I’m spending a few days at my mom’s house, which also happens to be the house I grew up in. I haven’t lived here in more than 40 years, and it is a very small house, so I rarely happen upon stuff from my youth during my visits here, with one notable exception: In my bedroom, there’s a jar full of badges, or buttons, as we Americans would call them.
It will probably come as no surprise to anyone who lived through the ‘70s and ‘80s to hear that I was one of those people who always a) wore “T-shirts with things written on them,” as my college roommate, who hated such garments, always called them, and b) covered any items of clothing that didn’t come covered in words with buttons bearing right-on slogans.
The last few times I’ve been here, I pawed around at the top of the jar, but today I really dug deep, emptying the whole thing out. (I am already convinced I’ll get stuck with a rusty badge-back during the night, since I laid them all out on the bed.)
Sadly for my hopes and dreams for this newsletter, there were very few buttons commemorating great moments in lesbian history. Also, shockingly, nothing with Margaret Thatcher’s name or image. I had assumed this jar would establish my bona fides as a precocious political activist. Instead, it mostly reveals that I was a pathetic teenage nerd!
For instance, there were MULTIPLE buttons marking my keen readership of British children’s comics. We’re talking Beano, Dandy, The Beezer (The Beezer?, that one really doesn’t seem real–but Wikipedia assures me it ran from 1956-1993), Whizzer and Chips, etc. We kept our local newsagent in business (and probably gave the paper boy a permanent shoulder injury) by getting every one of them delivered every week. I did eventually graduate to Jackie, and then on to Sounds, the NME, and Melody Maker (yes, I had to have all three—and I really did read them from cover to cover), but I kept getting the comics way beyond the age where it could be considered even vaguely cool. HOWEVER, I mention this not only to embarrass myself, but because by a crazy coincidence, we ended up living in an Edinburgh apartment owned by a member of the family that publishes the Beano and the Dandy. I even met the paterfamilias when we were viewing the flat, though I didn’t know it at the time so couldn’t show off my knowledge of every regular strip in all those comics. (Probably just as well; I may well have seemed unhinged yelling, “Desperate Dan! The Bash Street Kids! Minnie the Minx!” But now at least I’ve told you all about this crazy coincidence!)
What else is in that weird jar? Well, somewhere in my teens, I got into women’s tennis. I eventually found a way to attend a ton of women’s tennis tournaments, which with years of hindsight seems one step away from miraculous—I mean, I had absolutely no money, and yet I went to tournaments all over Britain and in my first year at university attended three-quarters of the Grand Slam! (It’s a little easier to understand once I was at university, because that was back in the days when British students received a “maintenance grant,” and I got the maximum, baby!) Anyhoo. being a badge person, once I figured out who my players were, I had to get badges made bearing their likeness. This is my Rosie Casals button, created by cutting a color photo out of a magazine and sending it off to a company that advertised in the back of the NME! I eventually graduated to ball caps with my favorite players’ names on them—well, actually, the fandoms of my favorite players. It seemed weird to make them for big-name players, but my friend and I had hats that said “Russell’s Rowdies” (for JoAnne Russell, my all-time favorite player, who was an absolute mensch), “Carillo’s Cowboys” (yes, for Mary Carillo), and Forood’s Fanatics. (This was weird, really, because we weren’t all that into Lele Forood—who later spent decades as coach of the Stanford tennis team—but we couldn’t think of a cute name for the imagined fandom of our other favorite player, Sherry Acker.)
OK, this is getting worse with every paragraph. I feel my cool quotient draining with every character I type. This was a badge that you could get if you watched the ITV children’s show Magpie, which was the ITV equivalent of the BBC show Blue Peter. We didn’t watch the BBC, because it was too middle-class, so I was a Magpie girl. The theme tune was a jingle-ified version of the “1 for sorrow, 2 for joy, etc.” thingo, which is pretty much the only piece of folk wisdom I know. Every number had an associated badge that you could send in for if you qualified. (Needless to say, the hardest one to get was the one you were awarded for appearing on the show.) Being so familiar with the rhyme does come in handy, though, because every British mystery has a magpie-counting episode at some point, and the really pretty good recent show Magpie Murders was kinda-sorta organized around it.
OK, there were a few queer badges. I wish I could remember if I knew the real story behind it when I acquired this one. It’s possible I did, because I was a keen young reader of the works of Rita Mae Brown!
At last we come to a smattering of political buttons. I don’t think I attended that 1981 National Lesbian Conference—I’d surely have some kind of recollection if I had. I picked up the Carter-Mondale badge during the summer of 1979 on my first trip to the States, as part of my college course. (Of course I was an American Studies major.)
OK, so even though my buttons seem a little less rad than I remembered, THIS is the one that got more reaction than anything else. People—random strangers who espied it on my jacket—were SHOCKED AND APPALLED by this one. “Disgusting!” they yelled. Was it wrong, though? It absolutely was not!
RECOMMENDATIONS: Working on this post has put me in a weird looking backward deep into the mists of British time mood, and I know this won’t be for everyone, but the story of John Stonehouse, a Member of Parliament who a) supplied intelligence to the Czechs; b) committed business fraud on a massive scale; c) faked his own death in Miami and snuck off to Australia hoping to start over is told really well in Agent Twister, by Philip Augar and Keely Winstone. (There’s also a TV version with Matthew Macfadyen as Stonehouse, but shockingly, I haven’t watched it yet.)
LISTEN TO ME: On Working, I spoke with drag queen, author, and professor Lil Miss Hot Mess, and after the interview, Isaac Butler and I talked about how hard it is to make playfulness part of a creative process.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is https://buttondown.email/WhereAre. When my book is ready to be preordered, this is where I will tell you about that, but that won’t happen until 2024. Reply to this email to share any thoughts or ideas.
You just read issue #32 of Where Are All the Emails?. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.