On the occasion of Pride, a celebration of queer culture.
What have you given to queer culture?
In the mid-90s I did a lot of riot grrl stuff. DIY conferences and the like. Not just going to Bikini Kill shows, but going off to weird settings (farms in the middle of nowhere, abandoned gyms in the centre of Olympia) and meeting up with other radical young women. We’d get together and teach each other some good shit. I did my first knitting at one when 3 or 4 women found out that they all knitted and decided to form a group on the spot and teach others. That was the Young Anarchist Radical kNitters, and they were the glitter bomb. (I am sad to say that I never knitted up to their example.)
The gatherings I remember best were Bad Ass & Free (which formed YARkN), Bad Ass & Free 2, and Foxfire. That last was the one in the Olympia gym. Among the cool folks organizing the bash was Nomy Lamm. Her family lived in Olympia at the time and had a big ass yard and basement. So with permission and encouragement a good half or more of the women attending Foxfire camped in their yard or slept in their basement. It was the place to be in the evenings after workshops.
As you can imagine, there was fooding and dancing and musicing and other crepuscular delights. But at some point after the crepusculatory portion of the evening was over, on one of the nights we moved on to reading smut out loud. I honestly don't remember how this happened, but if someone else remembers me being to blame, I’d be hard pressed to mount a successful character defense.
A few of us took turns reading aloud. During mine one particularly lovely soul became bouncy and giddy about one rizzy and androgynous character riding a horse and obviously destined to have passionate moonlit sex with the narrator. The Lovely Giddy Soul practically squeaked at the description of Rizzy Androgynous Character, and at some point while RAC is still ahorse, LGS interrupted to announce that RAC should very definitely have a rhinestone on their cheek like Prince did in this one thing.
I am nothing if not fan-servicey, so while reading I took a moment in the middle of a sentence about Rizzy Androgynous Character dismounting to improvise the narrator's surprised and awed reaction to seeing the light of a star catch in a drop of dew on RAC's cheek, now glimmering like a magical rhinestone.
So smoothly did I accomplish the insert that Lovely Giddy Soul stopped breathing for a moment. Other women cheered and a paragraph later LGS had to interrupt again, "Did the story really say that about the rhinestone?" Obviously she wanted to believe, but I told her the truth:
"Oh, my Lovely, Giddy Soul, that shining drop of dew was written into the story with invisible ink, pressed between lines so fine that no one could read them before you called attention to their existence. Those words were made visible because of you, and will never be read again without you. You are the cypher that unlocked this moment."
And no, we didn't fuck that night, however much I might have enjoyed a nibble on my collar bone. Others fucked. Fifty queer & queer friendly women in 400 square feet of space? There were some sleeping bags wriggling that night, I can tell you. But I wasn't trying to get into the pants of this Lovely, Giddy Soul. This was just a gift, inspired by her senses of excitement, wonder & joy.
Sometimes, during Pride, I like to think about what I've given to queer culture. And yes, I've written essays and done activism and all that added to queer community in various ways, but to queer culture?
I'm not sure that I've ever done something so perfectly queer culture as a dramatic DIY reading of androgyny porn in front of a group of Pacific Northwest riot grrls improvisationally satisfying one woman's transgender Prince-inflected horsey-girl rhinestone fetish.
I'll die someday, but a glimmer of that perfect moment under Olympia's skies will twinkle in the light beams between the stars until the final dusk of the universe itself.
Crip Dyke also writes for the delightfully cussmouthed Wonkette!
If you want to see me try to write essays in 299 character blobs, you could join the two thousand people amused at my inability to understand the “micro” in “microblogging” over on BlueSky.
But seriously. What have you given to queer culture? I'd love to hear your stories.
This is gorgeous. I love the poetry in it.