Moon Memo: Sylvia and Marsha and Misha
Good morning from Portland, Oregon, where I'm doing ok. Cancer sucks (a lover is going through treatments. It’s hard). Work is what it is. Wrestling this weekend. I'm getting ready to travel. This is going to be a short one.
This week I put a picture of Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera up on my door at work. Its a classic one: the two girls together, on the street, right before pride, looking beautiful and glamorous. Marsha will be dead within 10 years. Sylvia will be homeless, paying other girls' rent with her body. This is what Pride looks like. Throw bricks.
They would have hated me. They would have seen a fat rich white girl. Fighting for visibility and acceptance. They would see a sellout. And that's ok. Pay them no mind.
Downloaded the entirety of wikipedia onto my computer this week. I've been wanting to do that for a while. Be able to unplug from the internet, and still be able to search the entirety of human knowledge. Why? Because sometimes I feel stuck when I'm writing, and a random page from wikipedia helps. For example, a quick run through Italian Transgender culture brought me to faggot, and this little nugget that I never knew:
The word Faggot was originally an abusive term towards women
I just learned this today (from Wikipedia)
The word faggot has been used in English since the late 16th century as an abusive term for women, particularly old women,[6] and reference to homosexuality may derive from this,[5][7] as female terms are often used with reference to homosexual or effeminate men (cf. nancy, sissy, queen). The application of the term to old women is possibly a shortening of the term "faggot-gatherer", applied in the 19th century to people, especially older widows, who made a meager living by gathering and selling firewood.[7] It may also derive from the sense of "something awkward to be carried" (compare the use of the word baggage as a pejorative term for old people in general).[5]
Faggot as a word of abuse for old women, which leads me to my place right now. I was assigned Faggot at Birth. This is a poem, and off I can go (it's tomorrow's poem, so I'm not going to write it now. )
Oh, I kept my job. I don't know if I told everyone. "There is no other Misha Moon," one of the directors said. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but there you go.
Current status: topless. Coffee and quick breakfast pizza. Typing on screens. Work chat open, and wikipedia, and an article about Wolfram Notebooks (an environment for computational computing) and fucking Phish on the speakers (I hate the whole idea of Phish: drugs and jams and bro culture and searching for the eternal tone, man, let's dance in a crowd maaaaan...a hold over loathing from my anti Grateful Dead days, as a teenage queer metal head/punk...but damn are they fun sometimes. Sigh...). BBEdit in two windows: Center Doc that I'm typing this in, and a satellite idea dump. Commonplace book in Obsidian to the bottom right. Notes App at upper right, where I'm dumping quotes from wikipedia about trans women in italy, which I'll mulch and gather and turn into something. It's a lot of input, but this is my happy spot: writing, gathering info, stealing time from work to write.
Because the poems are the most important thing to me. Writing the poems. Making the work. Doing what I can to prioritize that. Because this is how I stay happy. Or at least some semblance of that.
That's it. Love to you all.
Misha