This post originally published on Nov. 30, 2022.
Vol. 18
In this issue: Essay | Reading Recs | Nature Nook |
The first gay club I ever went to was a dingy, bare room called The Wreck. Down a narrow hallway painted black, the one-room club was housed inside a small warehouse in a rough-around-the-edges neighborhood of Oklahoma City.
I was 16 and had only lived in the state for a short time when I found my way to the club–a beacon, a light, a breath of fresh air in the middle of an otherwise oppressive state for all things queer and unusual. I’d been introduced to The Wreck by another Emily, who I met on a church trip to go snowboarding in Colorado. We hit it off because we were obviously and visually the weirdos in the group. She was even, miraculously out at the time, whereas I was still grappling with internalized biphobia and steadfastly refusing to name my feelings even as I regularly crushed hard on a wide array of friends and strangers and lusted after Xena’s blonde-haired, muscle-bound sidekick, Gabrielle.
Meanwhile, Emily had a shaved head and brought weed that immediately endeared her to the otherwise clean-cut straight kids on the trip with us. She lived in the city, whereas I lived in a small town two hours south, but I came to visit when I could, bringing along a few of my weirdo friends who were as desperate as I was for something to do that didn’t involve drinking beer in the backs of pickup trucks or getting “saved” at weepy Christian rock concerts at the big Baptist church downtown.
The Wreck was one of those all-too-rare places that didn’t limit attendance to the 18+ or 21+ crowd. It was 15+, which meant dry, which meant no bar and just a couple of big orange Gatorade coolers filled with water that inevitably ran out halfway into an evening and never got refilled.
There were drag shows that featured some of the grittiest queens I’ve ever met: Raggedy wigs and minimal makeup, track marks and bruises proudly on display, the girls rocked the shiniest mini dresses and tallest heels the local thrift stores could cough up. I loved them and they loved the adoring attention heaped on them by needy, dispossessed queer teens. They were tough as hell but fiercely protective of their community, of all of us. We were always welcomed with open arms. I could only imagine what they endured to simply be alive in that place and time, let alone to create moments of transcendent, deviant joy in that little corner of the world in late ‘90s OKC.
The Wreck lived up to its name. It was far from perfect, but none of us cared about that. It was ours. It was all we had. It was a liferaft in a sea of white evangelicalism that disdained anything and anyone not straight, cis, and gender-conforming.
No one bothered us when we were inside. I don’t think it would have occurred to anyone who wasn’t part of the community to enter a place full of queers in the first place. I can’t imagine the horror of being in such a place, relieved and cutting loose for one beautiful evening, only to have someone come inside and open fire. To set fire. To break. To arrest. To beat.
We had already been exiled. But that never does seem to be enough for those who fear the revolutionary possibilities of queer and trans existence. They want us dead. They want us erased. They desperately want to avoid seeing themselves in the bedazzled mirrors of our lives.
I feel it in my bones whenever I hear about queer and trans people being attacked. It’s a sort of boiling cauldron of rage and sorrow deep in my chest. There are so many real and terrible things to be fought in this world but they choose to come for us?! My gorgeous, brilliant, creative, loving, messy queer and trans family have been here since the beginning of humanity, will be here until the end–no matter how much some would wish it were not so. We are not the problem. We are, if anything, the solution.
The gay bar is hardly the end-all-be-all of queer life or what queerness has to offer. Queerness is a horizon, as José Esteban Muñoz wrote. It is possibility and change and something (hopefully) better than the current status quo.
“Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds,” he wrote in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
It is possible to dream up those new worlds from within the crushing pressure of an oppressive world, but I think it more possible to do so while surrounded by kin, by understanding, by the freedom we give each other in queer spaces to be fully and wildly ourselves. Because the dream can, even if just for fleeting moments, become real.
Sometimes, that alchemical place is a ramshackle club full of thirsty, dispossessed kids.
So I will always have a special place in my heart for the gay bar, the queer house party, the ball. Places where we make our own magic, despite (and to spite) the ebb and flow of threats from outside. I will fight for and hold tenderness for them and everyone who finds some kind of freedom there, including that confused, scared, defiant 16-year-old queerdo taking her first, tentative step out of the closet.
Reading Recommendations
I’ve been really enjoying Sam Harrington’s series for Tone focused on the oak savannas of Dane County and work being done to restore and protect these important ecosystems. This is the final entry of four.
Read this Cap Times interview with UW’s first openly transgender athlete, Emmett Lockwood, who plays on the men's water polo team. “While I love the work of educating people, there are days where I just want to exist as a trans student on campus and have no one ask me about what I think of the political situation in the U.S. Often when people are thinking about trans folks, it feels like sometimes there's the loss of the sense they are talking about a person. These are people.”
Meanwhile, too many people in this country are still hell-bent on targeting trans people for the worst harassment and abuse. Erin Reed continues to do incredible and important work to track anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation across the country, which we should all be paying close attention to and standing up against at every turn. Check out this Post-Election Anti-Trans Legislative Risk Map for a birds-eye-view of the situation.
Hey guess what?! Turns out running on abortion and being pro-choice is a political winner.
John Paul Brammer gives us a stark and moving reflection on the imperfect sanctity of the gay bar, in the wake of another mass shooting tragedy in a LGBTQ space: “In the mix of pain and sadness and rage following the shooting at Club Q, a nightclub in Colorado Springs where five people were gunned down and many more injured, there is an emphatic lack of surprise. Threats of violence to trans people and drag performers have found acceptance in the mainstream, with accusations of ‘grooming’ being levied against essentially anyone who isn’t cisgender and heterosexual. ‘It was only a matter of time, wasn’t it?’ seems to be a prevailing sentiment. And it was, really, only a matter of time. Among the victims were trans people, straight people, gay people, all committing the grievous sin of being there. For all the modest gains in the past decade, the truth remains that even if you sequester yourself, even if you keep it all behind a closed door, they will find you anyway.”
I’ve been on Twitter since 2009. It’s been a blessing and a curse. These days, I can’t help but stay and watch the Musk-induced conflagration. But a Twitterfolk I’ve followed for years makes the compelling argument for why it’s time to go: “That’s what Twitter is. Or at least, what it was. A collection of haphazard groups, not just of experts, but of people. Glorious, glorious people with all the edges and whistles, and career changes, and marriages, and kids, and vacations, and dad jokes. It is the office watercooler during the day; the conference ‘hallway-track’ during events; the Sunday barbeque social on the weekend. This is the thing that the new ownership of Twitter never seemed to fully grasp: Twitter’s value was never about engagement or technology or checkmarks. Its value is not found in its code or the servers on which it resides, or in the 24-by-24 pixel seal of approval granted opaquely by whomever at Twitter thought an account happened to be noteworthy in real life. The engine that drove Twitter was the people. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
This piece on “America's New Civil War” by Jeff Sharlet for Vanity Fair is a real gut-punch. He traveled through small town Wisconsin interviewing the people who fly the “Fuck Biden,” “Don’t Tread on Me,” “Trump 2024” flags and the picture painted is…bleak. Except for the young folks at the end. They’re great.
Nature Nook
I learned a new word recently and it basically means “tree snogging.” Extremely here for it.
‘Til Next Time.
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Emily is still on Twitter, Instagram, and now Mastodon at AT millbot AT mastodon dot social