Poet Jade Foster’s Revival Tour Takes You to Church

It was a crowded room on a cool night and I was with a friend but completely naked inside all of the poetry. It was The Revival. It was queer women of color, their poems, and their stories, and that’s it. It was amazing, salon-style poetry and performance. One big room, truly full — and full of bad bitches, at that. All because of Jade Foster.

via the couch sessions

I haven’t met Jade Foster, yet. We wanted to meet up after I sat in on the DC stop of The Revival, but I was emotionally overwhelmed and she was probably running around like a crazy person. That shit felt like Church, and I packed up my reactions and all the energy in my body and left before we could run into one another. Foster put on the tour — her third — and now that the limited-city journey is over, she’s embarked on putting together footage from the adventure and preserving it all in a film. As a poet slash businesswoman, Jade’s going strong and putting amazing and unique work out into the world — and I can’t help but think it must be as exhausting as it is rewarding.

I wanted to probe Foster’s brain about poetry, the creative process, and making art work for you.

Hi, Jade! Thanks so much for being a part of this! Let’s get down to business: The Revival was one of the most powerful nights of poetry, ever. Congratulations, seriously, on putting it together. Can you tell me a little about how it got born? What was the genesis for it, and what was it like watching that project come to life?

Thank you! DC’s Revival 2012 show was our biggest show to date, over 400 women in attendance, man. The tour was born out of a open mic series I used to have at my house. But then neighbors were complaining, folks ain’t never wanna leave, $5 door charges wasn’t covering expenses, and it kind of just hit its cap. We pivoted to do the tour — 1) so poets can have larger audiences, and 2) so our communities can have more to do together than party.

Now, as you work diligently to put The Revival on screen, what are some of the challenges and some of your favorite elements of that process? How are you going about putting the film together, and what are your hopes for it?

Aesthetically, it’s fun to see new cuts as the director pieces together the narrative. Researching collectives like ours that have existed in the past. Sekiya (the director of the film), said I was Georgia Douglass Johnson — who was a DC sister to the Harlem Renaissance — hosting regular salons. That felt good.

We want the movie to be a testament and a gift to folks who have been with The Revival the past 4 years. We want it to join a powerful canon of great documentary film — Tongues Untied, Call Me Kuchu, Paris Is Burning —challenging the whole ‘trifecta of discrimination’ bull. Because I’m not but — if I was triple disadvantaged for being black, being woman, being gay, shouldn’t I be then, “thrice militant”? Folks need not play with me this year.

You’ve taken poetry on the road, which sounds amazing. Can you tell me a little bit about the journey that was The Revival and some of your favorite tour experiences thus far? 

What does favorite mean? That I preferred this or that experience to another? Or that this is a moment I never never never want to forget…

First tour, it was tension between the artists. We had like a showdown outside of my truck and I said to everybody, “You don’t have to do the last show, I can get you a bus ticket home.” Because I don’t know, it was like a moment of truth: anybody not willing to put the poetry first, can kick rocks. It was a quiet ride to Baltimore, and a transformative show as well. Shoot, I read my poems at that show.

I never wanna forget POWWOW Open Mic in Chicago, because everybody is a poet. It’s not about who got a degree, or who got a cool haircut, it’s about who got a story. And who got the drinks! Sekiya trying to bring one of the audience members in the car. We had a long drive and was just crunk and ready for the Southern leg of the tour.

Mmmmnn… The DC 2012 afterparty. Brunch the next morning with my godmother, and we just prayed and was just grateful and exhausted and feeling… unfuckwitable. Every person who comes up and asks to share, has never left me. Every friend or colleague who said I’ll watch your door, I’ll send that email, I’ll pick y’all up, y’all can stay at my house, has never left me.

I’m super interested in your creative process. What is a day in the life of Jade Foster like? How do you work? 

High, until 3 weeks ago. But now, I’m trying to get on my Dre3000 tip. But my creative process, I don’t know. I wake up. I pray. I put on Meek Mill or Trinidad James or whatever rapper I’m listening to at the moment, get ready. And get to my laptop. Producing is a whole bunch of asking for real. A whole bunch of email check ins. It’s tiresome trying to build a connection with folks through a subject line and signature. I just try to not let that get to me, and operate from my heart.

Pursuing a creative life can be challenging financially, personally, emotionally, etc. How do you stay focused and centered? What’s your advice for any folks trying to break free and really do their own thing?

Believe.

What brought you to poetry, and what’s kept you there? 

I don’t know, is poetry a place? I write, I work because that’s what I’m told to do. And when I’m told to do something else, I’ll do it. But the work isn’t done yet. Not ’til poets are as relevant as rappers. Not til our arts institutions are sustainable, abundant and working at a full capacity. Not til… lemme stop.

Idol Worship is a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. 

Column graphic by Rory Midhani

Idol Worship: Nicki Minaj’s 8 Gayest Songs

The jury is pretty much out on whether or not Nicki Minaj is inclined to date women, sleep with women, touch women affectionately, or ever make all of my dreams come true and admit that “Pink Friday” was, in fact, entirely about her latent homosexuality. Rumors have floated back and forth about her lady lovin’, and she’s come out multiple times to “deny” that she was “ever bisexual,” claiming it was a lie she made up to get famous. But like, do famous people really lie about being bisexual when they’re relatively unknown? I’m pretty sure most celebrities come out after the fame part for a reason, but I could be wrong. And maybe I am. But to be honest, you can’t blame me for trying – especially in the face of some super queer lyrical content coming from the baddest bitch herself.

These are the gayest Nicki Minaj songs. (In no particular order.)

The Boys

Counterintuitive, but see it for yourself: this is definitely some top-notch satire and it definitely involves alluding to oral sex with Cassie to make that clear.

Young Thug

I am not gay
but let’s be precise
’cause if she pretty then watch it
’cause I’mma be fucking your wife

In the words of Brittani Nichols: “THAT’S PRETTY GAY NICKI”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqx6hIAsqEo

Girlfriend

I mean. It’s called girlfriend. And she might claim it’s about her best friend, but like, isn’t the healthiest relationship the one where people croon over one another and go, “she’s my best friend” while other people vomit in the background? Nicki and her girl are living THE DREAM.

Where Them Girls At

I feel like you already know this is gay because you listen to it every night before you go out because your entire life is looking for the right girl at the bar. But whatever. You don’t know my life.

Little Freak

Excuse me little mama
But you could say I’m on duty
I’m lookin’ for a cutie
A real big o’ ghetto booty
I really like your kitty kat
And if you let me touch her
I know you’re not a bluffer
I’ll take you to go see Usher

If Nicki Minaj takes her side chicks to Usher concerts, count me in. Unless that Usher concert happens in the present and not in the early 2000’s.

Right Thru Me

When I was coming out, my roommate pulled me into her room. “You need to listen to this.” She was coming out, too, which probably explains why we were both crying at the end. Nicki put a man in this video, but it does nothing to squelch the immense amount of FEELINGS contained in the second verse, which I memorized within one week:

Answer this question, class is in session,
Tired of letting passive aggression, control my mind,
Capture my soul, OK, you’re right just let it go,
OK you got it, it’s in the can, before I played it,
You knew my hand, you can turn a free throw to a goal,
You got the peep hole to my soul

I Endorse These Strippers

Nicki, we’re not at Chippendales anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybZD9NXiHkw

Girls Fall Like Dominoes

I’m gon’ need sixty nine real bad girls for my tour bus
Somebody get security to escort us
They go the long way but we take the short cut
Give me the blond hair, long weave, short cut

You know the flow sick, came in on the small bus
So give the d-cup, c-cup, small bust
They judge me like the girl’s on trial
But every time that I come out it’s just girls gone wild

I have nothing left to add except this: if this isn’t your life, you aren’t me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_-GiF77St0

Idol Worship: Angela Davis Is My Ultimate Feminist Icon

I invited Angela Davis to my campus in 2012, when I was the outgoing (and soon-to-be-graduating) Director of our student-led women’s rights organization. She showed up right on time, waiting to be escorted, and when I met her, I was speechless. (Later on when I went to introduce her, I was met with raucous applause – because we had such similar hair that, for an instant, people actually mistook me for her. It was the greatest honor of my lifetime.)

This happened y’all.

We brought Angela as part of our Women’s History Month programming, but her visit was planned months before March rolled around. One of the first things I did in my office was write an emotional letter to include in her offer packet, which we sent off with crossed fingers to the speaking agency booking her appearance. I was the first, to my knowledge, non-white leader of the group in its history; I was also only the second queer woman and, potentially, the first from a working-class background. Angela Davis was everything to me: a radical queer feminist who worked to dismantle systems of oppression and worked alongside some of the most iconic feminists in American herstory. “I want to inspire students to go further than signs, and further than petitions,” I told her. “I want to empower women to go into the field. To live a new history. ”

Her speech that night was amazing, touching on power and privilege and how we can best push back against new challenges to our humanity. My favorite part, though, was that I was in the front row and she kept saying my name.

Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944 to two working, college-graduated parents who consorted with the Communist Party and were, in many ways, already tied up in the activism she would come to live as an adult. She spent her childhood among organizers and activists in the midst of racial conflict. By her junior year in high school, she’d had enough, and applied to a program that placed black students in northern integrated schools. Davis left for New York City, where she became immersed in the young socialist and communist movements. She would later go on to study at Brandeis, where she was only one of three black women in her class.

Davis travelled often — perhaps because, at that time, she related most to people outside of the communities and worlds she was living through. She explored France, Switzerland, Helsinki, all the while seeking out revolutionary minds and legacies to grab onto. It was at this point where she was first pinned down by the FBI who, in 1963, asked for an interview with her due to her high-flyin’ communist ways.

At Brandeis, Davis became intrigued by Herbert Marcuse because he “taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary.” She went on to be all four, graduating magna cum laude in 1965 while preparing to depart for Frankfurt, where she studied philosophy and lived on $100 a month. Eventually, though, she went home, pulled back by word of the Black Panther Party and the SNCC.

Davis’ colliding worlds — fringe activism and prim and proper academia — made life messy for her, to say the least. She was questioned during her time as a professor at UCLA about her involvement with the Community Party, and also pissed off a lot of (presumably white and male) people who didn’t appreciate her perspectives or her language during class. In 1970, she became a fugitive when the FBI deemed her a “terrorist” and made her #3 on the Most Wanted List. “Free Angela Davis” became a guiding phrase for social justice movements, and her eventual release from jail only left her more driven than ever to take action.

Davis’ activism reflected not only her experiences, but her own desire to be liberated. Constantly outnumbered and often labeled an enemy of a state which could not yet come to appreciate her magnitude, Davis was left to be a freedom fighter, no matter what the costs. Even now, she remains devoted to her principles: black liberation, gay rights, abolishing the prison-industrial complex, pursuing a more just feminism. She remains as active now as she was then, touring for speeches and publishing countless books on the injustices that face our nation and our world. Angela Davis will never be silenced, and her speaking out means that the rest of us are safely carried on the backs of giants when we do so ourselves. She remains a professor, a radical, a scholar, and a necessary piece of various movements. She has mastered her own mission.

When you live at the intersections of oppression, it is hard to choose something to devote yourself to for the rest of your life. Do you take on the political machine? Do you fight for visibility and recognition? Do you challenge all the systems which held you in place? Who do you align yourself with? Angela Davis mastered this tightrope walking decades ago, moving between movements and providing each with a perspective and framework no one before her had thought possible. She conjures respect from various communities, and lifts each one as high as the last through her work.

When I brought Angela Davis to my campus, I was looking for intersections. Nobody embodies the philosophy of intersectional feminism like she does, and like her I feel myself drawn not to one particular justice but to the pursuit of it overall. What I found that night, sitting in that auditorium with my head (and hair) held high, was inspiration: to push forward, to keep fighting, to never back down. For that, I’ll always be indebted.

Idol Worship: Julia Serano Talks To Autostraddle About Fixing Feminism

A lot of my favorite feminists are the feminists who stand up to the movement. Julia Serano is definitely one of them.

Julia describes herself as “a true Renaissance woman,” which is actually just code for there really is nothing she can’t do. Serano is, at most recent count, author of the Earth-shattering books Whipping Girl and Excluded, a biologist, a musician, a performer, and an activist. What brought me to Serano’s work, however, were the things she created last: her two books that completely challenged, confronted, and defeated notions of sexism and femininity that remained strongholds even within the mainstream feminist movement.

I came of age as a feminist in college, having been pretty sheltered and innocent until I first looked around at a dorm room and realized nobody was watching me anymore. The next few years were full of revelations, brought to me mostly by folks of color, gay dudes, queer chicks, gender non-conforming people, and other revolutionaries whom I fell in love with throughout my undergraduate career. The writings and theories of more recent, contemporary feminists became intrinsic to the work I was doing in and outside of my gender studies coursework as I approached graduation, among them Serano and the entire crew of Autostraddle Dot Com.

Whipping Girl and Excluded both touch on femininity, examining how a general disdain for what is perceived as feminine contributes to both transmisogyny and the overall violently sexist society feminists are constantly trying to confront. Modern textbooks, both books examine the feminine in different realms, with Excluded talking at length about how social justice movements have failed to embrace truly inclusive and intersectional frameworks. Through her own experiences and stories, as well as her amazing brain, Serano is able to call out the movements she calls home for excluding her, essentializing her experience, and refusing to accept her person.

In order to love a movement, you have to push it. That was one of the first things I learned about feminism, somewhere in between This Bridge Called My Back and a herstory lesson about The Lavender Menace. True revolutionaries have never chosen to ride out movements or bring them to their destined mainstream success; instead, they’re the ones who jump ship and demand the movement build a new island. Since its inception (be it defined as suffrage or the seventies, whichever you prefer), feminism has been rediscovered, redefined, and reclaimed over and over and over again – each time, coming to encompass new hearts. Feminism learned to be more racially inclusive, learned to be queer, learned to be a movement that fought for the working class, learned to be multifaceted, learned to hate men (and then, sometimes, forgive them), learned to sell sex, learned – well, you get my drift. And with each coming step toward a real, multidimensional movement, there have been people pushing and prodding and encouraging it to grow.

Serano’s work has been key in sparking dialogue about trans women, their experiences, and their needs to the modern LGBT and feminist movements. Where the feminine was once disdained, she came and painted pink on it; where her experiences were looked down upon, she proved they were meant to be revered. She has dared to tell her story over and over and over again, never for the sake of sharing but each time with purpose and with the meaning to improve the experiences of those who identify with it and those who someday might.

I had the privilege of chatting with Julia for this week’s column about her moving, her shaking, and her band. And, just as I said when I walked away from the feminist theories that no longer spoke to me: I regret nothing.

Ten(ish) Questions with Julia Serano

Hi, Julia! Thanks so much for agreeing to be a part of Idol Worship. You totally deserve it!

Thanks for having me!

You wear a lot of hats – poet, writer, biologist, advocate, speaker. What’s a day in the life of Julia Serano like? Do you ever sleep?

For a long time I had a full-time job as a biologist, and I did all of my writing, performing, and speaking on top of that. So yes, during that time there was not nearly enough sleep! However, my biology position ended about a year ago because the grant that was paying my salary ended. Since then, I’ve been primarily making ends meet through writing and speaking. My typical day consists of me spending copious amounts of time on my laptop with my bird Buddy sitting on my shoulder.

What’s it like being a femme trans woman in the sciences? 

My personal experience in the sciences was fine: I was out as trans and queer in the workplace, and my co-workers and supervisors were all accepting and supportive. Some of this may be because I live in a relatively queer-friendly region of the country (the San Francisco Bay Area) and was working in an academic settling rather than a corporate one. Also, unlike most scientific fields, the one that I worked in (Developmental Biology) has a high percentage of women in it – most of the labs I worked in were actually more than 50% women. So there was far less of the rampant sexism that I’ve heard other women in the sciences and tech talk about.

The femme part of your question is interesting though. I call myself a femme tomboy, as I tend to be more feminine than the average queer woman (at least in my community), but I probably strike people as more of a tomboy in gender-stereotypical environments. In the sciences (or at least, in the scientific settings I’ve worked in), I have found there to be some suspicion and derision toward both high masculinity and high femininity. In twenty years of working in biology labs, the only people I witnessed being teased for their gender expression were women who were especially femme and men who came off as especially macho. So as a femme tomboy, I kind of fit in with the norm. But if I were a very butch woman, or if I came to work wearing make up and heels, it might have been a very different story.

You’ve been working in trans* activism for quite some time. What are some of the accomplishments you’ve played a role in which make you most proud? What do you think the most pressing issues are facing the trans* community today?

I am a writer, so most of my accomplishments have come from forwarding and articulating ideas. Of those, I am probably most proud of my critiques of trans-misogyny in Whipping Girl, and for some of my lesser known work debunking psychiatric diagnoses, theories, and depictions of trans people.

I think that the issues that trans people face today are for the most part the same ones that have long existed: challenging anti-discrimination and violence, making spaces safe and accessible for gender variant and non-binary identified folks, fighting medical pathologization while gaining access to healthcare, helping the most marginalized members of our community, and so on. Too many trans people struggle to simply survive, to get through each day safely – that has to be the most pressing problem.

Excluded focuses, often, on your broken relationship with the feminist movement. What brought you to feminism, and what keeps you there? Who are some of your feminist icons and your favorite feminist thinkers?

When I transitioned to female about 13 years ago, I knew going into it that I would face traditional sexism once people started perceiving me as a woman. But the visceral experience of being sexually harassed by men, or having them talk down to me or speak to me as though I were a child, was really intense. I was really angry for a long time. And feminism helped me make sense of that anger. It gave me a framework to understand my experiences, and it gave me the tools to help challenge the sexism that I faced.

It’s always been hard for me to reconcile the fact that feminism pretty much saved my life with the fact that that there have been strong currents within feminism that have attempted to erase me and my experiences as a trans woman. I know that a lot of women who have felt excluded from feminism for different reasons probably feel similarly conflicted. And I’m sure that some of them abandoned feminism altogether. But for me, I felt compelled to try to fix the parts of feminism that aren’t working so well – the parts that lead many to feel excluded from it.

As far as my favorite feminist thinkers and icons, it’s hard for me to answer that because I have been influenced by feminists all over the spectrum, and who often hold very different views from one another. I’ll be reading one of my more “favorite” feminist thinkers and they’ll say something that I completely disagree with. Then I’ll read another feminist whose perspective I mostly disagree with, but then they’ll say something really profound and insightful.

Tell me a little bit about your writing process. Where do you normally write, and how do you assemble entire books? Excluded was a series of older writings paired with newer pieces – how was piecing that together different than Whipping Girl? What were some differences in the processes for compiling both books?

I mostly write at home, and tend to be most productive when I’m nursing my morning coffee. I have found that I’m way more productive when I am up against a looming deadline, much to my chagrin, as I have way more fun writing when I am working on whatever I want at my own leisurely pace.

Writing Whipping Girl was intense. My publisher (Seal Press) gave me a year and a half to write it – that was the longest contract they were able to offer. I had a few pieces already written, but wrote almost all of the manuscript for that deadline. I wrote almost every single morning from 5-8am before work, and did my research at night before going to bed. In retrospect, I am not sure how I maintained that work schedule for such a long time.

For the second book, I didn’t want to have a deadline. So I wrote and wrote and wrote. And wrote. The book (which became Excluded) never quite came together until I signed a contract with Seal with a deadline six months away. At that point, it was more of an editing project than a writing one. It was about deciding which chapters to cut, how to distill three chapters of ideas down into one shorter and more compelling chapter, and so on. There was a lot of writing toward the end, but it was more re-writing what I already had than anything else.

Both Whipping Girl and Excluded touch on femininity, but focused on different arenas in life. Can you speak to your femme identity for a bit, and what motivates you to make work central to femme communities?

I suppose I have a fairly atypical femme trajectory. I grew up having to hide the more feminine parts of myself. Part of my coming to terms with me being trans was allowing the feminine aspects of myself out, whether it was through “crossdressing” (in my case, dressing and presenting myself as female) or simply moving through the world as someone who was perceived as a feminine man because of my mannerisms and personality. After my transition, when I began moving through the world as a woman on a day-by-day basis, I started repressing my femininity again – in part, to avoid sexual harassment from men, but also because I found that feminists and other queer women accepted me as a trans woman if I came off as more of a tomboy.

I had an epiphany in 2005 about how ironic it was that, while I was out as queer and trans, I was still in many ways back where I was as a child – repressing my femininity so that other people wouldn’t dismiss me. And I also began noticing how often anti-feminine attitudes come into play when people try to dismiss trans women (even though not all trans women are feminine in gender expression). That’s when I began to publicly claim a femme identity. While I am not the most visibly feminine person, I am politically committed to challenging the idea that feminine gender expression is inherently inferior to, or more artificial than, masculine or androgynous gender expression.

Did you expect Whipping Girl to blow up like it did? What was it like watching your work have such a massive impact on the feminist movement and feminist theory at-large? 

When I first wrote Whipping Girl, I was pretty sure that it would resonate with many trans women and other trans-spectrum people, as I was writing from that particular standpoint. But my hope was that it would resonate with femmes as well, and perhaps even garner some awareness within queer and feminist movements more generally. When the book first came out, that’s pretty much what happened, and I was really excited that it seemed to make an impact outside of the “trans and femme” bubble. But I honestly was not expecting it to be considered an important feminist text or to be taught in gender studies college courses. At the time, I saw myself as an outsider challenging the feminist orthodoxy, so I never imagined that the book would be accepted in those ways. Frankly, it was sort of surreal.

Any sneak peeks into writing that’s on the horizon?

I have a couple potential future book ideas in mind. Since Excluded just came out, I want to give myself a bit more time before deciding which to commit to for the next book project. In the meantime, I have been getting back into music lately. For years, I played in an indie-pop band called Bitesize. While we are no longer playing together, I’ve been working on some new songs that I am in the process of home recording. So perhaps they will see the light of day before the end of the year.

Janet Mock Redefines Realness: The Autostraddle Interview

Janet Mock had kept a secret for over 25 years when she wrote the column heard ’round the world: “I was born a boy.” Already an established member of the publishing world, she was coming out as a trans woman.

At the time, Mock was known for her work with People magazine, where she served as Online Editor; now, she’s known for her advocacy and writing around trans* issues.

There are key moments in a person’s life when you just know your destiny is about to change. For me, this moment came when Wendi, whom I remained friends with despite being in different schools, started taking female hormone pills. When she graduated to injections a few months later, she sold me her pills for $1 a pop. The timing was divine, as I’d already begun to detect a hint of an Adam’s apple on my throat. The changes in my 15-year-old body horrified me. Sometimes while showering, my thoughts got dark: What if I just cut this thing off? Wendi’s pills were my savior. For three months, I took estrogen and watched my body’s slow metamorphosis: softer skin, budding breasts, a fuller face.

But I knew that taking them without the supervision of a doctor was risky. I needed someone to monitor my progress. That’s when I finally confessed to my mom what I’d been doing. A single, working mother, she didn’t have the luxury or will to micromanage my life and allowed me to do what I wanted so long as I continued making honor roll. That was our unspoken deal. But the medical changes were different — she recognized that my desperation to be a woman was not just teen angst or rebellion; it was a matter of life or death. “If that’s what you want,” she said, looking me straight in the eye, “we’re going to do it the right way.” So she signed off on a local endocrinologist’s regimen of treatments, which involved weekly hormone shots in the butt and daily estrogen pills. For the first time, I could visualize heading off to college as a woman, pursuing a career as a woman. No more dress-up, no more pretending.

The world learned in 2011 that Janet Mock was trans, and also that she was a hell of a writer. Her work was far-reaching, approachable, poignant: she wrote firsthand about coming out to her boyfriend, the murders and violence directed at trans women of color, and what she wants from her community. And we couldn’t get enough. Now, Mock is a regular on The Melissa Harris-Perry Show, NPR, Huffington Post, and, of course, Twitter – a rare land where the most intersectional, awe-inspiring, and thought-provoking feminists rise to the top.

#GirlsLikeUs is for ALL trans women, regardless of color, but all who lend their voice to amplify ours knows that intersectionality matters.

— Janet Mock (@janetmock) May 15, 2012

Mock took some time out of her media circuit to pen her so-far memoir, Redefining Realness; in it, she finally gets to tell us the full story. The book, out in February, is sure to sound just like the Mock we know and love: honest, frank, bright. (In her undeniable perfection, she also led a Storygiving campaign to make the book more accessible to trans women of color.)

Janet Mock is an inspiration to anyone attempting to live authentically. She’s unabashedly human, insanely dignified, humble and generous with her efforts. She’s been helping other women – and particularly other trans women of color – tell their stories, and it’s made the world richer and more understanding. When faced with what must have felt like impossibility, she barely showed fear.

Mock came out defiantly into the world as the person she knew she wanted to be, and she accepted and has handled the responsibilities of being both a spokesperson and a mentor with grace. I recently sat down for a phone interview with her to ask ten(ish) questions about stories and what comes after she’s done telling this particular one.

I’m really excited to start off the new year with such a great interview! I wanted to sort of start out with your switch to advocacy  – you sort of totally 180-ed from being an editor at People to being this outspoken trans* advocate. Have you ever looked back?

I haven’t looked back, ever. I think it was the best choice that I had at the time to tell my story on my own terms and then to hopefully use that story to raise awareness about a very marginalized group of women: young, transgender women. I think the biggest thing for me is the plug-in to this amazing trans* and queer community that’s out there that’s been doing this work that’s, I think, at a point where it’s really ready to take the lead from people who live in many multiplicities, right, who have many different identities, not just people who are gay or lesbian, cisgender, but people who tend to be kind of muddied in their identities. And I think that I came around at the right time to be a part of this new kind of “intersectional” blend of the movement.

The next biggest part was just kind of connecting to all kinds of young women who found, I guess, some semblance of reflection in my story and in my writings. And I just want to continue to make them proud and make them proud of themselves and just feel as though they can tap into themselves and tell their stories so they can be heard.

And I know a lot of your activism is sort of tied up in the gay community since queer and trans* issues are so close together. So how do you feel about the relationship that sort of exists there between gay rights and trans* rights and just sort of the LGBT movement as a whole?

You know, I really I wish that we could really talk about gender expectations within the movement. I think that when we’re all born we’re told that if you’re assigned male or female at birth and you’re supposed to, you know, like the “opposite sex,” that’s who you’re supposed to be with. I think it’s about all of those supposed gender expectations. And I think that if we would have kind of started the movement there in that sense, I think we could have been more cohesive in our journeys forward without excluding people. I think the relationship is exactly what Autostraddle talks about often – you know, telling different stories.

I think that that’s what’s very important is showing that it’s also not a monolith, even though that we are in the movement together moving forward that there’s many different little movements within this movement that hopefully pushes forward when the louder part of the movement is heard, you know? We’re not going to be silenced, the rest of us. I just hope that young queer, gay, lesbian, trans, bi – whatever – continue to lift up the erased history and they continue to lift marginalized voices.

It’s always a tricky question, but obviously it is a community, right? Because that’s how the world sees us. Often they see LGBT, they don’t see QQIA, you know? But they see LGBT and so they think that it’s a brand. And so how do we use that brand to forward the movement, move the movement forward and also hold people within the brand accountable to those who often aren’t heard? I think that’s the work of a lot of us that we’ve been doing, a lot of us who actually do a lot of our mobilizing through media, through social media and through the internet. I think that that’s what’s amazing about YouTube and about Tumblr. You hear the voices that often aren’t heard when it goes onto MSNBC or when it goes onto “Modern Family” and “Glee” and all that stuff. And so I’m happy that younger voices and voices of color and marginalized voices are being heard.

You started the #GirlsLikeUs hashtag, which continues to be a really strong and powerful place for trans women to connect or people to even just talk about trans* issues. And prior to your advocacy, you were also doing work online. So how do you feel about a lot of the people out there who doubt the ability of the Internet to connect and inspire and educate people?

I think it’s uniquely positioned for marginalized people who have access to the Internet. And I think that for me specifically, when I started #GirlsLikeUs, it was actually for the women who wrote to me and told me that they couldn’t come out. Either they couldn’t come out as trans* or they could not even start the journey of saying that they’re trans*, right? And so I knew that the internet, because of the physical difference of trans women, obviously there’s visible difference there for trans women because a lot of it is about body image and self image and self representation determination, sometimes it’s hard to leave your apartment where you feel safe and you feel like no one is going to throw slurs at you or say anything ridiculous about you. So the Internet often is the first place of refuge.

And so I knew this and I was like, how can I empower those women by showing women who are living “visibly” out in the world and who can send messages of support and affirmation about their lives and just kind of live their lives very publicly and have a space where we can all tap into this level of visibility. Whatever visibility you’re comfortable with, whether it’s just at the computer and your little studio apartment or if you’re out on the streets and you’re taking photos of yourself with your friends. There’s different levels of visibilty and all levels of visibilities matter for our movement. Because until trans women specifically are seen in the world beyond someone else’s gaze, beyond someone else’s gate keeping and lens, we’re never going to be seen as who we truly are, which is very, very different kind of woman.

So I think that for me I’d noticed that the most successful “hashtag” or social media movement based activism are the ones that are very targeted towards marginalized voices that tend not to be heard. And so then when we activate those voices and we amplify them and we collect them together, it shows a very strong portrait. And so I think that in this day and age, I think it’s the quickest, probably cheapest way of getting people to be heard in media is through web platforms.

And you’re also making the switch from web to print with your book that’s slated for February. Are you super excited, terrified?

So I’m definitely about the book. It’s like a mix of like exhilaration, fear, excitement, obviously a dream being realized is probably the biggest part of it. I had three goals when I was young. I wanted to be myself, which meant to be a woman, I wanted to write and I wanted to live in New York City. And those three things are kind of coming together in the book that my record of my life so far. And I think that to have that access to tell my story in a mainstream way that’s all my words, my filter, no one has filtered it for me, you know, it’s my story, my record.

And there’s intense privilege there, right? To be that, to have that and to have that dream. And so I’m excited but I’m scared too because also it is probably my first body of work that is unfiltered by someone else. It’s not someone else’s gaze. It’s completely me. And so that’s the scary part, right? And so criticism or whatever comes. And also being scared of the unknown and all this stuff. So putting myself out there. So yeah, I’m excited. I’m excited though. Mostly I’m excited. I’m very, very excited.

Well, how did it happen? How did the sort of process start and what were some of your favorite parts of the process?

It started I think three years ago right when I was in talks to tell my story in Marie Claire. I had already been writing stories and memories from my life just to myself. I didn’t really know that it was memoir yet, it kind of felt more like a journal. And then once I stepped out publicly in my life, I realized that there was a need or a gap within the quote, unquote, “trans* memoirs” and even within women of color memoirs it kind of missed that intersection of transness and woman of colorness. And so I wanted to put that together. I wanted this book to be the bridge between those communities, between the queer and trans* community and women of color communities and say, kind of how Barbara Smith said, kind of how Gloria Anzaldua said in their times. Those women were sticking the claim — and Audre Lorde — they were sticking the claims on their lives and saying, “We exist.” And that’s kind of what I want this book to be is the same. Young trans women, a lot of them poor, a lot of them of color exist. And I can share their experiences through the lens of my story.

And so that’s how the book became a book, those journals became a book. And so now the book has been worked on in the past three years and now it’s ready for the world and I’m really excited to share it with a lot of people. And I hope that it’s an accessible read for people who may not understand these issues and an uplifting one for those who kind of do understand but they may want to see themselves on the page in some way.

That’s awesome. What sort of stuff do you see happening sort of after it’s done? Are there any new projects that you’re going to start working on or any ventures that you’re going to do once the book is out?

Yeah, I have some things lined up for sure. I think this book will be at my side for the next three years. I’ll probably be touring intensely for probably the first two years, you know, to be honest. So I’m excited to have deeper conversations about the themes of the book, about authenticity, about trans womanhood, about being a woman of color.

But beyond that, I think I just want to continue storytelling. That’s kind of why I studied journalism, that’s why I came out with my story, that’s why I shared my story. And so I just want to continue to do that on different platforms. I’m thinking about making the transition to television, figure out what that looks like, as a showrunner or either someone who has her own conversation series.

And of course, writing more books. Because at the end of the day I’m a writer and that’s what I want to do. I don’t know what that next book project is. But I think that really what’s important for me is to create the media that I should have had growing up, as Alice Walker said when she wrote The Color Purple. She said she wanted to write the book or the books that she should have been able to read growing up, and that’s what I want to do.

What’s some of your favorite stuff that you’ve done thus far, sort of breaking into the whole advocacy queer activism community? And what’s some stuff that you’re dreaming of that have yet to do?

Oh my God. I think the number one thing, to be honest, was connecting with other trans women. Because I think that the way that I grew up was kind of like, you “transitioned” and then you move on with your life and you move on because you need to survive, right? So you move on away from the community that kind of raised you. Like I was raised with trans women, like a group in Honolulu, Hawaii. It was older trans women. My best friend was a trans woman. You graduate away from that once you can kind of live this “realness” life, right?

And so telling my story connected me to a whole network of women. And that has been the biggest strength for me. I have new friends in my life who are amazing trans women. Writers, artists, activists. And now I can tap into that network of women and really know what community is. It’s uplifting one another, it’s affirming one another, it’s challenging one another, it’s caring for one another. That has been the biggest gift in my life so far. And that all came through the act of stepping forward and telling my story and just speaking up. And so my voice connected me to other voices and it only enriches my voice. And so that has been the biggest gift in my life so far, being able to do that.

And I just want to continue storytelling and letting other women see themselves, right? Because when we create media, like I know how Autostraddle has done, you tap into other women. They start creating media and they start doing things. So that’s been the most inspiring thing is to see young trans women come to me, or just young women of color, queer women of color, who say that my story has meant this to them and so they created this project or meant this to them or they started telling their story or created a blog. And so I just love how that’s the part of the story’s sharing process, right? The telling is just step one, but the sharing part, you don’t know where that’s going to take you and it encourages other people to share their stories. And I think that we need more and more stories, our own stories.

What’s your ultimate advice to someone who is trying to live true to themselves or who is struggling with who they are?

I think number one is tap into yourself and take your time. I think that we tend to also see a lot of people — a lot of the stories tend to be people who are not in the process, right? When we’re the most vulnerable is when we’re in the process of finding ourselves, that process of self discovery. And so we tend to see from I went from scared, bullied child to this amazing person now and this is where I am now and, look, you can do it too. And that’s why I do like Tumblr and I do like YouTube because I feel like it’s a lot of people in process of self revelation, self determination.

And I think that a lot of those things, when you see people in the messiness of their journeys, that’s more empowering. So what I would say to someone is don’t look to these big role models that now you hold up on a pedestal. Look to those who are right in process with you. Because you see that they’re taking their time, that it takes a long time to find yourself. So take your time finding yourself, take your time finding and honing your voice, if you’re a writer or storyteller or an artist, whatever that point of view is, and to really tap into yourself.

And when I say tap into yourself, I mean like really find out who you are. Like beyond the labels that people may have embraced for themselves and find the labels that are you, you know? And specifically when I’m talking to trans and queer women it’s like really don’t go based on someone’s expectation who’ve said that these labels are fine with me. And so I’ve noticed that with a lot of people they’re like, “Well, I don’t really live up to trans*, I don’t really live up to queer, I don’t really live up to dyke, I don’t really live up to this and that. I’m not that because I don’t look like this person or I don’t seem as self assured as this person.” So really tap into yourself. It’s really great that you have these around you. They’re there to inspire you, not to dictate a path for you. And so tap into yourself and find your own path and take your time journeying on that path.

That would be the best advice I can give anyone, if anyone would ask me.

Idol Worship is a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. Graphic by Rory Midhani.

Idol Worship: What the Spice Girls Taught Me About Feminism

When I was a kid, I indeed spiced up my life: I owned Spice World on VHS, played with Special Edition Spice Girls Barbie dolls, and listened to Spice Girls albums on a boom box (afterwards storing said CDs in a hard, hot pink container which I hand-painted with the words “I Love Baby Spice”).

There was something about the Spice Girls that I deeply admired and which resonated with me – and maybe it was the fun, and maybe it was the theater, but probably it was the demand for a world full of girl power.

The Spice Girls were, for a really fucking long time, the only women showing me how to live a philosophy I later came to call feminism. And for a lot of girls like me, the Spice Girls were a primer to our later forays into women’s studies and bell hooks.

This is what the Spice Girls taught me about feminism.

5. That everyone needs to love their mothers

When I was very little, Baby Spice was my favorite spice. I don’t know why, but it probably had to do with her mother, who remained at the forefront of her interviews and regaled tales. When I read about Baby I inevitably read about how she was taking care of her mother, and she wasn’t embarrassed to talk at length about their relationship. For someone who pretty much only had a mother to my name growing up, that was powerful.

Plus, one of the only reasons I was allowed to listen to the Spice Girls at all was Mama. Like, the fact that it existed in general. My mom dug that sh*t.

4. That women are sexual beings

From rejecting unruly dudes to booty calling the good ones, the Spice Girls were never about being shy in the bedroom. And in a landscape of Cosmo sex tips and shitty rom-coms, the message that women are in control of their sexual experiences and can indulge in their own sexual expression is one that’s hopefully never going out of style.

3. That relationships work both ways

It takes two. Like, for real. Why else would they call it a partnership? If you’re going out on a limb and opening yourself up to love, you deserve something awesome, beautiful, and amazing at the other end – period. The Spice Girls showed me that women could make demands in relationship, set their own boundaries, and be vulnerable, all at once.

2. That women can get what they really, really want

We’ve all got unique desires in this life, and we deserve to be surrounded by people – friends and lovers alike – who respect and encourage those desires. The Spice Girls never would have settled for less than that, and neither should we.

1. That women contain multitudes

The Spice Girls were living, breathing, gyrating proof that girls could grow up to be whatever we wanted and whoever we wanted: sweet and innocent, daring and vivacious, prim and proper, sexual and liberated, athletic and determined, or a mix of every possibility in small pieces. Gender had no boundaries for the Spice Girls, who went from all dolled up to sports bras and shorts in t-minus 5 seconds flat and, together, told a story of womanhood which was complex, varied, modern, and diverse. They were five women who were meant to symbolize different aspects of our identities as girls, women, and people – and despite their differences and the gaps between them, they proved that all women share a story while also having their own.

The bonus? A healthy mix of athletic shorts, natural hair, heels and dresses, pigtails, and tattoos also drove home a solid point: that women are women, no matter how they dress, act, or behave. It’s like Judith Butler for beginners, but without falling asleep halfway through!

Idol Worship: Ten(ish) Questions with Melissa Gira Grant about Cats, Sex Work, and Writing

Idol Worship is a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week, I’m interviewing one of my only real-life feminist heroes: Melissa Gira Grant.

Header by Rory Midhani

Melissa Gira Grant was one of the first women who showed me what feminism looked like, and what it really meant. And almost half a decade later, I’m still relying on her definition.

I wrote an MGG appreciation post on Autostraddle last year but that was barely a sentence’s worth of her genius and her person in those words. And I’m back here because I think she’s more.

I met Melissa working on THE LINE, and even though it was my first internship and the two women (MGG and my forever mentor / feminist goddess Nancy Schwartzman) I was working with turned me into a firecracker, I came on board with a lot to learn. Until that point, feminism was just a concept to me — a set of definitions, not lived experiences, and a theory worth studying rather than a philosophy you could live. Looking back, I’m glad that internship was my first foray into feminism, because it was perfect: working in sunny apartments, eating Chinese food together at small desks in a rented office space, telling stories and working on three silver Macbooks. It was a space where I grew and I really became: I learned exactly what I could do and what I loved to do, I learned to always send emails signed simply “xo,” and I learned what I believed in and what feminism meant to me. Melissa, a queer writer and activist who loves the Internet, was thus one of the two most important teachers I’d ever had. (Very obvious now, but hindsight is 20/20 and back then I didn’t know I would sell out to a set of wires by 23.)

MGG, at the time, had long blonde hair and drank a lot of iced coffee. Our conversation topics included, but were not limited to: boys, my family, college, sex, bisexuality, being and/or not being goth (take one guess), and New York City. Melissa taught me what feminism was through her very existence: she lived her own beliefs, and so easily could pull them up in conversation that I wondered if maybe I should get some of my own. She challenged me on queerness, on sex work, on intersectionality, and on my own lamestream feminist beliefs that had been imparted on me by a biased media and a broken movement. I had so much to learn from her, and I still do, and I wanted to learn it then and I still want to learn it now. Melissa had, and still has, no keeper, no authority, no ceilings.; she carved out a life for herself in which she was pursuing what she loved, and she wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed about her past or anything she’d done. She was proud and therefore defiant, stood tall even among giants. We talked shit about mainstream feminism together in little nooks and she made me realize that the nuances feminists were often fighting about were more than principles and concepts: they were lived experiences.

Melissa, a former sex worker and active part of the movement for sex workers’ rights, doesn’t stray from the truth when she writes or when she organizes. I watched her once come to a launch party for a project I’d worked on and tell the founder, right on the side of the dance floor, that her language and strategy was isolating to queer people. She called out people she respected and worked with, and people who were making waves in the feminist movement, for refusing to accept the rights and agency of sex workers as intrinsic to the movement. She spoke loudly about what she believed in and remains an unwavering advocate for people living at the intersections of oppression, unwilling to quiet down even for her own sake. Melissa taught me that to love the movement, you have to try to change it.

When I bought MGG’s anthology Coming & Crying, I couldn’t afford the nicest Kickstarter package but my book still arrived with a note: “excited to publish your stories one day.” I laughed out loud when I read it because I was 20 and it was a book about sex and I couldn’t imagine ever being the kind of person who would write something Melissa would read. But I was wrong. I’d started my journey into anti-rape and sex-positive activism an innocent young thing, and MGG helped raise me into something much more remarkable and brave. Now, I share my stories with people every day when I have the chance; I put into words exactly where I am and how it’s impacted my world. I speak from the heart. I don’t tremble when I shout.

I read Melissa’s work — on the web, in books, in magazines — because it makes me smarter and more nuanced and more empathetic. I become more convinced. I begin to know myself a little more each time. Her career confused me when we first met: she completed a mix of regular 9-to-5 work at Third Wave alongside freelance work and writing, and I’d been raised with the ideal of graduating into an office space and living there for the rest of my life. It’s clear now how seeing women like Melissa who pursued projects and careers that they loved impacted my own participation in the movement. And it’s partially because MGG taught me about speaking truth to power, doing what I believe in for a living, and not being afraid to tell my stories that I became Carmen Rios.

When C&C arrived at my house on Arizona Ave, Brandon was in the room and I told him, “Melissa’s going on this book tour and I hope she comes to DC because oh my god, she’s just living feminism in this way. I just want to know more about her. I just want to learn more.”

“Tell her to stay here,” he said. “I wanna meet her too.” Melissa is so endlessly interesting and unique that it doesn’t take much to wish she was someone you could ask questions of or get advice from or sit across from at a restaurant.

In the years that passed since, I cut my hair and came out and still I met up with MGG a few times but mostly peripherally, and still each time I’m in New York City I’ve shot her and Nancy emails trying to get dinner, or lunch, or brunch, or five minutes on a street corner to say hi. Melissa got super involved in Occupy (and wrote a funded essay about the library which was distributed to every camp), continued to make fun of Nicholas Kristof on social media, and remained irreverent and hip. Now, she’s about to publish her new book about sex work, Playing the Whore.

I’ve continued emailing her in lowercase, never knowing exactly what to say. And I kept reading her articles and excerpts almost religiously, because in reading her work I get to know her and understand where she’s coming from. There are few people or organizations I consider truly “trustworthy” these days, and even fewer whom have the privilege to change my mind in one instant. But Melissa is one of those people. I want my work to come from wherever her work is coming from. I want it to achieve the same amicable things hers does. Nobody has ever inspired me to push as many boundaries, encompass as many perspectives, or think more critically about my activism than MGG.  I feel like following Melissa’s work expands my mind and liberates me from the world we’re stuck sitting in trying to fix. I feel like it makes me a better feminist, thinker, and person to hold my own ideas and opinions up to her standards.

I have no idea where I’d be without Melissa’s feminism. And so, I asked her ten-ish questions about writing and cats and New York City. Because I still have a lot left to learn — about everything.

Ten(ish) Questions with Melissa Gira Grant

Hi, MGG!

Hello, Carmen! Let’s do this.

You’re in the finishing phases (I imagine) of your book Playing the Whore. How did that book come about, and what are you most excited about as the process finally comes to publishing?

It’s done, out of my hands at last, and off to press just a few weeks ago. The book came about quickly, after I wrote an essay for Jacobin last summer on the myth of the myth of the happy hooker. I wanted to document and question the various interests involved in insisting that any sex workers who for whatever reason still want to do sex work are both an insignificant minority and a dire threat — because they shatter stereotypes, sure, but also because they insist on speaking for themselves. Writing the essay pulled my perspective around sex work into a new focus, shifting from sex workers’ experiences (including my own) to those people who want to speak for sex workers. Anti-sex work activists, police, politicians, journalists – these people produce fantasies about sex work that bear even less relationship to sex workers’ own lives than what sex workers get paid to play out with customers. Writing this was a classic script flip.

Playing the Whore is the first book I’ve written for another publisher, and the longest and most in-depth work I’ve done so far on sex work. I kept up with my other rioting and reporting as much as possible — I went to the Supreme Court to cover a case concerning AIDS funding and sex work for The Nation, I covered a few stories related to violence against sex workers for In These Times — and all those stories fed the book, and the book gave me the long view to put these stories into context. It’s still a bit of an adjustment for me, doing work that only a handful of people could read as I went along and pulled notecards off my wall and replaced each with a thousand words or so. Maybe years of blogging ruined me, or maybe they created a productive tension. From contract to press, it took almost exactly one year. That’s basically forever in internet time. So putting the book into people’s hands already feels long overdue to me. I just want to get out on the road with it so I can make that happen over and over.

I’m super excited for Playing because I’ve always really deeply respected you for being, well, pretty much the first and one of the only feminists I have ever come across who unequivocally demanded that the experiences and obstacles of sex workers be acknowledged in and integral to my own work. I’m so grateful for that, and I’ve tried so hard to take that with me to all of my projects and it’s made me so much stronger as a feminist activist to have that perspective. How did you come to identify with feminism despite the huge differences in perspective between so many on sex workers’ rights? Given the history of feminists treating sex workers like shit throughout time, how do you feel today when you look around at the movement? Do you feel like feminism is growing to understand the complexity of sex work and respect the agency of sex workers? How do you think the movement could come to do that even more?

That’s exactly how I felt about the first feminists I read on sex work. It was really feminists writing about their own sex work experiences and politics that saved feminism for me at all, made it relevant. I remember getting my hands on Jill Nagle’s anthology Whores and Other Feminists, and then picking up Gayle Rubin and Carole Vance and Amber Hollibaugh – this was a multifaceted, queer, class-conscious feminism. In a way, it felt like a feminism that had taken sex and the body and not only gender as its leaping off point, and a feminism that grappled with everything that was pressing to me then and still is now: pleasure, danger, violence not just from individuals but from institutions that are meant to protect you. Reading Amber’s stories about going and talking about lesbian rights to union halls in California in the late 70’s? And from there, to fighting for women with HIV to be seen and taken seriously, to celebrating the ingenuity of sex workers as sex educators when no one else was doing this work? It was almost like an alternate reality, a feminism as if the sex wars had never divided us.

But to the movement question you raised — of course, the sex wars did divide the movement, and they were a class war and a sex war, as far as I understand the history. The 80’s were a moment when some feminists were getting a little bit of a power within the institutions that had denied them. I think it was tantalizing to imagine that this was the way for women to get ahead: smash the glass ceiling, wear a shapeless beige suit with a floppy tie, I don’t know, everything the Atlantic still produces cover stories saying we’re doing wrong. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that anti-porn feminism and the backlash against what was the foundation of the sex workers’ rights movement found its foothold during the same era — Reagan and Thatcher, “welfare queens” and AIDS. The beginning of the austerity politics of blame and shame, and we’re still in bed with it. But you know, girls, if we can just pull ourselves up by our Docs… or our Tory Burch flats…

I don’t know that feminism — mainstream feminism, white feminism, the kind of feminism that will get you a job as a feminist — will ever fully address sex work so long as feminism is struggling to address work, period. I expected to set a little bomb off with what I wrote for the Washington Post about the bogus “movement” Sheryl Sandberg’s marketing people attempted to launch earlier this year, but I was legitimately unprepared for how the backlash was so bourgie and so basic. Like no one thought someone might ask, how are Sandberg’s low level employees at Facebook, let alone her own domestic staff, going to “lean in” any more than they already are? As if working class women haven’t been raising this critique themselves? “Work” was the real four letter word. And it was another moment of brutal clarity: what breaks feminists down around sex work isn’t only the sex.

Prior to Playing, your big book project which moved me deeply was Coming and Crying. How do those two processes compare, side-by-side? Did you prefer editing and publishing folks’ work under your own charge or was it more fun having an editor and pushing a book through as part of Jacobin? Now that you’re extensively published online and IRL, is there a vehicle for writing which you also prefer over the other?

Thank you for that! I just put a few copies in the mail today to people — it’s still with me, always just a few feet from my desk at the very least. What’s the most common to both books is this sense of community. With Coming & Crying, that was Meaghan O’Connell (who is writing and editing now at TheBillfold.com) being absolutely original on Tumblr, and us meeting all the other writers in the same way that we met one another: through reading each other every day. There was intensity and intimacy to that on a scale that’s quite different than Jacobin, where the connective tissue was really Occupy Wall Street — that’s where I met the first writers from the magazine, and a load of other writers and editors, as well, like Sarah Leonard, the associate editor at Dissent who has done a beautiful job in pulling together a left feminist community of writers. I might type in isolation, but I don’t write in isolation.

The biggest difference is doing something DIY vs. having this institution around you. Along with the community, some of my favorite work on Coming & Crying was production – like making those important decisions with designers about which typeface both the word “fuck” and an ampersand will look best in. I still remember the day we were deciding on the stock for the end papers (a really pretty dove grey with a nice grain). Contrast that with the day I first met the publicists for my book (also different: I have publicists for my book) at Verso, and we were talking about what would go on the interior cover, and me finding out that the book was going to have French flaps – where the soft cover stock folds in on the front and the back and looks very sophisticated, I think – and since this is the kind of decision I (still) obsess over, that’s all I needed for the highly particular publisher in my head to start whispering (quietly, just to me, thank god) “French flaps? Why am I only hearing about this now?” Well, of course – I was the one with the book to write. And then it was a relief to have “only” that to do, to really appreciate all the work happening around the book that was no longer my job alone.

This is all just to say, DIY and otherwise, books are impossible without lots of people on your side.

You’re a writer with an activist’s life, which is probably why I’ve admired you for so long. That, and how badass you are. How did your activism turn to writing, and how do the two compliment each other in your work?

I like that way of putting it — a writer with an activist’s life — because I never approached my writing as a form of activism. Activism is about collective action, and in my writing, I might be one individual part of that collective, but I am not the voice of any collective, and I don’t want to be or to be interpreted that way. It’s too much to ask of one person.

I also want to resist the ways in which feminism has been defined by its attendant media, by the comparatively tidy handful of feminists who make it in media versus those who I would say are doing the work of feminism, including those who do not identify with feminism. And just as it’s not a victory to usher more women into boardrooms, let’s not mistake more women on the masthead for feminism, either, if they’re just doing the same stories in the same ways.

Before I made my living as a writer, I worked within formally structured groups with activist missions — whether that was a union shop, or a health clinic, or even philanthropy — where the goal wasn’t just to get this contract, or provide this exam, or make this grant, but in being reflective and intentional about the way we did that work, being real about who that would build power for and how, and trying to understand what would be left behind long after we weren’t in the picture. I still bring that reflection to my work, which, in journalism — is that activism? Compared to a lot of journalism, probably. But does that make me an activist? I don’t think that does. I’m not shying away from that label, as if there’s something wrong with being an activist, but I don’t want to represent what I do as activism, when I compare it to the work of people who are out there organizing, caring for their communities.

What’s your advice to any up-and-coming writers reading this piece? How did you turn writing into a successful career? What’s your writing process look like every day? How do you decorate your desk? This is all important.

Become deadly practical about risks: risks in your work, yes, but also the risk of work — getting it, keeping it, losing it. And no one takes risks alone. We all need to work at building a community where we can take the kind of risks that build us up.

I’m working with Sarah Jaffe right now on a project about writing and money, which in part gets at the idea of risk — the risks we take, the riskiness of writing as a profession, the difference between our risks and the risks that make up the lives of people in our stories, and the risks we also share together.

Risk is something I’m more comfortable holding out a few inches from my own life and thinking through than something like “success.” You can’t judge a writer’s success by their bank balance, but neither can you judge their bank balance by where they’ve been published. None of this correlates neatly. As Molly Crabapple said, “A decade of practice honed my talent. But cash let me express it.”

In my work, I’m ritualistic, but the rituals change over time. Since I moved to New York from San Francisco, my mornings are dealing with just enough work-related email on my phone in bed to get to coffee at my kitchen table, putting lists of what I need to do together on paper, and then once that’s in order, to my laptop where I imagine I will be guided by that list. Sometimes that’s strictly true: follow-up on an edit, send a contract in, schedule a phone interview for later in the day, translate a few of the rough notes in my file of possible stories into new pitches. I’ve got blocks of time each day that I work to protect from the work that goes on around my work (correspondence, accounting, all of that) so that I can actually write. That’s how I boss myself around: do what needs to get done to get to that time, to what feels like my time.

I post a photo of my current desk in each of my email newsletters, but it’s always got a stack of books pulled from my own library for whatever I’m working on (right now, that’s a lot leftover from Playing the Whore that I haven’t put away yet, plus a copy of Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge and a CIA book I borrowed from my boyfriend), my to-do list, a souvenir brass brothel coin (“good for all night”), my notebook of the moment, and on cardboard sheets that came packed in with a shipment of records some hand drawn wireframes for my website, and some Sharpies, and knocking all that around — the cat.

Can you tell me a little bit about your cat. Anything, really.

She’s almost three, I think. I adopted her two days before the raid on Occupy Wall Street. Her name is Valerie Solanas and her new favorite place to sleep is on a black tutu in the back of my closet.

Idol Worship: The Holigay 2013 Gift Guide

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week, we’re gonna recap my year with some good old-fashioned SHOPPING.

Header by Rory Midhani

It’s been a little over a year now since I started pouring unsolicited praise upon various celebrities and figureheads while simultaneously oversharing information about my own life and asking vapid and uninteresting questions. Just kidding! It’s been a little over a year now since I changed the world with my short, sweet celebrity interviews and personal essays as part of Idol Worship, and I’m excited for the famous folks who will come into my life the interviews I’ll be sharing with y’all in the next twelve months as we turn this corner.

As an avid Idol Worshipper, I take great care to learn more about the people who inspire me while simultaneously avoiding the wrath of God, who is surely angry about my blasphemous column and encouragement for fellow idolatrists to indulge in gushing about their favorite important person endlessly to people who don’t really care but sometimes relate in strange and unique ways. If you’ve ever read my devotionals and wanted to become hopelessly devoted, or if you’ve ever been all, oh my god! Carmen is like, as obsessed with Eileen Myles as my mom is, I’m here to help.

Without further ado, the Idol Worship Gift Guide. For this year, at least.

Eileen Myles

There are never enough opportunities to tell you to shut the fuck up and read an Eileen Myles book already.

Snowflake / different streets // Skies // Sorry, Tree // Inferno // Chelsea Girls // Cool for You

Edie Sedgwick (And Andy Warhol)

If you love Edie, you love the entire factory. And if you’re me, it’s because you relate to her and Andy Warhol in a way which challenges you not to introduce yourself as their love child.

Edie: An American Girl // Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties // Factory Girl DVD //Edie, Factory Girl // Edie by Andy Warhol Photo Print // The Philosophy of Andy Warhol //Art of Andy Warhol 2014 Wall Calendar // Andy Warhol Portraits 

Frida Kahlo

I’d like to paint Frida Kahlo’s body over my own body and just walk around like, “Hey, I’m Frida Kahlo, don’t you just wish you had one ounce of my strength you motherfuckers?”

Socksmith Frida Knee-High Socks // Dod Frida Sculpture // The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait // Frida Kahlo Paper Dolls // Frida Kahlo Tank Top

Madonna

Chances are the Madonna enthusiast in your life already illegally pirated her entire discography. (I’m not naming names.) So think bigger, better, and sexier than a CD.

Celebration CD Set // Vintage Screen Print Tee // Free Spirit Eggshell Junior Shirt // Sex //Madonna: The MDNA Tour on Blu-Ray

Quvenzhané Wallis

If you get into her now, you get to say you were into her “before she got big.”

Signed Covers and Photos // Beasts of the Southern Wild

Bettie Page

For her inner pin-up girl.

Wanna Ride? Retro Sign //Bettie Page Playing Cards // Bettie Page Pint Glass Set // Photo Shower Curtain

Iris Apfel

I have an obsession with fabulous older women. I like to think I’m not alone.

Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel // Advanced Style // Iris Apfel for MAC collection

The Coquette

If you have a friend who is getting married, to a man (it happens), I highly advise they be required to read Notes to My Future Husband first. What better way to plant it in their hands than disguising it as an innocent gift? May the ass-kicking begin.

Janis Joplin

SO COME ON, COME ON, COME ON, COME ON, AND TAKE IT, TAKE ANOTHA LITTLE PIECE OF MY HEART NOW BABY

Love, Janis // Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits // Pearl on Vinyl

Zelda Fitzgerald

We could all use a life lesson or two from the flappers.

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald // Zelda Fitzgerald’s Collected Writings // “Nobody Has Ever Measured” Tee // An Illustrated Life: The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald //Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

Julie & Brandy

A subscription to Tello is all that can satiate someone trying to fantasize about Julie and Brandy being a couple. Pretending to be one, I mean. Or for people looking for their shady advice. Either way. You do you.

Idol Worship: I’m Not Strong Enough to Stop Listening to Sheryl Crow

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week, I’m confessing to a life spent secretly listening to Sheryl Crow’s hits from the 90’s and early 2000’s.

Header by Rory Midhani

So. I was perusing the Internet, as I am paid to do by various folks, when I stumbled across this week’s bit of 90’s nostalgia: a live cover of Sheryl Crow’s “Strong Enough” by HAIM and Lorde. No offense to the godessess of our loins that they all may be, it was kind of the shittiest thing I’ve ever heard.

But that could just be because I’ve been listening to Sheryl Crow for an inordinate and possibly unhealthy amount of time.

What I’ve just told you is my biggest fear, my number one secret, something Geneva only realized after we’d ridden in cars together for like, three weeks combined: I listen to Sheryl Crow. Still. On the reg. Like, all the time. I even have her songs on my iPhone and I even feel tempted, many days a week, to make them into Tumblr posts or integral parts of my Twitter biography. I strut to work listening to Sheryl Crow. And even if “Strong Enough” is no longer on my Sheryl playlist (because I mean, come on, my breakup was so long ago), I can still appreciate the lingering affection for an angsty girl who also knew how to see the sun.

Sheryl Crow to me sounds like endless summer, drunk and/or hungover mornings, dust falling on your small town, the loss of innocence, and, overall, my entire early twenties. (And twangy guitar, because in the nineties every pop star was apparently also a country star. Right, Jewel?) I listen to Sheryl Crow and I think about getting unstuck, and how nice it is to sit back and bitch with the girls about, well, other girls, and life, and how sometimes, deep down, I just wish I was sitting on someone’s front porch drinking a beer. The Sheryl Crow I knew was always cynical and sort of apathetic about romance and about everyone’s expectations for women, and she was a tomboy mixed with a bleeding heart and I always thought it was cute that there were people like that on this Earth. Sheryl Crow is rough around the edges, probably a little buzzed, and just looking for a good fucking time – and I can relate. And I’m aware that probably nobody else on this Earth (or at least who reads this website) listens to old Sheryl Crow, new Sheryl Crow, or the ghost of Sheryl Crow’s mainstream career crying in country bars, but hear me out: it’s worth a try.

I’m not here to talk to you about current Sheryl Crow songs or the state of pop-country music or LeeAnn Womack (though that’s always on the table) or Lance Armstrong. I’m here to talk to you about Bud Light, girls in men’s jeans, and an Americana that was invented by road-trip babes like Sheryl Crow before Lana Del Rey had learned to pout. Sheryl Crow always struck me as a total bro, someone who kicked it with the boys, someone with dirt in her hair, and it makes sense to me now what felt memorable about that.

I’d like to talk to you about why I’m still listening to old Sheryl Crow songs.

One at a time.

“If It Makes You Happy“

When I’m walking down the street and a bunch of people are staring at me I can choose between two extremes: listening to hip-hop and strutting like Kanye West, or listening to “If It Makes You Happy” and pounding my boots on the sidewalk as I think, “ugh, I’m 2 alt 4 u anyway.”

I try to think of the entirety of the lyrics as subversive, since observing “I hate to do this thing, but I did it anyway, for you, and you’re still being an unappreciative bitch” strikes me as kind of just that. Plus, having survived a relationship where I often felt like nothing I did was ever enough, this is a great cure.

If you want to feel powerful, just think back to the last time you weren’t living for yourself, throw your head back, and fucking werq through this song. In public. And preferably in a leather jacket.

Well, OK, I still get stoned. I’m not the kind of girl you’d take home.

“Everyday Is A Winding Road“

Not gonna lie to you on this one: my mom and I used to pop quarters into the jukebox at the local diner and pick songs and I always chose “Everyday is a Winding Road.” In light of my recently overexposed childhood, I think that makes sense. Not everything is the way we planned it, but hell if it isn’t a damn good ride.

I get a little bit closer. 

“A Change Would Do You Good“

If you’ve ever wondered about the futility of the world, about the academic-industrial complex, about the failing job market, about the dark underbelly of the American dream, or about a good party, you were probably listening to this song. So, that political apathy and sense of overall discouragement about our culture? Don’t worry — it’s not you. It’s everything else. And Ellen’s here to save you.

Hello it’s me, I’m not at home, if you’d like to reach me, leave me alone.

“All I Wanna Do“

All I wanna do is have some fun before I die. Like, seriously. Even if it means drinking beer on noon on Tuesday with boring dudes in a dive bar.

This song feels like my mornings in 2010 where I woke up, immediately got fucked up, and then skipped class, all never for a reason. All just to fucking feel like I was alive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dGGFpeQNfY

This ain’t no disco. It ain’t no country club, either. This is LA.

“Leaving Las Vegas“

The only time I didn’t listen to this song in transit was when Geneva and I were actually leaving Las Vegas, but I did hum it a little bit to myself to make sure I hadn’t wasted my only chance at ever making sense. I listen to it when planes are taking off, when I’m headed somewhere on a sunny day, or when I’m entering new city bounds, and sometimes I just listen to it when I wish I was headed somewhere else. I’ve been in DC for five years now, and that can feel like forever when you’re not even 25, and thus I sometimes like to listen to this song when I’m walking outside, stare up at the sky, and pretend it’s my last day there. Everything seems more romantic and nostalgic when you’re saying goodbye, anyway.

Such a muddled line between the things you want and the things you have to do.

“Home“

I actually only recently discovered this one, but it moved me super deeply and I had feelings about being stuck and finding the place I belong in afterward for at least seven days.

My head is full of voices and my house is full of lies.

Idol Worship: A Hand-Curated Betty White GIF Therapy Post

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week, I’m really glad the Internet likes Betty White like I like Betty White.

Header by Rory Midhani

Seeing as I was born with the natural style, grace, and attitude of an older woman, it’s no surprise that I used to stay up nights to marathon Golden Girls episodes in my bedroom as a wee lass. And seeing as I grew up watching The Golden Girls, it’s no surprise that I’ve turned out the way I did.

It was hard to pick a favorite character on GG growing up, mostly because I wanted to grow up to be every single old lady on Earth. I admired each of the four leading ladies: Sophia, who reminds me of my own grandmother, was too feisty not to leave me awestruck; Dorothy, whom I always knew, deep down, I really was, was too intelligent to disparage; Blanche, sexy and smooth, was everything I hoped I could be when I was her age. And despite my extreme, all-encompassing fear of ending up clueless and naïve, I loved Rose Nylund.

At first glance, Rose, a caricature of midwestern unknowing and small-town simplicity, seems to exist only for comic relief. She gets herself into messes, and she often doesn’t even realize what she’s done, but fuck if I didn’t laugh every. single. time. And on second and third glance, I realized Rose, in all of her childlike innocence, was quite a feisty motherf*cker herself. And that – well. That I truly, deeply loved.

Rose was experienced, and authentic, and genuine. She was well-meaning, totally kind, and absolutely pure. She had strength of character and she had a strong moral core. And none of this is influenced by the fact that when I took a quiz that assigns you to your Golden Girls soul twin, I landed Rose despite trying my best to avoid every nice answer on the damn thing.

Betty White, the last Golden Girl standing, the mother of all Rose, had a career more expansive than a small Miami kitchen and a fresh cheesecake, though. And even growing up, I recognized that of all the other actresses, she was the most public. I saw her speaking out on gay rights and animal rights, I saw her hosting SNL and sitting in my living room during commercial breaks, and I knew then that the joke had been on me the whole time. Rose was nothing to avoid. Betty White was, and is, no fool. And her ability to morph so well into all of her various characters, as well as her tenacity and never-ending presence on The Scene, was something I admired and still admire deeply as a teenage drama queen. (No, but seriously. I went to performing arts school, you guys. I was gonna make it.)

But I digress.

My love for the Golden Girls aside, it’s hard not to love Betty White. She’s really just simply amazing, and her ability to laugh at her own expense and portray strong, edgy, and hilarious characters above 30 is a standout art in today’s 20-something media landscape. Plus, I’m pretty sure, upon further inspection, that she really is my soul twin.

Funny women are hard to find. This isn’t because they don’t exist; I know from personal experience that most women are hilarious, after all (especially B), and that most men aren’t. But in Hollywood, and especially in visual mediums like television and film, it can be hard to find a woman at all, let alone a priceless gem of a comedic one. In that way, Betty White’s done swimmingly, and deserves pretty much for all of us to bow down before her. She takes herself seriously as a comedian, and hasn’t given up despite having celebrated a 90th birthday and being the butt of pretty much every “Keep Betty Alive” joke on the Internet. You can tell Betty White knows she’s funny, and you can tell she enjoys how ingrained into all of us that one fact is, too. And I ain’t even mad, because that bitch is one-of-a-fucking-kind.

My biggest fears with growing old, as a wee lass at least, all stemmed from social anxieties: How will I meet people? Will there be stuff for me to do? What do old people WEAR? How do they keep drinking? Will I be forced to marry some boring dude, start a family, and then cook big meals? WHAT IS HAPPENING. The Golden Girls did a lot to assuage those kinds of fears in us all; in the middle of a 90’s media firestorm of midriff tops and spandex, they showed America and the world that women, at any age, could be sexy, confident, and funny. They could spar with words, deliver witty and timely snark, and throw a comeback at any dude who dared offend them. And that was pretty badass, if you ask me.

Now that I’m all grown up (or at least too old to trick-or-treat, too young to die), my only fear is walking into a room of women, at some point in this wild journey, who don’t know The Golden Girls by word and don’t think of those four women as having raised them by TV light. Luckily, the entire internet fawns over the cast enough to keep historians puzzling over the population of St. Olaf for centuries; in addition to GG memes, White’s also had a streak of luck in the Tumblrverse and remains one of its most cherished treasures.

In honor of my strong feelings about her, I wanted to compile an assortment of Betty Whit GIFs, both in character and just in lounge wear, to showcase more accurately every dimension of her personality. In the process, I learned a lot.

1. Sometimes, a girl’s gotta drink.

2. Sometimes, she can’t.

3. I’ll never be too old for Vegas.

…or to shake what my mama gave me.

…or for sexy times overall.

4. No matter how many years it’s been, you can expect it to still be just you and your ego.

…so don’t be afraid to self-promote.

5. We all have hard lives.

6. And that’s just the way it is.

7. No matter what, remember: this is how we live, no fucks to give.

(So always speak your mind.)

8. Do the right thing…

and don’t be afraid to stand up for your principles…

…no matter what the cost.

9. Never forget your fans. 

10. And never change a good thing.

Idol Worship: An Alanis Morissette Feelings Atrium

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week, I’m spilling my guts about one of my original gut-spilling inspirations: Alanis Morissette.

Header by Rory Midhani

When I hear Alanis Morissette I think about my mom. I don’t think she would get that if I told her, and I never really have, but my friend Amanda and I always had this recurring joke with each other about growing up with newly-divorced moms pre-divorce-era, and what it was like riding in the car. There were two options: “Torn“, by Natalie Imbruglia, and “You Oughta Know,” by Alanis. Chances are, when you were about six, either one was on the radio. And your newly-divorced-mom pre-divorce-era knew all the words.

Growing up, I felt like not a lot of people “got” my family. My mom struggled to make ends meet; we changed schools frequently just because we needed to find new places to crash when the landlord finally gave up on us. Nobody’s parents in suburban New Jersey were divorced (yet) and when people asked Carmen Rios in 1995 “where her dad was,” she burst into tears on the spot. (Spoiler Alert: I never really knew, nor could I fathom why everyone else always did.) Popular culture certainly didn’t know: in a sea of shows about happy and slightly less happy families, still absent was mine. We were doing okay, like the little troopers we were, like the Three Musketeers we had deemed ourselves (a name my mother, to this day, uses to refer to my brother, myself, and her – collectively), but our stories were missing. And there was something in the grungy, frustrated, self-indulgent melancholy of nineties women that struck me, always, as being the most relatable and normal thing out in the world for me to consume. While other girls were listening to Britney Spears, I was still stuck on the reflective stuff, still singing Alanis Morissette to myself in my mother’s car.

And it didn’t end there.

I went to college in 2008, and there I met Josh. “You Oughta Know” was my song before I’d ever drank a beer and found MY SOOOOOONG!, and that’s saying something. We used to play it just to listen to it, just to remember it, just to feel more like anyone had ever walked in our shoes before that day. Growing up, I couldn’t grasp what a “self-fulfilling prophecy” was, but I did understand my own romanticization of what had brought that song into my life. I was convinced, when I dated men, that ultimately those relationships would be broken. I was convinced, for a short time into dating women, that those were destined to be that way, too. If my mother’s song was “You Oughta Know,” mine was “Hands Clean,” the tidied-up version of Alanis’ angst that broke later that decade. I internalized and conceptualized of a relationship where my feelings lingered past the ending line, where I was stuck singing stupid songs in stupid cars, where all I was for a while was someone hung up on one moment where everything changed. I was right about the self-fulfilling prophecy, and I was right about the song – it fit just as good in my headphones as the others had in my mother’s car.

Being 23 though, everyone else knows and loves these songs, too. If I could count on my fingers every time I’d listened to “Hand in My Pocket” and thought “holy fucking shit this is my LIFE STORY right now,” when I was unemployed, I would have had enough hands to cut off and sell on some weird black market to eat dinner for years. Even if I came of age in the 00’s (which, by the way, how fucking lame is that) there is a part of me that sits squarely in the decade before, the part of me who grew up hearing these sounds and seeing these images and will never be a different person because of them. Once you’ve seen clashing plaids in one outfit, you’re done for life. You’re never going to be whole again.

It was like that even moreso with the music, which I still cling to and now I listen to because it’s winter and I just want summer, and the nineties felt like an endless summer where the boys had hair like Pauly Shore and the girls wore bikinis on the beach and everyone lived in California. I didn’t get, as a kid, that the angst was about inequality, or inherent gender poison, or the way it feels to be rendered an object and an invisible force to the very sex people want you to be attracted to. I didn’t get that Alanis was a revolutionary in her own right, or that she was singing about the complacency of an America in prosperity or the recovery of an entire generation from the prudes who reigned before them. I didn’t even know she was actually smoking a cigarette with that other hand, because I was too busy watching Dogma into my later years to think about anything but how fucking long her hair was. I watch her videos now and I see all of these classic signs of a volatile politic inside of a polite body and I cringe to think I ever thought all girls were like that, but then I pat myself on the back for being that idealistic.

What if we were all raised by Alanis Morissette? She has this philosophy that, to this day, describes me to the bone: make mistakes, feel something, be honest about it, and recover. Get naked about your feelings, and with your body, if you want, and know that you’re going to be okay on the other end. There was always the idea, inside of her words, that eventually she was going to recover, and she was going to be fine, she was going to brush her hair and maybe put some wispy eyeshadow on and be okay. And you were, too. My mother always knew she was going to make it, and she told me women could and would do anything, and the nineties felt like that to me, maybe because I was a kid, or maybe because nobody had the Internet and thus most of our formative experiences actually weren’t public showcases later integrated into our “personal brands”. The nineties felt like being forgiven and starting over no matter how many fucking times you’d been back to the starting line. You live, you learn. Thank you, India. Isn’t that so fucking ironic? (It’s not, but be honest, you didn’t know what it meant, either.)

I think what brings me back to nineties music, again, and again, and again, and again, is always that vibe: nothing really matters. You’re all you have and this is all you’re working with and you know what, slugger? You gave it your best fucking shot, and that’s what counts. We’re all infinite. We all have a second chance. There are no economic problems weighing on our institutions, no wasted moments going to war, no worries outside of whether or not you’re using Pantene Pro-V or something. Alanis Morissette made so many mistakes, and she accepted her own futility at trying to stop herself from becoming one as well, and she threw in the fucking candle. In 2005, Alanis released “Everything” and cut all her hair off, y’know, to keep up with the times, and I remember vaguely staring at the screen thinking I know her from somewhere and not placing it at first. But the words rang back to my mother’s car, to everything she’d probably wanted that whole time, that any of us wanted, that I still want.

I blame everyone else, not my own partaking
My passive-aggressiveness can be devastating
I’m terrified and mistrusting
And you’ve never met anyone as,
As closed down as I am sometimes.

You see everything, you see every part
You see all my light and you love my dark
You dig everything of which I’m ashamed
There’s not anything to which you can’t relate
And you’re still here

What I resist, persists, and speaks louder than I know
What I resist, you love, no matter how low or high I go

Having been in feminism for over twenty years now (it starts at birth, you know), I’ve spent so many days trying to “put my finger on it” (ugh, that’s what she said) that it almost is laughable that I never put it right here. Or, right there I guess. On those ten years I spent being born, being new, being unaware, being dumb, being innocent, knowing I had second chances, knowing my mother’s life was a second chance, knowing I was her second chance. The nineties always feel formative to me, but my life wasn’t a Sugar Ray song or a Jewel song or any of that – it was, it is, an Alanis Morissette song. It’s mistakes and learning how to forgive myself, which, at some point, became a lot harder for me and the people in my life than it used to be for the people who raised us. Being imperfect was all the rage in the nineties, and people were open and honest about their imperfections and their flaws and the things we didn’t realize yet we had the capacity to “fix,” or maybe had never contemplated having to fix at all. The nineties were gritty and human and fleshy and raw, and nobody got famous from autotune and everything was heavy and sincere and even girls were allowed to tell the truth about how they were feeling.  I spend all of this time putting my hands up in the sky and trying to get free but really, I’ve been free inside the whole time, mostly because I was raised by revolutionaries.

Revolutionaries, and a really good FM radio.

Idol Worship: Ten(ish) Questions About Packing for A-Camp with DeAnne Smith

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week, I’m sitting down with A-Camp 4.0’s resident comedian, DeAnne Smith.

Header by Rory Midhani

DeAnne Smith is so, so funny. I knew this from simply reading the website Autostraddle Dot Com, but I was totally unprepared for the way it hit me in the face at her A-Camp 3.0 stand-up performance. It was like, who-even-knows-how-long-maybe-an-hour? straight of laughing. Like, no pauses. No gasps for air. That can really change a person, y’know?

I had the pleasure of being recruited to be DeAnne’s right hand for speed dating, which she executed with prowess and in a cute bow-tie. (I wore a crop top and got drafted to date and apologize to everyone who had to try and have a conversation with me without the appropriate three years of getting to know me on the Internet I typically require of folks.) After getting to know DeAnne on the mountain, all of her stuff was even funnier to me – Autostraddle column, Twitter feed, and all. Once you’ve seen her live you really, really get it. You sit there blown away with your mouth open thinking: DeAnne Smith is so, so funny. And completely adorable. That, too.

DeAnne Smith has a lot of accolades under her belt: she’s produced four solo international shows, heard her own voice on the radio multiple times, and been nominated for tons of honors, all the way to Australia and back. She’s seen the world through the eyes of a comedian since 2005, and – as if it couldn’t get any better – she’s CANADIAN. The woman is amazing, y’all! WHY AREN’T YOU LISTENING TO HER PODCAST YET, DAB NAM IT.

DeAnne blew us away at A-Camp 3.0, most notably because of her hilarity and also probably because of her good looks. I came away wanting to interview her and share my typically monumental appreciation for her work with the world, especially because there are not enough nice things I can say about her. And so I set up an interview with her to satiate my need for more packing advice, and also because she’s coming to A-Camp 4.0 to help us take off all our clothes.

Ten(ish) Questions with Deanne Smith

Meeting you at A-Camp was amazing in June. I’ve read a bunch of your pieces for us and always felt like they were really great, so seeing you in 3D was even better. What brought you to Autostraddle, and what kept you around?

Crystal brought me to Autostraddle. She interviewed me a few years ago, so I checked out the website. As I got to reading, I thought, “Hey, these people are really smart and fun and funny! I wanna get involved in this.” Then I did. You can live your dreams!

Aside from your performance, which was obviously the highlight of everyone’s trip to Angelus Oaks, what was your favorite part of A-Camp? 

It’s so hard to pick just one moment! (Also, don’t think your flattery went unnoticed.) Overall, I was floored by the sense of community there and how welcoming everyone is. It’s just a damn good time with really excellent people. If I had to pick some specific moments, though, I’d say that Lilith Flair and the Staff Reading were definite highlights. There’s so much amazing talent at Autostraddle! (I see your flattery and I raise you. But seriously.) Oh, and I should probably mention that time Katie, the camp director, kissed me on the cheek. That was, um, like, kinda a highlight or whatever, shut up.

Any spoilers about what you’ve got up your sleeve for camp this time?

Three words: Strip. Spelling. Bee.

You’re a global celebrity. What’s it like traveling so much? Do you check bags? What are your favorite cities to land in?

I travel as if I’m preparing for the end times. The world is unpredictable. You never know what’s gonna happen. Maybe I’ll need to look dapper in a rainstorm. Bowtie and water-proof jacket: check. Maybe I’ll need to block out noise in a cold room. Noise-cancelling headphones and knitted hat: check. Maybe I’ll need to correct some graffiti and then play word games. Markers and Bananagrams: check. My point is, I do not travel light. And as much as I travel, I still haven’t figured out how to check my emotional baggage. That would be amazing.

As for favorite cities, I particularly love Melbourne, Edinburgh and Baltimore. Generally, I’m happy wherever I land.

Tell me about being famous in Australia. I heard you’re a big fuckin’ deal in Australia. Talk to me about Australia. I love Australia.

Australia’s amazing. They have spiders the size of your face. I’ve been on TV a bunch there, which leads people to believe I’m famous. But you know who doesn’t care about this so-called “fame?” The face-sized spiders. They don’t give a shit.

I’m always asking people about their processes – so can you tell me yours? How do you write? How do you get ready for a performance? How do you decide what to wear on a Monday morning?

I’m still not sure how any of it happens. I write my best ideas maniacally on scraps on paper. As for performing, I usually don’t do anything special. If I’m really nervous, I do what an older comedian told me to do before my first-ever TV gig, which is to take a deep breath, exhale, and say “Fuck it.” That’s also how I pick my clothes on Monday morning. It’s just solid life advice!

You do funny shit on the radio, on TV, in front of human beings, and on the Internet. (Most notably, on your Twitter, which makes me laugh on the daily.) Do you prefer one to the rest? Also, how do you do it and why are you so amazing.

I’m glad my Twitter makes you laugh! It’s ideal for one-liners I could never quite pull off on stage. I have to say, though, I am addicted to the immediate gratification of live performance. Oh, and to answer your last question: I think I’m so amazing because I come from an alcoholic family. I have an insatiable need for attention and approval, and an unclear sense of appropriate emotional boundaries. It’s a perfect mix for comedy. Look at me! Love me! You say “amazing,” my therapist says “codependent.”

Can you tell me a little bit about the work that inspires you, and the comedians who sparked your interest in being a funny human? Are there people you find funnier than yourself (I am free to disagree here, for the record) and wish to tell us about? Worship all idols now or forever hold your praise.

Maria Bamford Maria Bamford Maria Bamford.

I wanna bring it back to A-Camp to close on the strongest of notes. So spill: what are you listening to on the plane? What are you putting in your suitcase? Are you the kind of person who checks a bag? Oh, and HOW FUCKING EXCITED ARE YOU.

Okay, you’ve asked me this “Do you check a bag?” question twice now. YES, I CHECK MY BAGS. Are there people who don’t check bags? Who are these people? How are they even remotely prepared for the myriad of potential situations that life presents? I expect everyone coming to ACamp to have checked at least one bag full of underwear, glitter, and feelings journals. That’s what I packed. That’ll be good, right?

Idol Worship: Selena, Queen of Tejano Music

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck Carmen is into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for her favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing her life and/or moving her deeply, which sounds only slightly harder than it is in real life. 

This week, Yvonne is filling in and shares with you her undying love for legendary Tejano music star, Selena.

I grew up 10 minutes from the Texas-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, a magical place where cultures collide and where you can find some real fucking tacos. As a Tejana, a Mexican-American woman, I’ve straddled the line of two cultures: one that is dominated by the English language and American mainstream culture; the other, my vibrant Mexican heritage. Cornerstones of my distinct experiences include being Catholic, speaking Spanglish, going to hundreds of large family gatherings, eating homemade tortillas and listening to Tejano music, especially SELENA.

She was the best.
via

Let me tell you something, I’ve been dancing and singing to Selena’s music since I was a wee toddler, whether it is at a party or in the kitchen with my mom. Whenever the synthesizer starts for “Como la Flor” and Selena begins to belt the first notes to the song, I get so excited. It’s like a signal — a call —to get your ass to the dance floor as soon as possible because it’s about to get real and you will dance like your ancestors before you danced because the rhythm is in your blood and you will have the time of your life. I have adored her since I first heard her amazing voice and my love has grown exponentially throughout the years.

Selena was a talented Tejano singer, who skyrocketed to success in a male-dominated genre and told machismo — which is so ingrained in Mexican/American culture— to go fuck itself. She performed all her life, beginning in the 80’s as a child in her family’s band and eventually became a legendary star. Selena was only 23 years old and at the height of her career when she was murdered by a deranged fan over a financial dispute at a Corpus Christi motel in 1995. She lives on in her music and in the hearts of many Latinos around the world, especially mine.

This is a fierce picture of Selena.
Photo by John Dyer

Selena was born on April 16, 1971 in Lake Jackson, Texas as the youngest of three to Abraham and Marcella Quintanilla. A former musician, Abraham encouraged his children to embrace music. Selena started singing at the age of 9 while her brother Abraham picked up the bass guitar and her sister Suzette played drums. They became Selena y Los Dinos and performed at their family-owned restaurant. A second-generation Mexican American, Selena grew up speaking English. It wasn’t till she started singing that she actually learned Spanish. Her father encouraged her to sing in Spanish to resonate with her community, so she learned Spanish lyrics phonetically and eventually learned to speak the language fluently.

After the restaurant went bankrupt, the family moved to Corpus Christi where they performed wherever they could, from weddings to fairs.  Slowly but surely, Selena y Los Dinos became very popular and were booking shows all over Texas. Their hard work paid off when 14 year-old Selena and the band recorded their first album in 1985.

The early years of Selena y los Dinos. via

In 1987, Selena’s career really took off. She won Female Vocalist of the Year at the Tejano Music awards — an award she would win eight consecutive times starting in 1989. She landed her first major recording contract with EMI in 1989 and released her self-titled debut album. In 1990 her sophomore album, Ven Conmigo was the first Tejano album recorded by a female artist to achieve gold status. In 1992, Selena’s song “Como la Flor” debuted and boosted her success with Mexican and other Latin American audiences. Her following album Selena Live! won Best Mexican-American Album at the 36th Grammy Awards in 1994. Her following album Amor Prohibido would go on to be nominated for another Grammy for Best Mexican-American Album. In early 1995, she was preparing to enter the English-speaking market with a new album.

Fuck yeah, Selena beat all the groups of men that dominated Tejano music.

Long before today’s pop stars donned bejeweled tops and flashy outfits, Selena was a pioneer in the Tejano world for expressing herself and being confident while doing it. She had a passion for fashion and created an eccentric sense of style, designing her many stage costumes, including her famous sequenced bustiers. In 1994, she began her own fashion line and opened two boutiques in Texas, which were equipped with beauty salons.

Not only could this woman belt out a song, she was an excellent entertainer that had some great dance moves. She was graceful and sparkled across the stage and got the party started.

Her best accessory was her smile though. Selena had a bright smile and an infectious laugh to go along with her lovable personality. She was relatable to her fans because she was a down-to-earth Tejana who always put family first. That’s why Selena was the coolest person to me growing up. I understood her because she was parte de mi gente. She was a humble person who never let her successful career outshine what was most important to her — her family. Once the Quintanilla family made it big, they didn’t splurge on a mansion in a big city, no they settled down in their hometown of Corpus Christi and lived in three houses right next to each other. Selena never lost sight of her roots and owed her success to her supportive family and strong legion of Mexican-American fans.

There is a range of memories I associate Selena with, even though she was actually only alive for four years of my life. I don’t really remember her murder being on TV because I was so young, but I remember realizing that she was gone, that there was no more Selena. Shortly after her death, I remember being on my aunt’s porch with my friend, listening to Selena on a small portable radio. She told me that Selena had died and I didn’t believe her. I was in first grade when they made the Selena movie starring Jennifer Lopez, which became one of my favorite movies ever.

When I was in second grade, I was really ambitious and wanted to be in my school’s talent show, singing a Selena song of course. I decided to sing my favorite song at the time, “Dreaming of You.” When I say sing, I mean just sing loudly in tune over Selena’s recorded voice. I told my parents I wanted to look like Selena and recreate the last scene of the Selena biopic.  My mom bought some white material and sequins, and our seamstress neighbor made me a CUSTOM dress that looked like the one JLo wore. I was a dark, chubby Mexican little girl with glasses and you bet I sang my heart out and won 3rd place. To this day my siblings still bring it up (and make fun of me). I wish I had a picture to show you but these memories are stuck on a VHS tape.

I wore a mini-replica of this dress for my school’s talent show.
via

My quinceañera was traditional and complete with a poufy dress and court of honor. There were two special choreographed dances I did with my court (aka my friends) — one was a waltz and the other was a crazy, upbeat remix, during which I had a solo, break-out dance move to Selena’s “Baile Esta Cumbia”. It was amazing, because it was all me having the time of my life.

This past summer, I went to a fundraising event for allgo, Texas’ queer people of color organization, called Queer Qumbia. Let me tell you friends, it was a beautiful experience to sing and dance with fellow queers to the anthems of my culture, like Selena’s “Baile Esta Cumbia.” I can dance to that song anywhere, anytime (especially when I’m cleaning my bathroom) but the dance floor was electric that night because all my identities were being acknowledged. After going to countless quinceañeras, bodas, family parties, etc. and only seeing straight couples bailando to their favorite cumbias and not being able to do the same, it was a magical feeling dancing with the girl I love to the songs of my childhood in a space where we were welcomed.

Today, Selena is immortalized through her music and the impact she made in this world during her short life. She brought communities together, made people happy and broke down barriers for women in Tejano music.

Look at that smile.

Before Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and the Spice Girls entered the picture, Selena was the first superstar that I fan-girled over and looked up to. She served as a role model for young Latina girls because she made them visible, she told the world, “Hey this is me, I’m a successful Latina woman who’s bilingual and has curves, beautiful brown skin with jet black hair and I’m proud of that.”

Selena’s music feels like home to me — it reminds me of the Valley and my family. When I listen, it feels like a Sunday afternoon hanging out with my huge family and eating arroz con pollo and a big pot of frijoles at my grandma’s. As cheesy as it sounds, Selena’s music is the key to transport me home wherever I may be. The memories I associate with Selena are an integral part of my identity and will always be there for me to celebrate and reminisce.

Idol Worship: Coretta Scott King

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. 

Header by Rory Midhani

The 50th Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington has come and gone, and with it came a ton of discussions: on the state of racism, the state of the economy, and the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., to name a few. But someone was strangely absent: the First Lady of Civil Rights.

Coretta Scott was born on April 27, 1927 in Heiberger, Alabama. Bright from the beginning, she graduated as valedictorian from her high school and went on to become the first in her family to earn a degree, studying music at Antioch College in Ohio.

Scott married Martin Luther King Jr. on June 18, 1953 in her family’s home. She met King in college:

He was looking for a wife. I wasn’t looking for a husband, but he was a wonderful human being,” she told an interviewer. “I still resisted his overtures, but after he persisted, I had to pray about it… I had a dream, and in that dream, I was made to feel that I should allow myself to be open and stop fighting the relationship. That’s what I did, and of course the rest is history.

From the start, Coretta and Martin Luther King had a partnership: both invested in the revolution, she was home caring for her newborn child during the first bus boycott; as the years passed by, she would march with him and sometimes speak in his absence at Civil Rights events.

But the partnership wasn’t always equal, and gender hierarchy often prevented it from being so. Coretta’s duties were in the home, in caring for children during her husband’s absences and in managing  the family’s life. And when the March on Washington came in 1963 – a historic occasion which challenged society’s long-held racial inequalities — she simply sat in the second row. Women marched down Independence, and men marched down Pennsylvania; although women had helped to put the whole thing together they were given only 142 words at the event by Daisy Bates, the only woman to address the crowd during the official program. (Josephine Baker addressed the crowd before the program began.) In the Smithsonian’s oral history of the march, Coretta is mentioned only once in passing, despite a lifetime invested in the work.

As we know, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life was tragically cut short — and with his passing came wider recognition and respect of Coretta’s presence in the Civil Rights movement. On the topic of his death, she said, “I think you rise to the occasion in a crisis. I think the Lord gives you strength when you need it. God was using us – and now he’s using me, too.”

Four days after her husband’s assassination, Coretta led 50,000 marchers silently through Memphis in mourning; her speech at his funeral was televised to over 120 million people. Two months after that she led the Poor People’s March to Washington. She went on the be the first woman to preach at Great Britain’s St. Paul’s Cathedral and the first woman to deliver the class day address at Harvard University. She created the Full Employment Action Council, which brought over 100 religious, business, labor, civil, and women’s rights organizations together to push for national policies on employment access and opportunity; she also created the Coalition of Conscience, a coalition of more than 800 human rights organizations.

Coretta’s work, however, was mostly invested in the founding and expansion of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. The center “has been a global destination, resource center and community institution for over a quarter century,” and Coretta led it until her retirement in the mid-1990s. Around one million people visit the center in Atlanta each year, and under her leadership it grew into an $8.4 million organization covering 23 acres — including the location of her husband’s grave. “When I say I was married to the cause,” Coretta is quoted as saying, “I was married to my husband whom I loved… It was my cause, and that’s the way I felt about it.” (Civil Rights, however, wasn’t Coretta’s only movement: she was active in feminist politics and the campaign to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, as well as being a public ally to LGBT folks.)

On January 30, 2006, Coretta Scott King passed away in her sleep. The work of her life is, in many ways, still a dream that many of us hold dear; an ideal of equality that we haven’t yet seen recognized. I’m inspired by her drive for leadership and her ability to recognize her own accomplishments as possible and important during a time where that seriously challenged the social norms of her own movement. I’m in awe of her strength and her willingness to sacrifice for that dream. And most of all, I’m grateful: for her voice, for her work, and for the march which inevitably made it all the more possible.

Idol Worship: Ten(ish) Questions About Dogs and Books with Ali Liebgott

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week I’m learning to fly with Amelia Earhart.

Header by Rory Midhani

Ali Liebegott is a writer. A really, really good writer. Her books include The Beautifully Worthless and The IHOP Papers; she’s also the founding editor at Writers Among Artists and managing director at RADAR Productions. She also does Sister Spit (casual) and teaches at Mills. She won Lambda Awards for both aforementioned novels. Recently, she released Cha-Ching!, and when that happened Ali and I embarked on spiritual journeys to get to know the award-winning lesbian writer we should have known and loved much longer than we have. Somewhere along that journey, we decided we want to ask Liebegott questions; shortly after it started, I had added her to my list of “idols worth worshipping,” which is actually very selective thankyouverymuch. Then a bunch of sh*t happened! And now, here we are. We’ve finally arrived. Ali and I read two books and asked ten-ish questions to poet, writer, and die-hard dyke Ali Liebegott for you. The rest is history, as far as I’m concerned.

Read A F*cking Book: Cha-Ching!

by Ali Cha-Ching! is Ali Liebegott’s latest novel about a soft-hearted, gambling-addicted butch dyke named Theo trying to get by in 90’s Brooklyn. It asks the question of how you get by in the world when the luck has already been distributed and you missed out. I would like to call this story brutally real: real about the hardships of gender fuckery, real about the whirlwind vortex of addiction that can feel so inescapable. It’s real about pests and stripping and healthcare when you have no money to speak of. Liebegott has the unique ability to make the world feel so heavy that it could crush you, yet also make the assertion that a solid pair of dapper boots make the month better and that “the world would be a better place if the sidewalks were filled with birds riding tricycles.” It couples wit with harsh reality. I never know how to review books because I’m a big bundle of feelings when I read. Or at least, I’m a big bundle of feelings when I read a good book. And this was a good book. It really affected my emotions – when Theo gambled away money, I winced and cringed as if it were my money she was losing. When she was sad or had a setback, I cried as if I were stuck in an attic apartment or working janitor or feeling rejected by the pretty girl. So did I take notes to help me when it came time to review Cha-Ching!? No, I most certainly did not take notes. I didn’t dog ear. I didn’t make a spreadsheet (that’s what I usually do). I was too into the story in my body to get in my head, even though I knew I’d need my color coded stickies eventually. It was too good. What I did instead? When I finished the book, I curled up into a ball and cried. I cried for how hard life is, sometimes. I suppose a review always comes down to one thing: do I recommend this book? Hell yes, I do. Especially to our little weirdo queer online community of awesome. I think really everyone will love how this book is a 90’s flashback and yet feels so of-today, so urgent and present in our shitty-economy-moment. If you ever feel unlucky or lucky, you should read this book. The words in it are both beautiful and real.

Read A F*cking Book: The Beautifully Worthless

by Carmen I agreed to review The Beautifully Worthless for two reasons: the open road and a love of dogs. I used to curl up with On The Road and dream about what it looked like and tasted like to be there, to see things appearing and disappearing, to feel wind. At the time, I was still preoccupied with freedom, moreso than ever since I was far from free. I always have these dreams of road trips when I’m stuck. Escape always seems more pragmatic than a vacation. The Beautifully Worthless is an epic road poem that follows a runaway waitress’ trip from Brooklyn, NY to Camus, Idaho – then to Pennsylvania, and then to Vegas. Poems alternate with love letters in the four-part tale of misplaced affection, lost memories, and a dog named Rorschach. Inside the book is a deep longing, a desire to find something intangible and of looking under every stone to find it. I think that’s what the open road really is: a place where you look for something else, and sometimes something you don’t know you’re looking for yet. The narrator finds two loves to write: the girlfriend she’s leaving behind and the boy she meets at an entrance to a natural landmark. For a dyke, that means there’s lots of questions and quiet thinking, all in search of new pins on a map toward something else. All written in that voice. I’d recommend the book to dreamers, and lovers, and someone who likes dirty cars and hot sunlight and how it feels to finally be taking it one day at a time. I think that’s you.

Ten(ish) Questions with Ali Liebegott

Carmen: The Beautifully Worthless was a novel-length poem. Cha-Ching! is a straight up novel. How was your writing process different for each book? Did the kinds of stories you were telling affect their structure? How did you decide on each story’s structure?

Well, The Beautifully Worthless was more of a process of assembling scraps of poems together to make a narrative. I was very interested in epic poems while I was writing it. The journey. A quest. This sort of canonized form but that we don’t really have examples from a queer perspective. Also, the female road story. How being female affects your experience of being on the road. What you have access to, what dangers may be present. And then navigating that road from a gender non-conforming body. That take on America.

Both books sort of make their structure on their own that fits the story they’re trying to tell, and then as an author I follow along. For Cha-Ching! I was writing a lot of stories that featured gambling and Brooklyn and then I realized I was writing a novel. And after I realized that, I made deliberate plot choices and streamlined and tried to see what the bigger story was.

Ali: You tour with Sister Spit – give us a one sentence description of Sister Spit and what it’s all about. What’s the most memorable experience you’ve had while touring with them? Like, the thing that even if the Men In Black used that flashy-thing on you you’d still remember.

I never saw Men in Black but Sister Spit is a group of traveling queer-centric established and emerging writers and performers. It’s wonderful to be able to meet people all over the country and Canada who’ve read your work. It’s also so great to be able to bring great queer writing and performance to towns who don’t always have a lot of access to that kind of thing.

photo by Amos Mac

C: When you were writing The Beautifully Worthless, did you find that the poetry or prose (the letters to Lamby and Peter, for example) helped you to build the story more? What were the challenges of limiting yourself to only poems and letters?

Yeah. The letters really serve as the links to make the poems hold together as a narrative. I don’t know if I felt limited in that structure– in some ways writing a book with so many hybrid pieces allows more freedom. Like if all of a sudden you want to put a list in you could.

A: In your City Lights interview, you and Jolene talked about the lack of female road narratives. You argued that there doesn’t seem to be a lack of people writing them, but rather a lack of people publishing them due to sexism, but that you weren’t going to rant about sexism on that particular podcast. As a writer of fiction centering around queer women and their experience, I’d rather like to hear that rant on sexism.

Oh Jeez. I can’t tell you anything you don’t know. We know that women’s stories are devalued in this society. That our work is often looked at in this “emotional” way that can be very dismissive. Or it’s marketed to other women in this other horrible demeaning way. Authentic queer women’s stories are just so rarely published in this country and if they are, then they’re on these tiny presses that don’t have a lot of support with publicity, distribution, getting reviews, etc. I think that our illnesses as a country: racism, sexism, homophobia, greed– are directly mirrored in the publishing industry in this country. Look at what is in an airport bookstore. Thank God for small presses and the work that they do.

C: I requested a review copy of The Beautifully Worthless because On the Road always intrigued me as a road narrative, and because of its almost singular role as a road narrative, and your book was said to be a queer women’s experience of the same kind. I’ve always hated the lack of female-driven road narratives myself. Which would you recommend?

I love Cruddy by Lynda Barry. Descent of Alette by Alice Notley. And Claudia Rankine’s, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely — which isn’t directly a road narrative but the way that the consciousness moves makes me experience it in a similar way.

C: When traveling, which songs should we all be listening to? Which sounds best with the open road in the window? Which sound best when you’re sitting near the wing on the plane? Which are best listened to in bus stations?

I feel my musical knowledge stopped in 1994. I wish people would mail me CDs and keep me up to speed. I did make a playlist for Cha-Ching! for Largehearted Boy’s blog.

Here are some more: Open Road: Anything Neko Case, Loretta Lynn, George Jones or Lucinda Williams Wing of the Plane: my extreme flight phobia would maybe say a Pema Chodron audiobook Bus Stations: I hate bus stations. Maybe some live stream of a baseball game.

A: I have to ask: what was the inspiration for Little Critter Hunting, the pest control book that Theo checks out of the library? Does that book actually exist? You write about unwanted house guests like only a New Yorker could. How much was research and how much of it was just city-living experience? (I witnessed a maintenance worker carry a dead rat by its tail out of a basement on St. James Place the other day and thought I was going to die, so I have a lot of critter feelings right now).

Little Critter Hunting is not a real book. I made it up. But I do know a lot about living in apartments with pests. It’s so awful. The roaches are somehow worse than the mice. I can barely think about it. That terrible feeling of no matter how clean you are, you can’t get rid of them.

A: How has it been to find publishing opportunities and audience when you are writing from a point of view that is not traditionally seen as “universal” or “cannon?” For other queer women creating art, can you talk about the importance of creating your own path and set of opportunities and how you’ve accomplished that in your career? Any pro-tips?

One good thing about being a marginalized writer is that you have a community of other marginalized writers that try to help each other. I’ve been very lucky to get the support of my peers. Michelle Tea has been an enormous ally to my writing career. All of my published works have been through these kind of personal relationships. I would say to others, make your work. Make the work you want to make. Not what you think someone wants to publish. Be authentic to your own voice. And hopefully you’ll find your audience. I’ve been writing and publishing for over twenty years! I continue to do so because it fulfills me. Not because I have any hope of being rich or famous. It’s hard sometimes. But I’m so grateful that there’s something I want to do with my time. That I have some kind of inspiration that makes my life meaningful. The first step is always making the work. Being in community to other writers and artists. I love that about the queer community. It’s very important to continue being generous to other writers and help as many voices be heard as possible.

A: In both of your books you write about adopted dogs. I hear you have one. Could you send pictures? Lots of them? We’ll send you pictures of our adopted animals – Carmen has the very cutest dog in all the land and I have a demon-like black cat who is absolutely my child. Can you tell us a little about your dog?

Well, for sixteen years I had my beloved Dalmatian, Rorschach. She is the dog that is in The Beautifully Worthless. She was insane. She bit many girlfriends, and could not be trusted around other dogs. But she was very excellent as well. We traveled across America so many times together. She was like a person sitting in the seat next to me.

Flaca is my current dog. She is around two. I brought her home from the Mayan Riviera where I help run the RADAR Lab, the first free queer writers’ retreat in existence, that I helped start with Michelle Tea. Rorschach had passed away, and I tried to foster a few other Dalmatians who proved too crazy. So then I met Flaca a few days before my 40th birthday. She looked just like a deer! I couldn’t say no. But she is a very high-maintainance dog. She is part wild. They call them village dogs. So having her in a one-bedroom apartment in the Mission in San Francisco is sometimes challenging. Many times, I’ve thought I wouldn’t be able to keep her. When they spay dogs sometimes they tattoo an ex on their belly. Flaca, has a turquoise ex tattooed on her belly. I got the same ex tattooed over my appendectomy scar. So that’s kind of it. We’re together forever now!

A: What is the one question you wish you’d be asked during interviews? Could you give us the answer to that question?

I never have any expectations of interview questions, but once during a Q&A at a bookstore reading someone asked, “What special power do you wish you had?” And I thought about it, and I said, “I wish that I could understand animals when they speak and that they could understand me.”

Idol Worship: The Women of Woodstock

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week I’m learning to fly with Amelia Earhart.

Header by Rory Midhani

This week marks the 44th anniversary of Woodstock, the music festival that changed the world. Billed as “3 days of peace and love,” it was marked by rain, lots of naked people doing what was at the time a legal hallucinogenic known as LSD, mud wrassling, and some of the defining bands of the psychedelic hippie era coming together to rock out, make out, and shape history.

I was raised by a hippie-would-have-been mom born too late to protest in the streets during the late sixties and early seventies. (Don’t fret – she did indeed come of age later in the latter decade and become a self-labeled “Disco Queen.”) My mom was in middle school when Vietnam was being broadcast on television; growing up, she would constantly recount a story of hippies marching past her school in protest of the illegal war. She wanted to march with them, but she couldn’t. So instead, she marched around the schoolyard repeating their slogans.

By the time I’d reached ten, I was obsessed with the hippie counterculture: how it looked, what it did, and especially how it sounded. My mother had suffered from having watched flower children from afar with a longing heart; as I became more interested in the history of the period I suffered from having never seen them at all.

But even worse, I was forced to live with the knowledge that I would never, ever, ever be able to go to the Woodstock Music & Art Fair.

The Woodstock Music & Art Fair, or Woodstock Festival, took place on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York from August 15 to 18 in 1969. The 600-acre plot of land was not the first or ideal location for the festival, and as the day drew nearer and shit hit the fan, organizers announced it was free and watched as a million people began approaching in their cars. Bumper-to-bumper traffic built up around the space. Organizers had expected a turnout of 50,000, and they were still in debt after money poured in for the video footage of performances.

Woodstock intrigued me, if only because it was the music, the spirit, and the people that defined the hippie counterculture colliding in one completely perfect place. I would look through books and image archives in awe of the girls in the mud and the crowds and the grass listening to music people would still miss forty years later. They embodied everything I wanted to be: revolutionary, uniquely beautiful, full of wonder and adventure, and utterly fearless. The obsession deepened: I started to read firsthand accounts of Woodstock online over and over and over. I downloaded what live audio of the performances I could find. I read books and watched documentaries. Ultimately, I regretted not being born in a different time or place, or having the ability to really feel what it was like to be alive during a time of such magnificent turbulence, progress, and partying. I wanted to know what that experience was like for those young people in long lines of cars on a country road, and it broke my heart that I never would.

Although I’ve since come to find a place in this modern world where I belong, my hippie-era values are still with me: I am totally and completely anti-war. I do my best to support the equality and liberation of all people. I love topless girls laying in the grass. I speak loudly about issues that matter to me. I love flowers.

And I still love the music.

By Ric Manning CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

32 acts in total performed at Woodstock, though many concerts were interrupted by rain and subsequent technical difficulties. Some performances were not photographed or filmed because of artist contracts. And most performances were dominated by men. Despite the new ideals of gender parity that emerged out of the late sixties and early seventies, the music of the era was distinctly male-fronted, from Crosby and Stills to Nash and Young. Even now, the acts that define the generation are often those with a majority male influence or no female members at all: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and John Lennon, Joe Cocker, The Grateful Dead, the Who. Men simply outnumbered women on the psychedelic scene, and Woodstock was no exception – only 5 acts included a female artist, and only three of those female artists were solo acts. (Joni Mitchell and Lighthouse, a huge band which included female members, both declined.)

The women at Woodstock were rarely on stage – but the ones who were played a huge role in shaping musical genres and a new generation.

The Women of Woodstock

(In order of performance)

Melanie Safka

Melanie Safka launched a 40-year career at Woodstock.

…at Woodstock, where as a New York kid barely known outside of the coffeehouse circuit in Greenwich Village, she sang her song “Beautiful People” and inspired the first panorama of candles and cigarette lighters ever raised at a concert event. That, in turn, moved the young singer to write “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain”), which sold more than one million copies in 1970 and prompted Billboard, Cashbox, Melody Maker, Record World, and Bravo to anoint her as female vocalist of the year. Her single “Brand New Key,” an infectious romp about freedom and roller skates, topped the charts in 1971.

Safka played seven songs on the first day of Woodstock, including the timeless “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Here’s some footage of her playing it at a years later performance in the same small town of Bethel.

Joan Baez

Joan Baez has been a well-known fixture in folk music since the dawn of time – or, more accurately, 1959, when her performance at the Newport Folk Festival rocked the world ’round and ’round. Because of her Mexican ancestry, she suffered discrimination and was often called slurs during her childhood, prompting her to become a civil rights and nonviolence activist who found herself behind bars more than once. Although her music was always vaguely political, in the ’60s she moved away from historical songs and began tackling current issues.

Baez performed at Woodstock on the first day. She was 6 months pregnant and sang 14 songs beginning at 12:55 AM, including “We Shall Overcome” and “I Shall Be Released.”

I do believe

We shall overcome, some day…

We’ll walk hand in hand, some day…

We shall live in peace, some day…

We shall all be free, some day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt-907OpVFk

Janis Joplin

We all know I love Janis Joplin, and ultimately I am glad she was at Woodstock because I believe she deserves to be as iconized as possible. With her long hair down and blowing in the wind, she performed 10 songs with the Kozmik Blues Band. Most of those were my own personal favorites, like “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder),” “Piece of My Heart,” and “Summertime.” She performed from 2 AM to 3:30 AM.

Janis’ raspy voice was spotlighted on Day 2. This footage captures her performances of “Try,” “Can Turn You Loose,” “Work Me Lord,” and “Ball and Chain.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ4hBsKxpiE

Sly & The Family Stone

Sly & The Family Stone changed rock ‘n roll with “Dance to the Music.” Performing what they describe as “dazzling fusion of psychedelic rock, soul, gospel, jazz, and Latin flavors,” they popularized funk music with a lineup of men and women bringing vibrance to the masses.

The group played at 3:30 AM – and until 4:20 – and performed 9 songs, including “I Want To Take You Higher.”

Jefferson Airplane

I fucking love Jefferson Airplane, and especially their badass and damn sexy female vocalist Grace Slick.

Slick joined the band in 1966 (they formed in ’65). With her as lead singer, the band was inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, culminating a career in which they shared stages with the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, Janis Joplin, and Steve Miller. Slick is now a painter who still enjoys making artistic references to Alice in Wonderland.

Jefferson Airplane ended Day 2’s performances at 9:40 AM the next day, closing up from an 8 AM set for the afternoon. They performed 13 songs including “Somebody To Love,” “Volunteers,” and “White Rabbit,” but not “Embryonic Journey” or “Today,” which is sad.

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all

Idol Worship: Every State Needs A Wendy Davis

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week I’m remaining inspired by Wendy Davis.

Header by Rosa Middleton

Wendy Davis made history last month when she filibustered a dangerous piece of legislation in the Texas Senate for 11 hours.

Davis, who read stories out loud that she’d collected via social media until and despite needing a brace later on in the process to remain standing, was trying to stop the legislature from passing SB5, an omnibus abortion bill that would have closed all but 5 of Texas’ abortion clinics. Davis succeeded, although Governor Rick Perry eventually “won the war” by calling a second special legislative session to push the bill forward in which it passed.

Davis, despite the final outcome, rose to political superstardom. She had a hashtag on Twitter, a column in CNN, talks of a gubernortorial run in the state. Her pink shoes became the stuff of legends. Wendy Davis was living, breathing proof of why you don’t mess with Texas. But it wasn’t her first self-sacrificing filibuster, and she was already well on the way to political superstardom before she put on that back brace.

Born in Rhode Island and moved to Texas at 11, Wendy Davis started from the bottom – rock bottom. She was the child of a sixth-grade educated single mom with three other children, who worked at an ice cream shop to make ends meet. By the time she was 14, she was working to help support her family; by 19 she was a poor single mother herself living in a trailer park.

Davis ended up in a two-year paralegal program when a coworker left a brochure on her desk; eventually she transferred to a four-year program at Texas Christian University. She graduated top of her class with a BA in English, and went on the graduate with honors from Harvard Law. Davis isn’t just a politician of convenience – she works to right the societal wrongs she suffered through, witnessed, and recognizes as interconnected to those injustices. She was elected to the Fort Worth City Council five consecutive times before defeating a Republican for seat as state Senator in 2008. And on June 26, 2013, she became a national political player.

Davis wrote of her filibuster:

I stood up and began talking on the floor of the Texas State Senate not long ago because I hoped the Republicans in power would listen to how their latest cruel health care proposal would hurt the women of Texas…Real Texans don’t want any woman to die of cancer because she can’t get decent health care or medical advice. Real Texans don’t want any woman to lose control of her life because she can’t get birth control…

The “people’s filibuster” that put a temporary stop on the misguided bill that powerful Republicans are still intent on ramming through will long be remembered as the moment when regular Texans — real Texans — stood up and said “enough” to the self-interested politicians who have run our state for too long.

The truth is, Texas is not the only state. Laws like the one Davis put her well-being on the line to defeat are being planted and passed across the nation: draconian bills which defy the Supreme Court and our constitution, openly target abortion providers, and shut down access to preventative and affordable medical care for women across entire states. In North Carolina, abortion provisions that would close all but one clinic were signed into law by a governor who campaigned on the promise not to pass abortion legislation that further restricted the procedure; the provisions were hidden in sharia law and motorcycle safety laws. In Ohio, a pro-life governor surrounded only by men signed restrictions into law that left the state with 8 clinics.

In every state, there has been an outpouring. In every state, there have been women and men, children and families, the young and the old, people of all races and ethnicities and sexualities and gender identities coming forth to protest, to scream, to cause a hot fucking mess in the name of everything they love: liberation, freedom, autonomy, respect. In every state, there has been a Wendy Davis – a superstar Senator, or Representative, or city councilwoman waiting to rise to demand order, to question apathy.

Even when these pieces of legislation pass, even when we wonder how it’s possible to win when the odds seem so stacked, we learn so much when we watch ourselves stand up for each other, when we hear our stories in someone else’s stories, when we no longer feel like we’re the only people concerned about this shit in this god damn place. It’s one of the reasons I got involved in activism – the breathtaking, exhilarating moment when you stop feeling alone, when you realize in standing up you have grown ten feet and ten years all at once. Watching Democracy take place in front of your eyes is sometimes absolutely beautiful, though most times this broken system is more bittersweet. There is nothing not rewarding about winning something for everyone. There is nothing not amazing about being able to do that with your voice.

Abortion has become a national issue, with some predicting it will hit the Supreme Court for the 2016 elections and polls showing American views shifting on the issue as voters in individual states make it an issue of priority in their local elections. It feels like we’ve been doing this forever, but we’re just getting started.

Every state needs a Wendy Davis. Every person has a story. And when you stand tall to share it, you never know what might happen.

Idol Worship: bell hooks Was Right

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week I’m learning to fly with Amelia Earhart.

Header by Rory Midhani

I fell asleep Saturday night around 10p.m., probably only a couple of minutes before the tweets started cascading and the noises started being made outside. I woke up at 3:30a.m. to an email from Rachel: “this feels like the least fun or okay day in the world.” I immediately googled “Trayvon Martin.” Then I put my head in my hands and cried. I immediately went to where people might be, where someone might be who could talk to me until everything ceased to make me feel sick: the Internet. I noticed a particular bell hooks quote blowing up on Tumblr:

White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action. Mass media then brings us the news of this in a newspeak manner that sounds almost jocular and celebratory, as though no tragedy has happened, as though the sacrifice of a young life was necessary to uphold property values and white patriarchal honor. Viewers are encouraged to feel sympathy for the white male home owner who made a mistake. The fact that this mistake led to the violent death of an innocent young man does not register; the narrative is worded in a manner that encourages viewers to identify with the one who made the mistake by doing what we are led to feel we might all do to “protect our property at all costs from any sense of perceived threat.

The entire Internet was eating this quote up, letting it fall from their mouths in big pieces that covered the table. Many of them didn’t realize, however, that the quote appears in the book All About Love: New Visions, which bell hooks published twelve years ago in 2001.

There’s a question I can’t shake: why is it still true?

via babazula

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952, in Kentucky. She was one of seven – with five sisters and one brother – being raised by a custodian father and a stay-at-home mom. She attended segregated schools, but eventually suffered through a shocking integration; all along, she remained a prolific reader and writer who was deeply moved by women’s leadership in spiritual movements.

Watkins came to adopt “bell hooks” as a pseudonym in honor of her grandmother in 1978, when she published her first book: And There We Wept. She chose not to capitalize the name in order to differentiate between the two women and remove the focus of her work from her own narrative. Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism was published in 1981, and would serve to introduce bell hooks to the burgeoning community of feminist theorists and writers as a post-colonial, post-modern mind grappling with issues of race, gender and sex.

bell hooks’ inspirations in her work – which now spans over 30 books – includes Sojourner Truth, Paulo Freire, Gustavo Guitierrez, Erich Fromm, Lorraine Hansberry, Thicht Nhat Hanh, James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

via Denison

As a cultural critic and destructor of the patriarchy, bell hooks’ work often linked issues of sexism and racism, focusing on the intersections of oppression long before the concept was commonplace in the movement for women’s liberation. By stressing that the feminist movement needed to include the broad experiences of black women – and by expanding the scope of understanding patriarchy to include how it affects men of color as well – she has been able to write with clarity on the importance of community-building, solidarity, and social politics. Recently, her work has focused on how loving communities can come to be and how they can overcome hatred and inequalities. bell hooks explained in All About Love:

When love is present the desire to dominate and exercise power cannot rule the day. All the great social movements for freedom and justice in our society have promoted a love ethic. Concern for the collective good of our nation, city or neighbor rooted in the values of love makes us all seek to nurture and protect that good. If all public policy was created in the spirit of love, we would not have to worry about unemployment, homelessness, schools failing to teach children, or addiction.

Although bell hooks has been writing and working in feminism for decades, her concept of an inclusive, diverse, non-patriarchal world that welcomes people of all races, ethnicities, desires and experiences has yet to come to fruition. She continues to play an important role in feminist theory and politics, and helped to shape the modern discourses around building a more inclusive and whole movement. Because of scholars like bell hooks, concepts of race and class have become interwoven with feminist activism and inextricable from its ultimate goals; because of that defining growth in the movement it has ultimately come to liberate more people. Recognizing internal and overlapping forms of discrimination, and looking for them within ourselves and then among our external world, is now a commonplace part of being a feminist thinker. Sympathizing with the contrasting experiences of oppressed communities and recognizing the systemic inequities in our power systems is no longer a second thought in this movement.

bell hooks’ feminism is, in many ways, my feminism: intersectional and self-aware. I like to think that for five years I have been very much a part of that bringing that concept alive in my own life and in the larger movement, and have put good effort into working to make it happen. But the Trayvon Martin ruling broke my heart. What makes us so full of contempt, so scared of one another, so unwilling to be whole and human and compassionate and loving? And how can those of us invested in social justice merely “keep going,” despite the frustrations of watching an entire culture oppose the idea that we all hold common a singular human experience?

After the Trayvon Martin ruling it was hard not to feel hopeless or to wonder what it was that anything I’d done in my short time as an activist had really accomplished – and what doing it even longer would actually get done. Was I changing anyone’s life, or merely my own world- and self-view? Is it really possible to change lives, or the world, or anything? I’ve devoted my life to this movement, but I admittedly didn’t realize when I began that journey in college that holding my fellow Americans accountable for racism, sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, cissexism and other forms of discrimination would be this difficult. (I never, in my life, could have imagined the challenge of convincing people these issues were present problems for an overwhelming number of Americans as well.)

I know I wasn’t, am not, alone in feeling this way. High-profile cases that highlight America’s ongoing challenge to become more welcoming, inclusive, and  – yes – loving of all of its people can often make activists truly aware of how uphill the battle will be. It can be hard to keep going when you can’t see the top. Sometimes I find that it’s become impossible to dream up an entirely new world; sometimes the idea of the movement succeeding seems almost like a dream and not a plan.

What made bell hooks’ quote on Tumblr more important than the rest was its age. Because aside from teaching us all an important concept of privilege in a simple, compelling way that related to the Trayvon Martin case, the quote also reinforced the idea that the racism and destructive hate we saw dominating in this case weren’t new or unique inventions in the courtroom. It reminded us of the history and legacy of racism this country still clings to, the impact it’s had on lives throughout generations and eras in our own development as a nation. And above all, it reminds us how lasting and important our work is, and must be, to stop that ugly history. The fight is not over, and neither is the dream. Activism is not instant and neither is social and cultural change; we have to be prepared to push forward even when we can’t see in front of us, even when our vision is blurred by tears and marred by anger.

This has all been done before and we have lost before, the quote whispers. And we kept going. 

Keep going.

via Irving DeJohn

And if that’s not enough to make you a deep believer, or commit you to buying the bell hooks books in your Amazon recommendations, here’s nine more bell hooks quotes that haven’t stopped ringing true yet.

+ “The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged. One group can change their lot only by changing the system; the other hopes to be rewarded within the system. Public focus on black rage, the attempt to trivialize and dismiss it, must be subverted by public discourse about the pathology of white supremacy, the madness it creates. We need to talk seriously about ending racism if we want to see an end to rage. White supremacy is frightening. It promotes mental illness and various dysfunctional behaviors on the part of whites and non-whites. It is real and present danger.” (killing rage: Ending Racism)

+ “A vision of cultural homogeneity that seeks to deflect attention away from or even excuse the oppressive, dehumanizing impact of white supremacy on the lives of black people by suggesting black people are racist too indicates that the culture remains ignorant of what racism really is and how it works. It shows that people are in denial. Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?” (killing rage: Ending Racism)

+ “It is necessary for us to remember, as we think critically about domination, that we all have the capacity to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not that power is institutionalized). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist—the potential victim within that we must rescue—otherwise we cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation.” (Feminism: A Transformational Politic)

+ “We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.” (Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism)

+ “Justice demands integrity. It’s to have a moral universe — not only know what is right or wrong but to put things in perspective, weigh things. Justice is different from violence and retribution; it requires complex accounting.”

+ “Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” (Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope)

+ “The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.” (Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism)

+ “All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like..I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to actually practice.” (Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope)

+ “We are all suffering. When black males are in pain we are all in pain.” (We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity)

Idol Worship: My Favorite Cher Songs

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week I’m basking in all things Cher because she reminds me of New Jersey, DC, and myself – no matter when I was.

Header by Rory Midhani

One of the first CD’s I ever purchased with my own money was Cher’s Living Proof in 2001. I was 11 years old. I had no inkling then that Cher would continue to be a part of my life, but I’m damn happy I got an early start on appreciating her.

Cher made headlines this weekend by performing at New York City’s star-studded Pride weekend, all of which occurred while I was getting kicked out of a bar in Brooklyn. She rolled up at 2 AM and performed her newest song, “Woman’s World.” No performance at such an event would have been complete, however, without an homage to the LGBT humans who make her status a pop icon possible:

Cher, standing below a giant neon LED signature of her name, told the crowd. “My first gay friend was when I was 9 years old — and I said this on Twitter — but I thought gay was a code word for fun.”

She went on to thank her gay fans, saying, “I have had ups and downs in my career, and you guys have never left me. I was out, I was uncool, I was a has-been, whatever the [bleep].”

She added, “You guys have always been there . . . You’ve kept me in sequins.”

Cher’s come a long way as a gay advocate and activist, as well as a gay icon. Her biggest learning experience when it comes to navigating LGBT issues has obviously been her relationship with Chaz, her trans* son. When Chaz initially came out as a lesbian, Cher admitted to struggling with the news – but come hell or high water, she was determined to work through her fucked-up internal script and be a supporting and loving parent. Now, her son is out and proud and she is outspoken and loud about the inequalities he has been facing for years as an LGBT person on this planet we call Earth.

Before the personal became political, however, Cher had already been cemented a gay icon. Gay men have always loved her, and let’s face it –  she’s fucking fabulous. Costume changes, hair changes, theatrics and dramatics, an acting career on the side, longevity and songs about perseverance made it hard for any queers to stray from her side. Cher has a Wikipedia page dedicated only to her role as a gay icon. I’m not even fucking around.

Now, Cher’s status as best friend to all things queer is indisputable: she’s keynoted by PFLAG, received honors from GLAAD and the Advocate, and carries the title of “the number one greatest thing about being gay.” Word.

Personally, Cher played a major part in my own coming out – but not in the same way as, say, Madonna or the way Madonna looks rubbing sand on her body. None of Cher’s songs ever made me “realize I was gay,” but they did make me feel normal; Cher’s lyrics about love have always been inherently assigned to the LGBT community out of mere association and her songs have long been meant to appeal to troves of gay human beings, and whenever I needed a vocabulary they were there to help with finding words. When I was straight and couldn’t relate to songs about wanting to be with men, and didn’t know why, I found solace in her songs about being independent and strong and a woman, and that being enough. When I hear her on the radio I remember my mother, my friends, pride parades, summer camp, shitty 80’s movies I watched reruns of on TV. Cher’s always been a part of my life. She’s always liked me no matter who the fuck I was in the morning.

Cher’s role as Mother To All Queers is good enough reason for every single human being reading this article to sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen to some goddamn pop music. So let’s do that.

“Believe”

I loved Cher as a kid because “Believe” was all over the radio and that song was my mom’s fucking jam. Chalk it up to her single mom status, but “Believe” was right up there with “You Oughta Know” and “Torn” as one of the songs my mom would raise the volume for and sing along to on our road trips to restaurants and shopping centers in Nowherseville, New Jersey. I remember being really struck by Cher’s voice because it was deep. I always liked women who had deep voices because I could really sound like them when I belted out their words in my mom’s Volkswagon Jetta.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p0chD8U8fA

“Song for the Lonely”

Amanda and I once listened to this song together by accident and it was the first time someone else I knew really, genuinely, liked Cher. I didn’t feel weird anymore. I recommend that everyone find someone else who likes Cher. Keep them in your life.

“If I Could Turn Back Time”

I was once watching a documentary or something on E!, probably, about Cher, and this song stayed in my head for years until I learned how to actually obtain music on the Internet. It’s very strangely wise and the music is killer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em9poFodnWg

“Strong Enough”

When I was a teenage feminist, “Strong Enough” was my anthem. Plus, my mom really likes disco and therefore I do, too, and this particular song is just very disco.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlDBUMX2DiY

“The Shoop Shoop Song”

Every single time I listen to this I’m just as interested in finding out how you know if he loves you so.

“I Got You Babe”

I think this is the sweetest love song of all time.

Idol Worship: What I’ve Learned From Amelia Earhart

Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks; women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. This week I’m learning to fly with Amelia Earhart.

Header by Rory Midhani

I always wished they would teach us more about Amelia Earhart when I was in elementary school.

Earhart, a record-breaking American pilot, always seemed like an adventurer, a heroine, and a total badass when we studied her, however briefly. For the most part, we were instructed always to focus on her mystery and not her story – her disappearance, and not her visibility. When I was little, I admired Earhart for her bomber jackets, her fearless promises, her constant seeking out of new heights and new achievements. I loved that she died for what was her art. I loved that she got looked for, that people had been waiting and watching. In a sea of boring old ladies and distant historical narratives of women I couldn’t relate to, Earhart stood out as full of youth and vibrance and energy and guts. She seemed brave instead of ladylike, and when I was little I was the furthest thing from a lady. Also, she was pretty much the most attractive and exciting woman we’d ever studied.

I was, to put it lightly, in love. I even bought my own bomber jacket before I turned 14.

With the recent discovery of what might be Earhart’s plane, however, coupled with the resurgence of her popularity as an American icon around 2009 with the release of Amelia, many of her mysteries are close to being solved. And my relationship with someone I’ve always consider an inspiration has changed.

Amelia Earhart took her first flying lesson on January 3, 1921. She bought a plane six months later. Her career came as a natural progression from her teenage years as a “tomboy,” in which she sought aventure and fearlessly followed the lives of women who were breaking out of their own histories. Her first plane was a yellow hand-me-down named “Canary.” It was seven years later, in 1928, that Earhart’s life became the planes she’d lusted over since before she turned twenty; it was that year that book publisher and promoter George P. Putnam and others coordinated a trip around the Atlantic and asked her to take the honor of completing it.

Earhart jumped at the opportunity, having begun breaking records years earlier for women in flight. Three women had died crossing the Atlantic, but she landed safely in Wales on June 17, 1928.

London.

Film interview with American Aviator Amelia Earhart after becoming first woman to fly the Atlantic.

Q: “Were you very excited when you saw the land?”

A: “I wasn’t exactly excited, because I had expected it momentarily for about an hour. I was very glad to see it however.”

Q: “Who was the first person you saw?”

A: “The owner of the land came out. I think he was surprised to find an airplane in his front yard.”

Q: “What are you immediate plans, Miss Earhart?”

A: “Well I hope to go to Rome to the Conference of Trans Atlantic fliers, in a few days.”

Q: “And then shall you be thinking about going home?”

A: “Yes, its time for me to go home then.”

Her status as an American icon was cemented then, as she continued to raise the stakes on her own journeys in an effort to raise her profile. After her initial record-making flight, she took up a relationship with Putnam, who became her partner in the years to come in what Earhart called a relationship of “dual control.” His spirit as a promoter and her intuitive role as a risk-taker proved to spark a chemistry that made history over and over again, with the couple arranging for Earhart to become the first women to fly solo and second human to fly solo across the Atlantic less than four years later. Her journey didn’t end an initial success, but it created even more buzz around Earhart as the Great Depression began to squash America’s spirits. Earhart represented a freedom and lust for life that didn’t get to radiate any longer to the average American family.

Strong north winds, icy conditions and mechanical problems plagued the flight and forced her to land in a pasture near Londonderry, Ireland. “After scaring most of the cows in the neighborhood,” she said, “I pulled up in a farmer’s back yard.” As word of her flight spread, the media surrounded her, both overseas and in the United States. President Herbert Hoover presented Earhart with a gold medal from the National Geographic Society. Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross-the first ever given to a woman. At the ceremony, Vice President Charles Curtis praised her courage, saying she displayed “heroic courage and skill as a navigator at the risk of her life.” Earhart felt the flight proved that men and women were equal in “jobs requiring intelligence, coordination, speed, coolness and willpower.”

Earhart was a sensation worldwide by then, bridging masculine and feminine and making the entire world fall in love with her. She relied heavily on the lecture circuit to finance what PBS described as a “lavish” lifestyle, and spoke out for causes in order to turn her fame into a stronger soapbox. According to their documentary on the American legend, “she preached pacifism to the Daughters of the American Revolution. She spoke out on behalf of commercial aviation, even enlisting her good friend Eleanor Roosevelt in the effort. And everywhere she went, [she] crusaded for women.”

In 1936, Earhart announced plans for a flight that would prove, if successful, to be the most ambitious in history: a trip around the world where she followed the Equator. “I think there was a certain amount of insecurity in her and a determination to prove herself to herself and to the world,” Putnam’s granddaughter told PBS. “And I think she used flying to accomplish that, but I don’t think she was ever really satisfied. I don’t think there was ever a flight that made her feel like she had done everything she needed to be for herself.” Earhart told others she felt she had one more flight “left in her,” and that that one was it.

And so she left, against all recommendations and perhaps her own instincts. Craving to remain in the spotlight, to continue impressing the masses, and to sustain her own lifestyle and public life, Earhart took up the challenge despite clear risks inherent in her own plan. She had failed to find someone for her crew who knew how to operate a new-fangled radio. Her navigator was a drunk. She was exhausted, and perhaps even slightly out of her own mind. Her marriage, by this point, was centered around her own self-promotion.

She crashed on the runway the first time she attempted to begin the journey, in 1937. Putnam wrote her a letter:

“We both recognize the hazards, and I love you dearly. I don’t want you to run risks and I don’t want to run the risk of perhaps having to go on without you. That makes me terribly sorry for myself, entirely disregarding your end of it. But gosh, once this is out of your hair, what a very happy, interesting time we can have. We can have it, too, should you for any reason decide to quit.”

June 1, 1937, she took off again, having re-mapped her route and raised funds to repair her plane, The Electra. She left behind her good-luck charm.

Earhart made it through three parts of the four-piece journey in chunks and successfully, landing in New Guinea on July 2, 1937. From there, she was meant to take off and complete her journey on Howland Island. She never made it there.

Standing off Howland Island was the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, waiting to provide radio assistance, but there had been a serious lack of communication between Earhart, G.P. and the Coast Guard about which frequency she should use to talk to the ship. In the end, they could hear her, but she could never hear them. The Itasca logs indicate that Amelia and Noonan came very close to Howland Island on the morning of July 2nd, but could not find it.

At 7:42, she radioed, “We must be on you, but cannot see you, but gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio.” Minutes later, another report: “Calling Itasca. We are circling, but cannot hear you.” At 8:43, Amelia’s voice, shrill and breathless — “We are on the line at 157,337. We will repeat message. We will repeat. We are running on line north and south.

The Coast Guard continued to listen and to transmit on every possible frequency, but her voice was not heard again. Amelia Earhart never arrived at Howland Island where a cabin and a bed had been prepared for her.

Growing up, Earhart had been posited  to me as a stubborn feminist who sought out often insane records and achievements for, seemingly, the hell of it. To see her as someone who set records and broke records is certainly easy: she was the first women to rise to 14,000 feet, the first to rise to 18,415 feet, the first to cross the Atlantic, the record-setter for women’s speed records, the first to fly nonstop coast-to-coast, a pilot who broke her own speed records over and over again, the first person to solo from Honolulu to Oakland, California, the first to solo from LA to Mexico City, the first to fly solo from Mexico City to Newark, the first person to fly from the Red Sea to India. And on top of it all, she was other things – an author, a public speaker, an activist, a committed and devoted member of the aviation community and community leadership.

But Earhart was ultimately human. She watched her own marriage begin to dissolve. She thirsted for fame. She was frustrated by her own era, and by her experiences as one of the first woman in aviation. Her friends and family asked her not to take her final journey and she didn’t listen. She was human and she made mistakes, and she felt rushed but excited, terrified but impossibly determined. If feminism was about choices, about individuality, about freedom – then Earhart stands to be living proof that it worked. Headstrong and unashamed, she found a calling and followed it into oblivion. She let it consume her. And that was, really, what she lived for.

As the pieces begin to come together in Earhart’s story, almost eighty years after the fervent searches for her plane, her navigator, and herself commissioned by the government and her family, I don’t want us to lose sight of what we learned from her mystery: that Amelia Earhart was sinkable only by fate. That nothing stopped her but circumstance. That she pushed until she couldn’t push anymore to make it. That we can learn from that, man or woman. “Please know I am quite aware of the hazards,” she wrote to Putnam before her last flight.

“I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”