Holigay Gift Guide: Upgrading Your Home Bar

My home bar could use some love. None of my glassware matches, which I’d love to claim is a fun, kitschy aesthetic choice but is really something that happened unintentionally as individual glasses broke and left their siblings behind. Sad, but true. Now, though, because it’s the holiday season, my home bar is getting way more attention than it gets all year — and I’m scrambling! Chances are, your home bar is also getting a lot of attention. Whether you’re hosting or going to an event, beverages are at the forefront of many minds this time of year. Here are some ways you can amp up your home bar game in time for the holiday season!

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Invest In Glassware

Glassware is one of the best (and easiest) ways to upgrade your cocktail game. I learned the hard way that a martini sipped out of a repurposed yogurt jar does not taste the same as the exact same martini sipped out of an actual martini glass! I don’t know what alchemy (science?) is behind this difference, but I do know it’s worth it to invest in glassware.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the martini glass linked above since I saw it in one of those pantry stores. The glass olive is surprisingly realistic and would look SO cute nestled amongst a duo of Castelvetranos, but honestly, much cheaper martini glasses exist and will probably serve you just as well. If you’re prone to spills (no shame!), or if you’d just rather drink a daiquiri, coupes are a wiser choice. If you’re looking for a general purpose wine glass, I think tiny cups are a much prettier alternative to many of the “universal” wine glasses I’ve seen. Sure, they’re stemless, but the ones above are whisper-thin and somehow also dishwasher-safe. Also, they’re $2 each!

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Try Some Non-Alcoholic/Low ABV Options

Whether you’re a drinker or not, I think it’s important to have nonalcoholic choices included in your home bar — especially if you’re hosting parties! Not everyone drinks, and it’s nice to have more than just soda on offer for folks abstaining. NA spirits are one way to bring the same level of thoughtfulness that we bring to craft cocktails into the mocktail space, as are NA aperitifs. Even for drinkers, both can be subbed into traditional cocktail recipes for a lower-ABV alt. If you’re leaning into the mocktail space, both craft soda and alcohol-free bitters are worthwhile investments (some bitters have alcohol in them!). If you’re more of a beer drinker, there are some surprisingly good nonalcoholic beers. I was halfway through a bottle of Heineken 0.0 at a party before I realized it was the nonalcoholic version!

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Garnish Everything

A cocktail (or mocktail, for that matter) isn’t complete without a garnish! You probably already have a peeler for citrus peels, but if it’s dull, it might be time to get a Y peeler instead. They’re not significantly more expensive than traditional peelers, but they’re way easier to handle. Plus, they can help you get a less pithy peel. Fancy salt is a great way to change up the ordinary — consider black salt for your next margarita! Dried citrus slices are a fun cocktail topper, and you can even make them yourself. Maybe something to consider if you get your hands on a blood orange! Reusable cocktail picks are another way to add some personality to a beverage (for a splurge, maybe this zodiac-inspired set), as are glass straws.

Bud Light Is the Dykiest Domestic Lager — Change My Mind

I have said it (screamed it, really) before, and I will say it again: Bud Light is for lesbians.

Put another way, Bud Light is the dykiest domestic light lager. Or, in my girlfriend’s words: “Kayla is always trying to make ‘Bud Light lesbians’ a thing.”

Would you like to change my mind? Well, you can’t. Some of my own coworkers attempted to in an act of great betrayal:

laneia: ok but people will try to change your mind bc it’s actually michelob ultra somehow???
nico: yeah but frogs are gay and budweiser has frogs
laneia: the dykes in arizona will behead you for a michelob ultra and i don’t get it but
me: that is the wildest choice to me
well no, coors light would be the wildest
it tastes like beer that has been spilled onto a carpet and then put back into the bottle
nico: everyone here at the gay dives drinks yuengling
carmen: yuengling is delicious, i’m sorry
i buy a case whenever i drive through pa
riese: my favorite beer is whichever beer has no alcohol in it and tastes the most like water
is that bud light
laneia: so michelob ultra then

Someone threw out something called an “I.C. Light,” and all I have to say to that is: I don’t know her. I am also refusing to acknowledge Laneia’s M*chelob Ultr* propaganda.

I have been declaring Bud Light a lesbian beer for many years now, and I am oft-called upon to explain why. Here is some of the evidence I have assembled:

• Bud Light, especially when extra cold and crispy on draft, tastes the most like drinking a seltzer, and dykes love seltzer.
• All other American-style light lagers taste bad (and therefore are straight).
• “Bud” is what every butch dyke I know calls any man who is younger or shorter than her.
• Bud Light has somehow been a sponsor of every Mainstream Pride™ event I’ve ever been to. Like, not Budweiser, but specifically Bud Light. What’s going on there?
• In fact, Bud Light has got rainbow capitalism ON LOCK. The rainbow aluminum cans? Perfect Pride photo prop. Exhibit A:
  
• Every restaurant industry dyke I have ever known loves a Bud Light paired with a shot of fernet.
• This neon sign I own of a Bud Light logo that is rainbow and also says BE YOURSELF??????? Gay.
  

Alright gays, come and fight me!

11 Drinks if You Don’t Like a Negroni Sbagliato With Prosecco in It but Still Want To Be Gay

Feature image of Emma D’Arcy via HBOMax TikTok

If you’re any level of “too” online and any type of queer, then you have likely already seen the HBO Max promotional interview that made a splash last week between House of the Dragons co-stars Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke. There is a certain je ne sais queer about the moment that is difficult to explain. Much like a Negroni Sbagliato itself, you either get it or you don’t (and if you don’t — no shame!). Again, much like a Negroni Sbagliato, it’s not everyone’s cup of bizarrely alluring and specific celebrity content.

@streamonmax

I’ll take one of each. #houseofthedragon

♬ a negroni sbagliato w prosecco l hbo max – Max

While the spell of this video doesn’t quite work on me, I do understand why it has worked on others. Something about the shape of “sbagliato” in their mouth or perhaps the cadence of “with prosecco in it” coupled with the little smirky lean in does have a spellbinding effect.

Perhaps you have already Googled what the fuck a Negroni Sbagliato is. That’s not what we’re here for (but truly, if you want to know, it’s your most basic ass 1:1:1 ratio recipe of equal parts Campari, sweet vermouth, and prosecco).

Maybe you even tried to order a Negroni Sbagliato this past weekend, and maybe you realized a Negroni Sbagliato is not worth the hype. It’s, like, a fine drink? Not disgusting by any means but also nothing really special??? So if you don’t want to order a Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco in it, there are plenty of other stunning drinks you can get your gay little hands on that also have a certain je ne sais queer about them. Here’s what they are, according to my queer cocktail lover expertise.

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1. Club soda with half a lemon squeezed in

I cannot explain it, but this, despite its stark simplicity, is the mocktail version of ordering a Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco in it. Something about the excess of lemon is what pushes it into this territory. Bonus points if you want to add a splash of simple syrup for sweetness.

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2. Grasshopper

Have you ever thought to yourself “hey, I wish those Andes mints I get with the check at the Olive Garden were a cocktail I could drink,” well, the Grasshopper is for you.

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3. Boulevardier

The whole vibe of a Negroni Sbagliato is, like, a Negroni but make it different. (Sbagliato means “broken,” so you’re breaking the Negroni by subbing prosecco for gin.) A Boulevardier is like a Negroni but you sub bourbon or rye whiskey for the gin.

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4. Campari soda

My favorite part of a Negroni is the Campari. The hangup I have a Negroni Sbagliato is that you get a lot less of that bitter Campari taste when you throw in prosecco, which doesn’t meld as well with Campari as gin does imo! Sometimes, I like to just get down to business and have a no-frills Campari soda.

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5. Fernet + Coke

AKA a Fernando. Do you by chance WORK at the gay bar?

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6. Ramos Gin Fizz

Ah, yes, the drink with a notoriously complex shaking method. I once had a bartender make me a Ramos Gin Fizz with foam so tall and stiff that she could insert a straw through the middle and it just stayed there. Gay magic!

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7. Corpse Reviver No. 1

In rare instances, the sequel is more popular than the original, and that’s true of the Corpse Reviver No. 2, which is the much more commonly found drink. You could order the more standard option — much like you could just order a regular degular Negroni — OR, you could go with its less loved sibling, the Corpse Reviver No. 1.

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8. Brandy Alexander

Indulgent! Has a name that sounds fancy and goofy all at once! This is the creamy, dessert-adjacent equivalent of a Negroni Sbagliato.

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9. A vodka martini with an entire lemon squeezed in

It feels gauche to reveal exactly WHICH ultra famous celesbian orders this drink as her go-to given that I did not find out this information from an interview but rather by hearing her order it multiple times, but I promise you, a beloved celesbian loves this very lemon martini. If you also happen to know any go-to drink orders of famous celesbians, please feel free to allude to them in the comments.

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10. Bud Light

Famously, not a cocktail. But this is all part of my masterplan to prove that Bud Light is the dykeiest domestic light beer, an assertion that people love to fight me on, and yet I persevere.

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11. I mean, you can just order a Negroni

It’s a classic for a reason! Yes, I know as queer people it is our right to put special twists on the norm, but like, a Negroni is good!!!!! If anything, the way I sometimes fuck with it is by adding slightly less vermouth. But I will admit that “Negroni, light vermouth” does not have nearly the same ring to it as Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco in it.

Stunning!

15 Things I Drank in My Year of Not Drinking

A Cup of Coffee, First Thing in the Morning, with Toothpaste Taste

Tasting notes: A secret new year nestled in its own space at the end of November. Laughter from nowhere.

A Can of “The Bitter Housewife” Bitters and Soda

Tasting notes: Bracing, aggressively present. Sister said it reminded her of the inside of her mouth after vomiting. Woefully drinkable herbaceous liquid that dries the mouth as it is consumed.

Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Tea

Tasting notes: Knowing that little sleepy bear your whole life, letting him in your mind like a mental Teddy. The tasting begins when you hold it in your hands, pull the bag from the wax paper inside the cardboard box with that soft crinkle sound, smell the mint and the chamomile and the cold ceramic of the collectible figurines from the 90’s. This tea is an utterly American variety. It is manufactured by a cult and no other brand can ever capture the original flavor profile.

A Single Can of Non-Alcoholic, Sparkling White Wine

I crack this open, and the first sip gives me wine mom.

It places memories of not just any wine mom, but a specific one, on my tongue. I taste how it felt when my ex-mother-in-law kept filling my glass at a dinner out with my partner’s relatives until I could not see. It comes on strong, like threading the needle of being blind drunk, but not letting on, being friendly, polite, personable with her family that swam like the ghosts of the drowned in front of my eyes, like in a ‘hey, the station isn’t coming in right,’ kind of situation with all fuzz and blurred figures, but the voices of the actors or news anchors or whoever you’re trying to watch still coming in crisp. When I told my partner I had gotten very drunk, all I got was a Really? I couldn’t tell at all. I was a kind of drunk I only get when I forget to go at my own pace and instead follow whoever I’m with. How drunk was the woman pouring?

What does it taste like to know that I can in fact not have a drink for a year, in spite of my ex-mother-in-law’s best efforts to shape me in her image, to make her drinking the new normal, enabling herself by encouraging my drinking and her kid’s? Spite tastes like seeing candy-pink flamingos stuck into a fresh-cut suburban lawn, recognizing a facade of well-being that could have anything hiding behind it. White wine does not stain lips or teeth like its red sister. It still causes the same internal effects. The psychic handprints she laid on her child left no visible marks.

Tasting Notes: Creates a temporal illusion. You will think time is supposed to slow down or speed up in the way a lazy summer afternoon with friends and full plastic wine glasses might. But it will not in fact slow down or blur past you, because there is no alcohol to do that work, so the whole effect will just be that your brain becomes like an after-image, dragged after your body and responsibilities and ego and wherewithal saying wait, we were going to relax, weren’t we? This brain is like a slinky, pulled by the gravity of the fact that it is you, now, not a poison you have administered to yourself, that has to choose to slow down and that is too hard for now. The tartness builds. The sweetness does not linger.

Diet Pepsi, Bottled, Sold From Vending Machines in Side-of-the-Road Stops

Tasting notes: Not crashing the car. Grinding teeth. Supposedly Catholic talk radio rattling off the URL for a website that grants religious exemption for vaccines. Plastic nestling into its forever home in the earth. Lingering low notes reminiscent of limited choices.

A Single Can of Lemon La Croix Outdoors at a Brewery

It’s a very Halloween-y, gothy birthday celebration at a brewery, just a few days before the October fundraiser officially launches. I ask if they have Diet Coke. They do not. They just have regular, which tastes worse than anything. I don’t like the viscosity of the sugar in Coke.

While talking to a tipsy straight woman who I would consider a friendly acquaintance but one I’m pretty darn fond of, she says you should go as Guy Fieri for Halloween. I laugh. Maybe. I pull this suggestion back out later on in the party. I stand within a circle of queers around the fire pit. Someone I’ve just met says, well they just put that on you, didn’t they? It was artful, the way this friendly queer didn’t want to invalidate me, in case I was excited about being Guy Fieri, but was at the ready to offer sympathy in case this was distressing. A social contagion takes hold in the group. We become obligated to go around the circle and each in turn affirm that we had heard that Guy Fieri is “actually a pretty good guy.” He is known for officiating gay weddings, you know.

I heard his name while I was listening to Sherry Shriner’s “Sherry Talk Radio” — the raw recordings from the conspiracy theorist’s broadcasts. I put them on for research — or trying to understand a person I’d lost to conspiracy. I listen while I make coffee in the mornings, picking up on nuggets and distinctions that were important to her destructive world-building (The Queen of England is a lizard person, for example, but Princess Diana was not, Harry is not). At one point, she suggests the listener take their kids on a trip to deposit orgone, a substance that fights aliens or reptiles or leftists or whatever. She says it can be a family affair. She brings up Guy Fieri, tells the parents of soon-to-be orgone-chucking children to look up some destinations from Diners, Drive-in’s and Dives and take the kids there. I wonder if she knew he does gay weddings.

I look up at the planes and the lines behind them in the sky. Conspiracy theorists say some of these are “chem trails,” some kind of mind-controlling toxins dropped onto us. The person I lost hasn’t used a microwave in years, even though she was the one who taught me how in the first place. Don’t stand in front of the microwave. That was as cautious as we got back then, while I stared into its glowing recesses, over-nuking my oatmeal into a solid puck before kindergarten. Now, the pandemic has deepened her resolve. She won’t get vaccinated, is afflicted with an obsession with bodily purity. A broken clock is right twice a day, and the conspiracy theorists are right to not be complacent, are right that people are held against their will, that the world is toxic, is dying, that there are wealthy people controlling everything. But they are wrong about so much more. Their reality ends where their complicity begins.

I don’t get to finish the La Croix. A bee chases me around the fire. They always come for me and never anyone else if I’m around. They are relentless. I drop the can while running away.

I remember when I used to drink and watch Absolutely Fabulous with my conspiracy theorist, wine or vodka splashed into water forming a bridge between us that just isn’t there anymore. Edie used to say on the screen, It’s ‘La Cwah,’ sweetie.

Tasting notes: sober, empty, fizzing liquid, a memory of a flavor.

Two Coffees, from Two Different Rest Stops, One McDonald’s, One Tim Hortons, Both Weak

Tasting notes: Night air. Drivers’ eyes at rest stops bore holes through your skin and muscle and bone. The summer night breeze whistles through these new orifices. Exhaust carries through your innards. A small child references you to an exhausted parent while you wash your hands, Girls’ room? This the girls’ bathroom? The parent eventually strains out: People look different ways! This coffee has middle notes of an elevator starting to move. The floor falls away for a hot second, your stomach lurches. Wasn’t McDonald’s coffee always standardized? What happened? Is the coffee bad or do I have Covid? When you get to your destination, it will become clear that the coffee was only weak, a small disappointment in the grand scheme of things that could go wrong, are going wrong.

Can After Can of Spindrift Sparkling Water

Are you sure? They don’t press much after that. It’s there if I want it, my dad reassures me, and then points to the way he’s stocked half of a shelf in his fridge with different flavors of Spindrift in anticipation of my visit. He first tried them at my place. I crack one open, pink lemonade, and watch the pale fuschia juice glitter its way into a glass. August magic.

Birthday martinis! My stepmother is excited, waving her hands in the air. My dad gets out heavy cream from the refrigerator, whipped cream, cake flavored vodka. I watch him shake heavy cream and vodka together. Shake shake shake. He pours the frothing, ever-so-off-white mixture into two martini glasses. It coats the sides and slides back down. The glasses look dirty after that. He splits the rest of a can of whipped cream between the glasses. It sputters even more of a mess onto their milky edges. He places three individual sprinkles on each. I sip from the Spindrift like it’s a shield.

Out on the back porch, we play Apples to Apples, selected by my sister. (It’s her birthday.) Mya the dog lolls in the grass and eyes the cake. At one point in the game, it is my turn to ask everyone else to submit cards for my judgement. Each card has two options for the person who is “it” to choose from.

Mine are ‘Feminine’ and ‘Shiny’ and I make a joke only my sister will get, oh, the two genders.

My dad looks up from his beer. I sip at the new bubbles of my second can.

What’s that? he asks. What’s shiny? Tell me. I tell him it’s nothing, just a joke. No, he insists, what gender is shiny? I make a face, laugh, he does not laugh. No, dad, it was a joke. People make this joke about there being only two genders. Shiny is not a gender I know of, a lie I tell to simplify the conversation, because of course your gender could be shiny, but listen, you can tell I am still trying to explain the joke here. Okay, he says. His eyes narrow. He doesn’t quite believe me. He says, okay, but I need to keep up.

My sister and I will whisper and delight in this later, how earnest it is that he has assigned himself the task of ‘keeping up.’ After watching my dad drink a blue cocktail made from cake vodka and curacao and after witnessing ‘birthday martinis’ which are not in fact dirty martinis served to you on your birthday, I ask, what happened? How did they all go completely feral with cocktails?

She tells me about their weekly quarantine happy hour, when he would try a new drink each week, and how he and his wife had eventually started creating drinks of their own, including the blue one named after my stepsister, her creation.

My sister tells me about the time he served her a water glass of heavy cream and vodka.

I laugh into my Spindrift.

Tasting notes: This one is real, like a hallucination. You can feel it, see it, and it leaves very little evidence of its passing through your body. Lingers barely on the tip of the tongue, with high notes of bright genders named like quarks.

Just. Tonic. Water.

Tasting Notes: The cackling of the skeleton from The Last Unicorn, pouring wine into the hollow in his jaw, screaming, But I remembeeeeer!

Fake Gin, Monday Brand Specifically, Made into a Gin and Tonic

Tasting notes: A disturbing lack of burn, but a tingling sense that limes are more fun than they’re letting on.

Non-Alcoholic Beer

Tasting notes: Turns out, beer is bread soda! Refreshing in the summer. Really, truly, nothing like it. Tends to be turned down by people who identify as “sober” with a wary look. Fair. Even non-alcoholic PBR tastes a lot like its alcoholic counterpart, except it is actually better.

Three French Presses of Coffee, Often Daily

It takes less than a month for a rattling pebble to come loose in my brain. This is not dissimilar to something that happened to me in the eighth grade. Among body stuff and bisexual discovery, while staying with my grandma because my mom decided that taking care of both me and my little sister while my dad was deployed was too much, I began to hear a rattling.

I heard it for the first time in the upstairs bathroom, after cranking her old Buffalo taps shut. I moved. I rattled. Was it something inside me? I clutched at my organs, my stomach, my hips. Whenever I moved, I heard a little jangle of something hard, pinging around. Was I dying? At school, the rattling followed me up staircases and down halls. I swiveled my head, perked my ears, tried to locate it.

One night, I took off my chunky black shoe and inspected the worn sole. On the underside, there was a flapping hole in the rubber. I reached inside and extracted a pebble like I might remove a lost tampon. How weird to discover the source of my months-long anxiety was just a stone lodged in an extension of my body.

Three French presses of coffee will make you impossibly alert. With fingers jittery from caffeine, I locate another stone. Before the end of December, I pull it out, hold it in my hand, let out a sigh that lasts for days. It was a little pebble of not-cisness. Alcohol had helped me ignore the rattling. Even though I heard it, I could quell the anxiety. Like the pebble in my shoe, I know what it is the moment I pull it out. All the rattling memories fall into place. My shoulders relax.

Over a cup of the French press coffee, I tell my therapist. She yells, Me, too! and talks about wanting a motorcycle and a penis from a very young age. I nod along. I tell my girlfriend on the couch and she holds me, then my sister just before we watch the X-Files episode about a gender-swapping alien. DID YOU PICK THIS EPISODE ON PURPOSE!?

Tasting Notes: Bitter with penetrating oils. Greasy like something that might coat the edges of the little cysts left when you extract truths that have been nestled into crevasses, hardened with years of detritus and hoarded dust.

A Sip of My Girlfriend’s Beer

Tasting notes: Shockingly, not great, and does nothing to distract from being bothered by a bee that eventually lands in my dad’s cup. He scoops it onto the ground, He’ll leave us alone now. He’s drunk. The bee gets up and flies into a sign. Yep, there he goes.

Cold Brew and Too Much Flavored Almond Creamer

Tasting notes: Conspiratorial laughter. My girlfriend telling me she loves that I’m trashy. Minty kisses. Not being afraid of yourself. Cackling, syrup, and sometimes, a slight mineral oil chemical burn sensation on the tongue. (I would know. I had a mineral oil chemical burn scar on my right butt cheek for a long time.) It’s not not not unpleasant.

Diet Dr. Pepper Cream Soda Flavor and Also Diet Dr. Pepper Cherry Flavor

I know what’s coming. Fundraiser. A time to fill my veins with as much caffeine as possible, and in the preamble, I need to stock up on supplies for all nighters because they tend to strike without notice. I’d seen an ad on Autostraddle, of all places, for new flavors of Diet Dr. Pepper. Marvelously targeted ads advertise the one thing I always want, a brown-colored diet pop with vanilla flavoring. You know the movie theater soda machines where you can mix your own flavor? They report the data back to the company. Maybe this WAS made just for me and people I share a customer profile with, all of us pulsing in a server somewhere together, longing for the same vanilla flavor. I’d gotten a pack of each, the cream soda and the cherry Diet Dr. Pepper last time I’d been to the store — and I am back for more. I rattle my red Target cart down the aisles and drag containers of the recyclable, aluminum cans into my cart, four maybe five 12 packs.

I stack them on the checkout belt. An unmasked woman turns toward me, pointing at the Diet Dr. Pepper, the cherry ones. Have you had those yet. They’re sooo good.

I have! I love the cherry. Have you had the cream soda one?

Not yet.

It’s good. I mean. It’s gross, but in a good way.

She looks like she wants to back up a step. It’s not an unfamiliar look. With masks now, sometimes I get nervous looks from women on the street, forcing me to call out to them, making sure my voice carries high and light like some kind of Mrs. Doubtfire impersonator Oh hellooooo! so that whoever she is, she knows she can relax.

The woman at the checkout has nowhere to go while the red-vested employee keeps scanning her items. I keep babbling: It’s gross but I like it.

Her body starts pulling away from me at the corners, she stares at the exit. She gets her receipt. Her voice comes out flatter than old soda. Have fun with that.

I call after her, I will!

Tasting Notes: A grubby triumph like sweat stuck between your teeth. Bitter prune notes of memory. A mouthfeel of chemically enhanced free will that is only real sometimes. High notes trumpet the arrival of the future.

The Book That Made Me Get Sober: Leslie Jamison’s “The Recovering”

Happy Hour at Home: Let’s Get Spritzy

Be our guest for Happy Hour at Home, a small series about the joys of lesbian socializing from home, because let’s be honest with ourselves — we’re going to be here for a while.

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Before our weekly happy hour together can begin, a question: Are you hydrated?

Apparently, I am very bad at hydrating. It took me moving to the desert to learn this unfortunate fact about myself. Sure, I’ve heard the whole “eight eight ounce glasses” a day rule and been like “well, I’m probably doing that.” BITCH. I am not coming EVEN CLOSE to doing that. I know I should probably get one of those bottles that keeps track of how much water you’ve had/still need to guzzle, and yet I’ve found that the most effective way to get my dumb ass to hydrate is to drink water out of a WINE GLASS. So yes, I have made the scary mid-quar discovery that I am turning into my mother.

Drink water right now and then come back to this!!!!!!!!!

Okay, welcome back. Hope you’re more hydrated than I am. It’s summer now, and even though all of our summer plans have changed and we’re still inside most of the time, my girlfriend and I have still been trying to trick ourselves into feeling like it really is summer. And that means it’s spritz o’clock.

The best thing about spritz mixology is that you can pretty much just top off any alcohol on ice with some seltzer or club soda and call it a spritz. It’s a very easy way to make a drink that looks and tastes like something fancy. Even a basic white wine spritzer—literally just white wine with club soda—is a summer treat.

And doesn’t the word “spritz” just sound so good and onomatopoeic? It sounds like running through the mist of a lawn sprinkler or drinking water straight out the garden hose. Spritz sounds like drinking next to a pool. Spritz sounds like condensation slipping off a glass and down your hand while you drink in the sun.

The best known spritz is without a doubt still the Aperol spritz. The ultimate spritz. Listen, it might be tempting to write off a classic Aperol spritz as trendy Instagram bait, but I personally believe the drink is beloved for good reason. It tastes good!!!!! It tastes like summer!!!!! I’ll always associate it with the season and fondly recall when someone attempted to cancel the Aperol spritz and wrote that it “drinks like a Capri Sun after soccer practice on a hot day” AS IF THAT WERE A BAD THING!!!!!

Hot Tip: You can sub pretty much any amaro or apéritif for Aperol in the standard Aperol spritz recipe and it’ll be good.

But here are some non-Aperol spritzes for something a little different.

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Anise Spritz

For those who want to drink liquid licorice! The best spirit to use here is the Greek aperitif called ouzo, but you could also use sambuca, pastis, raki, or even absinthe. Pour two ounces in a glass with ice and add the juice of an entire lemon, fresh or dried mint if you have it. Top off with plain or lemon-flavored seltzer.

Cherry Spritz

This is a slight play on the kalimotxo, the brilliant Spanish drink that is just red wine and cola. For this, you’ll need a glass of red wine (nothing too expensive! can be boxed! bonus points for an effervescent red like lambrusco!). Add canned cherry Coke or plain Coke with grenadine syrup and a squeeze of lemon juice. Cut the sweetness a bit with a splash of plain or black cherry-flavored seltzer.

Zesty Gin Spritz

I previously wrote about making fresh citrus margaritas, but if tequila isn’t really your thing, you can still make colorful cocktails with other spirits. I like how gin mixes with fresh citrus, because you get all these botanical and fruity flavors swirling together in a flavor party. Get to juicing whatever citrus you have on hand and combine equal parts juice and gin (or vodka) in a glass with ice. Topped with plain or citrus-flavored seltzer.

Virgin Spritz

For an alcohol-free spritzy drink that isn’t just flavored seltzer, combine a can of tonic water with a teaspoon of lemon zest, a squeeze of lemon juice, and fresh or dried mint or rosemary. You can also make a similarish drink to an Aperol spritz without alcohol by combining tonic water or seltzer, grapefruit juice, lemon juice, and rosemary. It’s not an exact match (rhubarb soda instead of tonic water will be closer, but rhubarb soda isn’t necessarily something people have in their pantries at the moment), but it has the same kind of floral, refreshing taste.

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Really, the sky’s the limit. Throw something in a glass with ice and then top it with seltzer and you’ve got a spritz.

Happy Hour at Home: Kitchen Scraps and Pantry Items for Fancy Cocktails

Be our guest for Happy Hour at Home, a small series about the joys of lesbian socializing from home, because let’s be honest with ourselves — we’re going to be here for a while.

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Hello! The city I live in has started re-opening, and I am s t r e s s e d about it!!!!

My girlfriend and I are maintaining shelter in place though, which means we’re still coming up with ways to spend meaningful time with each other that somewhat replicates our lives beyond our home. Yes, we’re still doing weekly gay club night.

Today’s Happy Hour at Home is very straightforward: I’m gonna give you some easy tips-n-tricks for kicking cocktails up a notch by using scraps and other things you already have lying around your kitchen.

First up: ICE! For this extremely simple rosemary gin and tonic, I filled a small ziploc bag with water and added chopped up bits of rosemary before freezing it. Once frozen completely, I used a heavy spoon to smash it into chunks and then plopped a piece of it into a glass with some gin and tonic. That’s it!

Other variations on this theme: cilantro ice in a classic margarita, smashed strawberry ice in a gin smash, basil ice in a gimlet. You can chop up fresh or dried peppers and freeze them in an ice bag for any cocktail you want to add a hit of spice to. It’s simple and pretty, and if you have any extra herbs or fruits that are about to turn, freezing them is an easy way to hang onto them for a bit longer. Herb STEMS can also be your friend here! Cilantro stem ice is perfect for a bloody mary.

Ice usually waters down the flavor of a drink, but in this case you’re also gradually adding flavor. There are also ways to use pantry ingredients in ice. Whole black peppercorns frozen in ice make for a punchy addition to a gin and tonic, especially if the gin you’re using leans botanical in flavor. If you have tea bags on hand, brew up some earl grey and then pour it into an ice cube tray and freeze. Add a couple to some vodka and lemon juice or, for a virgin version, add the tea cubes to lemonade or tonic. If you’ve got honey, mix a few spoonfuls with about half the amount of warm water and freeze into honey cubes that can be added to nonalcoholic iced tea or just a pour of bourbon.

I can’t vouch for this one yet, but I’m going to attempt making some sort of balsamic vinegar ice cube to throw in a drink? If you get up to any experiments of your own, please let me know.

In a previous iteration of this column, I gave some tips for making colorful margaritas. If you’ve been dabbling with citrusy drinks, make sure you’re getting the most out of your citrus! There are obvious ways to include the scraps, like orange peels for an old fashioned or some lemon zest that will kick up a plain ol’ martini.

You can also candy citrus peels as a sweet treat or turn them into a simple syrup. For a lemon peel simple syrup, throw the peels from a whole large lemon in a pot with one cup of sugar, and one cup of water, stirring as you bring it to a boil. Remove the peels, let the mixture cool, and add lemon juice to taste. If you wanna make it in larger batches, know that it will keep in a sealed glass container in the fridge for a whole ass month.

While on the topic of repurposing things: My bar cart now always has at least one bottle that has been turned into a bud vase.

Happy Hour at Home: Welcome To The Gay Club

Be our guest for Happy Hour at Home, a small series about the joys of lesbian socializing from home, because let’s be honest with ourselves — we’re going to be here for a while.

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I confess that I wasn’t entirely sure what this series would be until I started writing it (story of my life!), but it essentially has become: My girlfriend and I did this weird, fun thing during quarantine and idk maybe you could try some variation of it if you want a distraction or an activity or just a small crumb of that thing that I think a lot of us are longing for. The little everyday feelings that we probably took for granted. Like running into a friend unexpectedly while doing errands. Or striking up conversation with a stranger while waiting in line for something dumb. Or overhearing gay drama at the coffee shop. Whatever that feeling is that those outside-the-home experiences gave me, I miss it.

After turning our apartment into a tea parlor, a fancy restaurant, a spa, and a beach, it was only a matter of time before my girlfriend and I decided to make a fake gay club. Before, we kept making and changing plans to go out dancing at one of the queer spots in Vegas. Now we’re extra-regretting that it never happened. So we turned the apartment into Club Jane’s (our fake beachside bar was called Sailor Jane’s, and I don’t know who Jane is, but apparently she’s a very busy lesbian entrepreneur in the realm of our quarantine fantasies) and we had so much fun getting sweaty and silly that it’s now a weekly tradition.

PROS OF CLUB JANE’S:

• No bathroom lines.
• I can actually hear myself talking.
• I control the music.
• Minimal drama.

CONS OF CLUB JANE’S:

• No bathroom lines. Even this is a form of human interaction that I now miss. Nothing bonds strangers faster than the feeling of nearly peeing your pants.
• I can actually hear myself talking. WHO WANTS TO HEAR THEMSELVES TALKING —especially after shots of cheap liquor?
• I control the music. This is too much pressure.
• Minimal drama. I want to see at least one couple fight and at least one messy newly single person at the club. I almost started drama with the dog just for that rush.

To set the mood, I found a looped video of a disco ball changing colors on YouTube. Sometimes my past theater kid self REALLY COMES THROUGH, but especially in this current moment in time, so I don’t think my girlfriend was at all surprised at how readily I agreed to pretend to be a dyke bartender and how much I then committed to the bit. She did not seem as thrilled when I charged her $10 for the “drink special” (two-for-one vodka well drinks), but baby, welcome to Club Jane’s.

I miss the rare fucking times of being in a room full of entirely queer people. Dancing and shouting together. Even the messy nights, the crying nights. So many gay clubs and bars already struggled to stay afloat before this, and I know that we’re likely going to return to a world with fewer of them. In the grand scheme of things there are obviously bigger losses to worry about, but it still matters.

The last time I danced outside of home was on Valentine’s Day in Orlando. We came back to our hotel, thinking we would quietly close out the night. Instead, we stumbled upon a whole ass dance party in the hotel lobby bar. We weren’t sure if it was an invite-only situation, but by then, everyone had enough drinks in them not to care about us crashing. So we joined in, and it was incredible. AN IMPROMPTU DANCE PARTY WITH STRANGERS IN FLORIDA!!!! Experiences like that, as silly and inconsequential as they are, are so difficult to even conceive of right now. I wish I’d savored it more.

At Club Jane’s, we danced to Robyn, Abba, Missy Elliot, and a few wildcards like the Vanderpump Rules theme song and also my favorite song from the My Best Friend’s Wedding soundtrack (“Tell Him” by the Exciters). In a complete departure from the reality of a gay club where it seems like the same 15 songs play over and over, I have decided that one of the rules for Club Jane’s is no song repeats week-to-week. Every week, I’m going to make a fresh playlist. Yes, this is probably indicative of my overall need for control and variety in one very small aspect of life right now (“lol”). I also already have my outfits planned for the next three fake club nights, so you know, I’m doing great!

Perhaps the most perfectly imitated portion of the night (other than my girlfriend spilling an entire drink on the floor because she was dancing too hard to Robyn) was the end of it — the part that normally takes place at home anyway. Tired and sweaty and drunk, we shoveled leftovers (a dilapidated shepherd’s pie) into our mouths on the couch while watching the important work of cinema Mamma Mia!.

Here was week one’s playlist at Club Jane’s, but I highly recommend that you make your own to fit the particular vibe of your gay club. The vibe at Club Jane’s is a little chaotic (“Dancing Queen” into “Gossip Folks”… my mind), but I don’t expect that to change.

Happy Hour at Home: How to Make Your Own Beach (In Three Easy Steps)

Be our guest for Happy Hour at Home, a small series about the joys of lesbian socializing from home, because let’s be honest with ourselves — we’re going to be here for a while.

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1. Remember Sounds

REMEMBER SOUNDS? I remember so many sounds, and I miss them. Everything is just the same, same, same now. I keep joking that I’m watching more Bravo than ever just because the sound of large groups yelling over each other reminds me of busy happy hours at bars, but I think it might be true.

There are so many soundscapes I miss: busy bars, industrial-chic restaurants with their shitty ass acoustics, people ordering overly customized coffee drinks, servers listing specials. I miss noise. I think I even miss the awkward pitter-patter of small talk!!!!!

I definitely miss the soundscape of the beach. I’m quarantined in the desert, and the last real beach day I had was almost exactly a year ago when I flew to Florida to spend a long weekend with someone I’d only spent a handful of nights in a hotel with. At the beach, there was a balcony. On that balcony, we ate avocado with lemon juice and had mimosas with our coffee. The sun was Florida-hot (a heat that was new to me) and I sweat through my half-unbuttoned floral shirt. There were lots of good tastes and touches on that balcony, but right now I can’t stop thinking about the sounds. Breezy trees and birds that were also new to me and crashing waves and the people partying down below, ocean-front tailgating in cars that track-marked the sand. The day got noisier as it got hotter. Everything was very, very alive and loud. A good kind of bustling.

To make an indoor beach, simulate the sounds of one. Did you know there are hours and hours of beach footage on YouTube? I did not! They’re meant for meditations and for helping people sleep, and they can turn your living room into a pretty believable beach. There are nighttime ones, daytime ones, ones with more dramatic waves, ones with softer sounds, with birds, with crackling beachside bonfires. This is your beach, so make it sound however you like.

2. Fill a Cup with Crushed Ice

Why does everything taste better with crushed ice?

We made a fake gay bar for our simulated beach day. We called it Sailor Jane’s, because I like to imagine a dyke named Jane slinging Mai Tais at an outdoor bar somewhere. Rejected names for our beachside bar include Seas The Day and Shell Yeah.

All you need for tiki-style drinks is rum and citrus, really. At Sailor Jane’s, I had to do a decent amount of improvising. I don’t have a blender here, so I made crushed ice piña coladas with rum, unsweetened vanilla coconut milk, pineapple juice, and a few dollops of canned coconut cream that I’ve been keeping in the fridge and occasionally mix into my coffee (highly recommend). We don’t have Orgeat or curaçao, but I similarly faked a Mai Tai with rum, fresh-squeezed orange juice, triple sec, lime juice, and almond extract.

Did my piña coladas and Mai Tais taste like the ones I’ve sipped on the beach before? Not exactly! Unsurprisingly, a simulacrum of a beach day is… a simulacrum of a beach day. It’s never going to be exactly the same, but it’s still fun, another way to differentiate the days, which I guess has become the entire point of this Happy Hour At Home series. Making space for nice, comforting, fun things that don’t perfectly replicate socializing out in the world but evoke at least some small parts of it.

The drinks were still good, in large part thanks to crushed ice. You can crush ice by putting it in a ziploc or wrapped in a tea towel and banging it with a rolling pin. You can also use a blender or food processor, but the banging is better for dramatic effect. Other beach day drinks that taste better with crushed ice: coke, lemonade, sweet tea, ginger beer, seltzer.

Get your beach snacks, too. Pineapple or mango slices sprinkled with tajín. Just a straight up bag of chips. Pickle spears are an underrated beach snack. The good news about a faked beach is that you don’t have to worry about eating sand or things melting in the sun.

3. Wear Sunglasses Inside

You gotta dress the part! Wear a swimsuit inside. Wear a flowy cover-up. Wear shorts and a tank top, even if it’s cold outside. It’s your indoor beach, bitch! Who cares what the weather’s like outside? Personally, I have taken to wearing a bikini top in my own home, even when my girlfriend and I aren’t pretending to be on a beach, and you know what? I recommend it.

You’ve got a fake beach on the television and cold drinks and snacks, and now it’s time to just lay on a towel on the floor or, like I did, stretch out on the couch and take a nap. A fake beach day absolutely calls for a real nap.

Happy Hour at Home: On Koselig, DIY Spa Days, and Boozy Spicy Hot Cocoa

Be our guest for Happy Hour at Home, a small series about the joys of lesbian socializing from home, because let’s be honest with ourselves — we’re going to be here for a while.

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Norwegians have this word — koselig — that imperfectly translates to “cozy” in English. Cozy only begins to encapsulate what it means for something to be koselig, a word I hear often from the cousins and extended family on my mother’s side. Koselig things are cozy, yes. Cinnamon-scented candles are koselig; warm blankets are koselig; crackling fireplaces are koselig. But it’s more than a coziness. To be koselig is to be connected, grounded, immersed, lovely, intimate. Koselig is a vibe, feeling, lifestyle. It’s a way to cope with long, harsh days of winter, a way to find pockets of joy and warmth and closeness even in the dark.

Koselig is a hard thing to accomplish right now, when social life is fragmented, flattened, ephemeral. Making things koselig also feels newly urgent for me. Like. As in. If I don’t experience one drop of koselig right the fuck now, I might unravel entirely. A crumb of koselig. Please. I’m desperate for it.

A non-exhaustive list of things in my apartment right now that are indeed very koselig: string lights next to the bed, a bunny ears cactus that keeps sprouting new pads, my softball trophy from when I was in first grade, a completed Cats Of The Zodiac puzzle, fresh flowers, a pale blue Dutch oven, a full bookshelf, a rosemary plant, YES SOURDOUGH STARTER, a long-sleeved t-shirt I impulse bought on a trip to Park City last summer and is the absolute perfect level of wash-worn, a candle that smells like the beach, a little perfect dog who always finds the pooled sunspots in the morning. When I look at something here that makes me think of koselig, I try to record it in my head. I want to keep a list of the koselig things so that it can be an easier feeling to find.

My girlfriend, who I’m thankfully quarantined with, and I decided to have a spa day. We never went to the freakin spa before all of this. We’re not even necessarily Skincare Gays. This wasn’t so much an attempt to bring our outside lives inside but rather just a small way to differentiate the days. We keep grasping at ways to make days feel special or different or memorable, because it’s easy to get lost in the cloudiness of quarantine. The future is smudgy-blurred and daunting.

There are fewer things to look forward to. Every time my mother calls, she asks where we’re going to live after Vegas. We currently live here for my girlfriend’s fellowship, and were only suppose to stay until the end of May but now may have to stay in for longer. I keep telling her I don’t know. Who the hell knows where the hell they’re going to be months from now? For the foreseeable future, there’s home. There’s the indoors. There are hours and days, and I’m trying to make them ebb and flow with the same rhythms and dynamics of life before.

Let’s put it this way: I cried on Easter because I forgot about Easter. Do I actually care about Easter? No. Have I done anything special on Easter in the past few years? No! But it seemed like a missed opportunity to plan something special, to get up and make a big brunch or pull one of the nicer meats out of the freezer. But because I’d forgotten, there wasn’t time to do any of those things. I still *Dorinda Medley voice* made it nice (with a cheese plate!), but something about forgetting what day it was and also missing an opportunity to do holiday things (even on a holiday I don’t really celebrate!) made me very sad.

ANYWAY. Spa day. Robes: on. Bathtub: filled. Eye masks: applied. Feet: soaked. Spa days at home, like happy hour at home, can look like a lot of things. Maybe a spa day for you means digging out random face masks you impulse-bought at CVS months ago but forgot about. Now is absolutely the time! Listen, I managed to accidentally do a chemical peel of my feet several days ago — not even on spa day! But it turns out foot masks are divine in addition to being extremely disgusting.

Maybe a spa day for you means painting your nails or taking an afternoon nap in a sunny spot of your home or some quality time with a vibrator. If you’re quarantined with a partner: spa day massages! If you’re quarantined alone: massaging your own face is a severely underrated activity that also can help a lot with stress and anxiety (if those are feelings you happen to be feeling at the moment, no particular reason). Make it nice! Make it koselig!

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One more thing that made our spa day extra koselig and warming: Boozy Spicy Hot Cocoa. Here’s a guide, including a non-alcoholic version:

Follow the instructions on your hot cocoa packets/hot cocoa mix for making one mug of cocoa. Add a dash of ground cinnamon, a dash of cayenne powder, a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and a shot of tequila. For the alcohol-free option, skip the tequila and add an orange rind when heating your water and/or milk to make the hot cocoa.

Now it’s time for the main attraction: tequila-infused whipped cream. Whip about ⅓ cup of heavy cream with an electric hand mixer or stand mixer. For faster results, pop the bowl and whisk in the freezer ahead of time so it’s nice and cold. Technically, you can whip the cream by hand (hot!) but be warned that it’s going to take a lot of work and time and you’ll definitely want to freeze the bowl and whisk first. Once the cream achieves the consistency of whipped cream — stiff peaks! — dump in another shot of tequila, some sugar, and a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and continue to mix until it’s all incorporated. Boom: infused whipped cream.

If you’re skipping the tequila, you can still make a lovely scented cream. Add finely grated orange zest to the cream or add a tablespoon of instant coffee mix. Listen, I live in the desert, where the sun is technically always shining, and I still found comfort in this winter treat, and maybe you will, too.

Happy Hour at Home: Margaritas in Every Color

Be our guest for Happy Hour at Home, a small series about the joys of lesbian socializing from home, because let’s be honest with ourselves — we’re going to be here for a while.

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Yes, it is totally okay if you miss the ritual of happy hour right now. For a lot of us, our days are saturated with fear and anxiety and loneliness. The seismic changes happening in a lot of people’s lives right now due to the pandemic are nuanced and plural. But there’s still absolutely space to miss the little, trivial things.

Happy hour is, after all, about more than just the drinks. It’s a way to gather with friends over food, and it’s also a way to engage with one’s neighborhood and break up the day. And you know what? You can absolutely do these things at home.

Maybe “happy hour at home” looks like just walking to your fridge and opening up a beer or two, and that is honestly fine! But if you’re looking to spice up your drinks-at-home and don’t necessarily have a lot of cocktail making experience, a great place to start is the ever-versatile, always-pretty, perfect blend of salt and acid and sweetness that is known as the margarita.

I have been making… so many flavored margaritas. In a pinch, you can use pre-made margarita mixes, but it’s easy and cheap to make fresh fruit margaritas. And then, as a bonus, you’re also getting a serving of fruit! Look at you!

The basic ratio for my margaritas is two parts tequila, one part fresh fruit juice, half part triple sec, and a few squeezes of lime juice. But there are a bunch of alternatives and modifications you can do, especially if you’re just working with what you’ve got. So here’s a more detailed and perhaps TOO thorough breakdown of what you’ll need/what you can use:

Tequila!
Alternative: Mezcal, which will lend a smokier taste. If you want to make a mocktail version, then use a (preferably citrus-)flavored club soda/seltzer as your base. Topo Chico’s “twist of grapefruit” would be my top choice for margarita mocktails.

FRUIT!
For a straight up traditional margarita, all you need is lime juice, but if you want to get fun with the colors and flavors, that’s where these other fruits come into play. I recommend fresh citrus if you’ve got it. You can even use citrus that’s starting to go a little mushy, because guess what? The juice is probably still good! Think oranges, mandarins, blood oranges, grapefruit, pomelos, etc. You’re going to want to slice em in half and juice them. I use the juicing attachment for my stand mixer, but again, just use what you’ve got! If you don’t have a handheld juicing mechanism, then try using tongs to squeeze the halved citrus instead of doing all the work with just your hands. Remove any seeds.

No fresh citrus? No problem. While TECHNICALLY margaritas are citrus-based, you can cheat a bit with other fruits. You can use fresh pineapple chunks, but you’ll need to break them down. Put them in a bowl with a little bit of sugar and use a potato masher to mash it into a pulverized mess. Do the same thing with blueberries or strawberries. You can also peel a very ripe mango and then grate it with a cheese grater.

If you don’t have any fresh fruit at the moment, that’s understandable! Canned pineapple chunks are a great cocktail ingredient, and you don’t have to do the mashing process with the canned kind. Just leave as is (don’t drain!). You can also use a jug of premade citrus juice (I like Simply Grapefruit), but those are generally sweeter than fresh, so keep that in mind and adjust accordingly.

You can also use frozen fruit to make really easy frozen margaritas, but the ratio is a bit different than the rocks version. For a frozen fruit margarita, use about a cup of frozen fruit per margarita that you’re making. Add to a blender with tequila and a little bit of orange juice or triple sec.

Sweetener/ Spice/ Salt!
Triple sec/orange liqueurs are absolutely not necessary for making margaritas. In fact, it’s kind of just a shortcut, but I LOVE SHORTCUTS, especially at the current moment in time. The triple sec lends sweetness. If you want a super boozy and acidic margarita with just a touch of sweetness, then you can straight up just combine tequila and citrus juice, but it’s going to be a pretty intense drink. Cut it by making a simple syrup (simmering equal parts granulated sugar and water until dissolved).

Dress up your margarita with a salt rim — or my personal favorite, tajín. And if you want to make it a spicy margarita, add chopped jalapeño or a light dusting of chili powder. Chopped cilantro, lime zest, or a ginger-infused simple syrup are also things you can add.

Here’s a Quick Cheat Sheet:

Classic Margarita
Two parts tequila / One part lime juice / One part simple syrup
Serve over ice

Flavored Margarita
Two parts tequila / One part fruit juice or mashed fruit / Half part orange liqueur / Squeeze of lime juice
Serve over ice

Frozen Flavored Margarita (Makes One)
One cup of frozen fruit / 1.5 shots tequila / One-third cup orange juice or orange liqueur

Margarita Mocktail
Two parts flavored seltzer / One part fruit juice or mashed fruit / Squeeze of lime juice
Serve over ice

Tasting as you go is an important part of cooking, and the same goes for making drinks. The ratios I’ve outlined are what I prefer, but maybe you like your drinks boozier (add more tequila, duh) or sweeter (more simple or triple sec or splash of juice).

Invite your friends for virtual happy hour! Simulate a raucous bar environment by popping on Vanderpump Rules! Or if you want a more chill happy hour, light a coconut candle and pretend you’re drinking on the beach. If you have a space where you’re able to safely drink outside, then absolutely do that. Or throw open your windows. The best thing about happy hour at home is that you absolutely dictate the vibe.

Marching at the End of a Very Long Parade: On Being A Queer Alcoholic

“I’m Sagaree, alcoholic. I’m new.”

I introduced myself very briefly at an AA meeting on a hot, windless Saturday morning. It was in a church, as they all are, only this one was in Oakland, and this one was reserved for queer people of color. A QPOC-AA meeting, if you will. In every other AA meeting I had attended, I had sat shivering slightly, a bodily response to my own brownness, youngness, short hair and dramatic earrings. Here, I was greeted by the almost physical welcome of a space I related to, some older Black and brown women, some younger queers bearing overalls or ripped t-shirts, a couple people cradling babies in their. I sat, as inconspicuous as possible, among a collection of folded chairs, children’s easels, and “Big Books,” the AA’s Bible.

I had arrived just in time for us to read a story from the Big Book about a wealthy banker who became addicted to alcohol. I didn’t expect to relate to his story, but I did. We began to confess our own cavalcade of harms, wounds, and absurd behaviors, enumerating our transgressions against normalcy. One woman cleared her throat.

She had been coming to meetings for decades, and she, too, had a relateable story. Not the worst the room had heard in the day, and not the best. She had tried to come to meetings in 1980, and she had found it unbearable. She couldn’t, she said, speak in this way to a room full of straight people. So she returned to the outside world, to her debilitating drinking, to rejection from family and rejection from her church. In 1987, she said, she came again, and found they had Gays and Lesbians meetings now. Finally, a meeting for her, for her people.

“And that,” she said, “is where God met me.”

In the back of the room, I felt something meet me, too. I began to cry, doing my best to excise my conflicted, suppressed joy.

I had been searching for that something for a long time. I got sober alone, in a village about an hour north of Kampala, Uganda. I had moved there for a job opportunity, naively confident I, as an openly queer person with a mental illness, could flit across the globe like a moth. My mental health began to decline almost immediately, and as I parsed through the complex postcolonial dynamics of my own selfhood, I searched desperately for queer community in a country in the habit of inviting American evangelicals to rail against The Gays in front of the Parliament.

By the time I quit my job and scheduled an emergency move back to the United States, my drinking was threatening my life. I didn’t even consider attending meetings in the country, although later research revealed that there are two. That was my first lesson in the mechanisms of Alcoholics Anonymous: without some baseline trust in the people running the show, there are no twelve steps, or even a first step.

I tried, though, once I was back in the San Francisco Bay Area. First, in San Jose, in a LGBT Center LGBT-AA meeting filled with older white gay men — sweet, but very confusing. Again, in my hometown, where I found a meeting, drove to the parking lot of a Presbyterian church, sat silently in my car, and drove back home, unable to face the possibility of running into Indian uncles at an AA meeting. Then, in Berkeley, at a queer meeting where I sat tensely cross legged until two younger, androgynous looking queers wandered into the meeting, and I relaxed into the seat of my chair.

From Kampala, where LGBT centers can’t mark their doors for fear of violence, to the East Bay, where people regularly commute an hour to access queer- friendly meetings. Alcoholics Anonymous notoriously keeps very few centralized records, but Gay and Lesbians-AA lists 1,283 regular queer meetings in the United States, averaging 26 per state. Of those 1283, I found three meetings that were specifically for queer people of color. Only one in the San Francisco Bay Area, only one in New York City. I felt as if I were squeezing myself into the margins of a movement, marching at the very end of a long parade.

Alcoholics Anonymous’ methods and reach have both come under controversy in the past decades. The organization was founded in 1935 by a stockbroker and a surgeon, and it grew out of an Episcopal non-alcoholic fellowship known as the Oxford Group. It was the stockbroker, not the surgeon, who spread the gospel that alcoholism was a disease rather than a moral failing. In 1939, the growing organization published a textbook, Alcoholics Anonymous, that remains the organization’s Bible 80 years later.

The basic tenets, that alcoholism is a disease and that confessing one’s sins to god and country will aid in the fight against that disease, have not exactly been scientifically proven. If alcoholism is a disease, it’s a disease LGBTQ people suffer from at more than double the rates of the general population, a claim only a step away from the kind of biological essentialism that insists that queer people are suffering from a defective gene, or a malformed psyche. For some, alcoholism may be a biological predilection, but for many, many others, it is a set of circumstances so unbearable that the cycle of substance abuse becomes a welcome relief. Alcohol abuse is social and therefore exists on a spectrum that AA orthodoxy did not recognize. Although, these days, there is space in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for “problem drinkers,” those lucky souls who flirt with the depths of alcohol dependence, but may not have hit the proverbial rock bottom.

This is one departure from the 1935 original model, but in many other ways, the AA model has remained rigid. Even in the anarchic Bay Area, meetings begin with guidance from the Big Book, continue with confession, and end with the Serenity Prayer. The value of Alcoholics Anonymous depends on confession of sins—what Michel Foucault would call “one of the main rituals we [in Western societies] rely on for the production of truth—, abstinence from alcohol, and on honesty in the face of God and the Fellowship.

And in so many places in the United States, and the 175 countries that the AA model has spread to, it is simply not safe for queer people to be honest.

What might it look like to build models of care for alcohol abuse that, instead of just including queer people, begin with us in mind? Models that recognize the interconnectedness of social marginalization and alcohol abuse instead of pathologizing alcoholism? That commemorate the small victories of survival in a deeply homophobic world? That accept and even celebrate that sometimes, you have to hide parts of yourself?

As it turns out, AA is not the only model that responds to alcoholism. Scholars of the history of Alcoholics Anonymous’ program have pointed out that the program often eclipses harm reduction approaches, dealing with individual triggers to drinking, or prescription drugs such as naltrexone alter the effects of alcohol in the body.

I can imagine, in a small and hopeful corner of my mind, a version of my queer communities where resources for alcohol abuse are as abundant as alcoholics anonymous meetings, where folks like me could access naltrexone to dull the effects of alcohol or counseling on substance abuse triggers and strategies as easily as information on STDs. I can imagine the kind of guidance that usually comes from a sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous coming instead from licensed and queer affirming counselors, and working one on one with experts to find triggers of binge drinking and work out safety plans, and a proliferation of LGBT specific substance abuse centers.

Parts of that vision are oddly terrifying, coming to me with jagged edges. I go to AA meetings, I have benefitted from the community there, and I have accepted a lot of the language for myself. I tell people that I’m an alcoholic, reciting my months of sobriety with a combination of pride and deep, dark exhaustion. But I imagine those idyllic sets of resources, and I feel a threat pushing at the edges of my words, my identity. Would I describe myself in the same way if, from the beginning, I’d had the support I needed? If I could simply take a deep breath and say that life became briefly unbearable, that I have experienced cruel depths of queer erasure and had no other strategies to cope, but now I have everything I need?

At least for me, Alcoholics Anonymous asked me for a kind of ill-fitting honesty, of accepting that I fundamentally have a problem. I still do not know how to encounter the term “alcoholic,” just as I once did not know how to encounter the term “queer,” the term “South Asian,” the term “bipolar disorder II.” I have accepted each and remade my life around them, come out of closet after closet, but each time, it has come with a sharpened consciousness of how my social world has failed people like me, and a burning need to see my worlds change to accept me. In my experience with substance abuse, I felt what it was for a substance to consume me, to become broader and deeper than my own conscious mind, and I knew that in a world without homophobia, racism, sexism, ableism, on and on, I would never have asked to be consumed in that way. I needed to come to terms with my own substance abuse, but even more, I needed to come to terms how it had been constructed along with, in conjunction with, other oppressions and struggles I have moved through in my short life.

And in that need, Queer People of Color Alcoholics Anonymous meetings have given me community, self- knowledge, and peace. I know that there have been many before me, and that within the AA and in the larger queer world, queer people struggling with alcohol have fought for space and recognition. Calls within AA for special interest LGBT meetings date back to 1970, before homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, and Gay and Lesbians-AA was established in 1981. Today, queer cafes, bookshops, and event series offer crucial sober alternatives to queer bars, often based on community support.

To me, when queer folks struggling with multiple marginalizations gather, speaking to the complex dynamics of substance abuse along with the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality, there’s something in the room that recognizes and accepts us in all of it, apart and together. To me, my Saturday QPOC AA meeting is something stronger, newer, and more precious than the founders of AA might have known. I know that this space is not available to everyone, and I know that there are alternate universes in which every QPOC person partaking in it was presented with a half dozen options apart from AA. But even as I dream of the abundance of those options, I choose to believe in that meeting. In the embodied warmth of the church room in Oakland, in the happy babbling of children, and in the clasped hands of queer people choosing to save each other.

21 Boxed Wines, Ranked by Value By Day-Drunk Queers At Gay Summer Camp

Between the years of 2015 and 2019, I’ve had the honor of hosting several events at A-Camp combining the pleasures of cheeses with the delights of boxed wine. In fact, I’ve done this event enough times that I realized I now possess enough information to rank not JUST a small number of wines from our most recent tasting, but a whole bunch of wines from a variety of tastings! My only regret is that I lost the wine cards for our 2015 event while making an ultimately ill-advised temporary move from California to my Mom’s house in suburban Detroit, but don’t worry, that’s all in the past now. I live in California again. But I never saw those wine sheets again!

Thus, I present to you this very scientific ranking of boxed wines — the wines ranked in our most recent tasting don’t have links in the headers because they are new. The previously rated wines all link out to the original discussion of said wine, which is more lengthy than the discussion contained herein. These are those posts:

• 5 Boxed Wines, Ranked By Lesbians (October 2016 Camp)
• 6 Box Wines, Ranked From “Capri-Fun” To “I’ve Had Worse” By 30 Drunk Queers (May 2017 Camp)
• 5 Boxed Rosés, Ranked by Bang-for-Your-Buck by a Bunch of Inebriated Queers (May 2018 Camp)

Here is the wine card upon which the wines were rated:

Let’s begin!

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21.  House Wine Chardonnay – 2.2

$19.49 for 3L // 97 cents a glass

“I guess this is wine”

This wine really claims to do a lot of things in one simple box, ensuring upcoming aromas of “creamy apple” (what the hell is a creamy apple), “sumptuous flavors of peach and ripe Asian pear,” as well as, somehow, “hints of toasty vanilla” AND “a burst of pineapple.” Pick a gender already, House Wine!

Our drinkers compared this wine to used mouthwash, pee (although they did so by saying it was “better than pee”), rubbing alcohol, “millennial tears,” “the double stick tape you used to cat-proof your house” and paint varnish. Ex-girlfriends came up a lot? Kari was willing to drink it “quickly over ice in a Solo cup in the bathroom to tolerate holidays with my family.” Anna called it “Spring Dew” but also wanted to “serve it to an ex when they come over to get their stuff.” Honestly, not a bad way to consciously uncouple.

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20. Naked Grape Pinot Noir – 2.3

$15.99 for 3L // .79 cents a glass

“Mouth Feel: warm :-/”

The box promises “a soft confidence that hits the perfect note,” which describes my future wife but does not describe this extremely maligned wine, which ranked high on the “Tar” wedge of the Wine Wheel. It appears — and please do quote me on this — that this wine has stolen a secret and apparently holy recipe. Nearly 25% of our tasters said it reminded them of what the gentiles refer to as “communion wine.”

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19. Franzia Cabernet –  2.5

$14.99 for 5L // .44 cents a glass

“This gets worse the longer you drink it.”

Franzia delivers the goods when “the goods” are sweet wine, but a cheap red is much harder to master. “A satisfying dry red wine with cherry and plum aromas. Complements beefs and dark chocolates,” claims the Franzia website regarding this wine. Despite a noted lack of beefs and dark chocolates, our drinkers did indeed drink this wine. Compliments, however, were few and far between.

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18. Barefoot Chardonnay – 2.5

$18.99 for 3L // .94 cents a glass

“This wine knows who it is. It’s not trying too hard — it is what it is. It is here to get you drunk.”

Hello and welcome to my chateau! What wine do we have on tap, you ask? Why, it’s Barefoot on Tap!

This tall drink of wine promises “big, bold flavor with a smooth finish,” but most of our drinkers hoped to use it as a punishment, like at a “passive-aggressive housewarming party for a frenemy” or “the funeral of your enemy.” Brittany deemed it perfect “to serve to someone you dislike so you can watch their face as the drink it.” Meg wanted to cart this bad boy all the way to the shores of Ventura, calling it “wine for the beach when you want to share booze with people you dislike.” Yikes!!!!!! “Boy howdy it’s bad,” wrote Gavin. “My mouth went to hell.” Speaking of hell:

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17. Trader Joe’s Block White Chardonnay – 2.7

$11.99 for 3 L // .59 cents a glass

“A betrayal to the apple community.”

Do you have children? Well, Dwyn suggests pouring them a tall glass of this drink because it’s good for “parents who want their kids to hate wine.” Gavin wants to keep it handy “for your fourth viewing of Russian Doll where things *really* go off the rails.” Rebecca thirsts for it while “fucking your friends, obvi!” Brittany wanted it for “scrolling though your ex’s instagram.” Callie was like, “I’ve been waiting for some oaky shit! Like I’m licking a branch! Maybe we could name this one “Consensually licking Michelle Branch.” Meanwhile, an anonymous drinker compared it to a “hard fuck” from “the patriarchy.” Denise, however, had an alternate take:

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16. La Vieille Ferme Rosé – 2.8

$14.99 for 3 L // .74 cents a glass

“When you don’t give a fuckkkkkk but you like pink.”

Imagine a Mommi in a Subaru, dropping her angsty teenage daughter off at a field hockey party, then driving home along sun-dappled, neatly paved roads, thinking of a more innocent time. Specifically, she is remembering her time at St. Catherine’s, the resplendent Catholic Boarding School she attended as a girl. It had a distinctly Victorian aesthetic and also chickens, pan flutes, and an aura of dark nostalgia. It is this mood that likely caused Sally to consider re-naming it “Sister Mary Francis” and deem it suitable for “detention time in a 19th century Parisian nunnery.”

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15. Bota Box Redvolution – 3

$16.99 for 3 L // .85 cents per glass

The Bota Box copy promises “rich aromas” of “black cherry, cocoa and a hint of spice” which extend into “lush flavors of dark fruit, cherry and toasty oak, this smooth, full-bodied wine culminates into a juicy, well-balanced finish.” Putting aside how messy this already feels, I can confirm that “vaguely fruity” was a popular choice on our Boxed Wine Wheel, so they got that right. When it comes to the RedVolution, you either loved it or you hated it. One drinker loved it enough to suggest consuming it while “playing board games in your underwear at A-Camp,” whereas another succinctly suggested Redvolution to be an appropriate libation for “Death.”

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14. Black Box Pinot Noir – 3

$21.99 for 3L // $1.09 a glass

“Is this where memories are saved when all is lost? Or is it where memories are lost and all is saved?”

Black Box Pinot Noir, according to their press materials, “displays enticing aromas of strawberry, cherry, and rose petal with complementary notes of toasty oak.” I think we all know the truth, which’s that this wine was inspired by the taste of the deep seawater dripping off the black boxes they find in the ocean after a plane crash. Our guests were not delighted by this wine and didn’t have much to say about it, besides that they wouldn’t mind drinking it in an airport

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13. The Naked Grape Chardonnay – 3.1

$18.90 for 3L // .94 cents a glass

“The quickest route from Point A to Point Drunk”

“Our Chardonnay has essence of baked apple and caramel,” claims the Naked Grape website. “Its elegant and creamy palate delivers a mid-bodied chardonnay with lingering fruit finish.” In other words — you know when you’re a child at a Halloween party and there’s a “haunted house” in some hallway and one of the elements of it is putting your hand in a bowl filled with unpeeled grapes that some sadistic and undoubtedly drunk mom declares are DEAD EYEBALLS? That’s these grapes. But: everybody could totally taste the apples, so that’s something!

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12. Provisions Cabernet Sauvignon – 3.1

$18.99 for 3 L // .94 cents per glass

“Fresh and Full-Bodied, Like a Nice Woman.”

This was Laneia’s favorite wine at our 2017 tasting, and many drinkers had nice things they imagined doing with this wine, like engaging in Self-Care or becoming best friends with a box of wine. Claims made by the box include “fine tannins,” “spice notes,” and generosity with “blackberry and cassis flavors.” However, the issue of cassis was not raised by anybody in our group.

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11. Block Rosé – 3.34

$11.95 for 3L // .59 cents per glass

“This wine was what I needed when I broke up with my ex-girlfriend.”

Rosé is typically associated with whimsy, ironic joy, and frivolous social occasions. What we learned from sipping upon tiny plastic cups of Block Rosé is that even pink wine has a dark side — and an ability to comfort its consumers as they journey through dimly-lit periods of abject despair. Many tasters found it suitable for mildly dark events like “a bad painter’s first opening but like not at a gallery, at like a coffee house” and “numbing your senses to a level where you can sleep at a campsite with people having sex next to you.”

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10. Big House Pinot Grigio – 3.4

$19.97 for 3L // .99 cents a glass

“Ain’t a Hell Yeah but it Ain’t a No Either”

“Big House Pinot Grigio boasts a nose full of citrus fruits and a round, soft palate,” claims the website, “With flavors of grapefruit and honeydew melon to leave you quenched.” Putting aside the fact that honeydew melon is a bullshit fruit used by restaurants who claim that a $5.95 fruit cup contains a variety of fruit when it really just contains honeydew melon and some slouchy red grapes, one of our drinkers found quite a different fruit within their glass, suggesting the name “Sad Pear.”

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9. Corbett Canyon Chardonnay – 3.5

$11 for 3L // .55 cents a glass

“I’ve had worse.”

This simple, unassuming wine describes itself as “medium-bodied with classic hints of apple, pears and toasty oak.” Our tasters found it aggressively mediocre, good enough for their Mom to drink “while watching 20/20 and sending me passive-aggressive texts” or for “an awkward holiday work party where you’re pretty sure you’re about to get fired.” Still, Diane declared it “totally worth it” but was concerned about a potential hangover.

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8. Black Box Sauvignon Blanc – 3.6

$21.99 for 3 L // $1.09 a glass

“Perfect for self-loathing”

“Jesus, take the wheel because Mommi’s drunk,” slurred one drinker upon drinking this fine box, of which official PR materials claimed to contain “stone fruit, fresh peach and floral notes unfolding into refreshing citrus flavors and crisp acidity.” This wine was deemed suitable for sad situations like “drinking alone in the airport,” “drowning your sorrows with a stranger in the liquor store parking lot” or, similarly; drinking in the alley outside the liquor store. Speaking of the airport, Andy noted its suitability for an airport experience familiar to many queers with this suggested re-naming: “Finally Got Through Airport Security Blanc.”

Dwyn got down to business with it: “good for an office holiday party when the office manager picked wine based on budget effectiveness.”

S.B. said it’d be a great wine for “admiring a beautiful blonde queer woman,” by which she probably meant me?

“It is a wine,” declared Smita. And in that spirit, most found it agreeable enough, and certainly drank their fair share. But it didn’t cure the pain of at least one drinker:

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7. Fish Eye Pinot Grigio – 3.6

$15.49 for 3L // .77 cents a glass

“Classy McClassyface (pronounced with an Australian accent)”

Our tasters declared Fish Eye suitable for shoreline situations, suggesting renaming it “Beachy Keen” or “Drinking on a Boat” and consuming it while having a “Beach Day w/Coney Island dirty water hot dogs” or while “Canoe Fishing,” which is a highly recommended method of fishing.

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6. Bota Box Dry Rose – 3.8

$16.99 for 3L // .85 cents per glass

“Like something you’d drink your first weekend in college.”

Think all rosés are sweet? Think again!!! This dry rose promises no sweetness at all, but feels strongly in its capability to provide a crisp taste with “aromas of raspberries and red rose and flavors of strawberry cake and grapefruit zest.” Pretty much all of those things are sweet, but whatever. Our tasters found it polarizing. On the one hand: Eva called it “Pink Antifreeze Lite,” Lorna called it “Diet Lemonade Powder + Acid” and Jennifer compared drinking it to “gut rot.” On the other fist, we have drinkers re-naming it “Bubble Gum Sparkles,” “Strawberry Dreams” and “Rosé Canseco.”

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5. Bota Box Riesling – 4

$16.99 for 3 L // .85 cents per glass

“Literally anything is suitable for this.”

I wasn’t surprised to see Riesling come out on top, because Riesling is a varietal of wine named after me, Riese, and I am a very influential person. This wine’s PR materials claim a wide variety of fruit flavors, professing: “Bota Box Riesling is a medium-bodied wine that offers lively aromas of sweet melon, ripe stone fruit, honey and floral notes, followed by flavors of juicy lychee, pear, white peach and a hint of green apple.” It’s practically an entire orchard! In fact, this cool and refreshing libation scored big on the “Hi-C” portion of the Boxed Wine Wheel.

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4. Bota Box Pinot Grigio – 4.1

$16.99 for 3 L // .85 cents per glass

“Soft and cozy like a California King Bed.”

The wine itself asserts its possession of “lively aromas of golden delicious apple, ripe pear and fresh spring flowers,” a “medium body” and “flavors of honeysuckle and apple” (repetitive) “with a light, vibrant finish.” A lot of summery images were conjured, as drinkers did not compare it to a summer’s day, but did suggest calling it Morning Light or Breezy or “Be Steadwell topping a top,” a classic summer image.

Where might one enjoy this fine liquid? Perhaps at Passover or “other holidays that require lots of drinking,” in a bubble bath, at “a bridal shower for your cousin who was really into her sorority,” “going through the motions” or if you’d like to get “white girl wasted at 10am.” Not everybody was willing to drink this at various occasions, however. Brittany thought it was “just barely” better than water and Gavin was not pleased:

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3. Franzia Moscato – 4.6

$14.99 for 5L // .44 cents a glass

“A great wine for people who hate wine.”

No surprise that our runner-up is also a sweet inexpensive wine. This, my friends, is the American way: dump a bunch of sugar into a a cheap box and call it food!

I somehow managed to gather approximately ten rating sheets for this particular wine. This could be because we didn’t print enough sheets because I underestimated the amount of wine I would be panic-buying at BevMo or because by this point everybody was drunk and scrounging for pub cheese.

Noted as “Manischewitz for everyone else” (Inside Jew joke, google it) by Eleanor and “Goyish Manischewitz” by Dwyn, one human thought it’d help her “fix low blood sugar levels for my diabetic friends.” Gavin had a very specific suggestion for appropriate imbibing opportunities: “An at-home Olive Garden dessert experience. When you’re here, you’re family! And your family is drunk and complicated.” Calli said “this smells like the BLUE CAN of Juicy Juice?!” She’s probably right?

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2. Franzia Sunset Blush – 4.8

$14.99 for 5L // .44 cents a glass

“Wow, that’s cheap.”

Whether you’ve ever blushed at a sunset or not, Franzia Sunset Blush should not offend you any more than an average glass of off-brand juice. Torre’s Mom mixes this wine with Starbucks Refreshers for a mid-afternoon cocktail whereas others liked this wine as a good chaser to a bad divorce or a nice follow-up to “after the neighbor says they can see through your blinds.”

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1. Franzia White Zinfandel – 4.8

$14.99 for 5L // .44 cents a glass

“Capri-Fun”

Franzia White Zinfandel is probably pictured in the dictionary when you look up “box wine.” Is there any box wine more box-winey than a giant white crate of uber-cheap pink wine that even in its own tasting notes, humbly acknowledges that you will likely consume it with Ramen noodles? “Complements cheeses, salads, and simple pasta,” it says of itself. It will not surprise you to learn that about twenty minutes after losing my Franzia White Zinfandel virginity in 1998, I went ahead and lost my actual virginity. It was fine, much like this wine!

The high ranking of this particular wine speaks to two facts: one, that the rating scale evaluates whether or not each wine is financially “worth it,” therefore giving cheap wines an advantage. Two, that boxed wine is never gonna be great, but if it can’t be great, it can be something else — INEXPENSIVE. I think Diane said it best when she suggested renaming Franzia White Zinfandel “My Girlfriend’s Getting Naked.” Cheers!

How To Grow Up Without Being Invited

I wasn’t exactly invited to V’s birthday party. I was actually on my way “home” to my tiny dorm room when I ran into Becca; my brilliant Friday night plan was to climb into bed and binge watch Parks and Recreation. I was 18, painfully anxious, and definitely not dressed for a party, but Becca insisted. So armed with my friend, a bag of Tostitos, and absolutely nothing better to do, I headed off to the first college party of my life.

Becca was the first actual friend I had made at college. I’d followed her tumblr since taking American Sign Language in high school; she was hard of hearing and posted about queer ASL slang. We had never talked, but one day in early September, while picking at the peeling paint of my dorm room wall, I was startled to see a picture taken at my university on her blog. I hesitantly messaged her— I’d had no luck befriending my roommates, my classmates, or really anyone. She suggested I meet her in the back booth of the dining hall the next afternoon. She was a senior studying psychology, four years older than me, but we were on the same wavelength about everything important: disability, queerness, insomnia, fanfiction. She began dragging me along to movie nights and LGBTQ club meetings, and quickly became my de-facto campus guide and honorary older sister.

A note about the party hosts: A and S were, from my standpoint as a baby queer freshman, on par with favorite bloggers and reality TV personalities of choice: just accessible enough, but inhabiting a realm of self-assuredness and brilliance I couldn’t really imagine joining. They lived in a little off-campus brownstone lovingly nicknamed the Homo Hut, collected bad dollar store Halloween decorations, and threw a party for just about every possible occasion.
The first time I met them, I figured their group was too elusive, made up mostly of juniors and seniors touting curious art projects, pastel hair, and impressive social justice plans. But I kept showing up, and kept asking questions, and after a few weeks their crew had essentially adopted me.

They referred to themselves as my “Queer Fairy Godparents,” but their best gift to me wasn’t magic, but just a window into their lives. There is no better way to learn that growing up can be just as powerful as it is devastating than by witnessing a chaotic group of college seniors firsthand.

The first time I stepped through the doorway of the Homo Hut, I was awestruck. The house was nothing special, just an overpriced townhome built circa 2000, near the highway, just on the edge of an even shittier neighborhood. Some of the indoor walls were whitewashed cinder blocks, just like my dorm. The deck smelled like 15 years of cigarette smoke and faced a spectacular view of a magnificently spray-painted dumpster. But the walls were covered in handmade zines, club announcements, and framed photos of friends. My favorite part of the living room was the set of proudly thrifted end tables, glass tops supported by iron dragons.

Best of all: this was their home. It felt like the grown-up equivalent of a hastily but fondly constructed blanket fort, and it would become my safe haven: the place where I could, and would, spend the night when I was depressed, get both good and terrible advice, hide from my suitemates, and learn how to be an almost-adult.

When I kicked off my sandals and stepped into the living room, I came face to face with a circle of mostly drunk friends. They were playing some awful game of dares. V, the birthday girl, was in the process of eating an orange crayon and insisting that it tasted like macaroni and cheese.

“Who’s this?” she mumbled through a mouthful of wax.

I thanked her for letting me crash her birthday party, placed my offering of tortilla chips on the table, and sat down cross legged in the circle. I was introduced to C, an award winning poet with elaborate tattoos; L, with brightly dyed hair and a voice loud enough to match; M, local meme queen with perfect eyebrows; and K, a graduate student who liked to yell about communism.

A few hours later, on her way out, V patted me clumsily on the shoulder and told the remaining folks in the room, or maybe me, or perhaps no one in particular, “I like her. We’re keeping her.”

I was an hour late to the Halloween party, dubbed the Homo Haunt. I was dressed as Cecil from Welcome to Night Vale, in a headache-inducing purple tie and suspenders. When I stepped into the kitchen, K called me handsome. Even drunk off their asses, everyone remembered to ask for my new pronouns, or paused to correct themselves. It was Becca who said it, when I hesitantly corrected her as she slurred the story of how we met: “These people can respect your pronouns even when they are drunker than hell. If people can’t respect you, you don’t deserve them in your life.”

Those parties wouldn’t last forever. C graduated and moved to Boston. S dropped out and started working at a Domino’s across town. Even Becca packed her whole life into a tiny sedan and set out for Colorado.
Not all of the moments in that house were good, and not all of the friends I made there would last. Years later, in a Transgender Studies class, I would discuss with my favorite professor the ways that queer communities are uniquely fragile, built by often broken people with deeply difficult lives, riddled by trauma and tragedy. I would realize when I was a mess of a 21 year old myself both how much and how little they had been any older or wiser than me.

But the house was there when I needed it. It was there when I was afraid and alone, when I was the baby gay that all of us were at one point, that some of us become again and again like some sort of hellish phoenix, that some of us cherish and others would rather forget. For just a year, those friends would be the blueprint that taught me how to make adulthood an opportunity. When I met them, I found a space to write stupid poems, make cookies for dinner, make mistakes. In the cracks between all those things, though, I became someone who could make adulthood a place where I belonged, instead of just a burden, another hourglass of waiting.

“Don’t worry about making close friends until at least sophomore year anyway,” C told me, in a dead serious tone. Her lips were painted a severe shade of wine red.

“When all your people are queer and mentally ill, everyone you know will drop out, and move away.” She twirled a fry between her fingers as I looked around the table and wondered who would be there the next year and who would not. I decided silently that I would be.

The Homo Hut was the first place a cute girl called me pretty, the first place I got drunk, and by the middle of the year, it became the first place I told someone confidently that I didn’t drink. I wasn’t just molding myself into its embrace anymore; I was choosing the ways it could hold me, the type of launching pad it could be for the rest of my life. It was the place I went when I decided to avoid someone who couldn’t take no for an answer. In the winter, I sat on the kitchen floor at four in the morning, watching K make soft pretzels in the oven, and talked about myself like I was writing a journal instead of designing an advertisement, owning every word that spilled from my mouth.

One night in February, I woke up late, 6 PM, from staying up with a bad case of anxiety. I had cramps. I couldn’t figure out what to wear. After being buffeted around by the wind the entire way, I made it through the door, deposited a tupperware of strawberry lemon cookies on the coffee table, and collapsed on the floor.

It was by no means perfect. S was drunk enough to worry us. There was a thunderstorm, and I was mostly quiet. I didn’t drink anymore, and even if I had, there was no palatable alcohol except terrible white wine mixed with pink lemonade. We watched cartoons on mute, and together we practiced the art of making things mostly okay even when they’re not. I claimed a corner of the living room wrapped in a blanket that I think was maybe once a sleeping bag. It was Valentine’s Day, and it was probably the best one I’d ever had. Sometimes getting older is just getting more and more lost in the dark, learning how to have fun camping in open air.

As I sat shotgun in L’s car, the tail end of pop song crackled through the radio. The notes of the next song seemed vaguely familiar. It was an old Fall Out Boy song, and I could suddenly taste middle school in the back of my throat. We were driving through the city in the rain, and they sang along as I watched the dark buildings speed by under brown-yellow light from the street lamps.

I was thinking about what would make me finally feel like an adult. Living on my own? Living with other people and building a life together? Having a girlfriend? Cooking, traveling? I thought it might be something I hadn’t mastered yet, like driving in the snow, or singing to the radio in front of other people.

It didn’t feel like it should be so anticlimactic as buying Christmas presents with money I didn’t have, and making small talk with the pharmacy tech at Wegmans. It was drinking, or it was being okay with not drinking. It was having back pain on airplanes, or waking up earlier than my mother, or recognizing my own incompetence, or doing everything anyway. It was crying on the way home from therapy, and it was talking to coworkers about the weather. Maybe it was just as simple as it sounds: being a person, but older. Maybe I already was.

The last party they hosted before packing up the decorations and returning the coffee table to the alley where they found it, before handing off the waffle iron to M and the keys to the landlord and the club leadership to me, was shortly after graduation. I went even though I knew I hadn’t packed my dorm room. I wasn’t ready to leave. I went because I knew none of us were.

V, A, and K were graduating, so they made a mock jeopardy board about themselves: a game to celebrate the familiarity of their lives, the knowing of them. I answered more questions than I thought I could, and didn’t walk home until the early morning, escorting a stumbling acquaintance through the park to deposit them safely at home.

The problem with birthdays, and graduations, is that endings and beginnings are so often the same thing. What we’re really celebrating is the motion, the opposite of stagnating, the skill of turning your head and blinking your eyes to see things in a new light, even if your feet and heart feel heavy and the landscape hasn’t changed. Growing up means that everything you fear will probably come true: you won’t know what you’re doing, some of the worst things will happen, you will be completely at a loss. All that remains of the person I was at that birthday party I sort of crashed, years ago, is some pictures, some old text messages, and the memory of identities slipping together and apart, names and homes overlapping and disintegrating.

And of course, me.

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edited by rachel.

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12 Holiday Beers, Ranked by How Much They Taste Like Christmas

If you’ve been around me or Autostraddle or A-Camp for any length of time, you know I love beer and am determined to see women take back the art of brewing and drinking it! A couple of years ago I decided to rank every pumpkin beer I could get my hands on, which was a Hagrid-grown pumpkin-sized mistake; it burned me out so bad on nutmeg and cloves and allspice I don’t even want to eat pie at Thanksgiving anymore. This year I smartened up and decided to recruit some friends to help me sample the top 12 holiday beers recommended to me by the alewives at my local beer and cheese shop. I made my friends write down their tasting notes on worksheets I printed up. I’m fun that way. Using my friends’ increasingly tipsy notes and my own personal opinions I have ranked all 12 of these recommended holiday beers by how much they taste like Christmas.

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Celebration IPA

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. 

“Oh this is just tastes like something you’d try to make me drink any other day,” my friend Anna who drank this with me said. “TOO FUCKIN’ HOPPY,” is what she wrote on her tasting notes sheet. She is correct about it being hoppy but not correct about it being too hoppy because no such thing exists! There’s nothing Christmas-y about this beer except that it’s released only at Christmastime and one of the three(!) kinds of hops in it is the chinook, which always taste a little bit like evergreen.

Festive Ale

SweetWater Brewery

Many holiday beers, like this one, are Winter Warmers. That means big malty flavors, bitterness, and dark-colored ales with semi-high ABVs. Mmm boi! Winter Warmers also often include spices. SweetWater’s Festive Ale, for example, has just a touch of cinnamon and mace. One of my friends who drank this wrote on her tasting notes sheet, “Burnt brown sugar toast, but in a good way!” Valerie Anne wrote, “PIE BEER.”

Merry Berry Ale

Schlafly, The St. Louis Brewery 

If this were the Mary Berry Ale, it would make it to the top of this and every list! It’s not, but it does taste like something Our Lady of Distinct Layers would like: raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries brewed with the intention of capturing the “essence of a delicate French pastry.” It’s really sweet! But not in an unbearably sugary way. It’s fruity sweet, balanced with some malt. It’d be a little bit of all right to drink this as dessert with your Christmas pudding.

Santa Vs. Unicorn

Pipeworks Brewing 

Piperworks loves some unicorn fisticuffs. They’ve got the Unicorn vs. Science, the Unicorn vs. Ninja, the Unicorn vs. Zombie, the Unicorn Galaxy. This one, Santa vs. Unicorn is a very tasty American Barleywine. It’s 10% ABV and once you drink a single can of it you’ll think this is the most clever beer description you’ve ever heard in your life: “This Holiday Season, the Unicorn is back bearing his mantle of rainbowed chaos, and this time, it’s seasonal bitches.” Anna, who drank this with me, wrote in her tasting notes, “What is this? What is it. WHAT IS THIS?” I’ll tell you what it is: grapefruit, pine, malt, caramel, and a little bit bread-y. It’s also surprisingly hoppy for a barleywine!

Old Man Winter (Ale)

Southern Tier Brewing Company 

Old Man Winter (Ale) is an English Old Ale with a hearty 7.5% ABV. It actually tastes a little more like an IPA than an English Old Ale, which is fine by me. It’s caramel-y and malty and hoppy and not too sweet at all. Like a dessert with enough savoriness you could eat a lot of it. It also tastes much boozier than it really is, which is also fine by me. If I were trapped in a cabin in the woods in a snowstorm, I would happily share my body heat with this beer to keep it alive.

Christmas Ale

Anchor Brewing

Another Winter Warmer! What makes Anchor’s Christmas beer really neat is they never brew it the same way twice. Every year it’s slightly different (and every year it’s very good). This year it’s the same toasty dark malts as always but they’ve balanced out the candied apple and maraschino cherry notes with some grassy hops. It tastes like the kind of toast you might leave out for Santa.

Accumulation

New Belgium Brewing

My friend who drank this beer with me is our staff writer Valerie Anne! She also happens to be my neighbor and has gone to many of my Bitches Brew classes at A-Camp so she knows New Belgium is the most progressive and woman-dominated brewery of its size in the world. Which is probably why she wrote “I can taste the feminism!” in her notes. Accumulation is a Belgian IPA, which sounds intense but this is pretty wheat-forward. A semi-sweet easy sipper. A warm-weather Christmas. [Update: This batch was brewed by the fiance of one of our readers! I’ve moved it higher up the list due to festive lesbianism!]

Flannel Shirt

Greenpoint Beer & Ale Co. 

First of all, this beer comes in a can that looks like an actual green and red flannel shirt. So that’s just Christmas gay right on the face of it. It’s an IPA but what’s weird about it is the malts are kind of tobacco-y? I’m going to be honest with you, if Charles Dickens were a beer, this would be it. It’s bitter but it gets less so the more you drink it, and it moves through its toasty, tobacco-iness until it feels almost warm and and fruity, so familiar. It does take itself very seriously, though.

Holiday Donut Cookie

Platform Beer Co.

Most of the time when beers say they taste like something that’s not hops or malt or chocolate of coffee, they taste like that thing just a little bit. Notes of the thing. Ho ho ho, no! Holiday Donut Cookie tastes like a literal snickerdoodle. Cinnamon, ginger, sugar, even a little milky? It’s too sweet. Not just for a beer. It’s too sweet for, like, a hot chocolate or a Christmas latte from Starbucks. It tastes like something a Buddy the Elf would get sozzled on! (It’s high on this list but low in my heart.)

Fitsmas Ale

Revolution Brewing

Valerie Anne also tasted this one with me. “I heart drinking Christmas trees” is what she wrote in her notes and she’s right! It’s not as pine-y as the next one but it’s got just enough pine to balance out the ginger and cinnamon that also fill out the flavor. It’s not as carbonated as you might expect, but that works in its favor. Also it’s called Fistmas, okay? FISTMAS.

Pennsylvania Tuxedo

Dogfish Head Brewery

This is one of my absolute favorite beers. It tastes like an actual Christmas tree. I didn’t share this one with anyone because no one likes sipping on pine cones as much as me, I guess, and that’s okay. I would drink this year-round, if I could. I would brew it if I were a wood-sprite.

Mad Elf Ale

Tröegs Independent Brewing

Every year this is the best beer brewed in the United States of America. I walk all over New York City trying to find a six-pack of it and then squirrel it away and ration it out to myself over the holidays and it’s like Santa came to visit every single time. It’s a Belgian Strong Dark Ale, boozy as everything, but it’s also honey and cherries and chocolate and malt and cinnamon and pine and nutmeg and perfect, perfect, perfect. It tastes like everything magical at Christmastime.

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Okay, your turn! What are some of your favorite holigay beers?

Merry Butchmas: Cozy Holiday Cocktails and the Hot Butch Looks to Sip Them In

This post is by Mika and Heather. 

Everyone has their own holiday traditions; part of the joy of being queer is creating your own. For instance, just spitballing, what if your holiday tradition was handsome butches getting dressed up to make and enjoy festive cocktails? WHAT IF.

This year we have made this dream a reality with resident soft butch dreamboat bartender Heather Hogan making you three signature holiday cocktails while outfitted in a butch bartender look styled by Mika — who also has three smokin’ outfits for you, too. Pick out your look and make a cocktail to enjoy it in; if you want to play fuck/marry/flirt with the three butch archetypes in the comments, no one can stop you.

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Casual Butch Would Love to Carry Those Gifts Babe

2 oz. Four Roses Small Batch bourbon
1/3 oz. Fresh lemon juice
1/3 oz. St. Germain liqueur
1/3 oz. Zirbenz Stone Pine liqueur
1/3 oz. Simple syrup
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Sage leaves

Muddle the sage leaves and the lemon juice in a cocktail shaker. Add the other ingredients and some ice. Shake it ’till the cocktail shaker is almost too cold for you to hold. Strain and garnish with a sage leaf.

Heather: This is a dapper lumberjack cocktail. The tender butch drinking this will get up, slip out while the party guests are chatting away all warm and content, shovel the snow, and slip back in without anyone noticing they’ve been gone. Sweet, classy, functional.

Mika: This look SCREAMS quiet farmer minus the toxic hetero hyper masc bullshit. This is for the butch who wants to be comfy while also looking nice, the tough cookie that’s warm and mushy on the inside. Let your inner Jughead season one out with this trucker jacket and pair it with a soft warm knit so people know you have an emotional range. Next, add some black chinos or ripped jeans to bring that bad boy youth element in, so people know they can make out with you in your childhood bedroom. Finally, finish this look with some lace boots that say, “Hey I know I could get some Chelseas and make this easier for both of us… but I like to take my time.”

Fancy Butch Kills It at Your Company Holiday Party, Duh

1 oz. gin
1 oz. Campari
1 oz. sweet red vermouth
Orange slices / cranberries / rosemary sprigs

Chill your glass and then add some ice. Pour in the gin, Campari, and vermouth. Gently stir the ingredients, then garnish with any combination of orange slices (or peel), cranberries, and rosemary sprigs.

Heather: This is a Mommi Christmas twist on a Negroni. The absolute go-to cocktail for the characters in The Holiday, Family Stone, and Love Actually. Elegant, festive, sharp.

Mika: For this fit let’s be real: you wanna be the Idris Elba, Jude Law, Resident Posh Spice of your family. This look is for the butch that takes more than 45 minutes with their hair. This is for butch Victoria Beckham; you have at least two sinks in your bathroom. You want to look like you’re an art director at Vogue, like you own a vacation island somewhere, like you have a fucking fireplace in your bedroom. This is the energy we are trying to go for here. Earth tones and plaid are very much in this season, so you gotta wear some plaid trousers. Pair these with a turtleneck to reaaaally get that early 2000 holiday rom-com feeling. Tuck it in or wear it partially tucked in, at least. This is zaddy/mommi look. You gotta wear some leather, suede is for the YOUTH, so pair it with these chelsea boots from Aldo OR whatever brogue or oxford you have around. Finally, LONG OVERCOAT. Jackets were left behind during your high school years behind the bleachers.

Cozy Butch Made Canned Homemade Apple Butter for Your Mom

1 small slice butter
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1 dash ground cinnamon
1 dash ground nutmeg
1 dash ground allspice
1 splash vanilla extract
2 ounces dark (not spiced) rum
5 ounces boiling water

Bring your water, butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and vanilla to a boil over medium heat, whisking it from time to time. Go slow, it should take you five to ten minutes to get it boiling. Remove it from the heat as soon as it starts to bubble. Stir in your rum. Garnish with a cinnamon stick.

Heather: You know in Christmas movies when people wear matching pajamas (tops and bottoms!) and a cozy Christmas-colored robe and soft, jubilant slippers? That feeling of being ultra cozy but not effortlessly so. A take-home basket of artisanal products in the guest bathroom and extra extra smooshy towels. That’s the person this cocktail is for. Intricate, toasty, lush.

Mika: Joke’s on you if you thought you couldn’t pull off some sort of sweatpant for the holidays! This butch knows comfort comes over EVERYTHING. A Taurus most likely will wear this. This fit is for a butch that’s serving some Ellen Page on her way to destroy some Republican. KStew on her way to coffee. You are ready to go off on your family members during dinner and might as well be as comfy as possible for dessert later. You’re trying to channel this bear but like in a cooler way. Again, turtlenecks, I know. If that’s not your cut, get some thick knit since these are very in right now. An ugly sweater (that isn’t super ugly, please) can also work. Pair this with some jogger or fake pants and some cute socks and you’re good to go. Wear this look with some white clean cut sneakers so you don’t look like you are in pajamas (literally) and a matching beanie that compliments the color palette.

Alewives: The Women Who Crafted Beer and Split Hell Wide Open

In 1948 the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a Michigan law that prohibited women from obtaining bartender licenses, unless the bars where they worked were owned by their fathers or their husbands. Justice Felix Frankfurter delivered the majority opinion of the court, writing that women bartenders “give rise to moral and social problems.” He pointed to the irrefutable evidence presented by writer of fictional history William Shakespeare, specifically his portrayal of the “sprightly and ribald” alewives who had caused “wantonness, brawls, frays, and other inconveniences” in England’s social life for centuries.

Shakespeare actually only trots out alewives in two of his plays. Once when Henry IV peeps up an alewife’s skirts and once in The Taming of the Shrew when Petruchio’s nemesis, Christopher Sly, breaks a bunch of beer mugs and spends the rest of the play making fat jokes about the alewife who asked him to pay for his mess.

It seems likely that Justice Frankfurter, a renowned anglophile and sexist, misremembered exactly where he’d encountered alewives during his time studying and teaching in England. They do play a very minor role in Shakespeare, but the place where alewives actually reign ubiquitous is hell. Alewives grinning and riding piggyback on the shoulders of demons, sloshing their beer on their descent into the eternal abyss. Alewives pushing wheelbarrows full of innocent men into Satan’s flames with one hand and pounding a pint with the other. Alewives tenderly cradling the horned heads of hoofed hellbeasts to their bosoms while their fellow humans burn alive in chains. The only thing more popular than alewives in religious art depicting hell is the devil himself.

There was a time, however, when alewives were the saints of society. They were celebrated to the point of reverence, and rightly so: For thousands of years they kept their families and communities alive by brewing and serving and selling beer.

In fact, in every ancient society where beer existed, the craft was created and carried out by women. Often, they even received their instruction from goddesses they conjugated with for life. There’s no mythology in which a male god gifts brewing instructions to humanity, and no mythology in which a man receives brewing instructions from a deity. It’s always goddesses and it’s always women brewers.

“It is the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates.”

Most historians agree that beer originated in the Sumerian settlement of Godin Tempe, an outpost on the Silk Road trade route, between 3500-3100 BCE, where it became a staple of daily diets because it contained loads of nutrients from the grains used to brew it. The other thing historians agree on is that the process of brewing in Godin Tempe was initiated and cultivated by women.

Ninkasi was the goddess who gifted women with instructions on beer brewing; in fact, the oldest known writing about beer is The Hymn to Ninkasi (written down around 1800 BCE), which reads half like an ale celebration and half like erotic poetry. Here’s Ninkasi working her ministrations, soaking her malt in the jar, the waves rising and falling and rising and falling. Here’s Ninkasi holding on with both hands to the honey and the sweet wort, the waves rising and falling and rising and falling. Here’s Ninkasi at the climax, pouring the beer out of the vat, the life-giving onrush of Tigris and Euphrates!

Ninkasi was the brewer of beer, but she was also the beer itself. Her spirit and essence infused the beer her priestesses prepared. Her name literally means “the lady who fills the mouth.”

Sumerian women created dozens of styles of beers, mixing them with spices, tree bark, peppers, crab claws, and many herbs that were also found in ancient medical remedies. That’s no surprise: Ninkasi was also associated with healing because she was born when the Mother Goddess Ninhursag was giving life-saving care to another god. (Hang on to that; it’s going to become important.)

Ninkasi wasn’t the only goddess who taught the craft of brewing to eager women. In Baltic and Slavic mythology the goddess Raugutiene provided protection over beer. In Finnish mythology Kalevatar brought beer to earth by mixing honey with bear saliva. For the Pharaonic Egyptians, the goddess Hathor invented beer. Viking women were the exclusive brewers in Norse society and law dictated that all brewhouse equipment remained always in their possession.

“Then put it again into the Cauldron, and boil it an hour or an hour and a half.”

By the time the middle ages rolled around, women in Europe were brewing beer every day. They were called alewives.

The height of alewife popularity came after The Black Death of 1348, which wiped out between one-third and one-half of Europe’s population. Post-Black plague socioeconomic effects have been well-documented by historians; for the alewife, the change came in the form of not having families to prepare beer for, and in families not having an alewife to prepare beer for them. Because the boiled — therefore bacteria-free — water that went into beer made it the only drink that didn’t kill people, selling and buying it became a necessity that proved lucrative for women who’d learned the craft.

Here’s what an alewife looked like: She did her brewing in a giant cauldron; boiling water, adding grain, overseeing the fermentation process. To keep the mice away from her stores of grain, she kept plenty of cats around. When she had extra beer to sell, she put a broom out in front of her house to signal the surplus. Or, she went to the market, where she took the fashion of the day — the henin, a tall white steeple-shaped hat — and made it black, to stand out in the crowd.

“She is ugly fayre; Her nose somdele hoked; And camously croked.”

By the 1500s, the church had had it with alewives. They were usurping the structures the church had been using to strip women of their agency and autonomy for over a thousand years. Land ownership? Nah, alewives just needed a cauldron. Husbands? Nah, alewvives didn’t need any land. Alewives were perfectly capable of making money without men. They were, quite literally, destroying the patriarchy with their beer.

The only thing medieval Europeans liked more than a good, warm ale was a good, warm story about hell. Dante’s Inferno had captured the minds of a continent ravaged by a plague, and the church leaned into the obsession and started centering almost all of their teachings on Satan and eternal damnation. To accompany these sermons, churches began commissioning art inspired by Dante’s conception of hell. Doom paintings became the chapel fashion of the day, sprawling murals on walls and ceilings depicting Christ’s Last Judgment and the poor disobedient souls he was forced to condemn to hell.

Priests helped shaped the direction of these paintings and sculptures, of course, and urged the artists to include alewives in their work. By the time Michelangelo finished his doom painting in the Sistine Chapel, alewives were depicted in hell more than any other profession in Europe (and they remain so to this day).

Along with the paintings came the poetry and the plays. The most famous was John Skelton’s The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng, a long, raucous, bawdy poem about an alewife named Elynour who ran a public house (pub). The poem describes her beer as “pig piss,” made while chickens roost over the fermentation tank, while Elynour herself seduces her male patrons, cheats them, lures them into gambling away their family’s money, steals their possessions and steals them from their wives. She looks like the real-life alewife everyone was familiar with, but: with a hooked nose, warts on her face, long spindly fingers, a crooked back.

For all its bawdiness, The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng so closely resembles a liturgical chant — in form and theme — that historians have sometimes wondered if it was, in fact, written by a priest.

Slowly but surely, thanks to the church’s propaganda, Europeans came to see alewives not as legitimate business owners doing a service for their community but as immoral, filthy, ugly, duplicitous women in league with the devil himself. The most popular morality plays of the day, The Chester Plays, dedicated one entire day to the alewife. In Play 17, The Harrowing of Hell, she descends into satan’s realm and happily recounts her debaucherous life to her demonic best friends.

In 1540 the city of Chester banned women between the ages of 14 and 40 from brewing or serving beer, a case recounted 300 years later, an ocean away, by Justice Frankfurter.

“Ye monsters of the bubbling deep, Your Maker’s praises spout.”

By the time witch hysteria set in in the 1600s, the church had learned a few lessons.

They’d reversed the policy of denying the existence of witches. Before the Black Death, the church painted witches as mythological women associated with pagan traditions, or as fictional figures associated with healing and teaching. After the Black Death, the church actively began presenting witches as slaves of the devil. With a continent’s psyche ravaged by a population-decimating plague and everyone looking for divine reassurance that it wouldn’t happen again, a demonic scapegoat became just the thing.

Church interrogators tracked down, tried, and executed “plague-spreaders,” most of whom were women who’d been in charge of healing in their towns and villages before the Black Death.

The witch trials used a blueprint that was already in place. Harvests were failing, wars were spreading, someone must be blamed for God’s wrath. The church had spent a century creating visual and narrative propaganda to depict the tall-hatted, cauldron-carrying alewife as a woman in league with satan. It wasn’t much of a stretch to extend that depiction to include women who had extensive knowledge of medicinal herbs and plants and spices.

From the beginning of time, the goddesses associated with beer were also the goddesses associated with birth and healing.

After the witch trials, both medicine and beer brewing existed completely under the dominion of men.

“I’m delighted to see the Supreme Court is interested in beer drinkers.”

Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter made one grave mistake. In 1960, Harvard Law Professor Albert Sachs suggested that Frankfurter take on Sachs’ star student as a clerk. Frankfurter agreed the student had an impressive resume, but he refused to hire her because she was a woman. 33 years later Ruth Bader Ginsburg shared that story when she was appointed to the Supreme Court, telling her own clerks that Frankfurter’s refusal to hire her based on her gender was the reason she became interested in the role of women in the eyes of the law.

Her first major Supreme Court victory came in 1976, when she was working for the ACLU. She offered to file an amicus curiae brief on behalf of a plaintiff who was arguing — like the Michigan bartender in 1948 — that gender was covered under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. SCOTUS sided with Ginsburg and ruled in favor of the plaintiff.

When Ginsburg began her litigation career, SCOTUS had never encountered a gender discrimination case it didn’t consider reasonable and constitutionally sound. After Craig v. Boren, she went on to win so many gender equality cases using the ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment became affectionately known as the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Equal Protection Clause.”

Craig v. Boren was a double blow to Frankfurter’s legacy. The case was about the difference in legal drinking ages of men and women in Oklahoma. The plaintiff just wanted to buy a beer.

“It is warm and dry, and has a moderate moisture, and is not very useful in benefiting man.”

The history of beer is rampant with men violently wrenching the art of brewing from the women who created, perfected, and sustained it — but, like all women-centric history, it’s also replete with tales of women who kept their craft’s secrets out of the hands of men. Queer nun Hildegard of Bingen, nursing a broken heart from the death of her lover who was sent away from Hildegard’s abbey when her brother uncovered their relationship, discovered the benefits of hops in beer, both as a preservation agent and a taste modifier. In her journal extolling the virtues of hops, however, she noted they wouldn’t be useful to men. “It makes the soul of man sad,” she wrote. In oral and written fairy tales, passed down from grandmothers to mothers to daughters in perpetuity, facts about medicinal herbs and spices and tinctures are tucked away between stories of morality and romance. The Hymn to Ninkasi is, in fact, the oldest written ale recipe. Woven between the hypnotic queer eroticism are detailed instructions for brewing beer; a sacred, feminine, life-sustaining craft. 

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A+ Roundtable: Vice Squad

It’s time for another Bad Behavior roundtable! This week we’re talking about vices, and so we asked our team: What’s your favorite drink and/or substance and/or drug? What’s drug or substance you used to do, but have since cut back on significantly or entirely? Why? How has it changed your life? We’d love to hear your answers in the comments!

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Al(aina), Staff Writer

I smoke a lot of weed. I’ve actually cut back, and I still smoke a lot of weed. It’s partially self-medicating, but being high is also fun. Sex is better, the sunset is better, music is better. I write with less anxiety, I’m more willing to have conversations with people I don’t know, and I’m generally happier. I laugh so much more when I’m high, everything is hilarious. I used to drink, I don’t anymore, except for communion wine once a week. Alcoholism is in my genes, and I felt myself getting more and more comfortable with drinking a bottle of wine a night, so I stopped. I didn’t really like being drunk, even when I did drink, so the change has been mostly positive. I don’t have hangovers anymore, and that’s a blessing.

Alexis, Staff Writer

HELLO ME AND VODKA GO WAY BACK LIKE ANIMAL CRACKERS AND APPLE JUICE. I was more of a wine person in high school ’cause, like, we didn’t have hard liquor/I already felt unhinged enough and I was guessing alcohol wouldn’t make it better (like what if… I got too tipsy and CAME OUT?????? the horror). But now that I’m stable(?)??? BUDDY.

Like actually any and all alcohol is my favorite, like if it gets me tipsy/drunk, I’m pleased. Except beer. Don’t bring beer anywhere near me please. But vodka? That burning shit that has made me brave enough to leave my house, do performances, talk to pretty people, and also make me cry enough that I literally just need to go to sleep thereby avoiding doing anything more dangerous/embarrassing, has been a pal and a half. (Honestly for most of these alcohol has been the reward more than the motivator). Vodka, tequila and Long Island iced teas when I’m feeling fancy are where I’m at at the moment and my ultimate faves.

Tequila makes me wanna make out with everyone and convinces me I’m a much better dancer than I am, so I avoid it more than the other two but Long Island iced teas make me feel 10% classier than I really am and that obviously enhances my life. It’s changed my life by making super terrible experiences/truths bearable cause it’ll blur ’em for me for a bit! Like work is hell but hell is tomorrow and right now?? Everything feels light and wavy and bad things are far away. I cut back for like a week and then go back to it cause work is hell and I’m always amazed at how magnificent alcohol is.

I can’t really do anything drugwise because 1) New Jack City fucked me up 2) the absolute terror of even getting my prescription meds right let me know that it would take even longer/be even more catastrophic for my sensitive ass to find the right drug and 3) all my family says to each other both in real life situations and when we are gathered around the TV watching a black person about to do drugs, is “Don’t mess with that, we don’t come back from drugs like white people do.” So.

Heather Hogan, Senior Editor

My favorite drink is beer! I used to drink a lot more than I do now, and honestly I wish I still could. Beer is delicious! I love trying new and different kinds of beers and spending a weekend afternoon sipping on my favorite IPAs! I love leisurely sipping beer flights and talking about everything in the world with Stacy for an entire afternoon! I love a very cold beer in my back yard (slab of concrete) at the end of a very long day! But I am nearing 40 and anything more than two beers once a week makes me feel pretty terrible. So it’s a special treat now, and not a multi-times weekly indulgence. I’ve never really done any other drugs or substances because my mom and both my grandfathers struggled with addiction and I have a very addictive personality — ask me how many hours I’ve played Zelda: Breath of the Wild in the last month — and so I’ve always had CONSTANT VIGILANCE where alcohol and drugs are concerned. I even turned back in half the Percocet I got when I had endometriosis surgery last year after two weeks and I didn’t need it anymore because I didn’t want it just lying around. (I Googled “how to dispose of prescription drugs in NYC” and Google said take it back to Rite-Aid and I did. I’m fun.)

Erin Sullivan, Staff Writer

My drink/vice of choice is wine. I think in the past five years there have been at least three conflicting studies on how much is good or bad for you (like only one glass of red a day is heart healthy versus, my personal favorite, a bottle of red wine a day is healthy), but even if they came out with a study that said wine killed you the second you hit (x) amount of glasses, I’d be like, let me go pick up this Cote du Rhone I’ve been meaning to try. Life is hard enough, let me have this.

Yvonne Marquez, Senior Editor

My favorite drinks are IPAs and bourbon. I don’t drink as often as I did a few years ago because my partner is sober now. We used to go out and try craft beers at bars a whole lot! We did it for fun and to socialize but it got expensive! We ordered about two beers each and then bar food because we got hungry. I sometimes miss those days because I missed trying new beers and hanging out with our friends mid-week and on the weekends a whole lot more than we do now. But I don’t really care that I don’t drink as much as I used to. And it seems I only drink bourbon at A-Camp and when I’m trying to Party. I was in Brooklyn with my siblings recently and we went to a bar near the place we were staying and I thought it was so funny how I didn’t really like any of their drinks except their whiskey ones? My sister got some tequila thing similar to a Paloma and my brother got some rum drink and I was like eww. And then my lesbian friend joined us and she also wanted the same whiskey drink I had and so I concluded only lesbians like whiskey.

Creatrix Tiara, Staff Writer

I’ve usually stayed away from substances, mainly because my medications already fuck with my brain enough that I don’t need to add to the chaos. I don’t smoke and have only tried edibles twice — once unwittingly, which led to a meltdown, and once in a more controlled environment which was OK but not really enough to interest me to go further.

I’ve got a possibly weird relationship with alcohol. I didn’t start drinking at all till I was about 23 — I didn’t like the taste of most drinks and I didn’t understand the appeal of getting drunk. I tended to drink in moderation (like once every few MONTHS or so) but I got into a relationship with someone who had an alcohol problem, which made ME worry about whether I had a problem too. We decided to go cold turkey together, then reintroduced alcohol slowly — yet when I’d check in with my ex about her alcohol usage, LIKE SHE ASKED, she’d accuse ME of projecting. This fucked me up to the point that I’ve had guilt trips about “Oh no what if I am actually an alcoholic,” despite me drinking way less than the average person (or at least the average Australian, which may not be saying much).

I’ve cut down on my drinking severely again, mainly because of a couple of incidents where I got really bad food poisoning or mood drops and went “Welp! My body rejects it now!” Once in a while I’ll have a drink, but it’s rare. I don’t know if it counts as a vice but out of the question’s general category it’s the only thing that fits.

Molly Priddy, Staff Writer

I love indica strains of pot. For a lot of people, it makes them feel snoozy and snacky and like they can’t move from the couch because they’re now part of it, but for me it does the opposite. I feel like an anthropologist when I smoke it, and it gives me a sense of having a slight bubble around me, a little world of my own where everything is interesting. I make slow but generally good decisions on weed, not like when I drank and made decisions to explode my life. Gave it up and wouldn’t you know it, things stabilized. After 18 months totally sober, I got medical card for pot to help with migraine issues, and ever since, it’s the most emotionally consistent I’ve been in my life. It’s amazing.

Rachel Kincaid, Managing Editor

At this point in my life my biggest vice is definitely alcohol; specifically, cheap red wine (Bota Box Nighthawk Black, $21 for 3 liters (!!!) of wine) that I have maybe two glasses of a night before bed and bourbon (Bulleit, which I know is problematic so this is really LAYERS of bad behavior here) occasionally as a treat, which I drink neat or with one (1) ice cube. I’m aware that like… ten drinks a week? Ish? Is not necessarily ideal or super healthy, and my family does have a marked history of alcoholism that is like, not nothing. I rationalize this by telling myself that this is really my ONLY vice and everyone should get ONE — I’ve never smoked, I cook at home all the time and don’t eat meat, barely leave my apartment, I don’t even smoke weed, and I’m down to like a fairly normal amount of coffee in the mornings!! Let me have this.

In my youth, when I was going to a fancy liberal arts school on the east coast, my vice was more definitively prescription medication — it was the heyday of Adderall for both on-label and off-label use, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a wealthy white kid with a psychiatrist, and I had a constantly replenishing supply of Adderall and benzos in my dorm room and my purse covering everything in a fine film of gross pill dust. This changed, obviously, when I graduated and was no longer in those same social circles, and also things are so different now — even my friends who need it for medical reasons have trouble getting Adderall, and the opiate crisis means I feel slightly nervous asking for a refill of my legit prescription for Xanax. Time flies, etc!

Riese Bernard, CEO/Editor in Chief

I used to be really into whiskey drinks, like manhattans or just straight-up bourbon, but lately I’ve been really into tequila and grapefruit juice for no real reason? If I’m at a bar with specialty cocktails I usually go for a bourbon or tequila base.

My main vice right now I guess is weed, which helps me sleep and is also sometimes fun for feeling creative or passionate or giggly with friends.

My last relationship was with someone who was sober, so while we were together I probably drank like, once a month. Now it’s basically just when I go out, which varies from zero times a week to a few times a week, depending. But i used to drink every night and I don’t do that anymore!

Becoming a person who drank every night seemed to sneak up on me, you know? I started drinking regularly VERY late compared to my friends, like; after college — so it was like a “me” / “not me” thing. It started around the time we launched Autostraddle, which was a very stressful time! And I think got worse when I first moved to California near the end of 2010, ’cause my girlfriend did. And I don’t think it was impacting me in any significant way like socially or work-wise or anything, but as I started getting older i was like, how long can I keep this up really. Then suddenly — I think partially due to what happened at Dinah Shore (long story short: I passed out and had to go to the ER, it wasn’t drugs/alcohol related but they also didn’t know what it was so it just freaked me out in general about my health), but also just, changing as a person — one night i poured a drink and didn’t want to drink it, and I noticed immediately how much better I felt the next morning! Like SO MUCH BETTER. So I just … stopped. I usually don’t have alcohol just sitting around in my house or apartment anymore ’cause I only drink it when I’m out. I also don’t do illegal/hard drugs anymore (I’ve done cocaine, mushrooms, ecstasy, acid in the past) but that was sort of a brief phase in my early to mid 20s.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Staff Writer

I was late to the alcohol thing because of my deep-rooted fear of breaking rules and getting in trouble as a kid. But I got over that pretty quickly in college when I learned about tequila and how much fun it was to drink before going dancing! I love natural wines and sour beers and mezcal and spicy cocktails and super bitter amaros and FERNET GOD I LOVE FERNET. Sorry @ all my friends who I’ve convinced to try fernet who hate it.

That said, I do occasionally take breaks from alcohol, because in college I also learned that when I was depressed I would sometimes drink so as to numb my feelings and that is…not good! So I have rules with myself now about being careful about alcohol when I know I’m in a particularly bad place and making sure I’m not using it to self-medicate in any way. Something you should know about me is that I almost never get hungover, which is both a blessing and a curse because hello being hungover sucks but also the fear of a hangover doesn’t act as a deterrent for drinking for me, so sometimes I drink on nights when I really shouldn’t like when I have a flight at 7 a.m. the next morning for example.

Laneia, Executive Editor

My favorite drink is probably an obnoxiously piney IPA, or a dry as hell organic Cabernet Sauvignon (because if it’s not organic it stains my teeth ok), and I use THC to go to sleep or stop anxiety attacks.

I started smoking cigarettes when I was 16 and I’d like to walk you through my brand evolution if I may: Marlboro Lights, Camel Lights, Capris, Capri Menthols, and occasionally Capri Menthol 120s when they were out of the regular ones. I stopped when I was about 28? Or closer to 30 maybe? And then I’d sometimes smoke one socially, or at music festivals or other outdoor events that involved music and/or alcohol. I haven’t smoked in several years though and I’m pretty sure I won’t again, even socially or at a music festival, but! I do miss smoking cigarettes. I miss the ritual of it and I especially miss smoking on long car rides. It broke up the monotony! But I do enjoy being able to fully inhale oxygen into my lungs. That never gets old.

Alyssa Andrews, Cartoonist

Fun fact! I don’t do drugs. Like, none of ’em. Less fun fact! I don’t do them because I used to do too many of them.

I’ve had a lot of surgeries in my life. Some resulting in hospital stays for months at a time, and opiates throughout all of those months and beyond. I’ve also had my bouts of being very sad and anxious, and prone to a lot of self destruction. Life is very hard.

It’s changed my life in probably about a zillion ways, both the starting and the stopping, and I’m not good at talking about it, but I AM very committed to never doing them again.

Archie Cartoonist

I admittedly have many vices. Addiction runs in my family and I have been very unsuccessful whenever I’ve tried to cut back on my vices in the past. I’d gamble and drink the night away every night if I could just get a ride to the casino. It’s fine, it’s finnneeee. I’ve cut back on my drinking a lot, although it does get the best of me at times. I don’t think my drinking would have ever gotten out of hand if I wasn’t in the service industry — the cooks were all high on coke and all the servers would rush to the bar that’d serve us after last call just to get as drunk as we could in half-an-hour. It was like, the thing EVERYONE did. Also, basically everyone I dated after coming out up until maybe a few years ago was a low-key/high-key alcoholic, so partners and I often indulged each other (most folks I dated also worked as cooks/servers). I’m still in the habit of getting drinks after work and while that’s not a problem, I feel myself getting anxious if I can’t get one and am w o r k i n g on it. Also though, I fucking love drinking sometimes so I don’t actually know if I’m working on it at all. yolo.

Carrie Wade, Staff Writer

I’ve never been interested in drugs, not even legal ones — I think because I’ve had to take so many painkillers and such as part of medical recovery, the bloom kinda fell off the rose from the start. I’ve experienced nasty withdrawal from taking medication as directed, so it never really occurred to me that I would want to do this stuff for fun. I recognize that I’m lucky to have reacted that way.

I drink more now than I did before I moved across the country, but not in a way that’s concerning. I still rarely have more than one drink at a stretch; it’s just that I might have that one drink on a couple more weeknights than before. My desire to maintain tight control of my circumstances is (usually) a lot stronger than any impulse I might have to drink beyond the pleasant place. That same desire is also what gives me a ton of unnecessary anxiety, so it’s not necessarily a virtue in all cases. But it does help keep the brakes on these kinds of habits.

The vice I have the most trouble controlling is (ironically, maybe) internet use. When I’m in a funk I’ll spend so much more time mindlessly scrolling through whatever. It’s such an easy temptation, which is of course by design. Shutting yourself out from the world is a hell of a lot simpler than engaging with it these days. So when I’m feeling off, you’ll know, because I’m on my phone way more, filling up the hours I’m otherwise too scared to figure out how to use. I recently took a cold turkey month off of social media, which had the rejuvenating effects I hoped for, but also clarified that my ideal level of internet engagement is not actually “zero.” It’s professionally important for me to be out there and I do miss opportunities when I’m not. So I need to figure out how to use the internet for all the things it’s great at without simultaneously enabling my most destructive habits. I recently got a new watch so I have fewer excuses to look at my phone. It’s working.

Cameron, Cartoonist

Oh man. So, let’s talk about cigarettes. I don’t think anyone ever intends to become a smoker. I mean, I never meant to. I didn’t think I was at risk for that particular addiction. I had a few cigarettes in college when I felt especially stressed, sure, but it never stuck as a habit until around 2016. Around then, I started smoking cigarettes as a social crutch and as an escape. If some friends or coworkers were going out for a cigarette break, I’d join them. If I felt overwhelmed or uncomfortable in a situation, I’d go outside and smoke. I conditioned myself to associate smoking with some kind of respite. And I hate that.

Right now I’m in the active process of quitting, which is especially difficult because in my industry so many people smoke. It’s hard to get away from it and it’s hard to find people who will stop me if I’m really, really craving a cigarette.

I’m not doing patches or gum. It’s not the nicotine that does it for me. It’s the ritual of the whole thing, of turning off my brain but still having something to focus on. I cut down on drinking–which really I needed to cut back on anyway — and that’s helped. Now I just have to stay the course, which is easier now because I have motivation now. I have people looking out for me. And also? I’m really looking forward to being able to run again without my chest feeling like it’s on fire.

Vanessa Friedman, Community Editor

I’m about to be very boring here, and I apologize in advance, but also this is my truth: my biggest vice is Diet Coke.

I love Diet Coke so, so much. I started drinking it in high school when I hated my body and was always on a diet of some kind or another, and I don’t know if I conditioned myself to love it more than regular Coke or if its sweet sweet chemicals really do taste better to me than its full sugar counterpart, but like, Diet Coke is objectively the best soda in the whole world. Come at me for this, I don’t care, I will die on this hill.

I am addicted to Diet Coke which is why I cold turkey stopped drinking it on February 1. Honestly I do feel weird talking about it this way, because I’m aware that many of my sober friends who cut alcohol out of their lives use Diet Coke as an alternative beverage and that is truly awesome and also none of my fucking business. I don’t judge anyone who drinks Diet Coke, obviously!!! But for me, a fairly neurotic human with a low tolerance, an uncomplicated relationship to booze, and a fear of being out of control that has kept me away from most drugs (sometimes I smoke weed and then I fall asleep immediately and I tried coke once and it hurt my nostrils), Diet Coke is My Big Vice. And I was extremely dependent on it, to the point of getting stomach aches and headaches when I didn’t consume my regular 2-3 cans a day, so I decided to give it up, because being that dependent on a thing felt bad.

I haven’t had Diet Coke once since February 1 and I am going to be real with you, I have woken up every single day since craving it. I am never not craving Diet Coke. I assume I will eventually fall off the wagon (I gave it up for two years right after college but eventually went down the slippery slope of “only getting it with pizza” and then “only getting it at restaurants” and then “only one can a day and never keeping it in my own fridge” and then I was back to “2-3 cans a day, let’s keep an extra 2 liter bottle in the pantry just in case, WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T SERVE DIET COKE AT THIS ESTABLISHMENT I AM GOING TO LEAVE”) and to be completely real, I can’t wait for that day.

Stef Schwartz, Vapid Fluff Editor

I’m a bourbon drinker, have been for years. Bulleit bourbon is my go-to, but I’m happy to experiment with others and I hold a special place in my heart for cheap Old Grand Dad (mostly because I love ordering it). I work in a bar and I’ve always been a social drinker, but since I took over a management position at my job I’ve had to cut down quite a bit because being drunk at work is unfortunately not a good look for the boss.

I will tell you that as a youth, I used to do cocaine recreationally with some vague regularity. I don’t have a particularly addictive personality, but I did enjoy it because I’m generally very awkward in social situations and coke made me feel that people around me were interesting, or that I was interesting! I think it made me almost like a normal social human being (although from the outside, I was probably just really annoying, like everyone else on cocaine).

I had quit for a long time, and then at a Halloween party a girl I had a crush on asked if I’d like to do a line off a glow-in-the-dark Ouija board, and I decided this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I’m not terribly proud of that.

That said, I much prefer drinking. I’ve learned when it’s time to go home, when it’s time to order water, and although my hangovers have certainly gotten worse with age I don’t wake up feeling like an actual trash bag the way I did as a youth.

Valerie Anne, Staff Writer

I love drinking wine in my apartment. Just me, a mason jar of white wine, and the night is mine. I like writing while drinking wine, I like watching TV while drinking wine. I swear sometimes wine is the only thing that cures my insomnia. I don’t drink it every night, and sometimes I end up drinking too much of it in a night, but usually it’s just a nice mason jarful and I’m pleased as punch. I know this is probably a boring answer but I don’t like smoking weed and I’ve only tried coke once. I have an addictive personality and I don’t want to risk it, yaknow? Drinking so much is a dangerous game as it is, since my dad is an alcoholic (though he quit when my mother got pregnant with me.)

And I also know this is the most boring thing, but I think it proves my point about why I should never do anything harder than alcohol, because I get addicted to diet coke something awful. It happened once in college, and then again last year. If I had one diet coke, I had five or more in a day. It was nonstop, I would crave them, I would have them for breakfast, for lunch, dinner, always. Just constant Diet Coke, day or night. So January 1, 2018, I quit cold turkey. It was hard and sometimes when I’m hungover all I want is an ice-cold DC but it was too much aspartame for one person to handle, too much carbonation for one human body. I feel less bloated since I quit, and also less like I am being controlled by wondering when I was going to be able to have more Diet Coke. It was consuming my MIND and that was the scariest part, and that’s why I’m glad to have quit.

5 Boxed Rosés, Ranked by Bang-for-Your-Buck by a Bunch of Inebriated Queers

Mere weeks ago, in the sweet luscious valleys of Ojai, a group of queer people assembled in an outdoor gazebo where a lackluster “Rosé All Day” banner waved with limited spirit in intense winds. It was the Boxed Rosé & Cheese Plate workshop at A-Camp, hosted by me and my dear friend Laneia. The last time I did this workshop, the theme was Boxed Wine & Artisan Cheese. The time before that, it was Boxed Wine & Wisconsin Cheese Curds. The time before that, it was Boxed Wine & String Cheese. This time, I chose Rosé because it was very trendy in 2017 and I am 36 and therefore permitted to be at least a year late on trends, and Cheese Plates because I mean have you seen Laneia’s cheese plates.

Laneia will be sharing the results of this extraordinary cheese plate making experience in a different post today. I am here to talk to you about Rosé.

But first, the form upon which our judgements were made:

If the drinker did not give me their name or a pseudonym on their wine card, I have decided to call them Lorna, after everybody’s favorite cookie, Lorna Doones.

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5. La Vieille Ferme Rosé – 2.8 / 6

$14.99 // $4.99/liter

SUITABLE FOR: Backyard Pool Party With Power Lesbian Mommis, Parent-Teacher Night

It seems this particular wine, despite its charming animal imagery and the alleged stereotype that lesbians love animals, wasn’t sweet enough for our esteemed alcohol consumers.

However, La Vieille Ferme ranked very high on the Mommi and Land Dyke scale. Suggested names for this wine included “Mom’s Day Off,” “Farm-to-Table Roses,” “She Bought the Farm” and “French Farm.” (#sheboughtthefarm, sidenote, would be an excellent hashtag for a wedding between a Mommi and a Land Dyke.)

Perhaps this wine is best described as a journey to another land. If I may — imagine a Mommi in a Subaru, dropping her angsty teenage daughter off at a field hockey party, then driving home along sun-dappled, neatly paved roads, thinking of a more innocent time. Specifically, she is remembering her time at St. Catherine’s, the resplendent Catholic Boarding School she attended as a girl. It had a distinctly Victorian aesthetic and also chickens, pan flutes, and an aura of dark nostalgia. It is this mood that likely caused Sally to consider re-naming it “Sister Mary Francis” and deem it suitable for “detention time in a 19th century Parisian nunnery,” yes?

Finally, I’d like to give a shout-out to a tippler who called themselves “Bucky Barna” and said the best occasion for this wine would be “when you don’t give a fuckkkkkk but you like pink.” “Not giving a fuck but I like pink” is a very common feeling, thank you Bucky for your service!

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4. Unruly – 3.33 / 6

$12.95/bottle // $17.25/liter

SUITABLE FOR: Watching Netflix Alone In Your Underwear, After a Long Day on The Internet

Unruly scored high on the “not in a box” scale because Unruly was not, I admit, in a box. Here’s why: BevMo only carried three brands of boxed rosés, which was not sufficient for my workshop, and in a moment of panic, I decided the fourth would have to be a bottled rosé. I eventually found a fifth wine at Trader Joe’s, bless us all.

However, despite its classier packaging, Unruly’s notes and legs were all over the map. Drinkers seemed satisfied with its present name, but also suggested we re-name it:

• Capricorn Rising
• Trust Fall
• Bad Boi Rosé
• Old Faithful
• Rebel Tuesday
• Irresponsible Sunday Morning
• Almost Fancy
• Ballet Slippers
• Who Wants to Kiss Me?
• Wow, I Would Actually Drink This!

This wine, loyal to its name, emboldened drinkers to conceive of their own personal capacity for unruliness: Bucky found it appropriate for “getting inappropriately affectionate at your in-laws,” Wren wanted to “crash a sorority formal,” Lorna imagined “shoplifting at Barnes & Noble” and Sally envisioned “watching your best friend try on wedding dresses, when she is marrying a guy in two months and but you are still sleeping with each other.” Cheers!

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3. Block Rosé – 3.34 / 6

$11.95 // $3.90/liter

SUITABLE FOR: After a Fight You’re Pretty Sure Was Your Fault But You’re Not Ready To Accept Responsibility Yet, After A Long Day on the Internet

Rosé is typically associated with whimsy, ironic joy, and frivolous social occassions. What we learned from sipping upon tiny plastic cups of Block Rosé (aka The Trader Joe’s Brand) is that even pink wine has a dark side — and an ability to comfort its consumers as they journey through dimly-lit periods of abject despair.

Situations you wanted a box of Block Rosé for include:

• A book club where nobody read the book
• Disappointing your parents
• At a bad painter’s first opening but like not at a gallery, at like a coffee house
• Potluck you forgot about
• Numbing your senses to a level where you can sleep at a campsite with people having sex next to you
• When you only have $10 in your wallet and find $1 of quarters in the car

Eva said this wine was “what I needed when I broke up with my ex-girlfriend.” Ashe, clearly unimpressed but open to looking at the bright side of life, noted “this wine is p meh, but is still has alcohol…” If that isn’t the spirit of wine-in-a-box then I don’t know what is!

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2. Bota Box – 3.8 / 6

$17.49 // $5.83/liter

SUITABLE FOR: A Gender Reveal party and/or Baby Shower For Straight People, Watching Shondaland Alone In Your Underwear

This wine was polarizing. On the one hand: Eva called it “Pink Antifreeze Lite,” Lorna called it “Diet Lemonade Powder + Acid” and Jennifer compared drinking it to “gut rot.” On the other fist, we have drinkers re-naming it “Bubble Gum Sparkles,” “Strawberry Dreams” and “Rosé Canseco” and we also have Dwyn, who gave it a “5” and wanted to drink it at “a bridal shower for straight people hosted by the Bride’s semi-Christian mom with a Can I Speak To The manager Haircut.” Andi said it reminded them of “something you drink your first weekend in college.” You know, the first time I drank an entire bottle of Rosé by myself was my first year at the University of Michigan, talking to my ex-boyfriend on AIM while waiting for my friends to get ready to go out. It was Sutter Home, FTR. Drinking a bottle of wine by yourself: I don’t necessarily recommend it, but it’s good to have these experiences because you learn from them.

Wren cited Bota as reminiscent of “the free Blush you get at Sephora for your birthday,” which, what, you get free wine at Sephora for your birthday?

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1. Franzia Sunset Blush – 4.8 /6

$9.98 // $1.99/liter

SUITABLE FOR: Scored high for nearly every occasion, Franzia is the swiss army knife of wine!

Once again, we learned that when it comes to wine-in-a-box, there’s really no reason to aim any higher than Franzia, wine of the everywoman, the wine that I drank before losing my precious virginity, the wine that may or may not contain grapes. Last year, Franzia White Zinfandel took the top spot.

Yes, nearly every drinker likened it to “non-alcoholic grape juice cut with water” but here’s the twist: it IS alcoholic!

Two tasters wanted Sunset Blush for the very specific situation of attending prom with your gay boyfriend. Having personally attended prom with my gay boyfriend, I have to say I agree, because it turns out all of our friends were on acid and it was very confusing for us.

Other themes included drinking with your Mom, mixing it with Starbucks Refreshers for a mid-afternoon cocktail like Torre’s Mom does (she explained this to the class, it was a once-in-a-lifetime lesson), getting divorced, being in college, attending unsatisfactory weddings and “after the neighbor says they can see through your blinds.” Re-naming ideas included:

• Freshman Class Act
• Wow, That’s Cheap
• Well, It’s Wine
• Fruit Juice Dreams
• Friendzie-AHHHHH
• My Mom’s Blushy Crap (Family Name)
• Where the Wind Comes Sweepin’ Down the Plain
• I’m Very Excited About My Divorce
• Sunny Shit
• Fields of Blood, Diluted 1 in 10
• Your College Friend
• College and Crushing on Straight Girls
• Chug Chug Chug

Rebecca, who gave the wine a 4.0/5.0, really summed up our collective emotions by declaring Franzia “perfect for all occasions.” Do note that she found La Vielle Ferme appropriate for “drinking yourself to sleep,” so this is evident of somebody who is NOT going easy on their wines. This is a modern person with a refined palate.

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In conclusion, thank you to all participants in this workshop as well as all of the workshop’s cocktail waitresses and groupies. I hope this post will help so many of you in your journey to eventually just buying Franzia!

Liquor in My Last Post: This Rum Is Distilled At the Bottom of a Volcano

I know next to nothing about rum. My knowledge-base is far more aligned with the whiskey, which honestly is a miss on my part. It’s not as though I don’t enjoy rum; I love rum. So when Flor de Caña rum reached out to me and said hey hey, we’ve got rum that’s distilled at the base of an active volcano and we can tell you about science, I was like SCIENCE AND LIQUOR IS A PERFECT CONFLUENCE OF MY INTERESTS AND ALSO THIS FIXES A BLIND SPOT I HAVE. So I spoke to brand ambassador Ashela Richardson, who also happens to be an environmental scientist. And I asked her a TON about what goes into distilling rum! Here’s a lil’ bit of those answers, followed by a recipe, and then finally a little note from me. Because this is my last post as Staff at Autostraddle.

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What does the distillation process for rum look like? 

Rum can be distilled in a variety of ways; traditional pot stills, column, hybrid, or continuous column stills from a mash of either molasses or cane juice.

Sugarcane is the base ingredient of all rum and is biologically classified in the grass family.  Thus, the cane juice tends to be grassy in nature producing more vegetal congeners (flavors) in the rum.  Molasses, on the other hand, is a co-product of the processing of sugarcane into granulated sugar and has a caramel-like quality to it.

There are many unique flavors to explore in aged rums from heavier pot-distilled rums to lighter column distillations. Pot distilled rums tend to have a much more rich palate and oily mouthfeel compared to lighter more rectified column distilled rums. Both types of distillation produce premium rums that are then aged for varying amounts of time in wooden casks.

So I’m looking at the Flor de Caña website and I’m reading this: “The fertility of its soil, the enriched water and the volcanic climate to which the barrels are exposed during the aging process contribute in creating a singularly smooth and deliciously balanced rum.” Science me! What about these conditions make for a unique rum?

Nicaragua is one of the most seismically active places in the world, with 19 active volcanoes along the Pacific coast! The San Cristobol volcano is near the Flor de Caña distillery and erupts on a small scale frequently. All of our rum is aged a minimum of 4 years before being blended with other higher age statements and bottled. The heat in this volcanic area warms our Rickhouses and casks of rum. The American Oak ex-bourbon barrels have beautiful congeners (flavors) that impart on the rum over time and the hot environment catalyzes the process.

The oak maturation process is very complex, with many reactions happening simultaneously. Alcohol reacts with organic acids in the wood that produce new esters (aromas, flavors) in the liquid. The warm barrels release more of the embedded bourbon flavors out of the wood, adding more flavors to the rum. Also, as liquid vapors escape from the porous wood of the cask, the headspace of oxygen in the barrel increases and that oxygen slowly dissolves into the liquid, oxidizing certain compounds, softening the palate. Some of the vapors that escape are thought to be pungent, unwanted Sulphur compounds. It’s really a combination of our perfected process and 126+ years of family tradition combined with the unique volcanic ecosystem that makes the aging process so impactful on Flor de Caña. All of our barrels are kept as a single age statement until blended with other age statements for balance and flavor. This means that we have great control over the flavor profile of each bottling.

What are the hallmarks of a good “sipping rum?” I’m quite into whiskeys, and I know a lot about what sort of notes I’m tasting in those—but I don’t have the same knowledge-base for rum.

Put simply, a good sipping rum has been aged in oak casks for long enough that a bouquet of oak, vanilla, baking spices, roasted nuts, dried and tropical fruits, orange peel and maybe some tobacco or cacao are present, but not in a way that anyone aroma or flavor dominates the liquid. You should also be able to perceive the base ingredient of the distillate, whether it was molasses or cane juice. Molasses-based rums tend to have a more caramelized array of flavors, whereas cane juice rums are much more floral and vegetal.

How does one go about tasting rum and talking about rum, in your opinion? What are some good rum words to know and use?

I think it is important to understand the differences in styles of rum. Most importantly molasses or cane juice. The flavor of molasses is caramelized; brown sugar to resin depending on how much sugar is extracted. The flavor of cane juice is green and vegetal, like the grassy nature of the sugarcane plant.

Know the difference between flavoured, spiced, unaged and aged rum. Rum has very few rules of production, resulting in a category filled with different styles to try.  Also, note the origin of the rum to develop a deeper knowledge of the variety of flavor profiles (like the flavor of Jamaican rum vs. Nicaraguan vs. Barbados)

Tasting rum is the same as getting to know any other spirit. Go slowly, nosing as much as you can, try to perceive the flavors first on the nose. Banana, roasted nuts, dried red fruits, orange peel, baking spices, oak, caramel, molasses maybe?

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Third Rail Recipe

This recipe is called a Third Rail and I got it from the book And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. Basically it’s a Bronx cocktail, but with rum!

You will need: 

• 2 oz of medium body rum, I’m specifically using Flor de Caña 7 year

• 0.5 oz of orange juice (I’m using store-bought instead of fresh squeezed because I just came from the gym and I actually hurt too much to juice an orange, please don’t make fun of me I’m made of spaghetti)

• 0.25 oz sweet vermouth

• 0.25 oz dry vermouth

This is a shaker drink, because any time there’s juice, you wanna shake. So fill your shaker halfway with ice and dump basically all of this in. Give it a shake shake shake, making sure no one is standing behind you and no antique vases are in your vicinity because that’s asking for misfortune.

Strain it into a tumbler with some fancy fancy ice and serrrrrve. Or, if you’re me, serve it to yourself and cry a bunch while you write a farewell paragraph.

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Well y’all. Well. I’ve been here almost six years. This is the longest running job I’ve had, and the longest time I’ve called a community home. I still hope that second thing will be true as I leave to get deeper into my Professorial duties! I’m going to miss all of y’all terribly, but I’ll still be at A-Camp and you can certainly still find me on Twitter, Instagram and my own damn website. See you all on the internet. I love you dearly.