerness or transness then or now. The poem makes such labeling difficult. However, this is not what brings me back to this poem time and time again after the trip to the archives.

I can’t help but think about the speaker of the poem, the “she” who only loves Emil. In a magazine often so full of lonely voices, longing for connection and recognition, here is a poem from the voice of a lover. She is our only access to Emil, and, though she may switch pronouns for her lover, she never calls him anything other than “Emil.” Emil spans the ambiguity and distance between ‘she’ and ‘he’; Emil is different and a “real man.” This name — the consistency of the name throughout the poem — indexes that which exceeds any distinct categories of the time: lesbian, virile homosexual, or transvestite. Emil’s name simultaneously contains the excess and is in excess.

What might such a loving perception provide us if we could also access it? Would I see you in all your rich complexity? Would you see me in the ways I long to be seen?

The scholar Heather Love once wrote that “[t]he experience of queer historical subjects is not safely distant from contemporary experience… [t]hat is to say, contemporary queer subjects are also isolated, lonely subjects—looking for other lonely people, just like them.” Love presents us with instances of, what some might call, “tainted” historical work — the personal intermingling with the study of the past. And yet, can the drive to return to the past, to engage with literatures and histories of the past ever not, in some way, be personal? The work I invest in, the stories I uncover and write on, the poetry I interpret, these are scholarly acts and tasks, but they are also me. And they are also potentially you. And they are also for the countless queer and trans subjects who may feel awfully alone and want an anchor in this world.

1 This translation from the original German is my own. The Forum Queeres Archiv München recently digitized many issues of Die Freundin, and the issue containing this poem can be viewed here: https://archiv.forummuenchen.org/objekt/die-freundin-1930-ausgabe-42/. 

Daisy Jones & the Six Offers a Stunning Tribute to Black Queer Love, Freedom, and Disco

When I started my research for this review, I was not necessarily surprised to see that everyone had already formed some strong opinions on Prime Video’s Daisy Jones & The Six (from Vulture: “Watching Daisy Jones & The Six is a bit like buying a Fleetwood Mac T-shirt from Urban Outfitters” / from Pitchfork: “The soundtrack… ends up sounding like a Broadway tribute”). The adaption of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2019 bestselling novel was pretty much guaranteed to spark clickbaity takes. For what it’s worth, I love both faux vintage band shirts and Broadway soundtracks, so Daisy Jones & the Six is extremely up my alley, even by the measurements of its harshest critics.

What I was surprised by, however, was how queer and Black the show ended up being when I least expected it.

Developed by (500) Days of Summer’s Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Webber, Daisy Jones admittedly does have a bit of an artificial sheen to it; if you’re looking for a raw depiction of 1970s rock, this is most certainly not it. But if you enjoy listening to Stevie Nicks while drinking white wine with smokey eyeshadow and caftans during July sunsets, I think you’ll find yourself at home in this fictionalized take on the rise and fall of Fleetwod Mac.

Daisy Jones uses a documentary-style narration to tell the story of the band, who became larger than life in the 1970s and promptly broke up after their singular record-breaking album and sold out national tour. In the 1990s, an off-screen filmmaker tries to understand what happened 20 years ago using on-camera interviews with the former band members. In practice, I found the framing device flattening and cheap. It comes across as a VH1 Behind the Music that you could’ve sworn you’ve seen that one time, but can’t quite put your finger on.

But there are cast members who transcend Daisy Jones’ narrative limitations. Namely, I haven’t been able to take my eyes off of Riley Keough as Daisy. And yes, I shouldn’t have necessarily been surprised to find out that she’s a nepo baby — Riley is Elvis’ granddaughter, if that didn’t ping for you right away — but as a Stevie Nicks stand in, she captivates. Does Daisy comes across as some sort of manic pixie soft-rock girl? Sure does! But Keogh at the helm, it’s hard to turn away.

Daisy’s best friend, Simone (Nabiyah Be), is the resident gay. The roommates are both trying to break in as singers, sharing a small Los Angeles apartment and spending their evenings watching TV on a tiny couch. At an industry party, Daisy catches Simone looking at Bernie (Ayesha Harris) across a patio. Simone, closeted, makes her way to Bernie and casually, not to draw any unwanted attention, Bernie pretty much hits on her right away.

Simone gets flustered and Bernie asks, “I’m sorry, did I read you wrong?”

Bernie is a 1970s stud in the finest form. All eyelashes and a buttery voice that could make any femme blush. Simone never stood a chance.

Bernie gives Simone a card to look her up in New York — where she promises that the club scene is much more open for people like them than what Simone will find in LA.

Simone leaves for NYC, in part at Daisy’s urging, early in the series. Daisy knew that her best friend could not find what she needed in Los Angeles. While I applauded Daisy’s uncharacteristic selflessness, as Daisy Jones continued, I’d resided myself to the fact that Simone had been written off entirely. I’m glad that I stuck around, because the return to Simone, this time as her own entity, wrapped up in her own unique Blackness and queerness, was well worth it.

Simone Jackson’s actually not gay in the original Daisy Jones & The Six novel. Though the book is written by Taylor Jenkins Reid, the same writer who wrote the incredibly popular and gay The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. and was adapted for the screen by Riese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production company — who also eloquently added queer storylines in its novel-to-screen adaption of Little Fires Everywhere for Hulu. And while not directly related to Simone’s storyline, noted bisexual Phoebe Bridgers is listed among the artists who helped bring Daisy’s music to life. Which is to say that while there are echoes of queerness throughout the production if you know where to look, the way Daisy Jones sharply comes into focus during last week’s “Track 7: She’s Gone” — where we finally pick up with Simone, now living in New York with Bernie — was such an unexpected delight.

Significantly, the picking back up of Simone’s chapter does not just separate the audience away from the rest of the (up to now, majority white) cast and into her own world — but also it dovetails with Daisy Jones & The Six’s departure from rock and into a brief, but poignant, exploration of disco. Dr. Jafari S. Allen, author of There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life, put it best: “The significance of the disco— the club or the bar — for Black gay communion… cannot be overstated, any more than can the centrality of the Black Christian church in the United States’ long civil rights movement.”

And so it’s fitting that it’s here, away from the whitewashed desert folk rock scene that had regulated her to a side character in Daisy’s chaos, and music producers that did not recognize what made her special, that Simone falls in love.

Of course, disco itself is often whitewashed and straight-washed, which has been written about with more frequency lately, especially within queer communities, but is always worth repeating. The genre became synonymous with John Travolta’s white polyester suit on the cover of Saturday Night Fever when in reality disco sprouted from an overlapping mosaic of working class, gay, Black and brown communities. A flashpoint that’s as ephemeral as it is long-lasting.

In New York City, where Simone finds herself after that multiple days long bus trip from Los Angeles, disco meant clubs like The Loft and The Sanctuary, which was housed in a former German Baptist church in midtown Manhattan. In describing The Sanctuary to the Village Voice over 20 years after its height, model Leigh Lee recalled, “it was supposed to be a secret, but I don’t know how secret it could have been when faggots and lesbians came out of church from midnight till sunrise.”

The addictive rapture, the pure gratification, of disco came from being around your own people, intertwined and sweaty, a dance floor that post-Stonewall was no longer restricted to straight couples (as if it ever was really theirs in the first place). DJ/producer Nicky Siano, who founded Manhattan’s The Gallery — where Grace Jones first debuted — said it succinctly, the club “becomes divine: a love epidemic.”

Or to quote Bernie, holding Simone’s hand while Simone’s hair is wrapped up, the two of them tucked in close together, safe, on Bernie’s sun drenched couch the morning after Simone had pulled away from her while the couple was perched on Bernie’s DJ stand and the crowd pulsed in unison to Simone’s voice through the speakers: “There’s always going to be somewhere where we have to be careful. But in the club, with our people? Baby.. c’mon. If we can’t dance there, where can we?”

Looking back on that time in her life from the 90s, directly to the camera, Simone notes that Bernie was right. She knew she was hiding. And she wasn’t ready to stop, so instead she put everything she was feeling into her music. Over the next few years, with Bernie as her producer, Simone becomes a Donna Summer-esque pioneer in disco. Together they become something of a queer power couple in the club scene in NYC and New Jersey, Simone crooning about being “a diamond under pressure” over synthesized beats as Bernie conducts her turntables like they were an orchestra.

But no matter where they went at the height of Simone’s fame, they always returned back to the same Black queer club where they started: “They knew what the song was really about.”

The Black, brown, queer patrons of clubs in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago weren’t the only people who understood the power embedded in whom disco was really for. As the 1970s waned, disco found itself squarely in the crosshairs of a culture war for the burgeoning conservatism in the decade to come.

Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl, who had been fired from his job at WDAI Chicago when the station made the switch to disco, became a loud voice the months leading up the infamous “Disco Demolition Night” protest. Dahl, who was only 24 year old at the time, noted that he didn’t feel “at home” in disco. And that was the whole thing, right? That it didn’t center white men like him. Dahl gathered over 50,000 people in White Sox Stadium on July 12, 1979. The crowd chanting “disco sucks” while tearing and burning records, before the event quickly turned violent, with 39 arrests before the night was over.

The cultural impact of the night’s long shadow still lives with us, much like disco itself. And here again we return to Dr. Allen:

“When they said ‘disco sucks’ — including the ‘Disco Demolition Night’ mob scaling the walls of their own treasured institution, Chicago ’s Comiskey Park, to blow up a crate of records on July 12, 1979 — they were (are) really saying: ‘Shut the fuck up already!’ ‘Go back where you came from!’ ‘All lives matter!’ They were trying to ‘make America great again’ and ‘stop the steal’ (of popular music and culture).”

Simone hasn’t had to deal with Disco Demolition Night and its aftermath — or at least, not yet, the final two episodes of Daisy and The Six drop this weekend on Prime Video, so we will see what happens. For now, she’s wrapped up Bernie, empowered in the little slice of queer utopia that they have found between beats and underneath the hot lights of dingy clubs and glittering disco balls.

When Daisy telegraphs her urgently about an emergency that means Simone has to travel to Greece (long story, but if you know Daisy, you already know that wherever she flutters, mayhem reigns), Simone doesn’t bat an eye before uprooting the safety of the life she’s built for herself once more. Except this time, something is different. This time Bernie opens up a suitcase right alongside her.

Whatever comes next, Simone won’t face it alone.

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More Reading (and Listening!)

When I began this article, I had a sense of what I wanted to talk about, but I had no idea that I would spend the next two days in a deep dive on Blackness, queerness, and disco. But I’m so grateful that I did. In case you’re the kind of nerd who enjoys extra homework, may I suggest:

• Disco: Past & Present (with The Clive Davis Institute’s Jason King) by DJ Louie XIV of the Pop Pantheon Podcast
• There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life by Dr. Jafari S Allen (and also by Dr. Allen, Until We Meet on the Dance Floor Again: A Playlist — an article that is directly cited in this piece multiple times)
• The Last Days of Gay Disco by Peter Braunstein for the Village Voice, also cited in this piece
• The Night Disco Died | The Racist & Homophobic “End” to Disco by Blk Girl Culture (once again, cited in this piece!)

Quiz: Which Actress From Early Hollywood’s Sapphic “Sewing Circle” Are You?

As discussed on this website at length in the past, there was a time in the 1910s – 1950s when a group of Hollywood players were being secretly a little bit gay behind the scenes, creating for themselves an intricate chart of hook-ups and flings and multi-year relationships that historians continue dissecting with great delight to this very day. Actress Alla Nazimova coined the term “Sewing Circle” to describe this cadre of women, and it sure did stick!

But whomst of these actors (and one writer who I had to include because no mention of the Sewing Circle would be complete without her) are you?

“I Don’t Want To Be Forgotten”

Black History Month is often focused on prolific members of the Black community throughout history who contributed to the world in the name of betterment, and while they are incredibly important to our community, we often overlook those who are still alive and continuing to make a difference. We know that much of the fight for LGBTQ+ liberation has largely been led by Black members of the community who often don’t get enough credit for their contributions. This year, the Autostraddle team decided to focus our Black History Month coverage on the Black elders who are still here and still doing the work.

We connected with Black elders through a partnership with SAGE, the world’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to improving the lives of LGBTQ+ older people. Founded in 1978 and headquartered in New York City, SAGE is a national organization that offers supportive services and consumer resources to LGBTQ+ older people and their caregivers. Autostraddle was honored to talk with five Black LGBTQ+ elders, and we’ll be publishing these interviews throughout the month of February. We welcome our readers to celebrate these members of the Black LGBTQ+ community with us, while they’re still here to be celebrated.

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Barbara Abrams works towards the betterment of LGBTQIA elders in New York City. Talking to her was like a warm hug. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Sa’iyda: Hi Barbara, thanks for your time today.

Barbara: Thank you so much for considering me for this call.

Sa’iyda: I’d love to know a little bit more about you, as a person. Maybe tell me a little bit about your childhood, your upbringing, and how it led you to the work you do and the person that you are now.

Barbara: My fantasies were television movies, like Annie Oakley. I always liked and was admired by women that fought back. They didn’t let a man push them around. In other stories on TV, the women were always catering to the man, no matter what he said. In reality, my mother was being beaten by men. I just felt like, that is my mother and I am going to save the day. Because I am not going to let this man, who doesn’t even smell right in my world, in my head, come to you. You let him come to you, you let him come in our house. But he’s not kind to you. And you said to me that if I ever get married one day, make sure I look at the man’s shoes. And they should be shiny, and they never should have holes in their socks. But every man she brought home, that’s how he looked.

Sa’iyda: Interesting.

Barbara: I said, “My God. I think she’s trying to save me, but she’s also afraid that I’ll make the wrong choice because she knows her choices are what they are. And she sees me, I’m her firstborn and I’m coming to save you.” I would come at those men with anything that I could find, that I knew would cause some bodily damage. And then that’s when I was just not afraid and saying, “You’re not going to continue to hit my mother the way you were doing. And I saw it, it’s not going to happen.” So I would hurt them. Well, I’d find things and I’d hide my weapons, my arsenal, I’d just hide it. And whenever that kind of situation occurred, I’d come out and the next thing my mother knows is I’m in the room and I’m wailing on someone.

That’s the way that happened, time and time again. And then after seeing that, Annie Oakley wasn’t really making it for me. I tried sitting with Gunsmoke, Miss Kitty was all right, but she wasn’t really doing it for me really. And then along came somebody named Mary Tyler Moore, and she lived in something called an apartment, in this place called New York. And I said, “I like the way this woman seems positive about herself, she knows what she wants and she lives alone. So living alone must be really nice.” So I decided… I was fresh out of high school and my mother and the neighbor next door wanted me somehow to marry the boy next door, which was the neighbor’s son.

I said, “Mommy, you want me to marry this boy next door?” I said, “I will kick his ass.” I cursed and that was a no-no. But that’s what I said. And she said, “You are going to marry that boy. He won’t beat you.” I said, “What? Mommy, who beats who around here?” So she just said, “Get in that house now and put on your good clothes.” Because we were obviously going to some kind of courthouse, because I don’t remember any of this. I was 18 or 19, fresh out of high school. And we did this. And then right after that, was Vietnam.

Sa’iyda: Oh wow, okay.

Barbara: I mean, he went right away, like the next day. In that day and age they drafted you by your first and last name, and his name was Abrams. So is mine. I kept the name. So he was off to the war and he would come back home on anything that was moving back to Florida. And to check on me, he would hide between houses across the street and all of that, to see if anybody was coming by. I couldn’t take the jealousy stuff. I had a dog, he used to kick the dog. I told him, “If you ever do that again… it just won’t be pretty. I don’t want to fight, but I will protect what I love. You know I don’t love you. You know that. You know this was your parent and my parent. This was their idea, it wasn’t mine.”

It just never got right for him. He couldn’t keep a job because he would tell his boss — my uncle told me this and then I eventually got it from him — that his wife was sickly and he had to leave the job because she had to go to the hospital.

Then I found out that he was doing this and I said, “I want to have a discussion with you, but you are not allowed to talk.” And he looked at me and he was getting ready to say something. I said, “If you say one word, you will never see me again and you’ll always wonder why.” So he didn’t say anything and I said, “I am going to leave you. I’m not going to tell you when, but I’m going to leave you. So I thought you should know that. It’s not like somebody abducted me or anything like that. There’s nothing here for me.” And he said, “But I don’t do anything.” I said, “It’s not you, it’s just that I don’t like you and I don’t love you.”

I was very straight up, I always have been. He looked at me like it wasn’t real and he went to work. And when he went to work, driving the car that we had, as soon as I saw the car turn the corner, I pulled my yellow steamer trunk from under the bed. I had purchased the trunk first and then I purchased five articles of new clothing. My mother always said to me, “Always know what you’re doing…” She was a good advisor, but she didn’t live the advice that she gave me. But she was a good advisor. She said, “Always be prepared to live your life for whatever you want.” I didn’t say, “Well, I didn’t want this.” I just said, “Thank you, Mommy.” I bought five articles of clothing, little by little, and put them in the trunk that was under the bed. And I washed my underwear that I had, that I owned, every night. Underwear and socks every day. So that everything was always clean, whenever that day or that moment came.

Sa’iyda: That you needed to go.

Barbara: Yeah. That’s how I live to this very day. If I’m going to do something, I never do it immediately, I think about it first. And then when I feel like I’m certain, no matter what, then I make that decision and I don’t need people to talk to me about anything. Because I’m sure about my life. I’m only talking about my life, doesn’t involve anyone else but me. So I like for people to not try to give me advice. I know who I am. I left, and about six months later, I saw a lawyer here in New York, and had the lawyer send him notifications that I’m asking for a divorce. And my mother gave me his phone number and I told him, “You need to sign those papers because I’m paying for the divorce and you don’t have to pay out of pocket anything.” Then that was that. Because there was never going to be anything different, never ever. And he said, “But I don’t want this, [I don’t want] anybody to think I did anything.” I said, “Listen, I’m telling you what you need to do and that’s it. I’m not going to talk to you long. I know you heard me, sign the papers.” He signed it and he sent them back, and I got a divorce. I still have the papers.

Sa’iyda: Wow.

Barbara: I’m just so excited about that. That’s years and years ago. He’s since died and they tried to get me to take his benefits from his death, as his wife. I said, “I am not your brother’s wife. And I never was. I don’t want things to be more complicated for your young mind. Just accept the fact that I was never his wife. Okay? I know he wanted me to be, but I’m not.” That was the end of it. When I came here [to New York], I asked my mother one day, abruptly to her, “Would you take me to the train station?” She said, “Yes, baby. When?” I said, “Now.” And she said, “Okay.” She didn’t ask me any questions because she knows how I live.

I’m dropped off at the train station, it comes into Penn Station. I see Macy’s when I come up to the street. I know [Mary Tyler Moore] lives around here somewhere. Just because in the movies of course, she threw her hat up—

Sa’iyda: Hat up in the air, right. Yes.

Barbara: So I said, “She lives around here somewhere. But that’s okay, I’ll see her eventually.” My first apartment was 110th Street at Central Park West. It was July of ’69. And that was the junkie era, where people were just bowing down, falling, almost to the street but never really landing. That junkie bow, that’s the name for it on the street. And I went into this building and I immediately asked the super of a building, “Do you have an apartment?” It was like $50 a month or $25 a month at that time. And you were brought up to this little small place and no windows or view or anything, but it didn’t matter. And the super said to me, “Ma’am, close your door young lady.” I said, “Get out of my apartment. You don’t tell me what to do.” Of course when he left and some crazy looking man passed, I might do it… I’m from Florida, we don’t lock anything.

Sa’iyda: You got to lock those doors in New York.

Barbara: I had to learn quick, but I had to learn my way. I saw the evidence that I needed to close that damn door. There was this crazy little man, who looked in at me, and I’m like, “This is my home. You don’t look at my home.” I closed the door, and when I did, I went to pull up the blind to look out the window — all I saw was a cement wall. Like in I Love Lucy or something. So I went out to just kind of figure it all out. Where am I? I sat on the bench at Central Park West and watched yellow taxis go by. I had never seen that many cars.

Sa’iyda: Coming from Florida, that had to be a huge culture shock.

Barbara: It was. But I was enjoying it. That’s the thrill I wanted. “Oh, look at all of these cars. Look at all these taxis. Wow, this is amazing.” And eventually, I found out what the Village was. I knew nothing, I’m just curious to find out about my life. What am I doing? I went to the Village and I used to sit on the street because this was the hippie era.

Sa’iyda: East Village or West Village?

Barbara: It was the West Village between West Village and Sixth Avenue. That side. Sit right there on the street and everybody with their bandanas around their heads, and punky, crazy looking clothes. Because I’m from Florida, everything’s got to be dressed right. I had to get me some jeans and look like everybody else. And start singing folk songs and all of that. So after that era, I went into the super dance era — it was David Mancuso, white guy from Yonkers, that came up with this idea of spinning music all at the same time in his apartment called The Loft. And all of the musical people, Diana Ross, all of these people used to be dancing right next to you. But it wasn’t about fan loving, it was about just dancing.

Sa’iyda: And having a good time.

Barbara: And having a good time. I’ve never been a drug person ever. I drank, I never, ever ordered beverages, I’ve never smoked cigarettes, I’ve never smoked anything. But I was around all of my friends that did smoke and I was the roller. I was the person that used an album cover and a card from a deck of cards, and faced off this big batch of… it looked like weed from a bush. And you rolled it up, crack it up, and used the card until the pieces that you were going to roll up in this tobacco was ready for whoever was going to smoke it to smoke it. I was always in a cloud — like the president [Clinton] said… somebody said he never inhales. But I was in it, so I had to be high to some degree.

Sa’iyda: You were around it, so there’s no way you weren’t.

Barbara: Well, around it because that’s who all of my friends were. Everybody smoked and did some kind of quaalude or something. And I just had fun all the time. Just danced day and night, until I got older. Then you just slow it down and then you go to parties. A friend at the time used to give parties by the World Trade on Sundays. You go there from three o’clock in the afternoon until 11pm that night.

And you just danced. You danced the whole time. Dance was like heaven to me. And then you grow some more, you mature more. I still worked, the job that I had at that time was at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I had a responsible position — I’m proud of myself for doing all this. I didn’t have a college degree. I earned one, my job paid for it in full.

As long as I had an A performance, they paid for it. So I’m just proud of myself because everything I ever did, in terms of living your life and taking care of yourself appropriately and being financially able to sustain your life and your choices, I did that for myself.

Sa’iyda: So when did you figure out or have inklings, or fully understand, that you were gay?

Barbara: Just before I left Florida, the woman I call my best friend, lived down the street. Her sister was gay. She used to come back and forth home, whenever she felt like it. And it’s the way she dressed and the way she walked down the street. People would pull back the curtain, my mother and her sisters, anybody else that was an adult. I’m not allowed to look at what they’re looking at, because I’m a child.

But I saw her and I was impressed with how she carried herself. Because she knew, had to know everybody was peeking. It’s Florida, it’s a neighborhood. You know that’s what people do.

She wouldn’t care. She’d just give a walk, she’d give a performance for the eyes. And she’d just do her walk thing. And I just thought it was so classy and just so elegant. I just said, “I like that.” And one day I’m sitting on the steps, you can call them stoops or you can call them steps, of my home, and she passed by. Because I had moved from my mother’s house, I had my own house. And I’m sitting there, playing with my puppy and she said, “Hi.” And I said, “Hi.” And she said, “Can I come over?” I said, “Of course.” And she came over and she sat on the steps with me. And she just said, “So how long have you been living here?” I said, “Not that long. I always lived with my mother down the street.” We were just doing fly-by-night talk. All of a sudden, she kissed me.

Sa’iyda: Oh!

Barbara: Yes. She just abruptly kissed me. I don’t know, maybe she saw something I didn’t even know yet. And I said, “I think you better go home.” And she said, “Okay.” Her mother had built on the side of their home, an apartment for her just to live her own private life. So I went inside because my mother always preached to me… My mother’s very spiritual, very holy and all of that. And I was just the opposite.

So I went in the house, my home, and I sat on the bed and I looked in the mirror, and I waited for an hour. What I was waiting for was for a fang to fall out of my mouth and I’d become monstrous looking, and not recognize myself as a demon. If you did things like that woman, you become monstrous by God. Gave me one more reason to think God ain’t right. So after waiting an hour, I felt that was sufficient.

I didn’t see any distortions of myself. So I went to this woman’s house and I said, “It’s Barbara.” She opened the door and I did to her what she was doing to me. I don’t know where that came from, but I knew it just felt comfortable and it felt right. And then I said, “Okay, I got to go.” And then the next thing I knew, I was trying it out on another friend, who was married to this guy.

We were talking and we were in her bedroom window. Leaning in the window, both of us, looking at children playing. And it was in the afternoon, late, and she turned… We were very close in body, in this window. And she turned and she looked at me, and I looked at her and we had eye contact. And neither one of us was removing ourselves from that eye contact. So I took the lead because I felt like I’d kissed my best friend’s sister—

Sa’iyda: You already kind of felt comfortable at that point.

Barbara: I felt very comfortable at that moment. I kissed her and she liked it. She told me, she said, “I like the way that felt.” I said, “Oh, you did? You want to do it again?” She said, “I’m scared.” I said, “Well, let me know when you’re not scared.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll leave.” And when I saw her again, she told me she was afraid I’d come back to Florida. She told me she was afraid that she wanted to see me. We had an intimate encounter. And she said she was in love. I’m like, “Oh. You can’t. You can’t be in love. I don’t even know about this part yet. But that can’t be right.” So I said, “Think about it and we’ll talk the next time I come.”

Sa’iyda: You’re exposing them to something they had no idea about.

Barbara: So now I’m back in New York again and I had met two different guys on two different occasions. This one guy, and he looked like a bodybuilder, but when it came time to want to be intimate with me, because he did all the poses and all of that, I’m like, “Oh my God. Look at this guy. There’s no way I could be with him. I just can’t do it.” I could never feel anything toward a man. I could like him as a person, that looked nice and handsome, but I could never… You can’t touch me. So I just accepted the fact that I truly was gay. I had to be gay. That was my acceptance of myself. I made an announcement in my own head that I was a gay woman.

Sa’iyda: And did you have the language and understanding of what that meant, at that time?

Barbara: I knew that it meant I like women. I like the same sex as myself, because that’s the way I explained it to my mother. I had her come to New York, to know where I lived, and to see where I lived, so that she’d know that I was fine. And there was no trouble or reason for her to worry about me taking care of myself. She said, “I want you to have a grandbaby for me. I want a grandbaby.” I said, “Well Mommy, you have to talk to Lamar…” That’s my brother. “About that. Maybe he can have you some grandbabies because I like women.” She says, “Lord, have mercy Jesus. Barbara Jean.”

So I’m just looking at her and I said, “Mommy, what do you think?” She said, “You just can’t go around having sex.” I said, “Do you think that’s what gay is?” And she said, “Isn’t that what it is?” I said, “No, it isn’t. I haven’t even had sex yet, but I’m sure it’s coming. I don’t know what it is. How you really get into it. I don’t know any of that. I just know I like women and I will not be having any children because I will not have an encounter with a man.” And she said, “Lord, have mercy Jesus.”

She just didn’t know how to accept that, but she knew that I made her life comfortable. That’s what she knew for sure. So she just decided to go smoke her cigarette.

Sa’iyda: You put her outside. I love it. So, how did you become an activist and how did you do the work where you speak about your experience?

Barbara: Because I’ve been to many centers where socially, people gather as LGBTQ people, like GRIOT Circle. Once I retired, I knew the woman that started the place called GRIOT Circle, Regina Shavers is her name. She’s deceased. But I felt like I needed to give back by giving my body and time, and energy, and my knowledge about just life in general as a principal status, by being there. I had the time. I didn’t have anything that I had to do, I could be there every day. And because of the type of person that I am, if I’m going to give you my time, I’m going to give you my time a hundred percent. And the people there, where I was a volunteer, saw that. And the next thing I knew, I was having responsibilities. I’m like, “Wait a minute. I shouldn’t be having keys to the office. I shouldn’t be taking money to deposit in the bank. I shouldn’t be having this responsibility. These are employees who have responsibility.” They liked the way I function.

And all those things mattered. If something had to be cleaned, it was cleaned properly. If something was broken, it was fixed properly. Things just had to be right, they could not be shabby. In the beginning, we started with one room, in the YWCA here in Brooklyn. And then we went from there to a big functioning building, to the fifth floor. And that’s where I was spending all of my time, there. So little by little, when people would come in to socially benefit from this senior place, they’d come in with knowledge from anywhere, varying places. And that was also helpful. So whenever I’m anywhere, I talk about the conditions of things that I know, living from this position of how I live my life.

Sa’iyda: Right. And how did you get involved with SAGE?

Barbara: I saw them someplace. I think I was probably working, again, volunteering with GRIOT Circle and SAGE came into place. And then it became a partnership. So therefore, I joined SAGE. And then if something else was around, promoting themselves as LGBTQ+, I joined that too. I join everything. And this way, I’m over here for a minute, I’m over there for a minute, but I’m consistently doing the same thing. I don’t want to be forgotten.

Sa’iyda: Why is it important to you, not only to do these things but to, as you say, not be forgotten?

Barbara: Enough of us don’t promote ourselves because we’re still hung up behind the wall. We hung up behind that curtain. Young people are not, older people still hide.

Sa’iyda: Why do you think that is?

Barbara: Because of society. They don’t want to be judged in a stereotypical way, the way my neighbor asked me, “Are you gay?” And saying, “I didn’t know. I didn’t see you that way.” We deal with politics every day. So you don’t need people that are just like you, in the same manner, to make life rough. We don’t need that. So just be respectful.

Sa’iyda: Yeah. Well, we have been talking for just about an hour, so I am going to let you go on with the rest of your day.

Barbara: It feels like it’s been 10 minutes.

Sa’iyda: I know. I just looked at the time, I was like, “Oh my goodness. We have been talking for almost an hour.” But this has been absolutely lovely and enlightening, and I appreciate your time so very much.

Barbara: Well, it’s been terrific talking to you. Thank you very, very much.

We Should Engage With LGBTQ History All Damn Year

If there’s one thing I wish more people, especially people outside of movement spaces, would do, it’s engage with the works of movement workers, activists, writers, and artists of the past more frequently than only on the days and in the months we’ve designated as the “time to do so.”

There has not been any better time in history for us to interact with literature, artworks, photographs, love letters, journals, video recordings, audio recordings, and so many other types of materials from the queer people who made our lives possible than right now, and yet it always feels as if many queer people are not or cannot take full advantage of this great privilege. I do think the inability to sift through these materials is more structural and systemic than anything else. And I also fear that like so much of the rest of American and “Western” culture that wants to turn its back on history in favor of moving towards some glittering future, many people — even those of us who owe our existence to the work of so many who came before us — have a difficult time seeing the value in learning from the work of the past. But in order to actually build that bright future we want so badly, we desperately need to.

The work included in the anthology OutWrite: The Speeches That Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, edited by Julie R. Enszer and Elena Gross, perfectly exemplifies the reasons why it’s so imperative to look back at history with the willingness to be impacted by whatever we learn. The speeches and performances collected in the anthology were part of a short-lived LGBTQ literary conference for writers and publishers called OutWrite that took place throughout the 1990s. The conference first took place in San Francisco in 1990, then made its home in Boston the following year until it was no longer possible to keep it going after the last conference in 1999. A couple of years were skipped due to financial constraints, so they managed to hold a total of seven conferences. OutWrite featured a variety of events, including keynote addresses by famous LGBTQ writers and publishers, panels on various subject matter pertaining to LGBTQ writers, plenary sessions, performances by LGBTQ artists, and other, less formal social events.

Enszer and Gross write in their introduction to the anthology that by 1996, the OutWrite planning committee had outlined the purpose of the conference as “fulfilling four functions: first, as ‘a community-based conference with a strong commitment to a progressive, grass-roots political vision’; second, as a ‘vital site for queers in the publishing industry to meet, deal, network, and do business’; third, as an event that creates space ‘where established authors are celebrated and where new authors are discovered’; and finally, as a ‘forum for political discussion and a venue for the mainstream publishing marketplace’.”

Although OutWrite was open to queer people and publishers of all kinds, it’s described in the introduction — and evident in the kinds of speeches that are included in the anthology — that the conference was an incredibly progressive space, one that not only fostered and encouraged radical and leftist thinking but helped some people discover this kind of thinking was possible in the first place.

The anthology itself is organized chronologically, not thematically, though some themes do come up in nearly all of the speeches, given the fact that progress doesn’t happen nearly as quickly as it should. Of course, all of the speeches address the realities of being queer, being a writer, and being a queer writer in the 1990s, but many of them also address other issues within and outside the LGBTQ community such as racism, sexism, the class divide, HIV and AIDS, surviving as an artist in a capitalist world, the place of the writer in the struggle for liberation, and the community responsibility of queer writers in the late 20th century. Since the anthology includes pieces from some of the most important queer writers and activists in contemporary history, it would be impossible in this review to give a full picture of the genius, righteous rage, and calls to action that exist within these pages but I’m going to at least highlight some of the works that really spoke to me.

Sitting on a panel called “AIDS and the Responsibility of the Writer” together during the first OutWrite in 1990, Sarah Schulman and Essex Hemphill delivered powerful talks on how writers and artists should respond in times of great inequity and injustice. Schulman’s talk discusses how and why she decided to write her 1990 novel, People in Trouble, on the realities of the AIDS crisis and how writers need to move their politics beyond the page in order to actually help create meaningful change in our society. She states, “We live in the United States of Denial, a country where there is no justice. The way we get justice is by confronting structures that oppress us in the manner that is most threatening to those structures. That means in person as well as in print.” In Hemphill’s part of the talk, he directly criticizes white gay men for not doing more to combat racism in the queer community and discusses the damage done to Black gay men by white gay artists, specifically Robert Mapplethorpe, in order to illustrate the fact that the gay community isn’t as much of a community as it claims to be: “The best gay minds of my generation believed that we speak as one voice and dream one dream, but we are not monolithic. We are not even respectful of each other’s differences. We are a long way from that, Dorothy. I tell you, Kansas is closer.”

The keynote addresses from OutWrite 1992 given by Mariana Romo-Carmona and Dorothy Allison address the importance of writing as truth-telling but in their own crucial and extraordinary ways. In Allison’s address, “Survival is the Least of My Desires,” she challenges the idea that queer people must be relegated to mere survival and implores the audience to not gloss over the harshness of existing in a world that is trying to erase LGBTQ voices from the historical record:

“We need our romances — yes, our happy endings. But don’t gloss over the difficulties and rewrite the horrors. Don’t make it easier than it is and soften the tragedies. Don’t pretend we are not really murdered in the streets or broken in the darkened bedrooms of the American family. We need the truth. And yes, it is hard when fighting for your life and the lives of those you love to admit just how daunting that fight can be; to acknowledge how many of us are lost, how many destroyed; to pick apart the knots of fantasy and myth that blunt our imaginations and stalk our hopes for families in which we can trust each other and the future. But if I am to survive, I need to be able to trust your stories, to know that you will not lie even to comfort […] Tell me the truth and I make you a promise, If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine. That’s what writers do for each other.”

Romo-Carmona takes a different approach in her address, “The Color of My Narrative,” and calls on the audience to imagine the colonization of North and South America, reminding them that much of what they know about it comes directly from a purposely distorted view of history. She explains that it is the duty of writers and storytellers to untangle themselves from these distortions and presses the audience by saying, “As writers, we have a choice: to perpetuate the lies or tell the truth. The lies are composed of censorship, exclusion, deliberately twisting history to support the Eurocentric view. As people whose human rights are threatened, it behooves us to support, encourage, and protect in all ways the telling of the truth with the potential to liberate us all.”

As the OutWrite conferences went on, there was more of an emphasis on ensuring there was space for Black writers, writers of color, and antiracist writers and activists to discuss the ongoing divides between the Black and of color queer communities and the white queer communities that were represented at the conference. During her keynote address at the 1995 OutWrite conference, Linda Villarosa confronts white LGBTQ people head-on by explaining some of the ways in which they continuously fail queer Black people and people of color, illustrating some of the ways she’s been involved in the struggle for racial justice. She ends her address with a call to action that feels exceptionally prescient in this current moment:

“I want to encourage you to take your talents as writers and activists and do something and do it right now. Now is the opportunity because we are in the midst of a real life crisis, and to use a medical metaphor, we got a fever. Now there’s a fever, and a fever signals illness, but it’s usually a good sign that the body is trying to fight. The body is trying to fight back, fight for its life. And that’s what we have to do. We have to fight for our political lives. We have to fight now. We have to fight for the lives of ourselves, and we have to fight for the lives of others, and by others, I’m talking about otherness in a very broad sense. That means we have to take these stories that we have, and we have to tell them from the heart and from the gut.”

While they are all worth reading, my absolute favorite piece from the anthology is Minnie Bruce Pratt’s keynote address at the 1996 OutWrite conference. Pratt’s talk begins with her describing a memory of watching a mockingbird outside of her window as a young girl and then quickly expands its view to what it was like growing up in Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s. The emphasis of the talk is on the idea that the world around us makes us believe it has control over our ability to use our imaginations and our imagining of what the world should look like but in actuality, our unjust society doesn’t have that much control. Pratt reminds the audience they have the power within them to shape the reality they’re a part of and present that potentiality to others. She explains, “In the grip of violence and condemnation, despite loneliness and isolation, we gather ourselves up and fight back and find each other, to love and be loved. We affirm the human dignity of our pleasures; we bless our gift of crossing man-made boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality. […] And it’s true — we don’t have a choice about who we love. But we do have a choice about how we live. The writing of our lives visibly, audibly, visually into the daily chronicle of this world does have an effect on the world. We give others an imagined possibility: that there is a way, many ways, to walk through the invisible confining walls and find the others.”

By the end of the anthology, the impact of the OutWrite conference on the world of LGBTQ literature and even the broader category of LGBTQ art is extremely obvious. But beyond that, the speeches and performances in this anthology — as well as the OutWrite conference itself — are vital and vibrant pieces of LGBTQ history that should be experienced by all queer people, especially those of us living in the U.S. This collection of voices from all over the spectrum of queer experiences gives us insight into the struggles of the queer writers and artists who came before us but also helps put into perspective the fights we’re embroiled in now. Although we’ve experienced some significant milestones over the years — such as repealing the Defense of Marriage Act and achieving civil rights protections for LGBTQ people in some states — the truth is that the issues addressed by many of the speakers at OutWrite who are included in this anthology are exactly the same. This collection not only gives us some more wisdom with which to continue our battles against systemic oppression, but it also proves over and over and over again how critical it is for us to face history head on: because we still have so much work to do inside and outside of the LGBTQ “community.” And while the speakers at OutWrite might not have all of the answers for how we can successfully do this work, their perspectives on our duties in fighting these battles are invaluable.

“Mother Has Lived, What Can I Say?”

Black History Month is often focused on prolific members of the Black community throughout history who contributed to the world in the name of betterment, and while they are incredibly important to our community, we often overlook those who are still alive and continuing to make a difference. We know that much of the fight for LGBTQ+ liberation has largely been led by Black members of the community who often don’t get enough credit for their contributions. This year, the Autostraddle team decided to focus our Black History Month coverage on the Black elders who are still here and still doing the work.

We connected with Black elders through a partnership with SAGE, the world’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to improving the lives of LGBTQ+ older people. Founded in 1978 and headquartered in New York City, SAGE is a national organization that offers supportive services and consumer resources to LGBTQ+ older people and their caregivers. Autostraddle was honored to talk with five Black LGBTQ+ elders, and we’ll be publishing these interviews throughout the month of February. We welcome our readers to celebrate these members of the Black LGBTQ+ community with us, while they’re still here to be celebrated.

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I don’t talk about it enough, but I feel very strongly about intergenerational queer relationships. I have queer friends and community members in their fifties and sixties and older, and I cherish those relationships so deeply. It’s invaluable to have a friend who has been through what you’ve been through and more, and can impart some wisdom and hope.

So, when the idea of interviewing an LGBTQ elder was presented to us, I was really excited and jumped at the chance. This excitement grew tenfold when I first emailed DonnaSue to schedule our interview. Just from our brief exchange, I could tell she was serious, vibrant, and whip-smart. When we both logged into the video chat, my nerves were eased as I was greeted by her face.

DonnaSue Johnson describes herself as a “big, black, beautiful, Bohemian, bougie, Buddhist butch.” She was born in 1956 in South Jersey, to policeman Donald Johnson and mother Sue, hence DonnaSue.

“I had a great childhood. I truly, truly did. I was born the same day my grandfather died, my maternal grandfather, who was a physician and a civil rights activist,” she says. “He went to Lincoln University with Thurgood Marshall and Langston Hughes.”

DonnaSue’s life is full of historical tidbits like this. Her father’s father was a Buffalo soldier and a reverend. Her family has a rich history, and her own life is just as interesting. She shares with me that her family was very academically focused, and that academic excellence was embraced in the home.

DonnaSue recounts one story in which her brother ran home from a day of school crying and asked “Mommy, didn’t we [Black people] do anything?” and after that moment the family bought the Black History Encyclopedia and began to learn Black history together. DonnaSue says that she is still to this day learning Black history, and we briefly talk about American civil rights activist and lawyer Pauli Murray.

DonnaSue excelled in school, and eventually made her way to college, attending the HBCU Virginia State College, now University. She says that this was a way to get the Black experience, having grown up in a predominantly white area of New Jersey.

“I majored in special education. My mom was a special ed teacher. My grandmother was an early childhood educator. I think I mentioned my grandfather. My paternal grandfather was the physician for the black community in Burlington County,” says DonnaSue. “But he also was the first president of the NAACP for Burlington County in New Jersey. I was in a marching band. I played basketball, softball, tennis. I pledged Delta.”

After graduating, DonnaSue says she was a part of Black organizations like Jack and Jill, and also was a debutante, she jokes:

“Mom tried her best to get this butch out!”

After getting her degree in teaching, DonnaSue says that career path didn’t work out for her, so she decided to enlist in the Air Force. She went into officer training school to become an officer instead of the other routes into the Air Force at the time: ROTC, academy, or 90-day programs. Her schooling took place in San Antonio, Texas.

DonnaSue and I don’t talk a lot about this time in her life.

“It’s hard to talk about this part of my life because I am a one-hundred percent disabled vet. I suffered from military sexual trauma and PTSD, and major depressive disorder, but I didn’t even know what was going on,” she says. “I didn’t recognize it until decades later. I just kept on pushing pushing pushing.”

Throughout my talk with DonnaSue, even in the moments where we are talking about something serious or heavy, she always finds a way to bring gravitas and a lightness to the topic. She always has a joke or a saying that eases the tenser parts of our talk. I learn that after the Air Force, she went into social work for 40 years.

She says her favorite gig was “emergency psychiatric crisis intervention” in an emergency room setting. There, she would determine the level of care for each person on an individual basis. Back when she started, the levels varied from, to use her words, “I give you a card and say, ‘bye, call as you need’” to “the most restrictive which would be taking away your civil rights and forcing you into treatment on a commitment status because you’re a danger to self and others.”

“We were working to assist folks in having an opportunity to live and get better with whatever they were dealing with,” she says.

I can tell what this job meant to DonnaSue just from talking to her. At times, she’s on the verge of tears remembering working with families or individuals.

Now, DonnaSue works with SAGE, the oldest and largest advocacy organization aimed toward the care of LGBTQ elders. SAGE is based in New York, where DonnaSue lives now, but also has nationwide programs.

Having worked for SAGE for more than eight years now, DonnaSue says the pandemic definitely shifted how they administered care to the elders they serve. SAGE shifted to a hybrid level of care to make sure elders had their basic needs met as well as their social needs.

At SAGE DonnaSue leads many groups, one of which is called America’s Burning, where in 2020 they covered the three P’s: Politics, Pandemic, and Protest.

“We had a community of LGBTQ seniors, mostly Black lesbians, who were these women who are so intelligent and bright. They were on top of their games in terms of wanting to know about what was going on,” she says.

The group covered topics like the Tulsa massacre and many other massacres that happened to Black Americans, and most recently covered Pauli Murray’s work.

DonnaSue says she was out during her time in the military, before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a policy. She says it was like a “witch hunt.” Stationed at Travis Air Force Base between Sacramento and San Francisco, DonnaSue recounts her first gay day parade with Sister Boom Boom and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

She says in those days, during the AIDS crisis, she was doing a lot of dating despite messaging that “lesbians don’t get AIDS,” a phrase that makes her roll her eyes.

“I’ve read ‘And The Band Played On,’ read the pages, and I’m like, ‘oh my god, I was there. I was there.’ As much drinking, drugging, fucking, and sucking that I was doing in my twenties, imagine if I was a man? I might not be here.”

In the time we had together, we didn’t get into all the juicy tidbits about DonnaSue’s dating life that I wanted to, but she tells me she’s single now after having a long-term partnership end, and regales me with the story of the 10-year polyamorous relationship she had with a married couple.

The couple had three children that called her “Aunt Donna,” and they still keep in touch to this day despite the relationship ending. She still remembers birthdays and big days for the family.

“Mother has lived, what can I say, Dani?” she laughs.

We talk much more about DonnaSue’s social worker, and she tells me about getting her Masters at Fordham University, and becoming a workaholic who didn’t have time to really process the trauma she experienced in the military.

She was a part of the first ACT team in Jersey. ACT stood for Assertive Community Treatment, and there was also PACT (Program of Assertive Community Treatment) where she saw clients who had dual diagnoses, like those that struggled with mental health and substance abuse disorders. She says it wasn’t uncommon to hear:

“Excuse me, can I please continue getting high because that helps the voices?”

“Basically, my modus operandi was ‘Do you want a cup of coffee and a piece of pie,’” she says, and you get the sense that DonnaSue deeply cared for every person she encountered during her 40 years in social work. Even though she must have seen hundreds of people, it feels like she knew them all and brought them all the highest form of care she could.

“I’ve worked with a lot of seriously and persistently mentally ill people who are also co-occuring disordered, which means they were mentally ill and chemically addicted,” she explains. “I love the job. Most recently, I was working for an adult day healthcare center for adults that had HIV and AIDS, mental illness, and chemical addiction. That was a magnificent job. You see a lot of death because folks, for whatever reason, they weren’t adherent, they weren’t compliant with their medications. Some are still with us thank goodness.”

We also talk about Buddhism, and how it has served as a place to find peace in difficulty for DonnaSue. She says that she learned that most obstacles are brilliantly disguised blessings. And that when you look at it this way, a firework goes off in your head, and that’s when you can look for solutions, options, strategies, and answers.

“I’m here to say, ‘Be you, be yourself, Celebrate whatever you want to do. It’s important.’ When I say everything happens for the best, my grandmother taught me that way before I became a Buddhist. As I got older, I said. ‘What about death? What’s good about death?’ and I figured two things out. Number one, it teaches us how precious life is. As we move forward in life and all the different decisions we have to make, always remember, life is precious. You’re going to make it.”

“The other thing is, if anyone tells you you got plenty of time, they are not a reliable source of information. It’s a bald-faced lie when someone says you have plenty of time. Look at how you were on your game today making sure we connected. This time is precious.”

At 66, DonnaSue says she is working on a project for TEDx and a 501(c)(3). She’s also working on a presentation for Yale University. She’s got irons in the fire and wants other lesbian elders to know that it isn’t too late for them, that you’re never too old to get things started for yourself.

DonnaSue also ends our talk with a little wisdom that I needed, and I hope if you need it too you can hear it.

“In our community, in the Black community, so many of us have had childhoods where we were taught by our guardians that what is said and done in the house, stays in the house. That’s what they learn and then they pass it on, it’s generational. But there’s no need to suffer anymore. There’s no need to suffer anymore. Talk therapy helps, sometimes medication is needed. Talk to somebody. It’s safe. Find somebody that works.”

We end our talk with plans to keep in touch with one another, and I’m so excited and grateful for the opportunity to get to know DonnaSue. Everything she said was something I needed to hear or made me laugh out loud on a day when I didn’t feel like laughing. It was a pleasure and an honor and I hope you love getting to know her a little more too!

Why Do Lesbian Bars Keep Disappearing?

Feature image by NoSystem images via Getty Images

On a recent episode of the research and education oriented arts and culture podcast I co-host, Fat Guy, Jacked Guy, I brought attention to something I think more people should care about and that’s been on my mind a lot: the gradual disappearance of lesbian bars here in the U.S.

LGBTQ history is an area that I considered myself very well-versed in, but when I began the research for that episode, I realized I didn’t know as much about the contemporary reasons (and excuses made) for their disappearances as I thought. I’ll admit my own experiences with lesbian bars is amateur-ish at best. I don’t have a long, personal history of going to lesbian bars, because of some of the reasons I’ll get into here, but also because of where I grew up and have lived my whole life.

I came out as gay to myself and to my friends when I was 14-years-old, and in response, some of them ended up coming out, too. Being young and queer in 2002 was a truly surreal experience. Although we were able to use the internet to gather resources and make some connections to other young queer people, there wasn’t really an easy or accessible way for us to truly learn more about ourselves, about the history of people like us, and about being queer in general. Often, we had to listen to people from BOTH SIDES, not just the far right or the moderate left, openly question and debate whether or not queer people deserved to be as protected under the law as they were. We had “allies,” of course, but that didn’t make things much easier when your high school history teachers were allowing kids to openly debate the merits of “same-sex” marriage in class. In addition to that, we had very few — almost none, actually — models of what it looked like to be a healthy and successful queer person in mainstream media.

My queer friends and I did have one slight, unusual advantage, though. Not too far away from where most of us lived, there was and still is a small “gay village” called Wilton Manors situated just north of downtown Ft. Lauderdale (actually, we did an episode on this, too, if you’re interested). Wilton Manors is the first place where I ever saw gay people in real life just acting like their gay ass selves. Men on the streets holding hands, wearing leather and bondage gear, kissing on street corners. Mostly men, though. Sometimes women, but rarely, and usually, it was because they were hanging out with a larger group of guys. There weren’t a lot of people of varied gender experience, either, which I guess speaks to both the time and the way the neighborhood used to be. But it was what we had, and by the time we were old enough to drive, we were hanging out in the coffee shops and, eventually and illegally, hanging out in the gay bars of Wilton Manors as much as we could.

There was one lesbian bar in Wilton Manors, but by the time it gained popularity, our trips to the strip were getting more and more sparse. By the end of the early 2000s, there were tons of clubs and parties at clubs that were definitely borderline queer but open to everyone popping up in South Florida. Overall, they were “cooler” and younger-leaning than the bars in Wilton Manors and the long-running gay clubs on South Beach, so we started going to these mixed spaces a lot more. I didn’t actually end up going to my first lesbian bars until a couple years later on a trip to NYC, where in one weekend, some friends and I went to both the legendary Cubbyhole and to Ginger’s. Those spaces were much different from what I’d experienced back home. People were more radical, more gender exploratory, more punk, more like me and my friends. After that trip, I was jealous that they had a brick and mortar place to go to every weekend, when we had to follow parties and queer nights that bounced from venue to venue every few weeks or didn’t happen at all.

Those parties and queer nights I mentioned are still pretty much a mainstay in South Florida, but New Moon closed in 2014, and many of the remaining gay bars are, as they always have been, basically for men. It’s really tempting and compulsory to look at this as a distinctly South Florida problem, but  it isn’t. It’s an everywhere problem.

Before we get to the end though, I think it’s important we take a step back and examine how we got here in the first place. Let’s jump into some dyke history, shall we?

A short history of the American lesbian bar

I think it’s important to situate the development of the lesbian bar within the broader context of American social history. As we all know, cis women have never enjoyed the same freedoms as men, and in the first half of the 20th century especially, there weren’t many places outside of the domestic sphere where women could come together with other women. So, you can imagine the empowerment that comes with being in a space devoid of cis men, which lesbian bars frequently were. Since the inception of the lesbian bar, these spaces have often been more than just a watering hole for queer women. Many lesbian bars throughout the 20th century served as places for women to gather to do community organizing work, to take care of each other, to get healthcare, and to just generally help out the communities where the bars were located. In these spaces, women of all ages were able to come together and build community and camaraderie in a way they couldn’t in any other place. This is not to say that lesbian bars have always been sites of resistance against white supremacist, heteronormative culture, but I do think it’s important to point out that community formation and support was an important part of their function in queer culture and society, even if the members of that community weren’t as revolutionary as we wish they were.

It’s widely accepted that the first lesbian bar to open in the U.S. was Mona’s 440 Club in San Francisco, California in 1936. According to Nan Alamilla Boyd’s book, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965, Mona Sargeant and her husband, Jimmie, originally established Mona’s as a “bohemian” spot to take advantage of the ending of prohibition and the ever-expanding culture of tourism growing in the San Francisco area. It was mostly open to writers, artists, and sexual “deviants” of any flavor but quickly became well-known for its mostly female staff, clientele, and popular drag king shows after Mona and Jimmie noticed a desire for more clubs of this persuasion in the area. In archival material from Mona’s bar, including ashtrays printed with the logo, Mona’s advertised itself as a place where “Girls could be boys.” Many of the performers at Mona’s were butch women, often performing to a mixed audience of butch and femme women, “straight” women, and gay men. Mona’s clientele was interesting because it was frequented by lesbians and also by supposedly straight women whose husbands were away at war. Many of the performers at Mona’s were butch women, like the legendary Gladys Bentley, often performing to a mixed audience of butch and femme women, “straight” women, and gay men. Mona’s 440 Club stayed open — eventually changing ownership to Ann Dee who changed the name to Ann’s 440 Club — until the late 1950s. And while it’s certainly true that Mona’s broke barriers and influenced the opening of bars like it across the U.S., calling it the “first lesbian bar” is actually somewhat historically inaccurate.

Because the Prohibition of the 1920s drove all bars to go “underground,” there’s a lot of queer bar history that either wasn’t well-documented or is just not very well-known. Mona’s 440 Club might have been the first official lesbian bar, but the first-documented bar-like hang out for lesbians, Eve’s Hangout, actually opened 12 years before Mona’s 440 Club in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Eve’s Hangout wasn’t technically a bar because it wasn’t allowed to be, but it was established specifically as a “tearoom” for women (of course, it was more specifically for lesbians), immigrant writers and artists, and Jewish people. Eve Addams, a Polish immigrant to the U.S. and the founder and operator of Eve’s Hangout, opened the tearoom at 129 MacDougal Street in 1925. Unlike Mona and Jimmie Sargeant, whose sexualities are unknown and probably heterosexual regardless of the fact that they opened Mona’s 440 Club, Addams was an out and proud lesbian looking to create safe spaces for women like her here in the U.S. Eve’s Hangout frequently “hosted after-hours, locked-doors meetings, where women-loving women could share their experiences without fear of censorship or discrimination.” Supposedly, Eve also hung a sign on the door of the tearoom that said “Men are admitted but not welcome.” It didn’t take long for the Hangout to become one of the most popular spots in the area, drawing the attention of not only queer people but also the local police. Eve’s Hangout was shut down in 1926, and, tragically, Addams’s work at the Hangout and in the community led to her eventual arrest, deportation, and death at Auschwitz in the early 1940s.

Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, more lesbian bars opened in big cities (and some small towns) all over the U.S. Most of these places were male-owned because, unfortunately, women couldn’t be trusted with handling their own money and property until the 1970s. Many of the lesbian bars that opened during this period were owned by male landlords and run by their female tenants. This fact is pretty widely known when it comes to LGBTQ history, but one of the biggest benefactors of the lesbian bar business was the Italian Mafia. Because banks were reluctant and/or completely unwilling to fund women-owned businesses during this time, the Mafia was one of the few places women could go to get loans or to rent property for their businesses. I don’t want anyone to be confused in thinking that the Mafia is some progressive organization. The truth is, they didn’t care what these women were doing as long as they got their kickbacks. But the relationship between the women who ran the bars and the men in these organizations was certainly interesting. Of course, because they were interested in keeping these businesses open, they often paid off police to stop raiding the bars and other members of the community to keep quiet about the bars’ locations. As we know, this didn’t stop raids from occurring but it is so wild to imagine a Tony Soprano type paying off part of the NYPD to keep some place called Kitty’s Hideaway (or something similar) open.

While lesbian bars were often a refuge for queer women (and some men), it doesn’t mean they were safe and welcoming spaces for everyone. Lesbian bars during this period were usually racist and less open to trans people and people of varied gender experience. It’s obviously not as well-documented as it should be but queer Black women, even in places like New York City and San Francisco, mostly weren’t welcome in these spaces and couldn’t be part of the scene. For Black queer women, house parties — which was actually showcased in episode six of A League of Their Own — were the main way they were able to gather and celebrate themselves and each other. In the 1950s, the lesbian bar scene shifted somewhat with more bars being opened for working-class lesbians in big cities, especially. These bars were more racially diverse, but still not free of racism or white supremacist definitions of sex and gender. And although trans people were often part of the gay and lesbian bar scene, they weren’t exactly welcome with the kind of enthusiasm you’d expect. Because of the story of the Stonewall Uprising, people have a tendency to think trans people were embraced as members of the community, when the opposite was usually true. In addition to that, at this time, lesbian culture was, of course, dominated by a binary understanding of sex and gender that was liberatory for some and exclusionary for others. Of course, as culture changed, many lesbian bars became sites that were more welcoming of Black women and women of color and less binarist thinking. But I think it’s important to give a full picture of their evolution into the second half of the 20th century.

By 1980, there were over 200 lesbian bars around the country. 200. That’s actually quite a lot. But as of 2021, the Lesbian Bar Project has recorded that there are only 24 left in the U.S.

What the fuck happened?

Where have all the lesbian bars gone?

There are so many myths about why lesbian bars close and/or don’t survive. So many. There are two that I’ve heard more times than I count. The first is, old reliable, “queer women just don’t party the way queer men do.” When people say this, they say it like it’s a scientifically verifiable fact. I don’t know if “willingness to party” can be measured in any real way, so this just feels like a cop out that people use to hide something much more sinister or difficult to discuss. If we consider the way the society around us works, it makes more sense that being a woman who owns a business that specifically caters to women is extremely difficult. As it is, women already earn less than men, and the more marginalized your identity is, the less you make. This alone puts women at a great disadvantage when it comes to entrepreneurial efforts, but there are also systemic issues that prevent these businesses from staying open or opening at all. From the advent of the lesbian bar, men have had to play some kind of role in their operations, so we can infer what it means when men aren’t involved. Businesses owned by women simply don’t have the same survival rate as businesses owned by men due to a variety of factors, including obtaining bank loans to help keep their businesses afloat when they need it. This means that, since the early 1990s, lesbian bar after lesbian bar has closed its doors for reasons that are structural and completely unrelated to how frequently people show up in these spaces.

Many studies done on this have found just that: a series of structural and systemic issues that have caused the lesbian bar scene to putter out. According to an article in The Story Exchange, one of the biggest factors is money:

“We all know women earn less than men — in 2019, women make $0.79 for every dollar men make — but the disparity can be even more pronounced in lesbian women. Based on a recent study by the UCLA School of Law, LGBTQ-identifying individuals suffer economically across the board with higher rates of unemployment and lower incomes, among other categories. Coupled with the obstacles that women business owners face when it comes to access to capital, it can be difficult for female-owned lesbian bars that rely on female customers to stay afloat. In cities, which tend to be more liberal than, say, rural communities, the demise of the lesbian bar seems counterintuitive. For example, San Francisco has one of the highest LGBTQ percentages in the country, so it would seem that lesbian bars would have an eager and available clientele. The problem, however, is urban gentrification. Techies and creatives, most of whom are well-paid males, have moved in — pushing out a female demographic that doesn’t earn enough or wield enough disposable income to patronize bars.”

In South Florida, we currently don’t have a single lesbian bar across three counties. New Moon has been closed since 2015, and the only other lesbian bar to open in Wilton Manors, named The G Spot (I know, I know), did so about 2 years before the COVID-19 pandemic and then closed as a result of it. Of course, I don’t know the individual stories behind these closures, but I do know about how much the neighborhoods and the cost of real estate have changed down here in the last seven years, and their closures track with the reasons given in the article mentioned above.

As I said, people cite other factors for why lesbian bars have closed down over the years. In an article in the Smithsonian, they discuss that “Lesbian bars have struggled to keep up with rapid societal changes, including greater LGBTQ acceptance, the internet and a more gender-fluid community. With dating apps and online communities, bars aren’t necessary for coming out and connecting with queer women.” And Gwendolyn Stegall states that many queer people “claim that ‘lesbian’ leaves out bisexual women and trans people, who definitely have been historically (or even sometimes currently) shunned from the community.” I definitely don’t disagree that some queer people feel this way. In fact, I think I probably had a bit of a moment thinking this when I was struggling with my gender dysphoria and trying to figure myself out. It’s also very real that there are lesbians out there who are transphobic and heteronormative, which impacts the way spaces are created and patronized. But I don’t think we can say that this is actually a factor in whether or not these businesses survive because although gay bars have faced some similar criticisms, their existence isn’t threatened in the same way, and they don’t suffer the same rate of closure. In fact, if I’m using my neighborhood as a small case study for these phenomena, all of the gay bars made it through Covid, and two new ones even opened up in the midst of it.

To me, it goes straight back to the fact of access to capital. Gay men have a lot more access to capital than lesbians and trans people do as a result of the structure of our society. I don’t think you can untangle that fact from this situation. They have simply always had more money to invest and more money to spend, and it feels like talking about anything else beyond the fact that women and trans people still can’t get what they need is just a distraction.

And I’m not interested in being distracted. The Lesbian Bar Project certainly managed to bring some attention to the issue over the last two years, but similar to how these bars have been disappearing over the years, that attention seems to be fizzling out. I don’t disagree that some of the spaces that have historically catered to lesbians are outdated in terms of their concepts and inclusiveness but I do think there is still a need for places outside of the internet that specifically cater to queer women and trans people. In the last ten years since my friends and I followed queer nights from place to place, my feelings and my life have changed a lot. I don’t go out in the same way I used to, but I still feel that tinge of desire again for a place where I can go often and be with lesbians and queer women and people like me, gender freaks of lesbian experience. Maybe because I’m getting older, I just want to have a place that I can be a regular at and also feel completely at ease. I have a lot of wonderful people in my life, but sometimes, I just want to go out and have a drink surrounded by people who truly, truly get it.

I don’t think it’s a secret that many LGBTQ people feel as if they don’t have a strong network and/or unified community of other queer and trans people in their local areas — I know I feel that way, at least. These spaces have historically been the sites of not only connection and celebration but of resistance and taking power for ourselves. They’ve been places where we can dance all night and then rally together in the morning to fight back against the powers that are trying to destroy us. I often wonder how much different the world would be if we still had these spaces of so many possibilities, these spaces where we could meet friends or make new ones, fuck in the bathrooms, do drugs safely, drink, host writing groups or knitting circles or open mics, listen to live music, have afternoons to engage in resistance studies together, plan radical actions and have the organizing space to act on them, take care of each other in a variety of ways, or just grab a drink after work. I wish we were still willing to fight for these spaces, and I wish we could experience them together as Addams and so many others like her were years ago. We not only deserve them, but we desperately need them.

Marika Cifor Wants You To Activate Your Nostalgia for ACT UP

Feature image by Catherine McGann / Contributor via Getty Images

When I started volunteering at the Gerber/Hart Library & Archives, which helps preserve Midwestern LGBTQ history and culture, the director immediately put me to work helping to sort through their large ephemera collection. In archival terms, “ephemera” typically refers to documents created for a particular purpose but generally designed to be discarded rather than saved. This could include postcards, ticket stubs, event programs, pamphlets, and flyers — materials that people usually make a lot of copies of, and tend to throw away. On my first days at Gerber/Hart, I found myself examining thousands of pieces of paper: a flyer for a gay radio show in Cincinnati, a pamphlet with information for a community forum about HIV/AIDS and nutrition, an invite to a “Steamy Sundays” party at a long since closed gay bar, a poster detailing the schedule of events for Detroit Pride in 1996, and a flyer for the memorial of local Chicago AIDS activist.

I soon learned that ephemera comprises a large part of many LGBTQ archival collections and is often notoriously tricky to sort and organize. The director devised a system for sorting the material (by region, state, and then organization), but even with the instructional guide, I felt woefully underqualified for the task. How was I supposed to know which categories these materials belonged to? Could an important piece of LGBTQ history be lost if I mis-categorized it?

Marika Cifor’s new book Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS explores how LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS archives shape our understanding of history. Cifor, a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies and an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, became interested in the study of archives as a volunteer herself at the GLBT Historical Society. “Part of what brings queer people together are things that are very difficult to document, right? Bodies, feelings, relationships, sex, things that are just not well captured by paper documents,” she noted in a conversation I had with her via Google Meet in mid-November. “So I think community LGBT and queer archives have always have had a fascinating set of collections.“

Viral Cultures explores how LGBTQ artists and activists have historically determined how and where to preserve and archive their organizing efforts, when so many of these histories are ephemeral. What kinds of libraries and archives should these histories be donated to — volunteer-run LGBTQ community archives, like Gerber/Hart and the Lesbian Herstory Archives, or institutional and academic libraries with more resources but fewer connections to community? Cifor thinks about these questions by visiting the archives themselves. She spent a lot of time with the Gay and Lesbian and AIDS/HIV collection at the New York Public Library, for example, which holds over 100 collections — examining their organization as well as interviewing the archivists who sort the materials.

“AIDS archives occupy a really complex relationship to LGBTQ archives and collections,” Cifor told me. “They’re often grouped together at places like the New York Public Library. They share a curator there. They share a collection resource guide, but they’re not actually one and the same. For me, AIDS archives became a really interesting space to explore tensions there are around what is or is not LGBTQ+ knowledge.” In the book’s second chapter, she examines this relationship by narrating how members of ACT UP debated and decided to donate their archives to the NYPL.

Cifor is also interested in exploring the gaps within these archives: how do LGBTQ collections reflect the ways activist history is gendered and racialized? “In some cases, certain records don’t exist or weren’t saved, or certain people weren’t told their histories were valuable and worth documenting,” she said. Existing AIDS archives tend to focus on the histories of cis white gay men, perhaps because they have historically had greater access to the resources (time, money, social capital) needed to preserve their efforts than multiply marginalized LGBTQ people. “But it’s also about the kinds of narratives that people enter spaces with, right? If you already imagine AIDS activism looks a particular way, if you already come in with these kind of existing narratives that shape how people read and engage with these collections,” Cifor added. In writing about the whiteness of AIDS archives, Cifor critically analyzes how the archived history we have in some ways reflects the historical systems of power and patterns of exclusion within LGBTQ communities and AIDS activists.

Viral Cultures demonstrates how the archives themselves shape the narratives we have about AIDS activism. In critiquing the “silences” of the archive, as Cifor calls them, she looks toward more expansive and nuanced histories of HIV/AIDS. “We do not need a new dominant narrative of the AIDS crisis; we need many narratives,” she writes in the conclusion of her book.

Ultimately, Cifor is interested in how we can remember and repurpose our nostalgia for radical AIDS activism in the contemporary moment. Her book explores how LGBTQ artists and activists activate AIDS archives with what she calls “vital nostalgia.” Nostalgia is often thought of as a conservative longing for a past, particularly a past that might never have existed in the first place — think the right-wing call to “Make America Great Again.” But Cifor explores how LGBTQ artists leverage nostalgia for radical AIDS activism towards urgent issues around health, gender, sexuality, and race.

“I began to think about nostalgia as a way to talk about my own relationship [and] different kinds of generational relationships to AIDS. And I think there can be some resistance to that kind of nostalgia when talking about AIDS, right, in its kind of uncritical sense…. I think there’s this nostalgia for this kind of American AIDS activism that happened that’s like very flashy, on the street, and filled with these fascinating, beautiful aesthetics and all of these kinds of like radical communal practices. And it has this queer politics, as it’s all deeply engaged with queer movements that are happening in and outside of the academy in the same period,” Cifor shares.

Cifor is certainly not alone in expressing a nostalgia for radical AIDS activism. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers (myself included!) have explored the relationships between HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 in an effort to think through what kinds of organizing efforts we might need to confront this new pandemic. Additionally, scholar-activists like Alex Juhasz and Theodorr Kerr have argued that the last decade has witnessed an “AIDS Crisis Revisitation” that at times reproduces an uncritical nostalgia for AIDS activism, one that romanticizes and often whitewashes its history.

Cifor is interested in complicating this kind of nostalgia. “For me, vital nostalgia is a way to think about where we can use those kinds of nostalgia, that kind of interest in these moments, to do important political work now. And for me in the book, that’s a lot about thinking about, how do we reinvest in HIV/AIDS as both a kind of local and a global crisis with urgency again, which at least in the American context, [was] really lost, and to think about how AIDS intersects with other kinds of structural oppression, with racism and with other kinds of pandemics, COVID, poverty, a lack of access to healthcare and resources?”

Cifor finds vital nostalgia in the work of a number of contemporary LGBTQ and HIV+ artists and activists. These artists take the ephemera of AIDS archives and repurpose them, often circulating them through online platforms like Tumblr and Instagram. Cifor is “interested in how these records have a kind of contemporary life,” she said. “Because what interests me about archives is what they tell us [about] our relationship to the past, tell us about our present and the ways in which they shape feature possibilities. So for me, telling the story of how they circulate on Tumblr in the book is a way of thinking about how these records move and how we engage with them.”

The first chapter of Viral Cultures looks at a poster created by Vincent Chevalier and Ian Bradley-Perrin called “Your Nostalgia is killing me,” itself a response to the idealization of early ‘90s AIDS activism. In later chapters, she looks at the work of Indigenous queer artist Demian DinéYazhi´ who “takes some of the power of these records and uses them to talk about issues that were neglected or overlooked, or that to put them in conversation with contemporary social justice movements, in conversation with Immigrant rights indigenous sovereignty and other kinds of contemporary discourse.” One of DinéYazhi´’s pieces, for example, reimagines a piece of AIDS activist artwork to ground it in critiques of settler colonialism. Cifor wants to show us how “there’s a way in which you can take some of the power of these records and use them to talk about issues that were neglected or overlooked [at the time], or that put them in conversation with contemporary social justice movements.”

Cifor is especially interested in digital projects like the AIDS memorial on Instagram because artists who repurpose and circulate AIDS activist records make these archives available to a wider public. “The digital space is a complex and interesting space to do that kind of mediation…if you’re not a researcher thinking about these topics, it might be how you actually encounter these records for the first time.” This can be a powerful way to encounter AIDS archives, and one that Cifor hopes has the potential to trigger vital nostalgia in viewers.

Toward the end of our conversation, Cifor shared how we can revisit and repurpose vital nostalgia for AIDS activism in the midst of COVID-19. Finishing the book in the fall of 2020 gave her the opportunity to explore “the ways in which these two pandemics are intertwined and the ways in which they are fundamentally distinct,” she said. She wanted to “be really keenly aware of what it’s like to live in two pandemics, and I think in ways that were both flattening and ways that were generative and exciting. COVID offered opportunities to re-engage in a public discourse about AIDS because it’s a pandemic we’ve been living with and thinking with and addressing for much longer.” And while Cifor is not interested in simple equivalencies between HIV/AIDs and COVID-19, her book describes “how pandemics operate along social fault lines. They expose racism and sexism and transphobia and xenophobia and things that already exist in our world, but they really amplify it and draw it out to the surface.”

As we continue to live through these two pandemics, Cifor ultimately wants us to activate our nostalgia for AIDS activism, and sees the archive as one place to begin this process. “Nostalgia Is a way to think about, why do we have those kinds of relationships with the past and how can they be generative in this moment?” she asks.

I think back to my days sorting through ephemera in the volunteer room at Gerber/Hart. As I looked through document after document, I wondered about all of the people who created those events, parties, conferences, and protests advertised on the flyers, pamphlets, and ticket stubs. Coastal cities like New York and San Francisco are over-represented in narratives of LGBTQ history, and local and regional community archives like Gerber/Hart provide us with glimpses of LGBTQ organizing in the past that expand our understanding of queer and trans history. For Cifor, the power of these archives lies in the way they can inspire a vital nostalgia, allowing us to confront urgent crises in our communities in the present.

I’m Sick of White Women Centering Themselves in the Struggle For Reproductive Justice

Feature image via Georgia State University Library Exhibits.

This piece has been a long time coming. On June 24th, 2022, I sat next to my mother on the couch in our family home. Some trashy reality television was probably playing in the background. I checked my phone and I see the notification from CNN on my phone.

Like so many people, the devastation I feel about the Supreme Court’s federal ban on abortions is to a point where words don’t feel adequate. We all have the right to feel our pain and express our pain. No one should dismiss or invalidate anyone’s hurt. Sharing my pain about the ruling with others – talking freely and crying out frustrations with loved ones in safe spaces – is one of the most effective ways of coping for me, personally. Community is healing.

While trying to process everything, I noticed a certain pattern of comments from tapping through Instagram stories and popular Tik Tok videos on my FYP:

“I can’t believe women no longer have reproductive justice.”

“The position of women in society is going backward.”

“Women’s rights were taken away.”

All of these comments carry truth, and I’m not trying to completely negate them. The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a major step back. But, these comments are over-generalizations. We need to be intersectional and reframe our conversations surrounding reproductive justice. Womanhood isn’t an isolated identity and it isn’t a monolithic group. What white cis women today are experiencing is what women of color have experienced for decades, for centuries. Black women are routinely denied or mistreated in reproductive healthcare to the point where the lives of Black women are at risk. Modern gynecology exists because of cruel experiments that were forced upon enslaved women in America. There is a long and extensive history of the bodies of women of color being exploited in “the name of medical progress,” misunderstood, and not receiving necessary care.

Also, these comments erase trans, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary (TGNC) folks from the fight for reproductive justice. According to the Positive Women’s Network’s page on trans-centered reproductive justice, “One in three TGNC people delayed or avoided preventive health care, like a pelvic exam of STI screening, out of fear of discrimination or disrespect. This number is even higher – almost one in two — for transgender men.” Many trans people buy hormones outside of the health care system because they do not have adequate resources to safely obtain them.

There are even worse comments like:

“You messed with the wrong generation.”

“This time, we’re serious.”

These so-called “witty” social media captions are ignorant and disrespectful to history and activists who put immense physical and emotional labor toward freedom and liberation. Also, what does “we’re” mean exactly? Who’s “we”? It seems like the people behind these comments are trying to speak for everyone and putting themselves at the center.

Time and time again, many white women only stand up when it directly affects them. As a cis Latina, I know I can’t speak for every group. I will say that I’m tired. I’m tired of the white women that come to protests in Handmaid’s Tale costumes and hold up signs that say “we are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn.” I’m tired of performative activism on social media. I’m tired of the conversations that exclude the distinct issues of women of color and TGNC people in reproductive justice.

Why has this piece been a long time coming? One reason I struggled to accept is that I was afraid of upsetting people. I was afraid of comments that went along the lines of “not everything has to be about race” (everything is about race) or “you’re blowing it out of proportion”. But, I’m not responsible for white fragility, nor should I coddle it. I don’t want my silence to contribute to the erasure of TGNC people.

Whiteness needs to be decentered from the fight for reproductive justice. I’ve always said that history is a powerful tool for transformation and rethinking –  I want to share a piece of history that does just that, the history of mass sterilization and reproductive genocide of Puerto Rican women between the 1930s to 1970s.

I learned the history of reproductive genocide in Puerto Rico during my last year of high school. I was never taught it in a class – I searched for the information on my own from a yearning to learn more about who I was and my history. During my time in a former organization on my college campus called Planned Parenthood Generation, I worked with another member of the group (and the only other woman of color in it) to organize a panel that addressed the history of the struggle for reproductive justice for women of color. I made it my mission to bring up the sterilizations and cruel experiments performed on Puerto Rican women because silence is erasure. It is my mission now to use this history to expand dominant conversations on reproductive justice.

Freedom of any kind looks different for everybody, but my favorite definition of reproductive justice is from SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, which states that Reproductive Justice is the:

“human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”

The only thing I’d add to that definition is that reproductive issue is a human right regardless of race, gender, class, and ability. Reproductive justice is not just a woman’s issue. It is an issue of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, homophobia, ableism, and transphobia. It should always be at the forefront of human rights movements regardless of whether white cis women are directly affected or not.

A quick history lesson to understand the main history lesson. Puerto Rico was originally called Borikén and was inhabited largely by Tainos. In 1493, the Spanish invaded, colonized, and renamed the island. In 1917, The United States claimed colonizer status of Puerto Rico from the Spanish-American War. Puerto Rico’s been a colony ever since, and while it’s technically labeled as a “commonwealth” or “U.S. territory”, I don’t want to use any bullshit sugarcoating or euphemisms to hide the inherent violence of colonialism. This context is critical to understand because the U.S.’s reproductive control over Puerto Rican women’s bodies was a demonstration of colonial power.

The acquisition of Puerto Rico was a part of this fantasy U.S. rulers had of Manifest Destiny. American expansion was encouraged in the name of “civilizing” nonwhite individuals in different lands. So it was basically having a white savior and god complex. There was also an enthrallment with “neo-Malthusian theory,” a belief that “population control” was essential to human survival and connected economic status with genetics. The underlying logic behind it was that the rich were rich because of “good genes” and the poor were poor because of “bad genes.” Do y’all see this pattern of coded language? Anyway, the theory also dictated that it was the responsibility of the rich to dispose of the poor or else they’d be a detriment to society and cause overpopulation. These ideas fueled the rise of eugenics, which was at the root of the mass sterilization of Puerto Rican women.

Charles Herbert Allen, a U.S.-born politician, became the first governor of Puerto Rico after the U.S. seized the island. In his view, the island was “underdeveloped” because of overpopulation and the “excess” of people needed to be “taken care of.” Fuck centuries of colonialism and the denial of sovereignty as the roots of problems within Puerto Rico, I guess.

Law 116, which allowed sterilization surgeries, was passed in Puerto Rico in 1937. Health workers visited many family homes and pushed mothers to undergo hysterectomies or tubal ligations. In 1953, 17% were sterilized. In 1975, 35% were sterilized and the average age at the time of the operation was 26 years old. These surgeries were so common that they were simply called La Operación or “The Operation.” Many of these women were uninformed that these surgeries meant they would become permanently infertile and were under the impression that the inability to reproduce was temporary.

Puerto Rico was used as a laboratory by U.S. eugenicist Clarence Gamble, who tested contraceptives that were not approved by the FDA on over a thousand Puerto Rican women. The popular birth control pill we know today was tested on Puerto Rican women with the encouragement and help of Gamble. The women were informed that the drugs given to them were used to prevent pregnancy, but had no idea that they were test subjects. There were women who were severely sick, and women that died. It didn’t matter if these experiments caused irreversible damage to their bodies – they were disposable in the eyes of eugenicists.  It did not matter because upper-class white women, who were the first main consumers of the pill, were able to advance their mobility.

Eventually, the trials and experiments ended. But by the end of the 1970s, one-third of all Puerto Rican women were sterilized.

The denial of reproductive freedom and autonomy has been orchestrated beyond the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This is just one of the plethora of examples of a marginalized group being denied reproductive freedom and autonomy.

James Baldwin once said “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” History also isn’t a series of isolated events.  Everything is connected — Law 116 and the fall of Roe v. Wade are violent demonstrations of bodies being denied autonomy. They also involve, albeit in different ways, white people elevating themselves and their power.

The first step toward whiteness being decentered in the fight for reproductive justice and implementing intersectionality in praxis and discourse is to listen to different voices from different marginalized groups. Bring women of color to the front, burn the table that allows white supremacy to flourish, and work toward building a new, more inclusive table. It’s not going to solve everything. But it’s a start.

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If you would like to learn more about the dark history of sterilization in Puerto Rico, below are a few sources I recommend and where I got my information from:

Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women’s Struggle for Reproductive Freedom by Iris Lopez

La Operación (1982) directed by Ana Maria Garcia

Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico by Laura Briggs

The Eugenics Archive

How Realistic is “A League Of Their Own”? Let’s Do a Historical Deep Dive!

The Prime Video Series A League of Their Own, inspired by a 1992 film by the same name, tells the story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a real thing that existed in the Midwest between 1943 and 1954. Initially founded by famed chewing gum man Phillip Wrigley (owner of Wrigley Field, home to the Chicago Cubs), the league attempted to address a few interconnected issues. As emphasized in the film and TV show, Major League ballplayers were enlisting and thus thinning the ranks and starpower of their teams, and league owners were panicking about how to maintain love for America’s National Pastime during this slump. But there were other reasons, too. Minor League teams were so depleted by the war effort that many had to shut down entirely, a loss compounded by the fact that war-sanctioned travel restrictions were in place that made it tougher for fans outside of large cities to attend Major League games. Meanwhile, scores of war-related factory workers and their families in mid-size industrial cities like Rockford, Illinois, were in need of wholesome American evening entertainment to distract them from the woes of the era. And finally, women’s softball was actually already pretty f*cking popular, which we’ll talk about more in a minute. Thus the AAGPBL was born.

But how much of Prime Video’s League of Their Own is based on true stories, and which elements slightly revise the historical record? That is what we’ll be discussing today in this herstorical deep dive into the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, softball and baseball leagues for Black players, and lesbian culture in the 1940s.

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The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Actually Started Out as a Softball League

Although the show portrays the girls playing baseball from the jump, that wasn’t the case — they were mostly softball players recruited from local softball teams to play softball! Softball was an enormously popular American sport starting in the late 1880s, with hundreds of thousands of players joining teams in leagues all over the continent. By 1942, over 200,000 men’s and women’s softball teams existed in the country (including teams at all-women’s college), and local leagues attracted sizeable followings, including a beloved well-attended Chicago women’s softball league that inspired journalist Herb Graffis to note at the time that “it has been no secret to sports fans in the Midwest that girls’ softball in Chicago has been outdrawing the major league baseball clubs.”

Therefore, when the AAGPBL launched in 1943, it was originally called The All-American Girls Softball League. Some rules were shifted away from softball’s to increase the excitement of the game: the ball was slightly smaller, pitching distance was enlarged, base-stealing was permitted and the game lasted nine innings rather than softball’s seven — rule changes that inspired them to switch out “Softball” for “Baseball” in the league name mid-season, but not enough changes to prevent it from being changed from “Baseball” to “Ball” for its second season. Over the years, more rule changes and league name changes were made to keep the games exciting until it did become actual baseball and was named accordingly. This shift proved especially challenging for pitchers who’d honed their skills pitching underhand, and added a layer of difficulty to player recruitment.

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The All-American Girls Baseball League Was a Midwestern Enterprise

As portrayed accurately in the show, the league drew its players from all over the U.S, Canada and Cuba; but its teams were all headquartered in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, close enough to one another for away games to conform to wartime gas rationing restrictions. At times the league attempted to break into big cities, like Chicago and Minneapolis, but women’s baseball didn’t catch on there as it did in mid-size towns like Rockford, Kenosha, Racine, Muskegon and South Bend. Rockford was an industrial powerhouse, with many factories contributing to the war effort, and Rockford was also home to the military base of Camp Grant.

As addressed in the intro, these cities all had bustling populations of workers who were depressed about the war and death, and Wrigley was certain that women’s professional baseball was precisely the sort of wholesome family entertainment these workers should be enjoying in their off hours.

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Did the Players All Live Together?

While the “entire team living in the same house” dynamic was necessary to create the human dramas portrayed in the show, in truth the girls usually boarded individually or in small groups with local families to “further enhance the clean-cut image” they were meant to portray. While playing away games, they’d sometimes room in boarding houses and sometimes at-home players would occupy a group home, but in general we did not get the delightful dormitory lifestyle the film and show portrayed.

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Did Black Women Play in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League?

As portrayed in the show, the AAGPBL refused to allow Max, a Black woman, to try out for a spot in the league. But in 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color line and in the ensuing years, the Major League’s shift towards racial integration caused the question to come up again for AAGPBL owners. Unfortunately, they maintained their intolerance! Firstly, they argued it was already difficult enough to generate interest for women playing baseball, let alone Black women. Secondly, they claimed it’d definitely be difficult to find qualified baseball players as most Black women played softball — but this was also true of white women, so that was simply the same “we can’t find any” shit that employers say to this very day. Their third reason was, as hinted at in the show, they did not consider Black women to fit into the narrow “All-American” feminine standards they imposed on their players, rooted in the ideals of white-middle class respectability. According to Coming On Strong, in 1951 they decided against recruiting Black players “unless they would show promise of exceptional ability,” but made no efforts to attract or find any, and a Black female player who’d later join the Negro Leagues (more on that in a second) was told she was unwelcome when she showed up for AAGPBL tryouts in 1953.

Thwarted by her experience at AAGPBL tryouts, Max agrees to get a job at her local factory to potentially play for their team, as (accurately at the time) most local softball and baseball leagues were organized around workplaces. Max and Clance working at the factory is also realistic — Black “Rosie the Riveters” indeed joined the wartime factory ranks, many traveling great distances for jobs that offered unprecedented (but temporary) economic opportunities.

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Were Black Women Allowed In the Negro Leagues?

The first season of A League of Their Own eventually sees Max becoming the second female player on a Negro League baseball team. While it’s true that women did play in the Negro Leagues, they didn’t do so until the early 1950s, after the National Negro League had already folded, following an exodus of star players and fans into the Major Leagues after it began accepting Black players. Syd Pollack’s Indianapolis Clowns (“The Harlem Globetrotters of baseball,” likely the inspiration for Red White’s All-Stars in ALOTO), were one of the four remaining teams in the Negro American league, and in 1953, Pollack signed the league’s first female player, Toni Stone, who’d already played on three semipro teams. She switched teams in 1954 and he signed two women to replace her, certain the gimmick of female players would bring more fans to the league. One of them, pitcher Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, had gone to tryouts for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League only to realize Black women weren’t allowed to play for the league. The other, Connie Morgan, had previously played five seasons with the North Philadelphia Honey Drippers, a semi-pro Black women’s baseball team, and had written Pollack directly to ask for a tryout after hearing about Toni Stone.

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Did Latina Women Play in the AAGPL?

While Black women were excluded from the league, a grand total of eleven light-skinned Latina women were recruited to AAGPBL teams over the course of its existence. According to the ALOTO instagram, Lupe Garcia’s character was inspired by Mexican-American Californian AAGBPL catcher Marge Villa (who joined the league in 1946) and Esti Gonzalez by Cuban player Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez, who joined the league when she was 15 and is the subject of the documentary “Latin Nights: The Baseball Journey of Isabel Alvarez.” Like Esti, Isabel spoke limited English, and often felt lonely, isolated and homesick on her team. 

Baseball had been Cuba’s top national sport since the 1870s, and the AAGPBL held their 1947 spring training in Cuba, where they scouted Eulalia Gonzeles, the first woman from Cuba to join the league. Many Cuban players felt homesick and struggled with the language barrier, inspiring some to cut their AAGPL careers shorter than expected. Isabel’s mother had to convince her to return for the 1951 season, at which point, much to Isabel’s relief, Mirta Marrero, another Cuban player, joined the Fort Wayne Daisies.

The Mexican-American community in the U.S. also had a profound love of the game, with women’s teams attracting local fans in Latine neighborhoods, often sponsored by churches and small businesses.

When the AAGPBL toured in Latin America, Villa served as her team’s interpreter.

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Were AAGPBL Players Forced To Wear Skirts and Go to Beauty School?

Wrigley was incredibly uncomfortable with the “mannish” women he saw on softball fields across the country and created his league “with the highest ideas of womanhood in mind… the natural appeal of women in every walk of life will be brought out in this venture. Girls will dress, act and carry themselves as befits the feminine sex.” He emphasized the intrigue and entertainment value inherent in feminine women playing a “mannish” game, the “amazing spectacle of beskirted girls throwing, catching, hitting and running like men.” They were forced to abide by strict codes of conduct, given chaperones, made to observe full makeup and beauty routines and forced to wear impractical, feminine uniforms. As in the show, a beauty mogul was brought in to whip the women into shape — Helena Rubenstein taught classes on fashion, makeup, posture and proper speech for the league’s first two years. Although players resented these restrictions and the uniforms, they also simply saw them as rules of employment and generally complied. Although the show and film frame these guidelines for femininity as essential to the league’s success, whether or not that’s true remains a matter of debate.

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Were There Really That Many Lesbians in the All-American Girls Baseball League?

There sure were!

“The lesbian lifestyle has long been a bugbear in ball-playing circles,” writes Lois Browne in The Girls of Summer, before going on to note that “there were some lesbian players, and, chances are, chaperones. The fact of being lesbian was probably an added inducement to flee the stultifying atmosphere of their home towns and go on the ball-playing circuit.” Regardless of the sexuality composition of the sport overall, those willing and able to leave their home teams, move to a new city and travel unpredictably for several ensuing years would logically often be women without husbands or children, or women itching to get away from whatever family they did have.

According to The Hidden Queer History of “A League Of Their Own”, the league’s rigid standards of femininity were imposed in part to ensure the women were not perceived as lesbians. Rules against inter-team fraternizing were also partially rooted in a desire to stamp out romantic and sexual relationships. Managers who suspected a lesbian affair was afoot within a team would refuse to let the two continue to room together. In “Coming On Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth Century Sports,” Susan K. Cahn writes that “knowledge of gay women in sport ranged from hazy, unarticulated awareness to an informed familiarity or personal involvement. Often an athlete’s initial awareness of lesbianism developed from seeing women ‘pairing off’ or getting ‘very clannish’ with each other.”

The exact prevalence of lesbianism in the league is impossible to quantify, but the historical record is full of evidence that there was a significant percentage of queers in the league, including the two women at the center of Netflix’s documentary “A Secret Love.”

Maybelle Blair, who joined the Peoria Redwings in 1948, told the audience at a screening of A League Of Their Own, that “out of 650 [players], I bet you 400 was gay.” That’s over 60%, for the record, and ALOTO’s team is only 46% gay. Soooo take that, homophobes who think the percentage of lesbians on the Peaches is unrealistic!

“I’m very happy with what they’ve done. It’s things that Penny Marshall couldn’t say in 1992,” Blair told The Los Angeles Times. “People weren’t ready for any of this, but it needed to be told because it is the truth. These are the things that I really appreciated.”

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Were There Lesbians Living Fully Lesbian Lives in the 1940s?

World War II was actually, relatively speaking, a pretty great time to be a lesbian, certainly better than the decades immediately before and afterwards. For a brief shimmer of time, women’s labor was necessary to the American military machine and therefore the idea that women, specifically white middle-class women, were best suited to making pies and children, went out the window. There were more jobs open to women than ever before, enabling greater economic stability without male support and the war brought women together in friendship but also “to learn to appreciate other females as serious, self-sufficient human beings,” working together in pursuits they considered important.

It also became easier for lesbians to blend in to the general population of women now that they weren’t the only ones making their own money or going to bars and restaurants with other women. There was less pressure to date. Many married queer women like Carson Shaw got a little break from their husbands. It was even okay to wear pants, since so many did so to work in factories, which enabled lesbians to more openly experiment with fashion that enabled them to spot and attract other women.

Furthermore, increased attention to “deviant” sexuality from psychologists and literature incidentally gave women the language to describe their experiences that they may have lacked in earlier decades.

All of this progress would be swiftly rolled back in the super-conservative 1950s!

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Was Gay & Lesbian Nightlife in the 1940s A Thing?

During World War II, “increased freedom for women to defy expectations of all kinds” led to many lesbian bars opening and in some cities, “bar hopping became a favorite weekend activity, especially for working-class lesbians.” Gay and lesbian nightlife did flourish during the war, not only in gay hotspots and ports like San Francisco and New York, but also in midsize cities near military bases and factories. In Buffalo, New York, historians have verified the existence of at least 26 gay & lesbian bars during the era. Although Buffalo’s population was about five times that of Rockford’s (the second-biggest city in Illinois at the time), it’s realistic that a city Rockford’s size would be host to at least one LGBTQ+ establishment.

Series co-creators Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson told yahoo that AAGPL players they spoke to while writing the series “told us stories of sneaking out to bars and barely escaping raids,” which was ‘a reality of life for all kinds of queer people at the time, and is still a reality for people in many parts of the world now.”

D’Arcy Carden told Vanity Fair about a story Maybelle Blair shared about her first time in a gay bar: “When we asked her questions about what it was like back then, we expected her to be like, ‘It was a struggle every day, and I feared for this or that.’ But Maybelle said, ‘It was a party. I walked into that bar and I saw those other women, and I was like—oh. This is what I’ve been missing all my life.”

The possibility of raids, imprisonment, and subsequent outings through the local newspaper held different degrees of risk for different queer people, depending on race, class, employment, family situation and financial resources. The risk of patronizing gay establishments is part of the reason why these bars were generally segregated by race and class (the other part of the reason is racism and classism).

Although Black queer bars existed across the country (including bars specifically for Black lesbians), often Black queer people preferred to congregate at private house parties. Like Uncle Bertie and Gracie in A League of Their Own, Black queer couple Ruth Ellis and Babe Franklin hosted regular parties for the Black queer community at their home in Detroit, eventually called “The Gay Spot.”

Bar raids became more common in the 1950s and 1960s, and owners could often avoid them by paying off local police or by having ties to the Mafia.

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In Conclusion

You should watch the show, it’s pretty gay

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Non-web sources for this piece included:

Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality In Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, by Susan K Cahn, University of Illinois Press,1995

The Belles of Baseball: The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, by Nel Yomtov,  Adobo Publishing, 2017

Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Routledge 1993

Girls of Summer: In Their Own League, by Lois Brown, Self-Published 1992

Latinos and American Popular Culture, edited by Patricia M. Montilla, ABC-CLIO 2013

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, by Lillian Faderman, Columbia University 1991

When Women Played Hardball, by Susan E. Johnson, Seal Press 1994

Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, by Barbara Gregorich, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1993

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54 Portraits of Lesbians in the ‘80s

feature art: Autostraddle // photo: Bromberger Hoover Photography/Getty Images

We’ve always been here.

That’s something that, no matter how many times I try to wrap my mind around it, never ceases to amaze me. I think we all know that a lot of queer culture is youth obsessed — always looking forward, looking for what’s hot, what’s next. But I’ve always gotten chills at the longevity and strength of our community.

I think all of us at Autostraddle feel that way, nerds who get excited about our history. And that’s one of the reasons we asked legitimately one of my favorite indie artists, Jenifer Prince, to create an exclusive print this Pride that celebrates queer love across the decades (there’s a copy of the print at the end of this list — a little treat for when you’re done scrolling. And you should get one, because if you’re already reading this photo list, I’m gonna assume it’s extremely your shit.)

I don’t usually include the full Getty description in captions for photos when we do these lists, as opposed to focusing solely on the photographer’s credit, however I’m making an exception this time because I think the full description really adds to time and place.

Sometimes it’s just about seeing two women hold each other in some dope aviators on a sunny day, you know? Kinky dykes on bikes in black-and-whites. That’s what magic is made of.

That’s the inspiration for this list. Simple. And I hope it brings you some happiness today.

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1980

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

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If you enjoyed this list (I cannot even begin to tell you how often I smiled while putting this together! Why are we, as a people, so cute??) then I want to let you know that it’s forever been our dream to put together massive photo lists like this one, but for a long time we were not able to do it because photo rights are expensive! And unlike Buzzfeed, where these kinds of lists are common,  queer indie media runs on a lean budget. Last year, with the support of our A+ members, we were able to finally get a Getty Images account — but it’s not cheap!

One way that you’re able to support our work this Pride is by spending your gay dollars at home. Jenifer Prince, a queer independent artist, created this exclusive print for Autostraddle — in celebration of gay love and protest across the decades. You can celebrate queer indie art while also supporting queer indie media, and that sounds like a win to me! The print is $36 dollars, and A+ members get a discount on their purchase.

You can order a print here, and also get an A+ membership right over here, they start at $4 a month (and we have gift memberships if you are financially strapped right now).

And especially to all my 80s babies, wishing you all love this Pride!

Which Historical Lesbian Bars Would American Girl Dolls Have Visited?

Let’s just take it as a given that American Girl characters are queer icons. I’m a Molly, if you couldn’t tell, but also with strong Kit tendencies. I’m saving my “American Girl Made Me Gay” essay for another day, but let’s be clear that that’s where I’m coming from.

Thanks to the incredible work of Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney at the acclaimed American Girls podcast, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my childhood fascination with the historical American Girl books shaped my lifelong love of history (the early 20th century in particular). In wondering how these stories shaped the person I’ve become, I’ve also become curious about how the characters I love might have grown up. These stories, for me, are so closely connected to their chronological settings; Molly is the 1940s girl, Kit is the 1930s girl, etc, and imagining them older, in subsequent decades, lets these vibrant characters expand beyond their original narrative confines.

So let’s imagine these adorable queer icons as they’d be turning 18, maybe figuring things out, maybe beginning to search for queer community. What community spaces would have been available to them as they entered adulthood? What bars would they be sneaking into? What might their queer lives have been like?

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Samantha Parkington — born 1895, turns 18 in 1913

Because Samantha’s original books are set in 1904, I’m counting her as my first 20th century girl, and what a helluva start to the century she represents. A lot of Samantha nostalgia centers her luxurious accessories, but beneath all the frills, Samantha is the badass femme queen we all deserve. Growing up with her bicycling suffragette Aunt Cornelia, how could Samantha become anything other than a legend? Her civic-minded progressive labor politics are central to her story and I can see her growing up to do further community outreach and advocacy work, probably as one of those SpinstersTM who totally had a “historians will say they were friends” kind of partnership. As historian Lillian Faderman notes, at this point in time there weren’t many bars where women could go; Samantha would more likely have found her queer family at a ladies’ club or activist circle. However, by her mid-to-late twenties, I know in my heart Samantha would’ve been sneaking off to speakeasies with her, ahem, ~best friend~ Nellie and reading Radclyffe Hall.

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Rebecca — born 1905, turns 18 in 1923

Rebecca wasn’t yet part of the story when I was a kid, but god I wish I’d had these books when I was in the thick of my A Tree Grows in Brooklyn phase. Rebecca grew up in New York during peak Edith-Wharton era, and would be 18 just as the 20s were really starting to roar. Prohibition was in effect from 1920-1933, but let’s be real: this girl’s too resourceful not to find the best house parties and speakeasies. By the early 1920s, bars in the West Village were growing devoted gay clientele, like one which in 1929 would be renamed Marie’s Crisis (and which remains a beloved gay piano bar.) However, I like to imagine Rebecca in community with Eve Adams, subject of a superb recent biography by queer historian Jonathan Ned Katz. Eve Adams was a Jewish immigrant from Poland who traveled around America distributing radical leftist literature, and whose 1925 book Lesbian Love was burned for being ~indecent~. Additionally, Eve Adams opened a salon and tearoom in Greenwich Village called Eve’s Hangout where queer community congregated — I picture Rebecca here, probably with a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein.

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Kit Kittredge — born 1923, turns 18 in 1941

Oh Kit, rough-n-tumble butch queen of my heart. Typing up her own newspaper on a clattery typewriter, building a scooter out of fruit crates, playing baseball, and dressing as a boy to ride the rails and learn firsthand about Depression-era “hobo” culture, it’s safe to say we know that Kit grew up to be a badass. She’d be coming of age in wartime Cincinnati, when military necessity led to the town’s industrial boom. As a center of manufacturing, Kit would’ve had no trouble finding a job — can’t you picture her, Rosie-the-Riveter-style, slinging heavy machinery around and looking very at home in her shop floor coveralls? Especially during the war, working-class lesbians congregated at dive-ier bars, often close to the plants for an after-shift drink; this is the generation who would’ve been the elders in Stone Butch Blues. These bars haven’t received the level of historical preservation I think they deserve; since they so seldom advertised themselves as the de facto queer community centers they were, it’s hard to name for certain any specific institutions Kit might have frequented. However, Cincinnati’s current vibrant LGBTQ+ community from the 60s onward didn’t come from nothing. We know there must’ve been somewhere for Kit to get a drink and cruise for crushes after a long shift. By the time of Cincinnati’s first pride parade in 1973, Kit would have been 50 years old — a beloved butch elder, I imagine, at the front of the parade.

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Nanea Mitchell — born 1932, turns 18 in 1950

Nanea is Hawaiian, living in Honolulu during the Pearl Harbor attacks. I want to shout out here how great it is to see another indigenous character added to the lineup, and with such rich and attentive historical specificity. Nanea witnesses the attack directly herself; a large part of her plotline is about recovering from this trauma and from the ensuing separation from her best friend Lily, whose family is forced to the mainland by the enforcement of Japanese internment. Even against this harrowing backdrop, wartime Honolulu was a fascinating place — acclaimed female pilot Cornelia Fort was stationed there, teaching men how to fly, when she witnessed the Pearl Harbor attack from the air, and you better believe that those fantastic, fierce lady pilots were, ahem, yknow. Nanea herself is a creative, headstrong, often-impulsive girl with a penchant for Nancy Drew novels. (Did Nancy Drew make me gay? Probably not, but having a hot girl sidekick named George sure didn’t hurt the cause.) By the 1950s, I don’t doubt that teenage Nanea wouldn’t be having any trouble shaking up gay adventures. Especially in proximity to military bases like the ones in Honolulu, gay and lesbian bars had sprung up like clover; you can read all about them in Coming Out Under Fire, about how wildly gay the WWII-era forces were, and where some of the interviews were even contributed by lesbian former-WACs still living in Honolulu.

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Molly McIntire — born 1934, turns 18 in 1952

Molly’s stories are set in Jefferson, Illinois, which I take to mean Jefferson Township outside of Chicago; heading into the city, then, as an 18 year old, Molly would be walking into the thick of McCarthy-era vice raids and mob-controlled underground bars. (If you thought Molly would grow up into some straitlaced boomer, think again.) The Andersonville area of Chicago remains to this day a queer haven, but back in Molly’s day the scene looked rather different. This extensive entry in the Chicago Encyclopedia and this piece from the Chicago Tribune outline the context of the community Molly would’ve encountered, including the vibrant community led by Black LGBTQ+ people that coalesced on the South Side and included popular and long-standing mixed-race drag balls which lasted well into the 1950s. In addition to these gatherings, Molly’s main South Side bars would have probably been places like Mommy-O’s (what a name!) and The Fiesta, where she would’ve risked police surveillance or harassment, particularly if she butched it up beyond the law’s unofficial rule that people had to be wearing at least 3 items of clothing designated for their assigned sex. (May they roll in their graves at the sight of us now!). Nowadays, there are tours available of Chicago gay neighborhood history, and these interviews with patrons of Chicago’s lost lesbian bars give us a glimpse into the scene as it would’ve developed after Molly’s coming-of-age.

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Maryellen Larkin — born 1945, turns 18 in 1963

Maryellen is a more recent addition to the Historical Characters line, and I love her whole vibe. She’s a polio survivor, adventurous and creative and headstrong, and she works in her family’s seaside diner in Daytona Beach, Florida. This girl is a bartender in the making if ever I’ve seen one, complete with opinions about what goes on the jukebox! Over at Dishing with Mark and Carrie, local legends in the queer community have also compiled an informal, unverified, entirely delightful rundown of Florida Bars That Were. Most of these bars catered primarily to gay men, but they speak to a lively and long-standing queer community in Central Florida. About an hour away from Maryellen in Orlando, she’dve had options like those compiled here by the Florida LGBTQ+ Museum, including Palace, which opened in 1969 and later became home to Face to Face, aka Faces, the first bar for LGBTQ+ women identified in Central Florida. Maryellen might even have been around the same age as the belovedly eccentric mother in Kristen Arnett’s Gay Florida Masterpiece Mostly Dead Things, no? I bet we’d see some gay taxidermy at her bar.

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Melody Ellison — born 1954, turns 18 in 1972

God, I wish Melody had been around when I was a kid! This is a girl raised on Motown, coming up in Detroit during its industrial boom, and already (look at that Mary Tyler Moore style outfit!) a pop culture icon. Where was Melody when I was making my dad blast Motown classics radio on the way to school? She and I love the same artists — Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, and the like — and Motown was much like Hollywood in its draconian enforcement of straight femininity in its artist contracts despite the popularity of bands like The Supremes with openly queer fans. You can find out more about the queer Motown milieu in the delicious mystery novels by Cheryl Head, which feature a queer Black private investigator! By the 70s, however, white artists closely connected with the Motown crew like Dusty Springfield were publicly out, and the rise of disco was creating an environment more openly welcoming for queer artists of color. Black lesbian organizing was gaining momentum as well; while the Black Lesbian Caucus was based primarily in New York, their newsletters had national circulation, and groups like the Salsa Soul Sisters offered Black and Latinx women an alternative to often-racist and otherwise discriminatory bar spaces —  groups and networks like these are where Melody might’ve gotten her best recommendations! Over at this interactive map, you can watch the expansion (and, sadly, contraction) of the Detroit gay bar scene, based on data assembled by historian Dr. Tim Retzloff.

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Julie Albright — born 1966, turns 18 in 1984

Oh, this sweet little long-hair-butch San Francisco sports gay. By the time Julie would’ve been coming out, the scene documented in historian Nan Alamilla Boyd’s iconic book Wide Open Town would have been a thing of the past and San Francisco’s icon Mona’s (440 Broadway, ‘Where Girls Will Be Boys’) which is often credited as the first openly lesbian bar in America would have been closed for a while. We can’t forget that the mid-eighties would’ve been right as the AIDS crisis accelerated, and a team player like Julie wouldn’t have been able to escape the urgency of this moment. However, in addition to community organizing, and queer women’s volunteer efforts to support HIV and AIDS patients, I like to imagine her in such options as Amelia’s, Wild Side West, and the iconic Maud’s, subject of the magnificent and profound documentary Last Call at Maud’s that you can stream for free online via your local library. Personally, I’m betting that Julie would’ve been fielding Maud’s softball and basketball teams, and driving the girls to the bar after practice in her beat-up van. She strikes me as a cold beer kind of gal.

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Courtney — born 1976, turns 18 in 1994

So, like, we know they made Courtney her own doll-sized American Girl doll (Courtney’s a Molly; same, girl, same) — are they going to make Courtney little doll-sized copies of Dykes to Watch Out For too? Courtney grew up in Southern California in the 80s, and by the mid-90s I bet she’d have found her way to Los Angeles, which for a time was an unofficial capital of lesbian bars. The longest-running appears to be The Palms in West Hollywood (which operated from the 60s until its closure in 2013), and many more from that neighborhood are represented in the holdings of the local June Mazer Lesbian Archives, where oral histories have helped patch together this history of earlier bars in the area dating back to the 1950s. Latinx and Black lesbians, however, congregated in East LA, where bars like Kitty’s are immortalized by the ONE Archive LGBTQ+ Research fellows. The number of such bars over all of  LA has plummeted, sadly; this 2019 article by a local queer paper and this one from the following year highlight the erosion brought on by gentrification and other forces.

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I’m just getting started — queer history didn’t begin in the 20th century, and the 18th and 19th century American Girl characters deserve their queer lives imagined too. Keep your eyes peeled for Part 2 featuring beloved characters Kaya, Felicity, Caroline, Josefina, Kirsten, and Addy!

In the meantime, if you’d like more information about the past, present, and future of LGBTQ+ bars and community spaces, I recommend searching out a secondhand copy of the Our Happy Hours anthology, edited by LGBTQ+ literary legend Lee Lynch in the aftermath of the Pulse Shooting, for its firsthand accounts. More wonderful anecdotes can be found in this VICE documentary done by JD Samson, and in the recent Lesbian Bar Project committed to supporting and promoting the remaining bars across the country. If you’ve got any historical insights or modern-day recommendations for queer bars and community spaces worth supporting, lemme know all about what I’m missing out on in the comments!

Rosie O’Donnell In Blazers, 1992 – 1999

As you may know, a blazer is how power lesbians and power-lesbian-adjacent humans radiate their power. Lesbians have been blazing trails in the fashion fields of blazers since the beginning of time, as established in the scholarly work 12 Monumental Moments In Lesbian Blazer-Wearing History (Bernard, 2013), which studied prominent blazers as worn by blazer hotshots including Melissa Etheridge, kd Lang and the author. The limited sample size analyzed for that study did not offer the author a chance to zoom in on the specific blazer history of a single subject, but luckily for us all (and for academia) that time has now arrived. The single subject we will be approaching in this work is the one and only Rosie O’Donnell, star of The Flintstones.

The ’90s have been established as a key moment when lesbian fashion and fashion-fashion collided spectacularly. While it remains true that every blazer is a little bit gay (Honey Boo Boo, 2012), the oversized-blazer trend of the ’90s was slightly more gay than the aggressively shoulder-padded blazers of the ’80s and the cropped, boxy, and often very shiny blazers of the ’00s.

I have been a consistent appreciator of Rosie O’Donnell‘s since the ’90s and have always found her to be warm, smart and funny in person. She has also consistently been a target of lesbophobia, most recently from the actual former president of the united states. Over the past year,  I’ve been delighted to witness a cross-generational resurgence in Rosie O’Donnell celebration as the world flocks to her very popular TikTok account and anticipates her upcoming guest spot on The L Word: Generation Q.

Rosie is an interesting subject for fashion analysis because she very much prefers casual-wear whenever possible and once wrote in Elle Magazine, “the truth is, I have no fashion sense—never did.” Unfortunately, when you are famous you have to pick a look and wear nice clothing to events. Fortunately for a lesbian, you could usually just throw on an enormous blazer. Let us begin with this paper I am submitting for peer review.

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March 1992. Celebrity Ski Blazer

Ah, to be a guest at VH1’s 1992 “Celebrity Ski” event in Squaw Valley, California, which apparently involved relaxing days on the slopes with other celebrities and evenings in what looks like a hotel conference room where the audience was treated to the sweet sweet sounds of Kenny G and Smokey Robinson. Also in attendance was our very own Rosie O’Donnell, who had been working at VH1 since becoming a VJ in 1988 and then hosting a comedy show called “Stand Up Spotlight.” This blazer tells you everything you need to know but are not yet able to say: “I am gay and I am prepared for long Canadian winters.”

June 1992: Completely Innocent Blazer Ensemble

For the premiere of A League Of Their Own, Rosie chose a traditional look that my Social Studies teacher would’ve definitely worn to an evening event in the school auditorium, but Rosie pulls it off with absolute panache. Somehow white blazers seem less gay than other types of blazers, but still this outfit subtly suggests “this was a compromise between a dress and what I actually wanted to wear.” She repeated the unassuming ensemble for the 1993 premiere of Sleepless in Seattle.

June 1992: A League Of Her Own Blazer

This oversized black blazer with gold embroidered fleur-de-lis was undoubtedly one of Rosie O’Donnell’s most beloved blazers of the ’90s, and she wore it to several events, including the after-party of the premiere of A League of Their Own with new bestie Madonna. This blazer says “I may be a lesbian who isn’t allowed to come out yet, but I am also a Catholic Saint of France and Madonna is holding my hand.”

August 1992: Wild Animal Blazer

This Blazer was a Choice, this overall presentation was a Look, and she wore it to host the 1992 Emmys. Recently The Hollywood Reporter did a piece lamenting a time “before an army of Hollywood designers glammed up TV’s Big Night” when “talent was eager to show off individual flair” and Rosie’s velvet pants, leopard-print blazer and matching cap were a prominent feature of the piece celebrating celeb’s “wackier takes on fashion.”

On the other side of the coin, Entertainment Weekly slandered this blazer by referring to it as “leopard print PJs” in which Rosie “looked like she’d rolled out of bed and onto the red carpet.” Homophobia at its finest. I would excuse this judgement had it been made in 1992, but it was unfortunately made in 2012, at which point Rosie was already out and therefore protected by the Lesbians Can Wear PJs as Pants Rule.

October 1992: Politically Active Blazer

You’re interested in rocking the vote in the direction of the Clinton/Gore ticket and you’ve been invited to the Los Angeles premiere of the Brad Pitt film “A River Runs Through It.” What do you do? You simply put on a blazer and a Clinton-Gore hat for a Tomboy Look that absolutely Works for me. This shiny black blazer is too long in the arms but that’s okay, you do not fear a cuff. Yes you are wearing khakis and a t-shirt and a literal baseball cap to a movie premiere. But it’s okay, it was a casual movie premiere: Jodi Foster was swallowed by a sweater and a man on her way to the theater, Melissa Etheridge did a Canadian tuxedo and Catherine Keener only wore half a shirt. What we were all doing that year was our best.

August 1993. Swallow Me Blazer

Did anyone iron this camel-colored linen blazer? Probably not, but that’s okay, because I believe that is what we call “rumpled” and it reflects a casual lesbian lifestyle in which one cannot be fussed with such things.

March 1994: Duster-Blazer-Gown

This blazer says “I am the real deal from head to toe and although this bra is sucking my ribcage out of my torso, my boobs look amazing.”

June 1994: All That Glitters Is Not Gold Blazer

This is probably the most heterosexual blazer in the series. Although it is glittery, that does not automatically make it queer. This is your Very Hot Divorced Aunt showing up to your wedding in a Long Island Sheraton wearing jewelry she bought on her good-for-nothing ex’s credit card after learning he’d been cheating on her. She looks like a million bucks!

September 1995: Is It Okay to Look Gay at a Gay Movie Premiere Blazer

We were mixing a lot of neutrals and doing a lot of shopping at The Gap in 1995 and furthermore it was a wild time for hats. Rosie’s vibe is often along the lines of “okay fine I’ll dress up for this,” and I relate to that vibe and probably wore this same outfit when I went to see Too Wong Fu Thanks For Everything Julie Newmar.

September 1995: Mama’s Silk Pajamas Blazer

The tint of her sunglasses matches the tint of her suit! Tonight we celebrate her first-ever Primetime Emmy Award nomination, for her self-titled HBO comedy special! She accessorized with a small Poloroid picture of her recently adopted son.

June 1996: The Custom Blazer

Rosie’s daytime talk show launched in 1996, and she often spoke on her show of how hard it was to find clothes she liked in her size. Within a few months the show assigned her a personal designer, Dale Richards. who aimed to “make O’Donnell look like a typical career woman.” Richards told WWD that there was a dearth of structured options out there for women over a size 14 and “to carry a TV show, you shouldn’t have soft swing coat things, especially with her personality.”  So Richards designed her suits, each inspired by specific suits from labels like Chanel, Escada and Gucci; and worked with a tailor to create the final, entirely hand-tailored and highly-detailed looks. She looked fucking fantastic every day.

September 1996: Cruising Blazer

When Rosie O’Donnell came out in 2002, many people were surprised due to her oft-stated infatuation with erstwhile Scientologist Tom Cruise. She specified: “I said I wanted him to mow my lawn and bring me a lemonade, I never said I wanted to blow him.”

December 1996: Bette Porter Power Collar

She came, she saw, she SPLAYED THE COLLAR.

March 1997: Ecru Blazer With Collar Detailing and Emmy Accents

The gayest thing about this blazer is that Rosie O”Donnell cried in public while wearing it, as she accepted the Emmy for Best Daytime Talk Show Host. Crying in public is queer.

May 1998: Shiny Pastel Pinstripe Blazer

This glimmering cotton-candy-pink ensemble complimented the gold in Rosie’s first Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show Host, for which she tied with Oprah Winfrey. It was a big year for satin and shimmering concepts in general and we all coped with that in our own ways.

April 1998: K’s Choice Blazer

To host the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards, Rosie wore an oversized button-up shirt and Adidas track pants. But this promotional photograph obscures this eventual choice, outfitting Rosie O’Donnell in her Katherine Hepburn Best. Rosie opened the awards by announcing, “Welcome to the 11th annual Kids Choice Awards, the time when Hollywood’s biggest stars put away the tuxedos and makeup and put on the sneakers and slime because this is the big night where KIDS RULE!!!!!!!!!!!” (WILD APPLAUSE) (ROSIE SCREAMS) (THE CHILDREN SCREAM LOUDER)

December 1998: Blue Velvet Blazer

Richards liked to dress Rosie “mainly in velvet, with full-legged pants paired with shells and shirts” for “evening-wear.” The thing about a velvet blazer is that it has a vaguely magical vibe, and is somehow both fancy and nap-appropriate. Also spotted at this event: Mary Tyler Moore wearing a silver spacesuit and Barbara Walters carting her Rosie doll. Also Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates were there? 1998!

July 1999: Blazer With Baby

Whereas Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, is consistently pictured in a red robe with a blue mantle in all iterations of the “Madonna With Child” art motif, here we see a variation on that theme. Rather than colors intended to signify the earth and an empress-like divinity, we see an unassuming sand-colored pantsuit intended to signify an easy fashion choice for an evening theater benefit in lush Sag Harbor, New York. However, consistent with later depictions of the Madonna with Child, this photograph does “express a more tender, intimate moment between a mother and her child [and Julie Andrews].” There is no better place to end this case study than right here, as we see all forces collide into one divine, transcendent moment, inspiring all of us to live as if we, too, were surrounded by angels, saints and lesbians [in Blazers].

What Mattee Jim, Navajo Trans Elder, Teaches Us About Remembering

A month of convergence: the pandemic, ongoing uprisings to defend Black lives, Native American Heritage Month, Trans Day of Remembrance, and a presidential election. After what felt like a year of waiting to exhale, Mattee Jim celebrated the loss of President Trump with a symphony of honks and rejoicing voices. “I was cruising up and down for four hours. I didn’t even mind going slow,” she said. Many were dancing in the streets. She placed her trans flag on her dashboard so it could be on full display: as a Navajo trans woman, many parts of her were relieved.

Mattee Jim is of the Zuni People Clan and born for the Towering House People Clan. This is how she identifies as a Diné — the word that those in the Navajo nation use among themselves. She’s speaking to me from her office at First Nations Community Healthsource, where she’s returned, despite the pandemic, to ensure her Native communities have the resources for HIV prevention. She’s been doing this work for several decades.

She was born in Gallup, New Mexico, which lies near the arbitrary border that cuts through the Navajo nation, a line meant to indicate when New Mexico becomes Arizona. Navajo voters like Mattee were instrumental in flipping Arizona, a battleground state, blue. Yet, in many exit polls depicting voter statistics by race, Indigenous voters were forgotten, placed into the “something else” category.

Despite the Native words that are scattered across a map of the U.S. — Milwaukee, Oklahoma, Malibu, Tallahassee, Mississippi River, and Yellowstone National Park are just a few — the meanings of these words have been warped, assigned new values by colonizers. Few youth today are taught that both the American constitution and the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first feminist convention in the U.S., were inspired by the laws and matrilineal traditions of the Haudenosaunee people. Indigenous knowledge has been the well of inspiration that colonizers have drunk from, only to poison the water later on.

Mattee was one of the Native youth whose life was shaped by the American neglect of Indigenous populations. Her decision to become sober at the age of 24 was the turning point. Three years later, she began identifying as trans, after she started working with the Coalition for Equality in New Mexico in the late 1990s, an organization that works towards a “reality of equity, full access, and sustainable wellness for LGBTQ New Mexicans.” Prior to that, she had never even heard the word “transgender.”

While Stephanie Byers of the Chickasaw nation has made history this year as the first Native trans person to be elected to office in America, Native trans youth rarely have the stability to become politically engaged. “Getting into politics wasn’t our priority,” Mattee explained. “How to get to the hospital, how to go to the grocery store, how to get transportation, our livelihood was first and foremost.” Due to high rates of homelessness, food insecurity, and unemployment, many Native LGBTQ people cannot afford to get involved in politics.

Over the last few years, Native issues have reached greater visibility, especially after the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline began in 2016. Columbus Day in many cities has been renamed Indigenous People’s Day. Meetings and rallies, particularly among community organizers, begin with an acknowledgment of the original stewards of the land.

That work took decades of pressure from marginalized communities. After centuries of erasure, evident in the loss of languages, Native culture is still being preserved by protectors like Mattee. Despite the dual layers of invisibility being both Navajo and transgender, Mattee proudly proclaims her sacred role in community spaces she enters. While trans issues have become a national discussion only recently, gender-variant people from Indigenous communities have been historically accepted and revered for their contributions to society.

“From what I’ve learned growing up, the elders would tell us that we’re special people,” Mattee recalled. “A family was blessed to have someone in their family who was LGBTQ. The riches were the knowledge they knew, the roles they played, the tasks they do.”

Trans people in Indigenous communities, across the world, added to the abundance of knowledge about the human soul. As with the Navajo nation, trans people in Vietnam, called chuyển giới, were traditionally mediums who helped people speak to their ancestors. In India, the gender-variant community of hijras were revered as having the ability to bless or curse marriages through fertility rituals. Among the Zapotec people of Oaxaca, transfeminine muxes are often artisans and craftspeople. The city even celebrates gender diversity in a three-day festival called Vela de las Intrepidas. In Hawai’i, the māhū were people who could embody both masculine and feminine spirits, and they were traditional healers, caretakers, and teachers. Since the beginning of the fight for Mauna Kea, a sacred mountain threatened with destruction through the construction of a telescope, māhū leaders have been among those at the forefront of the battle.

Through her advocacy work, Mattee educates on Native trans identity and has been viewed by her friends to exhibit cultural roles and characteristics of historical Native trans individuals such as Osh-Tisch. The name, which means “finds them and kills them,” refers to the two-spirit person from the Crow nation that earned her moniker through her fierceness in battle in the late 1800s. Osh-Tisch later was imprisoned by an American federal agent, who forced her to cut her hair, wear masculine clothing, and perform manual labor. The Crow nation stood by Osh-Tisch and found a way to remove the federal agent from their land. Chief Pretty Eagle called their treatment of her “unnatural” — a word often used today to disparage trans people rather than, in this case, the abuse of trans people. Since the time of Osh-Tisch’s life, the perils set up by colonizers have continued to plague Native trans people.

Mattee explains that for Native trans women, there are two overlapping phenomena: the ongoing genocide of Native people and the attack on trans bodies. The two are demonstrated through community-led initiatives meant to track the disappearance of these communities, one being Trans Day of Remembrance and the other being Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (commonly shortened to MMIWG2S). In the face of heightened danger, many Native trans communities end up tracking their own community’s survival, not being able to rely on the government or media. “We have Native trans women who’ve been murdered in the State and in our tribal communities…I’ve had conversations with other Native trans women. Within our Native communities, we know where the girls are. If someone was missing, we’d know.”

Her work has been bridging the worlds of trans justice and Native sovereignty. Speaking at the United States Conference on HIV/AIDS last year, she asked a crucial question: “A lot of Native communities, especially trans communities… at a lot of the meetings, trainings, and national tables, we’re not included whatsoever. How many of you are including Native populations in the work that you do?”

Her demand for inclusion isn’t simply about weaving Native people into advocacy spaces. Mattee embodies the world that colonizers have tried time and again to eliminate. She is the manifestation of the trans wisdom her ancestors had celebrated. Each time she commands respect, she invites us onto the bridge with her: the bridge between binary genders, the bridge between trans and Indigenous movements, and the bridge between our past and the future. She invites us into that world where we’re allowed to be our whole selves without limitations, whether we know it or not. It’s our job to accept the invitation by giving her and every ancestor before her what they’re due. It’s our duty to remember.