Ritual Pride

As a baby queer Wednesday nights at Flannigan’s were my weekly ritual. Some weeks, we’d gather at someone’s house or apartment to pre-game and then we would make our way to the restaurant/turned club to dance the night away. Some weeks we’d start our night at Flanny's ordering bar food in the restaurant portion of the building and then when the music started blaring we’d stumble our way to the room with a stage, writhing our bodies around a pole that was structural support but we made it ours for that one night a week. Like many small college towns, Lawrence, Kansas didn’t have a dedicated LGBTQ bar at the time. And so, we found ourselves at the “Gay Night” celebration as our mid-week ritual. I suspect that the gays were relegated to Wednesday nights because in a college town a bar can make money any day of the week given the right marketing. We obviously weren’t going to get a prime weekend spot, and even Thursday, the weekend-eve, would mean too much queer for the patrons whose money mattered more. Folks would get kicked out all the time from fights that would break out, and I always wondered as security continued to increase their presence if that was necessary or if the same level of policing happened on the non-queer nights too. I was never at Flannigan’s unless it was Gay Night. But, I was at Flannigan’s religiously my senior year of college. Many of us accepted the way the owners targeted the community for economic pandering purposes in exchange for the opportunity to dance, make-out, and make a space ours for that fleeting weeknight. It was our home in so many ways.

Lawrence clubs were known in the early 2000s to kick out queer folks who were “making scenes” around town, and so we had our special places that accommodated queer activity better than others. Thursdays we often found ourselves gathered at Henry’s. And Saturday nights one might make their way to the Replay for more debauchery or The Bourgeois Pig for a quiet, upscale date with someone special. Not all queer folk of course, my first girlfriend wasn’t a big fan of the clubs. I would go find her where she liked to spend most of her nights, at Amy’s cafe where she’d be drinking coffee into the wee hours, reading books as she balanced a cigarette in-between her fingers, turning pages as she suggested music for the coffeeshop playlist that made her feel cool. The Sundays cover of Wild Horses would be wafting out with the smells of coffee grounds, while I was moving to Britney Spears’ Toxic down at Flanny’s. Two queer landscapes connected by the love of finding oneself in music. Both within the bounds of a small college town. Both filled with queer spirits who were intent on making a scene one way or another.

Flanny’s was where I learned I loved making out on the dance floor. It's where I grew crushes on townies from Topeka who were clearly unavailable. But, there is something so delicious being surrounded by people who are also dejected by their family members, or who can only find their true freedom on the dance floor. At Flanny’s when the lights were pulsing and the remixes were bouncing off the walls you could absolutely be who you wanted to be, not the version of you that sometimes creeped atop you like a mask, the you who had to pretend to be someone not quite yourself with your roommate, or your classmates, or your family. It was the place where we became family to each other. In 2016 following the worst mass shooting in US history that took place at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando so many writers and artists mourned the loss of life that took place in our safe(r) space. The intersection of queer and Latinx identities meeting in the space of LGBTQ dance floor calls to mind the ways Latinx family gatherings often include dancing in living rooms, on patios, wherever the music can play and the bodies can crowd. Given these traditions many of us have, finding that space for queer folks becomes sanctuary.

Protecting those who gather in those sacred spaces is what one might say kicked off the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City 51 years ago. I’m grateful that the narrative is shifting to ground the Black and Latinx transgender women who kicked off these riots that many in the queer community harken back to as our radical legacy. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are often credited as “throwing the first brick,” I’m excited to see Stormé DeLarverie’s name gaining more memory. There’s this excellent episode about her life on Code Switch (a replay of The Nod podcast episode They Don’t Say Our Names Enough); historians now point to the police brutality she endured as club bouncer as the true spark of the rebellions. Regardless of the specific details of the spark, police violence against the queer community is well documented and continuing. While we think about club spaces as only party sites, we all would do well to remember that LGBTQ club spaces are sacred. Further, for those of us who occupy queer racialized identities, we always recognize that at any point we may have to defend these spaces, our communities.

I live in the country now, in rural West-Central Minnesota far from the stages of my youth. The mostly gay clubs in the Twin Cities are 250 miles away. We’re also in a pandemic which means it is not safe to be in the spaces many call sancturary in large masses, sweating on each other, screaming to our favorite show tunes together, tipping drag queens with folded up money in our teeth, shaking hips to the top 40 remixes or twirling each other around easing between Salsa, Bachata, and Reggaeton on the dance floor. In “Stages,” Chapter Six of Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz writes about queer utopia as a practice of hope through examining this concept of stages through Kevin McCarty’s “representations of illuminated stages at gay bars” and independent punk clubs. Muñoz argues that McCarty’s photographs serve as a utopic possibility of hope for queer folks, in transgressing time through space these empty stages signal to me the history and memory of what has happened in these queer sites along with the magic of queer freedom possibilities. Even though, this year I’m not celebrating Pride on a dance floor with my heart beating to the rhythm of the bass and someone's tongue down my throat, I'm grateful I've had the chance because of the work of Black and Latinx queer and trans foremothers. This Pride I am reveling in the power of the riot and the reacquaintance of many who were once disconnected from the power of the possibility of radical queer revolt.

What I’m Reading

The Grand Marshall

Zami A New Spelling of My Name, A Biomythography is a genre-bending text by late the Black lesbian feminist writer Audre Lorde. As a poet, her text here reads as sometimes lyrical. The first person prose blends her life story with an ability to shape a new, queerer, more collaborative future. Zami “a carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers” becomes the underlying thread she pulls throughout the biomythography. I wanted to revisit this text after reading Alexis De Veaux’s Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde earlier this year. Biography, memoir, and now biomythography are my go-to genre of choice in these times because it’s calming to have the opportunity to see others’ lives during various times. It’s a powerful reminder that no matter the era and the manifestation of white supremacy in our modern times, people still danced, people still wrote, people still thought new ideas, people still loved, and people still made art. This is a classic that deserves a revisit every Pride season.

A New Parade Route

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha I’ve been waiting for just the perfect time to make my way through this collection of essays and this month has been it. In a context of a pandemic like nothing the world has seen for many of us alive in these times, thinking about ability and disability justice in the face of Covid-19 feels particularly timely. In this collection of essays Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha weaves together practical organizing strategies for people in need of care and models possibilities for those who can provide care for others. These groups are not mutually exclusive, and much of what Piepzna-Samarasinha provides is more of a map for folks to explore in order to do the important internal work on the issue of access for the community. The 10 Principles of Disability Justice are incredible guiding principles, and the one most salient to the ways folks are dreaming new futures in 2020 would be the Anti-Capitalist Politic. As most folks who are disabled are already resistant to the norms of oppressive capitalist systems, grounding disability justice as an important starting point for movement organizing is powerful. The book will give you a lot to think about, like much of the academic disability studies work I’ve looked at (though to be clear the author is very clear this is not an academic text), it has me thinking about my connection to work, productivity, and my own (dis)abilities in a new light. The fact that Leah is a femme of color makes the book also just such a sweet offering in these times, where love and care are necessary fuel for our revolutions.

What I’m Watching

Sometimes a person just needs to turn to their old favorites as a means to seek comfort. Cancer season has been characteristically difficult for your favorite water sign. I’ve been finding good company with a re-watch of Broad City. While the show certainly centers a particular (harmful) kind of white femininity that benefits from white supremacy, I find that Abbi and Ilana can make me laugh out loud, and that energy is something I have been desperately craving in these times even when those laughs are only offered as crumbs. There is also something so great about the way that show uses New York City as its canvas, and even though it’s over, there is plenty to continue to think about during this pandemic rewatch season. Given the projections of what might be ahead for fall, we may all be turning to our problematic faves to keep us company as Covid has impacted the ability for filming to continue for our favorite shows!

Artist Offerings

• I'm constantly looking for ways that the visual can be impactful, and in what ways this might be more powerful than words this is a great example of the power of the visual
• As a queer Chicana theorist committed to recovery projects when archives often leave out our experiences, this project at UCLA heartens me because it brings together amazing film projects at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and the LGBTQ+ family 
• Part artist offering, part creative ritual update, I've joined a small reading group of queer Chicana femmes who are engaging the work of Jillian Hernandez. We gained excitement about her work with the annoucement of her forthcoming book Aesthetics of Excess and have started working our way through her journal publications as we eagerly await the book, available on her website. Our first read which I think anyone interested in Chicanx aesthetics should look at is Beauty Marks: The Latinx Surfaces of Loving, Becoming and Mourning. 

Creative Ritual

I am happy to report I have a completely white-walled studio space ready for painting on canvases! Somehow I pulled that out, removing a wallpaper border and a couple of shelves that had probably been screwed into the wall for 15 years took tenacity, and I rose to the occasion this month. I did this while also preparing the ChicFinn Cottage to receive guests from the Twin Cities in need of a respite and getting us set up to do more of that. I received some good news that I’ve advanced to the next pool of applicants for a grant I applied for in May, it would help me make some upgrades to the ChicFinn Cottage for more hosting. I painted a landscape scene in my sketchbook, and completed a couple of sketch studies just to move my hand. The most creative I've been in the last two weeks was through making this awesome collage (pictured above) to celebrate the birthday of Luis Martin. He makes these incredible collage kits that make for an amazingly fun time, order one or many for a party here! They make for a great socially responsible, physical distancing activity you can do with friends/fam. I'm grateful I got to meet some cool artists in this gathering he organized. Besides that, I’m coming to terms that June and July are not my productive times for art making, but in this part of my creative cycle I can definitely work to prepare for when the creative muses visit.

Questions to Ponder

What are you dancing towards?
What lessons might you take from Queer Pride to inform new paradigms?
How have stages functioned for your life to prepare you for your current you?
Have you thanked a queer person today?

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 

-KCF