Trans Man in a Van: driving toward queer resistance in south dakota.

November 2, 2023 / Ty..Bo / Leave a comment

Katrina and Wally are coming to South Dakota with me.

I probably couldn’t have told you Pierre (pronounced “peer”) was the capital of South Dakota before deciding to go to Pride there. Fort Pierre, where Pride was held, is a “suburb” of Pierre, just across the Missouri River and in a different time zone. The entire area has a population just over 15,000, making it the second-least populated state capital in the U.S., even though it’s the ninth-most populous city in South Dakota.

I was thrilled Katrina had time off and felt like accompanying me to South Dakota. It meant Wally could come, too. It’s rare I have company on these trips so I was eager to be a good host. I found a spot at the Cow Creek State Recreation Area, just twenty miles from Pierre, to camp in the night before Pride so I wouldn’t have to ask Katrina to sleep in a random parking lot with me.

I reserved what turned out to be a great campsite, solitary, at the end of a tiny peninsula, overlooking a pleasant lake. There were a lot of flies and smoke from a Canadian wildfire cast a middle-Earth like haze over the view, but we had a nice dinner and Wally played fetch under the setting, apocalyptic sun.

Wally said we didn’t have to drive this far to play fetch.

In the morning, as I was packing up the van, Katrina was throwing the ball for Wally. I came around the corner of the van to discover Katrina on the ground, holding her ankle. She had twisted it pretty bad. Wally was very concerned.

We got her in the van and started discussing options. We could drive home, about eight hours as the Cookie flies, but it would be uncomfortable and disappointing. We decided to head into Pierre for ice and ibuprofen then see how she felt in an hour. We had breakfast, then found the Pride venue only to discover the event would be held entirely indoors.

With Wally banned and Katrina injured, the best option was to find a hotel room where a Law & Order marathon in air conditioning might distract from the circumstances while I attended Pride. Nobody felt like driving home right away. After I made sure Katrina’s foot was iced and elevated and Wally was snuggled up to aid her healing, I headed back to Pierre Area Pride.

Pride was in the Event Center at Drifters Bar and Grille. It was one large room with a handful of vendors/organizations lining two walls. There were about a dozen round banquet tables staged in the middle, with a small dance floor/performance area to one side. The tables were bedecked with complimentary Queer flags and stickers, and there were flyers with QR codes to tip the Drag Queens. There was a small Drag “closet” in the corner to aid anyone feeling less than festive.

I found this jaunty tiara. It hurt my head.

Pierre Area Pride first took place in 2018 in a hotel across the river. It’s put on by a small number of volunteers who form the board for Pierre Area Center for Equality (PACE), a non-profit, also born in 2018. The group decided to do something for their community after someone’s social media inquiry about holding a Pride in town generated a number of negative online comments. Pride is still an act of resistance, especially in small towns. The organization lacks a physical location but strives to be an online support resource for the area’s LGBTQ population and tries to throw four events a year.

By this point on my tour, I could easily identify the Pride organizers in the bustling event center, even though they were not wearing matching T-shirts this time. I picked out the ones walking briskly, looking as if the entire fate of Queer history was riding on their shoulders and praying their Queers would show up on time for once in their lives. As I took in the scene, catching a contact high from everyone’s earnestness, I remember supposing our Queer legacy, at this surreal and precarious moment in history, in not insignificant ways, does depend on the devotion and organizational skills of small groups of individuals in places like this.

It’s critical to be visible in the capital city of a red state, no matter how small. For the Queer community in a small town, Pride is often the only opportunity all year to gather in a loving, supportive space and meet other community members. The organizers not only have to be brave enough to be out in a small town, but resilient enough to withstand the criticism and harassment that results from being a visible leader. Their event has to be morally uneventful or those same critics will use even the smallest controversy to prevent any future public Queer event in their town. It’s a lot of pressure.

And then I show up, adding one more time commitment, one more element of potential judgement or exposure. And they are always nice to me. I want them to know I recognize how important they are. I drive all that way just to talk to them. Every single small-town Pride organizer I’ve met has wanted me to know how special their community is and why it’s so important to affect change where they are. Fort Pierre was no exception. I was introduced around, shown to a table, and promised interviews, just as soon as they had time.

There is something broken in people who protest this.

Pierre started their Pride with a Drag Story Hour. This relatively new tradition is simultaneously a display of community tenderness and responsibility and a favorite focus of conservative condemnation. I have never witnessed a child who didn’t love Drag Queens reading them a story. I watched those Queens in South Dakota teleport Disneyland to Mid-Western children sitting on dusty laminate flooring surrounded by beige partition walls. This sinister magic is the target of legislation and armed protest nationwide.

The Queens then helped everyone dress up from the “closet” in the corner to set the mood for an all-ages Drag Show for about 40–50 attendees. After a short dance party, the family-friendly portion of Pride was over and there was a dinner break before the adult entertainment began. I was able to sit down with two of the organizers as well as eat some tasty nachos.

Sarah Kanz is a Pierre Area Pride board member. She shared with me she identified as Ace in high school, and told me she suffered from debilitating low self-esteem then. She drove to her first Pride in Sioux Falls (South Dakota’s big city) by herself after graduation. She spent a long time planning her outfit. She told me that experience, being around Queer community, changed how she felt about herself and her possibilities in life.

She came to this Pride in a fun, rainbow-striped mini-dress, donning very sparkly eye shadow. She loves Drag. She made her boyfriend watch Paris is Burning. He’s a fan now, too. She told me most people she knows in town aren’t outwardly homophobic, but you still have to be careful. A good friend of hers was gay-bashed recently at a bar.

Apparently, the river dividing Pierre from Fort Pierre, also delineates the transition from Central to Mountain Time. The bars in Fort Pierre stay open an hour later and draw a rowdy crowd. Sarah said when the state legislature is in season, it brings sex workers to town. Militias drove into town when there was a small BLM demonstration in 2020. She painted a picture for me of an incidentally important small town, animated by a frontier masculinity that is never as charming or philosophical in real life as it seemed in Road House.

Sarah then introduced me to a controversy I hadn’t realized was swirling about this year’s Pride. A small, conservative lobbying group in Rapid City, South Dakota (almost 200 miles away) had posted a video to Facebook warning Pierre area residents the gays were marketing their agenda to children again. Drifters had received harassing emails and phone calls. The local YMCA, which had donated some Y swag for Bingo prizes, lost members and were accused of forcing children in their summer programs to attend Drag Story Hour. A counter-event, a “pray-in,” was organized by two local churches, but took place in a park two days prior to Pride.

Most concerning was the potential threat of violence hanging over the event. PACE hired security. Teams were posted at the two possible entrances to the venue. Josh Penrod, PACE co-president, feels the intimidation may have kept some people away this year. Josh works for the YMCA and was the one who asked them to donate. He told me he was stepping down from the board after this Pride.

He said the YMCA was very supportive despite the pushback. His manager talked with everyone who came in to see a manager about their discomfort. Some Y members even brought their kids to Pride to show support.

Josh was born and raised in Pierre. He says the intensified political climate surrounding anti-LGBTQ legislation, especially in the small capital city, has made it even harder to be Queer there. Prior to the legislative push, Pierre had more of a “live and let live” attitude.

South Dakota’s was the first state legislature to pass a Trans “bathroom ban” for K-12 public schools way back in February, 2016. This was a couple months before North Carolina passed a similar bill and caused a national controversy. South Dakota Republican governor, at the time, Dennis Daugaard, vetoed the bill in March 2016, claiming the bill “does not address any pressing issue concerning the school districts of South Dakota.” He actually had meetings with concerned parents and Trans youth opposing the bill prior to his decision.

It’s hard to remember a political reality where a Republican governor could veto a Republican bill he found unnecessarily controlling and punitive. It’s also difficult to recall the intensity of outrage expressed by corporations, celebrities, and college sports at the North Carolina “bathroom ban”. Remember how the NCAA boycotted the state until they repealed their bill?

Probably not. It’s nearly impossible to remember what was politically possible before Trump’s election later in 2016. Prior to then, there was very little legislation seeking to curtail Queer civil rights. Same-sex marriage had just been legalized the year before.

Since then, the volume and sophistication of anti-LGBTQ bills has compounded every year. Any less extreme Republicans who may have resisted implementing this unnecessarily aggressive anti-Queer campaign are increasingly being replaced by party hard-liners who are either true believers in eradicating “transgenderism” or are devoted to the political efficacy of an “anti-woke” strategy.

Dennis Daugaard was succeeded by Kristi Noem in 2019. She’s one of those updated Michele Bachmann Republican women so popular with conservatives. They all look like maniacal realtors.

Kristi has been more than willing to champion the whole slate of anti-LGBTQ legislation. She had a bit of a hiccup in 2021 when she tried to limit the scope of a Trans “sports ban” to elementary and high schools with a partial veto. She had been worried about the corporate fallout, particularly from the NCAA. She immediately issued executive orders effectively implementing the intent of the legislation. In 2022, she made up for her lackluster Transphobia by personally re-introducing anti-Trans legislation to the State House. A Trans “sports ban,” including at the collegiate level, passed and was signed into law, but her Trans “bathroom ban” died in the State Senate.

In 2023, South Dakota became the sixth state to pass a comprehensive gender affirming care ban for Trans minors. The law took effect July first. It hasn’t been challenged in court because South Dakota is in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals along with Arkansas, whose gender affirming care ban is still being litigated. The closest option for care is Minnesota.

I spoke to Jack Fonder, Community Health Advocate for the Transformation Project in Sioux Falls. His job is finding resources for Trans youth and their families seeking care now the ban has taken effect.

Jack is a Trans man. He came out in his mid-thirties. He helped start the Pride network at Citibank when he worked there before his transition. Through this work, he attended a conference where he saw a Trans man speak and was moved. He realized who he was.

The Transformation Project was founded by Susan Williams, South Dakota mother of two, one of whom is Transgender. When her child came out to her, she searched for resources and support and found little available in South Dakota. She also founded the Transformation Project Advocacy Network in 2020 in response to the increasing legislative attacks. Jack started there by volunteering and was eventually hired.

He told me South Dakota was a test state. Due to its sparse population (one of six states with less than a million people) and the relative remoteness of its capital, it made an attractive target for ambitious conservative groups. Trans advocates have to bus in protesters from Sioux Falls when anti-LGBTQ bills are being debated (a three-hour drive.)

He told me conditions have gotten worse because of the legislation. It brings up issues that most people wouldn’t have thought to get upset about. He said Sioux Falls is probably the best place for Queer community, but it’s still not great. He lives near there with his family in a neighborhood that isn’t very friendly. He’s chooses to be out because there was no representation for him growing up. And he stays because he’s passionate about fighting for Queer youth.

When I asked about Kristi Noem and her influence, Jack said, “no comment.” He informed me of an active law suit with the governor and he couldn’t say anything. I looked it up. Jack’s position at the Transformation Project was funded by a grant from the South Dakota Department of Health. It was terminated after a quarter for failing to meet quarterly filing requirements, but the organization was completely caught off guard and maintains they were in compliance.

A spokesman for Noem told a conservative media outlet that the Governor’s office had been reviewing all contracts with the DOH and Kristi Noem does not support the work of the Transformation Project and the contract shouldn’t have been approved in the first place. The Transformation Project has been the target of conservative ire since the incident was first publicized. The litigation is still pending.

The break in Pride between all-ages and adult time was nearly over and I had desperately wanted to interview the headlining Drag Queen, Dixie Divine. Even though she was from Rapid City, she helped organized Pierre Pride. With only a few free minutes remaining before showtime, she agreed to sit with me.

Dixie is a bearded Queen. She puts on shows in Rapid City as well as all over Nebraska and Wyoming. She’s lived other places, like Denver and Las Vegas, but returned to a smaller mid-Western town to fight for small-town Queers in conservative areas. That is why she moved there. She helps organizers in other small towns put on Prides. We both teared up when she was telling me her story.

She feels Drag is a vital resource for Queer liberation. She has mixed feelings about RuPaul, but credits Drag Race as a unifier. Middle-aged women have watched it and become allies. They show up to Prides to see the Queens. They may have developed empathy for the community through personal stories shared by favorite contestants on the show. Dixie organizes shows in small towns so the people who come to see her can meet the Queers who actually live in their community.

She understands why Queers move away to bigger cities, but it makes her sad and a little mad. “Who’s going to do the work? Who’s going to make that community?…I need and want people to fight.” Dixie doesn’t see herself as a leader. (I do.) It’s clear she’s passionate about her work. “We may not always leave with a full cup, but we generally leave with a pretty full cup. We get a lot of love.”

Dixie disappeared to get ready for the second half of the entertainment. I ran out to the van to go and pick up Katrina. I was supposed to take her out for dinner, but I got so busy interviewing everyone, she got hungry and hobbled over to a seafood restaurant on the river without me. Yes, I felt terrible.

It was pretty charming for the middle of South Dakota.

I got Katrina and Wally back to the hotel with some fresh ice and apologies. She said I had to go back for the end of Pride so I went. The controversial Drag Bingo game was almost over by the time I got back. It was a strictly over 21 crowd. They even checked my ID.

No children were scarred by winning a YMCA water bottle.

It was obvious from the size of the crowd (doubled from daytime) and their cheers that the evening’s Drag Show was what everyone had been waiting for. There were five Queens in rotation and each was met with enthusiasm and dollar bills. At the end of the show, Dixie brought all the Pride organizers up on to make sure everyone knew who they were and how hard they worked. She told the audience, if they needed anything, they could contact anyone on stage. This was their community.

As I was leaving, I had a chance to speak briefly with the owner of Drifters who’d popped her head out of the kitchen to watch the show. I thanked her for her support and asked her about the controversy caused by the religious group in Rapid City. “The closer it got, the more resistance I got. The more I dug my heels in…These are my people. This is my heart. What I’ve gone through these past weeks compared to what this community goes through, it’s nothing. A well-rounded society is important to me.”

I made it back to the hotel just in time for four more episodes of Law & Order. I was sad Katrina had missed Pride, but I’m so grateful for my life and my partner who supports my corny obsession with small-town Prides, even when she’s stuck in a random hotel room with a sprained ankle and a spoiled dog.

Upon returning home, I attempted to interview representatives from several organizations. The founder of Watertown Love, an LGBTQ+ support organization in Watertown, SD was featured in an episode of my favorite make-me-cry-every-damn-time Queer show, We’re Here. We kept exchanging emails and having scheduling conflicts. The same thing happened with Uniting Resilience, a Native Two Spirit, LGBTQ+ organization in Rapid City. Both seemed like amazing communities with fascinating stories so I hope to catch up with them some day.

I was able to talk with April Carillo, a professor and academic researcher in Vermillion, South Dakota. They are also the Vice Chair of Equality South Dakota and on the board at the Transformation Project.

April identifies as non-binary and Queer. They moved to Vermillion to teach. They spent much of their adult life in the Bible Belt and feels like they’ve “leveled up in oppression” moving to South Dakota. They point to “so much nefarious shit with ‘mid-Western nice.’” I detected some East Coast inflection and cadence to their voice and confirmed a passive-aggressive communication style can feel sinister and destabilizing to the uninitiated.

From their viewpoint, the culture in South Dakota is restricted, culturally and economically. They say they’ve never seen this level of hopelessness in twenty-year-olds. “Even the normative kids feel beaten down…It’s like 1984 here.” I didn’t know if they meant Reagan or Orwell, but the sentiment seemed clear. They feel constrained in their teaching. They don’t use neutral pronouns on campus.

They travel to the capital when LGBTQ issues come up for debate and spend most of their free time working on the boards of advocacy organizations. They feel the anti-LGBTQ sentiment ramped up in South Dakota following the Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationally in 2015.

That was the same year well-funded, national conservative political advocacy organizations began refining their anti-LGBT, legal and cultural strategy to operate as a fulcrum to move the bulk of their conservative agenda. They used focus groups to choose Trans and Gendernonconforming folks as targets, especially youth. Teams of lawyers wrote and deployed a slate of anti-Trans bills, curating willing legislators in every state. They started with South Dakota.

Working on this series, I’m beginning to discern a structure to this national conservative project. I’m sure I’m missing pieces, and I don’t think it’s a grand, cohesive conspiracy, but I think there are regional and national relationships. One common observation I’ve heard from nearly every organizer I’ve spoken to is the legislation and anti-Queer sentiment isn’t coming from the general, conservative population.

Numerous people have told me their communities used to have a “live and let live” attitude and no one was talking about Trans people competing in sports prior to 2016. That makes sense. Politicians create moral panics to scare voters into voting for the people promising to end them. It takes vast resources and multi-level logistics to promote a successful moral panic. It’s easy to point to national, conservative groups like Alliance Defending Freedom or Focus on the Family, but specialty groups are essential.

There’s social media forces like Libs of TikTok and Moms for Liberty. There’s growing, affiliated militias like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front who show up to Drag Story Hours like it’s the only threat to their masculinity. But the controversy surrounding Pierre Area Pride was manufactured by a type of group I don’t know much about.

The group is Family Heritage Alliance, a name obviously cobbled together from larger conservative groups and designed to signal potential allies. They are a tiny organization, headquartered in Rapid City. The executive director is Norman Woods, and as far as I can tell, he’s the only paid employee.

I know from trying to find small-town Prides, they often don’t show up in general Google searches. It takes time and intention to find them. The video Family Heritage Alliance put together has some production value and, again, took time to put together. As far as I know, no one from that group attended Pierre Pride. The intent of the video seemed to be to instigate protests locally, in Pierre.

I’d heard of an effort like this in Arkansas, when an organizer told me there were flyers recruiting TERFS in his home town back in 2017. I ran into a similar organization called Mass Resistance in Wyoming, trying to recruit book-banners to show up to library board meetings in Gillette. Are there networks of conservative, regional, satellite organizations, lightly funded by larger, national groups, whose sole purpose is to stir up shit at a local level?

I’m not an investigative reporter, but I emailed Norman Woods to see if he would talk to me. He agreed to speak with me off the record. I think that means I can’t really tell you what he said? I can tell you it was eerie. He was calm and friendly. He seemed genuinely curious. He seemed just as cautious of me as I was of him.

I can tell you I think we can outsmart these people. I just don’t know if we can achieve the level of funding and coordination necessary within a timeframe to match my sense of urgency. I did use the opportunity to ask Norman a question I’ve always wanted to ask a true believer. I asked, “if the conservatives won, if you took over government and all the mechanisms of control, what would that look like? What is your end goal? How do you maintain control and override dissent?”

Again, I can’t tell you what he said, but I don’t need to. I don’t think they know. Maybe Betsy Devos has a clear destiny, but I think your average Christian Nationalist is just trying to win the battle in front of them. They’re operating from a position of fear.

The other thing I can tell you, because I found it on the internet, is Norman’s wife used to work for Kristi Noem as a policy advisor until Noem vetoed the sports ban. Kristi has also called for Norman to be replaced as Director of the Family Heritage Alliance. Norman had sent a letter criticizing Kristi’s laziness regarding a “kid-friendly” drag show at a university to a local publication. In a formal letter to the FHA, she said, “I’d encourage the Family Heritage Alliance to evaluate the purpose of your organization. Is it to promote family values, or is it to attack the most conservative governor in the country?”

Conservatives bicker, too. Would it be the “low road” if we figured out how to use their insecurities and interpersonal conflicts against them? They’ve been doing it to us for decades.

If you’d like more information or are interested in resource sharing or solidarity work, here are some links to your Queer community in South Dakota:

Pierre Area Center for Equality: pierreareaequality.com

Transformation Project: https://www.transformationprojectsd.org/

Watertown Love: Watertownlove@yahoo.com

Uniting Resilience: https://www.unitingresilience.org/

Equality South Dakota: https://www.eqsd.org/

If you’d like to not share resources, but are curious:

Family Heritage Alliance: https://www.familyheritagealliance.org/

Next stop: Maryville, Tennessee.

Trans Man in a Van: driving toward queer resistance in Wyoming.

August 21, 2023 / Ty..Bo / Leave a comment

When I told my friends I was going to a Pride in Laramie, Wyoming, their initial reaction was unanimous: Queer horror. I doubt any of us would have ever heard of Laramie had the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard never taken place there. Queer people are murdered every year, but there is something about the historical position and brutality of Matthew’s murder that clings in our collective Queer memory. The struggle for Queer acceptance took a turn in the late nineties. Twenty-five years later, Laramie remains “the place Matthew Shepard was killed.” I was curious to see how his specter would participate in a Pride there.

Minneapolis to Wyoming is a long drive, almost thirteen hours according to Google Maps. I could not predict how long Cookie and I would take. I was hoping to drive around ten to twelve hours and see if I could find a spot to land for the night. I stopped for gas at the Corn Palace after five hours, a surprisingly robust tourist destination and seed-art festooned truck stop in the southeastern quadrant of South Dakota. I assumed I would encounter some suitable parking lot in the remaining 560 miles to Laramie.

*Loading Cookie near dawn for our adventure.*

After nearly fifteen hours with nary a tree, I was pulling into a hotel parking lot in Cheyenne, a mere fifty miles from my morning destination. I managed to make myself a quesadilla before snuggling in between a semi and a mud puddle to pass out.

It was a quick and pleasant drive over a mountain pass after my required coffee and Spelling Bee. Laramie is a charming, Western mountain town with old brick storefronts and fluffy, cartoon clouds overhead. It’s the home of Wyoming’s only public university. Their mascot is the cowpoke. There are “Poke Pride” references everywhere which delighted my inner 12-year-old boy, especially since I came all this way for something gay.

I arrived in time for the morning assembly and sidewalk chalking before the Pride March. It took place in a small outdoor seating area between rail tracks and an indie coffee/tap house at the Western end of a main commercial corridor. There were a dozen youth making use of chalk provisions and some grown-ups in matching t-shirts handing out donuts. By the time we were set to march, about fifty people had assembled.

After taking some pictures of the art and checking out the pedestrian bridge over the train tracks, I introduced myself to some of the organizers. They remembered the email I’d sent letting them know I was coming and enthusiastically agreed to chat with me after the march. There were some speeches, then a proclamation from Laramie’s vice-mayor, declaring June Pride month.

*Laramie’s vice-mayor reading a lengthy gay proclamation and a guy in head-to-toe gold lamé.*

Everyone kept to the sidewalk and obeyed traffic lights on our five-block Pride March down Grand Ave to the Albany County Courthouse. There were multiple honks of encouragement from passing cars and only one woman made a bit of a stink-face when she had trouble navigating through crowd into an antique shop. There were volunteers as legal observers/security/traffic patrol at every light.

*Laramie Pride March, paused for cross-traffic.*

When we returned to our starting point, I asked one of the organizers if the coffee shop had good breakfast. The woman told me the breakfast burritos two blocks over were better and offered to buy me one. This gracious person turned out to be Trey Sherwood, one of seven Democratic representatives (out of 93) in the Wyoming legislature.

We landed at Night Heron Books & Coffeehouse (highly recommend). They had a Pride display and their book club book for the month was Gender Queer. We were joined by two of Trey’s friends, one being the Minority Whip in the Wyoming legislature, Karlee Provenza.

This turned out to be a valuable lesson for me: never leave your camera and notebook in your van. Trey and Karlee proceeded to break down the current political and cultural climate in Wyoming for over an hour, including scandals and conspiracies involving local and state officials, cops, hate groups, and even Karlee. I vaguely remembered that story from its brief twitter saturation.

*Karlee got national attention from Fox News for this meme.*

Trey has a Master’s degree in Public History and leads an economic development board for Downtown Laramie. She is also an organizer for Laramie Pride. Karlee has a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology and Law. She researches decision making in police use of force cases and has long been an advocate for police reform.

I’m still kicking myself for not retaining a physical record of this fortuitous and delicious encounter. Trey could not have been more gracious. It was a delicious breakfast burrito. Karlee made her confident, confrontational eloquence apparent immediately. Both battle overwhelming odds in the state legislature.

The Republican Wyoming Freedom Caucus attempted to censure Karlee over her Instagram post in recognition of Trans Day of Visibility earlier this year. (See above.) Ultimately, Wyoming’s own cultural affection for the First and Second Amendments prevailed over Republican hypocrisy.

Karlee formally apologized for the distraction her post caused but reiterated her support for “armed self-defense for the LGBTQ community.” Nothing is quite as heart-warming as meeting intelligent, brave strangers standing in the way of your oppression. It was worth the drive just to meet these two.

Wyoming’s state nickname is the “Equality State.” It earned this moniker by becoming the first state in the nation to grant women the right to vote in 1869, fifty-one years before the passage of the 19th Amendment. Apparently, there were some ulterior motives. The men in the sparsely populated frontier territory, at the time, were hoping to generate positive national publicity. More importantly, they hoped to attract more women to their state where men outnumbered women 6 to 1.

The official state motto is still “Equal Rights,” but Wyoming has always been conservative. That’s the tricky part about “rugged” libertarian idealism when you also prefer capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. “Don’t tread on me” seems like all you need until People of Color and the Queers move into the neighborhood.

Wyoming is the least populous state in America. It has roughly the same number of people as Milwaukee. It is the second whitest state after Vermont at almost 93%. It is only slightly behind Montana in leading gun ownership per capita. Its LGBTQ population is estimated at about 3.3%. That’s a lot of wide-open space for white people with guns to intimidate whoever causes them discomfort.

Though a familiar slate of anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in Wyoming legislature this past season, only a bill prohibiting Trans girls and women from participating in sports on teams or in divisions aligning with their gender was signed into law. Wyoming seems to be hesitant to curtail individual liberties, maintaining their motto, but they aren’t in a hurry to legislate against discrimination either.

Wyoming repealed anti-sodomy laws in 1977. They weren’t banned nationally until 2003. That same year, the legislature defined marriage as a union between a male and female. But Wyoming reversed that in 2014, a year before the Obergefell decision. In fact, in the intervening forty-six years, every anti-LGBTQ bill introduced was defeated by appealing to the purported Republican principle of limited government interference in private decisions.

However, repeated efforts to enact hate-crime legislation have failed since Matthew Shepard’s murder. There has also never been a state-wide anti-discrimination law that includes LGBTQ civil rights, except those mandated federally. The Trans sports ban marked a turning point for the “Equality State.” The Republican governor called the bill “draconian,” but let it pass into law without his signature, straddling the divide between right-wing extremists and the rest of his party. The ironically named, far-right Freedom Caucus in the legislature has been infiltrating the more traditional libertarian Republican hoedown in Wyoming and gaining influence since Trump’s election.

After my undocumented, but enlightening brunch, I moseyed on down to Washington Park for Laramie Pridefest.

They had a full day of speakers and performers planned. Tabling was limited to local non-profits, churches, and organizations so I began wandering about in my “Nobody Knows I’m Trans” t-shirt, smiling and introducing myself, hoping somebody would want to talk to me on camera.

I passed this tough-looking guy with a big, black cowboy hat, holding his girlfriend’s hand and wondered if they had just stumbled into this event. I even thought he might be trouble. On my pass back through the crowd, I spotted him again. He’d taken his shirt off and I caught sight of two long, familiar scars on his chest. I smiled at him. He said he liked my shirt. I told him about my project and they both sat beneath a pine tree with me to tell me their story.

Chance and Caitlyn have been together for a few years. They’re saving up to homestead somewhere in the middle of Wyoming in the near future. They didn’t want to say where. Chance is a bartender at the Laramie American Legion. He’s out to his boss, but not the patrons. Caitlyn identifies as Ace.

Chance came out at as Trans at sixteen and started testosterone at eighteen. He’s nearly thirty now. He went to high school on the East Coast but seems comfortable in his cowboy boots and black Stetson. He told me he’s had great luck in finding supportive employers and health care in Laramie, but usually remains stealth to minimize his exposure to violence. “This is still Wyoming,” he said.

I talked to Jake, a Transman from Laramie, who was in high school in the late 90s. Jake was bullied in school after being outed as queer by a friend. After Matthew Shepard was murdered, Jake was threatened with the same fate. He said the teachers did nothing at the time, but he credits the response to Matthew’s murder for significant change in Laramie. It was the first city in Wyoming to pass anti-discrimination ordinances and there are now GSAs in both the middle and high schools.

Jake moved shortly after high school to Virginia then Tennessee. He describes this period as his “psycho-Christian phase.” He went to school for youth ministry and married a man, who turned out to be Bisexual. None of that turned out well. After a messy divorce, he moved back to Laramie where he began his transition and his mom moved back to be supportive of her son.

Antonio Serrano came to Laramie Pridefest to keep people safe. His day job is Advocacy Director of the ACLU Wyoming. He is also the founder and director for Juntos, an immigrant advocacy organization inclusive of intersectional oppressions.

“There’s a lot of neo-Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, those guys around Wyoming…You see in the news how they’re getting stirred up by the rhetoric of politicians. It trickles down to community events like this.” Antonio illuminates for me what should have been an obvious reality about Wyoming and is truly the source of my trepidation about red states in general. Anti-LGBTQ legislation is undeniably harmful to the populations it targets, both practically and psychologically, but the inflammatory rhetoric from elected leaders emboldens extremists to threaten and carry out violence against our community. Wyoming is the perfect model for legislating libertarian ideals while enforcing a conservative social hegemony through extrajudicial intimidation.

Antonio tells me even though many or most Wyomingites may support same-sex marriage or anti-discrimination laws for LGBTQ people, it’s difficult to organize a substantial resistance to potential legislation affecting any marginalized population. There are just not enough people who feel strongly enough to show up. “You’ll talk to five organizers on one issue and then you go to another issue, and it’s the same five organizers…I’m a firm believer in spending time in community…trying to build up that strength, that solidarity, little by little.”

When I ask if he’s got anything to say to blue states, “Red states are the battleground. We are the front line…This is where things are going to go bad first. Don’t forget about people like us, fighting in some of the most dangerous places. It’s the Wild West. No joke.”

*The PFLAG chapter in Laramie made everyone lunch.*

Everything began winding down in late afternoon. There were no counter-demonstrations as a few had feared. Patriot Front is active in Cheyenne, but they didn’t make the drive to kill any Queer joy that day. Maybe there was a sale on khaki cargo pants at the fancy fascist outlet mall. People started taking down their tents. A volunteer security guard pulled me aside. I’d noticed him noticing me earlier.

He wanted to know if I’d been to the Matthew Shepard Memorial yet. He told me how close it was and the best way to get there with all the construction on campus. He said the vigil was the night before so there should be fresh offerings on it. I’d planned on going before I left, but there was something about his investment in my seeing it that gave my pilgrimage weight. I thanked him and he thanked me for driving all way from Minneapolis. I guess news gets around in a small town.

*I’ll bet this sign was different in 1998.*

I parked a few blocks away at the main entrance to the University campus. He’d told me to park on the other side, but I couldn’t imagine the walk around the construction fences could be that arduous. I ended up walking almost all the way to where he told me to park.

I don’t know what I was expecting. I made my way to the other side of an endless construction fence guarding some underground maintenance work and found a bench.

*“You changed everything. You made us all immortal.” (handwritten on offered thesis paper)*

Withered, weathered, and haphazard offerings left at a memorial possess their own specific alchemy. They honor a memory and stranger’s grief. Because Matthew was Queer and I’m Queer and he was murdered and I’m still here, this memorial and these offerings assume my solidarity and a bigot’s shame. His murder is part of my history because it represents a possible Queer fate. Matthew was at Pride all day. I had to find him to say goodbye.

I was back on the road with a few hours of daylight left. I went over the mountain pass and through Cheyenne, into the infinite plains of Nebraska. I decided to take the road more traveled on the way home and was rewarded with a Love’s Truckstop off the interstate just as the sun was setting.

Upon my return home, I reached out to a librarian I’d met at Pride but didn’t get a chance to speak to. Eli is an outreach librarian in Laramie. They identify and overcome barriers to access for the public library there. They spoke to me about librarians in Wyoming organizing to combat book-banning efforts.

Eli told me there wasn’t much of a campaign in Laramie to ban certain books. They recalled one parent upset over a board book for babies that depicted possible same-sex coupling in the animal kingdom. They said Gillette, in northeast Wyoming, has had a “horrific experience” with book challenges.

Gillette experienced a population boom in the early 2000s with a sudden expansion of its fossil fuel industries, predominantly coal. The recent decline in coal use nationwide has led to an economic downturn in the area. The loss of easy money left many sad, mediocre white men vulnerable to the rhetoric of national book-banning organizers. Why deal with your frustration due to your own inadequacy when you can take it out on a vulnerable minority: a tale as old as time.

Gillette was targeted by Mass Resistance, a seasoned, well-funded, national anti-LGBTQ organization. Their sole function seems to be to distill the current national moral panic into an especially toxic, concentrated, local conservative emergency. They motivate disgruntled conservatives off their couches into Library Board meetings. They even provide flyers and talking points.

In Gillette, they succeeded in forcing the Campbell County Public Library to sever association with the Public Library System and The American Library Association which had offered them some protection from censorship. Prior to July 2021, no one from the public ever came to library board meetings. They also succeeded in getting the former board chair to resign and they’ve gotten little interest from people willing to run for the position.

I also asked Eli about their experience in Wyoming and Laramie, specifically as I had with everyone I’d talked to. They liked Laramie. They liked how beautiful Wyoming is. They experienced some antagonism when they were younger and told me sometimes small-town stereotypes are true. They graduated from the University of Wyoming and had gone to the Matthew Shepard Symposium, an annual social justice conference there, a couple times. Eli was a small child when Matthew was killed.

“I remember deciding I didn’t want to be the bearer of that memory anymore. I carried so much inherited history and trauma as a visibly black person. I am less visibly Trans or gender non-conforming. I chose not to center Matthew Shepard’s legacy, death, the after-effects as part of my Queer experience.”

There were many reasons Matthew Shepard’s murder got the national attention it did. The preceding decade and a half of sustained Queer activism pushing for AIDS research funding and basic human empathy had earned some legitimacy from mainstream American culture by 1998. Someone started making a documentary almost immediately. Matthew’s parents, who had never been activists, became prolific advocates for LGBTQ rights. And Matthew was a sweet-looking, young, blond, white boy.

I’m grateful Eli brought up race. There are complications surrounding Matthew’s continued presence in the American Queer consciousness. Dozens of Queers are murdered every year. The overwhelming majority being Trans Women of Color. Overlooking intersecting oppressions, especially race and class, is also part of our collective Queer struggle. Sylvia Rivera preached about it at the first Pride.

I’d thought about this before I left but didn’t know how or when to address it in an article about Queer solidarity. The end of the 90s also marked a pivot away from more radical Queer activism toward assimilation and integration into dominant society. Matthew’s murder wasn’t directly responsible for that strategy direction, but his was a normatively empathetic face as a symbol of our oppression. The world got a little safer for handsome white gay boys and remains as dangerous as it ever was for gender non-conforming folks, particularly if they’re Black or Brown.

I also had the pleasure of connecting with Sara Burlingame, executive director for Wyoming Equality. Her father mapped small towns throughout the inter-mountain West. She told me about growing up in “single-wide” mobile homes in remote locations. She organized her first pro-choice rally at fifteen in the Mojave Desert in Southern California. She graduated high school early and went overseas to the UK where she found her first girlfriend.

Upon her return to the US, she moved to Cheyenne and volunteered for United Gays and Lesbians of Wyoming which became Wyoming Equality. Sara reiterated the reality of the top-down nature of the national anti-LGBTQ siege red states are currently contending with. She told me anti-Trans and CRT legislation was focus group tested before experimental bills were disseminated to red states that had little progressive organizing infrastructure. This began around 2016 with the Trans bathroom ban in North Carolina.

When I asked about her to speculate on the goals of this strain of conservative Republicans, she said they want to both inflict damage on real people, but they’ve also realized it’s a winning political message. It organizes and energizes extremist impulses. That strengthens their overall movement on many levels. It creates ideological borders for more libertarian Republican legislators in Wyoming. The Freedom Caucus, which is also a nationally organized and funded activist arm, is able to oust more traditional Cowpokes if they err on the side of individual liberty.

She says she used to worry less about militia groups because they used to fight with each other. Now they see themselves as vigilante enforcers of this Nationalist political ideology and they’ve found ways to work together and recruit. The publicity they get from their reactionary or violent actions animates authoritarian politicians, who then passively or stridently endorse their tactics.

Wyoming Equality is part of the Equality Federation, an affiliation of state-based policy activists who strive to identify and develop leadership and provide support to organizers in individual states who work to defeat anti-LGBTQ attacks. Wyoming is part of a red state coalition within that network. I wonder if they would let me sit in on meetings. Sara is a bottomless fount of detailed Queer updates from all my potential destinations.

She told me, “In Wyoming, I worry we don’t have time. Our fight is ceaseless. We do it because we love Wyoming uniquely. This is our home, and I really do believe it has all the ingredients to be the best place on earth.”

Wyoming is beautiful. Could we take it over? Imagine coordinating 500,000 Queers. We’d be late. I worry about the vague timeframe she mentions. I’ve felt this urgency before. This project is slowly revealing the larger structure of the fight we’re in, whether we know it or not. I don’t think either side knows exactly where we’re heading.

If you’d like more information or are interested in resource sharing or solidarity work, here are some links to your Queer community in Wyoming:

Laramie Pridefest: https://www.laramiepridefest.com/donate

ACLU Wyoming: https://www.aclu-wy.org/

Wyoming Equality: https://www.wyomingequality.org/

Juntos: https://juntoswyoming.com/LGBTQ Pride Queer Transgender Travel

Trans Man in a Van: driving toward queer resistance in Iowa.

July 19, 2023 / Ty..Bo / Leave a comment

August came to the upper Midwest in early June this year. It was already eighty degrees when I loaded into Cookie, my van, at six AM. She doesn’t have AC anymore. The vent fan’s effectiveness fluctuates with road speed and elevation. I was channeling a seventies road trip movie trope with my windows open, driving into the morning sun.

I got to Ottumwa around noon. It was over ninety. I emerged from my van, hot and stiff, into the reinvigorating Queerness of ABBA, animating the pre-Pride assembly in Central Park. Pride was in the town square, surrounded by the courthouse, city hall, public library, and a Catholic Church. A volunteer showed me where to set up, opposite the bandshell, under a tree. Someone had created and hung giant rainbow curtains around the stage.

How’d they get those big gay curtains up there?

I hadn’t really remembered to include Iowa as a red state until I forgot to request Friday night off from my bartending job and I needed to find a Pride close to home for Saturday. When I pulled up the ACLU’s anti-LGBTQ legislation map, there was Iowa, right next door, waving at me with almost thirty bills introduced in just their last session. That’s a little too close to home.

Iowa is Minnesota’s neighbor. I lived there as a child. I’ve never associated it with far-right activism. My uncritical, childhood perception of Iowa mostly consisted of good schools, civic participation, and warm, intelligent, practicality. As an adult, I’ve had a vague notion of Iowa as a purple state.

Apparently, that was the case until 2016. Iowa sided with Democrats in six of seven national elections between 1992 and 2012. It was the third state in the nation to codify same-sex marriage way back in 2009. Abortion rights were reaffirmed by the state supreme court as recently as 2019. Then Donald Trump won the state by over 9% in 2016, a 15-point swing over from Obama’s victory in 2012 by 6%.

Along with the consequential Trump effect, their governor, Kim Reynolds, has been a major influence on Iowa’s shift to the far-right. She started as the Clarke County treasurer, a county with less than 10,000 people. She is an avid Trump supporter with potential national ambitions. She has advocated the full roster of anti-LGBGTQ legislation being workshopped across the nation.

Of the twenty-nine bills introduced, she was able to sign three into law this year. In March, Iowa banned gender affirming health care for minors, also prohibiting anyone “knowingly” aiding or abetting a minor with care. On the same day, she passed a Trans bathroom ban for K-12. In May, she was able to push through a busy education reform bill similar to the one in Arkansas. This legislation rolled in four other stand-alone anti-Queer bills for efficiency.

It has the familiar “Don’t Say Gay/Trans” language for K-6, parental permission requirement for pronouns and names of choice, no STI/HIV instruction, provisions for book bans, and mandatory reporting of non-conforming gender expression to parents. It also contains the right’s favorite white supremacist agenda item, sweeping reform of school voucher programs, which promises to gut public education in urban areas and practically eliminate it in rural Iowa.

Already having been dubbed Florida of the North, Ron DeSantis praised Iowa’s governor for “safeguarding freedom in Iowa” during his Presidential campaign launch there recently. He repeatedly framed Iowa and Florida as partners in a Republican crusade for “common sense.” Kim Reynolds name has been floated as a possible, less boring than Pence, family-values running mate for Trump in 2024, so that’s probably why Ron was flirting so aggressively.

Ottumwa is not Key West, but they organized a darn festive Pride, defying association with the joyless, gubernatorial tyranny of either state. The full day of scheduled entertainment began with the animal Pride march.

These adorable llama butts didn’t win, unbelievably.

There were two bouncy houses and a tractor ride for kids. Family-friendly fun is observably more critical in the planning of small-town Prides, along with local, small business involvement. These displays of civic participation and responsibility strategically undermine negative preconceptions of Queer identity in smaller communities.

Ottumwa Pride was largely organized by school teachers who want their community to be a safer place for their students. They were outraged by what they saw as governmental overreach into how to teach and care for their students. I didn’t ask everybody, but I was unsure if any of the Ottumwa organizers were Queer. Trump’s influence, the anti-racist uprisings following the murder of George Floyd, and aggressive anti-Queer legislation all seem to be factors in mobilizing left-leaning allies in small towns. The emergence of small-town Prides has accelerated in the past three years. This was Ottumwa’s third Pride.

The sentiment I heard repeatedly throughout the day when I asked about all the anti-LGBTQ legislation was, “This isn’t the Iowa I know.” Even though there are some rabid Trump supporters and Christian Nationalists in Iowa, people told me they are a disruptive minority who are vastly overrepresented in Iowa’s political environment. Kim Reynolds and the Iowa GOP spent money and political clout to defeat more moderate Republicans in state primaries in 2022. This has intensified the far right’s domination in state politics.

There was a small, well-behaved counter-demonstration to Ottumwa Pride. Fifteen people with home-made signs quietly filed in across the street soon after I was set up. They blew through a lot of glue sticks and printer ink just to stand stoically in the blazing sun for two hours, largely ignored. A few people parked their trucks in front of them, blocking them from our view. A local church, tabling at Pride, brought them water.

Aime Wichtendahl thinks local, grassroots organizing, and elections are the key to incrementally nudging Iowa back toward the middle. She became Iowa’s first openly-Trans elected official in 2015, winning a city council seat in Hiawatha, a small suburb of Cedar Rapids. Her campaign slogan was “Stand with Local Businesses.” She did not center her Transness in her race.

Aime described herself as a poly-sci nerd in high school. She was a Republican until her late teens. Though she travels the state to speak out against Iowa’s anti-Trans legislation, she focuses on schools, roads, and local businesses when serving her Hiawatha constituency.

“Republicans don’t have solutions for anyone…GOP donors are anti-everything but white supremacy.” Aime believes Democrats can claw back influence in Iowa by running for every level of local government and focusing on issues that are important to rural communities, like closer access to groceries and medical care. “Iowans don’t like this culture war dumpster fire… I believe Iowans are fundamentally fair people…Democrats haven’t been the best at addressing rural populations.”

Aime Wichtendahl addressing Ottumwa Pride.

I hadn’t realized I had been interviewing the keynote speaker until Aime got up from our chat and walked up onto the stage. She is a dynamic speaker. It’s easy to see her political appeal. She knows her audience and understands what motivates them. Getting elected by focusing on the needs of her local community she cares deeply about has provided her a broader platform to fight for things affecting her personally.

Somebody told this kid he wasn’t allowed to say ‘gay’ anymore.

Cara Galloway, one of the founders of Ottumwa Pride, is also a city council member there. She told me Ottumwa used to be reliably blue before they turned out for Trump. But there are signs they have limits on their tolerance for the current GOP moral panic. When Cara ran for city council, there were two vocal, anti-LGBTQ candidates mimicking the style of the governor. “And our community said, we’re not going to have that on our city council.”

She also told me Ottumwa elected its first gay mayor, two women for city council, and its first Black council member. She informed me of the growing immigrant population. Jobs at JBS, a large pork processing plant in town, and a lower cost of living attract people to the area. Ottumwa is becoming more diverse which Cara views as a positive. She wants everyone to feel comfortable in her town and that’s why she entered politics. “If I’m not going to run, who is?”

She helped found Ottumwa Pride the same day one of her friends, who is gay, told her there was nothing for his community in town. She and a couple friends met at a local bar and planned Ottumwa’s first Pride. She also started an HRC chapter in town.

She works in child welfare and suicide prevention. When I asked about the recent anti-Trans legislation, especially the Education Reform Bill, she thought about the youth she works with. “I’m terrified for them…Sometimes the only safe place they have is school, and now we’ve taken that away from them.”She has faith in optimism and pragmatism, inspiring my faith in her. She sees hope in Pride. “When we start to change our communities, we start to change our state…Ottumwa has a lot of potential and I can’t wait to see what we do.”

Kristen Payne (right), President of Ottumwa Pride and a decent Bette Midler.

Kristen Payne was also present during the initial planning meeting for Pride. She is also a school teacher, a realtor, and an artist. She sponsors the GSA in her school. I kept trying to catch her with a free moment to talk, but she’d been emceeing the entertainment all day. After a wardrobe change, she also competed in the amateur drag show with an homage to Hocus Pocus. I was able to finally catch her during the late afternoon entertainment.

She reiterated, “This isn’t the Iowa I know. Trump gave license for people to come out of the woodwork.” As a teacher, she’s been noticing more frequent displays of bigotry from her students in the last couple of years. She told me a story of some sixth-grade boys using a slur, and how she handled it. The teacher voice she reenacted gave me goosebumps.

She believes most Iowans either don’t care or are supportive of LGBTQ issues. Like most of the people I talked to, she wishes politicians would concentrate on practical issues that affect her community. She described the Education Bill as “heartless.” She thinks democrats are way behind in grassroots organizing and that’s allowing these culture war distractions.

Ottumwa’s state senator, Cherielynn Westrich, co-sponsored the Trans Bathroom Ban in schools. Kristen responded by showing up to a charity bakeoff, with Cherielynn in attendance, wearing rainbow attire. Kristen is also the one who wrote questions to Ottumwa’s city council candidates about Pride events. That’s when the two homophobic candidates revealed their extremism and it cost them their elections.

As the sun set, vendor tents came down. The grassy slope in front of the stage started to fill. The professional drag show began with seasoned performers in from Des Moines. Iowa was unsuccessful at passing a drag ban and Ottumwa seemed thrilled.

The night revealed professional lighting and a fog machine.

Children rushed the stage with pilfered dollar bills. There were death drops on concrete. The emcee broke both her heels. The crowd was captivated and joyous. The show wound down with the mandatory “Born This Way.” And even though I’m sure Lady Gaga was aware a gay anthem would be lucrative, her opportunism did not stop me from tearing up as I watched the crowd scream and rattle their glow sticks, while the pig-tailed Queen strutted through the grass in broken heels.

After the show, spectators were invited on stage for a dance party. The deejay played until eleven. I didn’t know Iowans stayed up that late. I was watching from a picnic table off to the side when Kristen, who was picking up trash, came and sat next to me. She asked me how long of a drive I had. I told her I was going to stay in my van. There happened to be a municipal campground in the middle of town. She thanked me for coming, even though I was grateful for permission to be a witness to the day. She left but came back a few minutes later to tell me I had a room at the Hotel Ottumwa, a block away. She told me someone had canceled so they had an extra room. I didn’t know if that was true or if she was just representing the Iowa I recall from childhood.

I had a shower and slept with air conditioning that night. This year I decided to seek out Queer resistance and Queer joy. I decided to just drive to a specific small town on a specific day, and it’s always there. There is always community waiting to welcome me like family. Our community always creates beauty in the face of adversity.

After I got home, I had a chance to talk with Max Mowitz, who works for One Iowa, an LGBTQ rights organization in Des Moines. Max volunteered for One Iowa in high school when it was created to organize for marriage equality. After college, they moved back to Des Moines, continuing to volunteer until they started working there. They also help run the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund.

Max brought up Iowa’s progressive history and its history of racism. They think the current moral panic over Transness is influenced by conservative media and an organized, top-down political strategy. They believe rural organizing can shift these patterns.

Max wants people in blue states/areas to recognize the cool work being done in red states. “Looking down on the South or red states really undercuts the amazing organizing happening there…There needs to be less of a pitying or disparaging conversation…To dismiss them is not a kind thing to do and it’s not solidarity…It makes you fragile in your perception that it could never happen to you.”

I also spoke with Max’s boss, Keenan Crow. Keenan’s passion for political and legislative analysis was immediately evident. They were the one who compiled the anti-LGBTQ legislation information on One Iowa’s website that had been so valuable to my research. They did their undergrad work in Political Science. After an unsatisfying job at Apple, and helping a friend with their political campaign, they returned to school to get their masters in public policy.

They had volunteered with One Iowa in college and came to work there just as marriage equality was achieved nationally and the organization had to pivot to a multi-issue advocacy group. They found their vocation as a lobbyist working on HIV decriminalization, creating new directions for their organization.

Keenan also believes most Iowans truly don’t care about Trans issues. They wouldn’t think about them if they weren’t asked. They think conservative legislators are made up of cynics and true believers. But Keenan pointed out that all of them believe in the political expediency of using Trans people to create the current moral panic. They think it will take much longer for the belief in that expediency to wane than the actual moral panic.

Keenan predicted at least a few more years of anti-Trans legislative attacks. Then, as if they were a soothsayer, they predicted the next focus will center on religious freedom. I talked to them a week before the Supreme Court ruled on the 303 Creatives case, allowing discrimination against Queer people by business owners who claim serving them conflicts with their religious beliefs. They said if that case was decided negatively, it would undermine many of the state protections Iowa put in place before turning bright red. Keenan is worried the next frontier in Republican cruelty will include state-sanctioned discrimination in medical care.

Sometimes, these attacks feel so well-organized, so strategic. It’s diabolical. Then I watch Marjorie Taylor Greene talk and think, what a ding dong. Both are true. For every Kim Reynolds, there’s a Lauren Boebert. Their collective ability to inflict harm should not be underestimated. Their strength should not be overestimated.

Every time I get in my van to drive to a small-town Pride, I know I’m going to meet caring, intelligent people, see spontaneous joy, witness beauty. It’s important to remember how scary it might be for some Queers to gather and celebrate. They do it anyway. Pride might not be a riot anymore, but it’s still defiant.

If you’d like any more information or are interested in resource sharing or solidarity work, here are some links to your Queer community in Iowa:

Ottumwa Pride: ottumwapride@gmail.com

One Iowa: https://oneiowa.org/

One Iowa’s lobbying arm: https://oneiowaaction.org/

Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund: check them out on the socials.

Next stop: Laramie, Wyoming

Trans Man in a Van: driving toward queer resistance in Arkansas.

July 19, 2023 / Ty..Bo / Leave a comment

Ty Bo Yule13 min read·Jun 172

I hit the road at 7AM on a Friday morning, only an hour later than I had planned. Set up for Ozark Pride in Hardy, Arkansas, was to begin the next morning at 11AM. My destination for that night was Springfield, Missouri, the last big town on the way to Hardy. Google maps told me it was an eight and a half hour drive. I thought I could make it in twelve.

My van, Cookie Monster, is not built for speed. It only theoretically has cruise control. It has a tape deck, but my cassette collection from the 80s has long since melted. I listened to public radio, then classic rock for as long as I could. Then I shoved my cell phone in my bra strap, by my ear, so I could listen to podcasts for the last two hours of my drive.

I was grateful to finally arrive in Springfield around nine. It was raining on a dark county highway for the last hour of my drive. I pulled into a strip mall and cooked dinner in my van by the light of a Jimmy Johns. I found a large parking lot between two hotels and settled in for the night. I had a weed drink while I finished the Spelling Bee then slept like a big, gay bear.

The next morning, I made coffee in a Home Depot parking lot and was back on the road by seven. I was excited to see my friends again. I had been to Hardy’s first Pride in 2021. The two and a half hour drive from Springfield to Hardy is a long, uninterrupted roller coaster of wooded hills and dead armadillos. Hardy is a tiny hamlet of 743 in the middle of the Ozarks in rural Northern Arkansas.

It’s an unlikely place for a Pride celebration. Hardy was a known sundown town not that long ago. It is still potentially unfriendly to people of color and non-normative individuals who may find themselves wondering where to park their distinctively queer van after dark.

One of the first sights upon entering Hardy.

Arkansas, as a state, has the distinction of being the first in the nation to ban gender-affirming care for minors in 2021. A judicial stay on enforcement of this law remains in place while the legal challenge, brought by four Trans youth, is ongoing. Most of the few providers for Trans healthcare, however, have left the state or discontinued that portion of their practice. Trans individuals that receive gender affirming care in Arkansas now have fifteen years to sue for malpractice, instead of two, making it additionally difficult find insurance.

They were the second state to ban Trans girls from playing sports. They recently passed their own version of a “drag ban”, which prohibits performances in public spaces, that may “appeal to” intentionally vague “prurient interests.”Arkansas governor and unironic SNL skit, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, just signed into law her own version of Florida’s “don’t say gay” education reform, which not only bans any mention of LGBTQ issues before fifth grade, but mandates restroom and changing room restrictions. School employees must get parental permission to use preferred names and pronouns. The bill also centers charter schools, a decades-long Republican project to gut public education and usher in a new age of de facto segregation.

There is a new bathroom ban for adult Trans people, who could be charged with misdemeanor sexual indecency, if they use the public toilet aligned with their identity while a minor is present. It was amended to add “for the purpose of arousing or gratifying a sexual desire” after considerable dissent. Sanders also banned the word “LatinX” for all official purposes as one of her first actions as governor.

This has all taken place in the last two years, since I went to Hardy’s first Pride. Over 500 similarly intentioned bills have been advanced this year in nearly every state with varying degrees of success. (For a well-researched and fascinating account of this top-down legislative siege, I recommend “The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality” podcast by TransLash Media.)This legislation has had the added effect of sanctioning and promoting organized, aggressive, and occasionally violent anti-Queer demonstrations at family-friendly Queer events.

As I drive past the Confederate flags announcing my arrival in Hardy, I wonder what I always wonder about authoritarian ambitions. What is the end game for these American Christian Nationalists? They clearly want to legislate Queers back into the closet. Are they trying to force everyone they don’t like out of their states? Do they want genocide? A new civil war? The Rapture? Are Republican politicians using this recycled moral panic cynically to distract from declining living standards and capitalistic plunder of the middle and working classes?

It doesn’t matter. They are currently making life demonstrably more difficult and dangerous for Queer people in areas that weren’t welcoming to begin with. What is the strategy for Queers in red states? Most of them can’t or don’t want to leave. I found Queers in those places do what Queers everywhere have always done — organize, build community, create joy, and defy bullies.

I turn off the winding county road onto a steep, gravel path I know ends in a terrifyingly narrow concrete slab across a decent sized river. I make it to the other side and drive into the country field where a small sanctuary of love and rainbows is being assembled.I never get tired of this. It’s always worth the drive.What kind of audacity does it take to put on Pride in this place in this time? No matter how far I go to see it, it’s like coming home.

I take my place on the vendor side of the field and set up my little display. There are about a dozen vendor/organization tents. I walk toward the ample, yet decaying covered wooden stage. Next to it, Ozark Pride has a new tent, with their retro 70s chic logo. Abby gets up to hug me and tells me to set up wherever there’s room. We met last time I was here.

Next to Ozark Pride’s tent is Engaging Arkansas Communities, a non-profit providing free STI and HIV testing as well as support and prevention services. I meet Kimberly and Kodee who agree to come talk to me when they have time. I continue down the line of enthusiastic vendors, introducing myself and making new friends when I spot Brennan, the Ozark Pride President and someone who made an impression on me the last time we met.

Brennan came out as Trans exactly two years earlier, the night I was last there, at the Pride afterparty and drag show. Since then, he’s started HRT and organized two more Prides. He’d just had surgery on his knee and was in a wheelchair, being pushed through the soft grass by his wife while he directed support staff.I leaned over to hug him while he tells me the speakers for the show just caught fire. I had noticed a couple drag Queens earlier so I asked how he felt about Arkansas’ fresh “drag ban.” “First thing I did when I heard about it was organize a drag show,” he drawled. I smiled and nodded, but I saw he had his hands full so I ambled back over to my tent.

Kodee came by to chat and check out my book. They agreed to sit for my first interview of the day. Kodee is Trans and lives in Little Rock. They started transitioning at 27. They are HIV+ and explained to me Arkansas also criminalizes people with HIV. If you don’t inform a sex partner of your status, you could be charged as a sex offender even if you don’t transmit the virus.

When I ask about how it is to be Queer in Arkansas and if they’ve ever thought of moving, they tell me they don’t have much of an issue personally, but are concerned for the Queer youth. “If we leave, who’s going to speak for them?” When I ask about the future of Queer in Arkansas, they just smile and tell me, “They (Queer youth) aren’t going to take this shit.” They feel like things might improve when the older generation dies. Wait it out — valid strategy.

Kodee’s coworker, Kimberly, approached my display next. She said telling her own story might help others having similar struggles so she was glad to have an opportunity to share it with me. Kimberly was in an unhealthy relationship eight years previously and then she lost her grandmother. She went through a struggle with meth and tested HIV+ at some point.

She beamed when she talked about her activism work. She loves helping people. She met her husband on an HIV+ dating app and they’ve been married for three years. They have a two-year-old and her husband’s daughter and toddler also live with them.When I asked about Arkansas’ anti-LGBTQ legislation, she replied, “I’m a very loving person. I’m a Christian. Everyone deserves to be their true selves…If we’re not giving support, where does that leave them? …Sometimes, you don’t know the impact you’re going to make on someone, but you still have to try.”

My old buddy, Abby, came over. She’s one of the organizers. She got involved when she met Mama Catherine (another organizer’s mother) at Walmart and she prayed over Abby and invited her to join Ozark Pride.Abby has a twin sister but never felt accepted growing up with her grandparents. She started wearing boys clothes at a young age and knew she liked girls. She told me about her past mental health struggles, but those issues were improving with medication and a new loving relationship.

She and her fiancé are trying to get back on their feet after their house with all of their belongings and savings burned down earlier this year. They’re living with friends in an even smaller town. Abby said she can’t find a job, but got on disability.

When I asked how it was being Queer in rural Arkansas, she said, “I’m loved. I have so many friends…Everything I know is here, so you risk it.” She’d like to move to Texas, eventually, “I wanna see what the world has to offer.” But for now also thinks the situation will improve when the old people die in 5–10 years. Damn boomers.

It was hot. I got up to watch the drag show. Somebody drove to Walmart and picked up a speaker. It wasn’t meant to handle outdoor events, but nobody is complaining. Everybody is cheering and tipping. The Queens’ heels are sinking into the grass, but that doesn’t stop the death drops. A drag King’s dog joins his dad in the act. Watching little kids watch drag Queens is one of my very favorite activities.

Aubi Gold, Mother, Haus of Mineral (center, in blue, in case you were confused)

During an intermission, I asked some of the performers how they felt about Arkansas’ new “drag ban.” None of them seemed intimidated. Aubi Gold, Mother of the Haus of Mineral of Fort Smith, Arkansas, replied, “I’ll walk into any gas station, Walmart, Dollar General. I do not care. Look at me.” In a later Facebook exchange, she told me she “grew up in a small town, just like Hardy,” so she wasn’t “scared of a little rough and tough battle.” Aubi is impressive. She is a talented performer and a natural leader.

It’s late afternoon. The drag show has ended. People are starting to pack up. There is no after party this year. Hardy won’t allow Ozark Pride to use their civic center any more. They claim there was property damage and theft the last time, but consensus seemed to be that was a “load of horseshit.” I have two more interviews I’ve been waiting to do.

The first is with Chase, a drag King I met in 2021. He and his wife and kids live in Thayer, Missouri, close to the Arkansas border. He’s been transitioning for ten years and says it’s the best decision he ever made. He got into drag watching Rupaul, but didn’t start performing until he saw his first King perform at a gay bar in New York. He loves the community created by drag culture and also loves glitter. There is still some in my van.

Hardy crowned their first Queen and King.

When he first started transitioning, he drove to Lincoln, Nebraska for care. His primary care physician is now unbelievably in Arkansas, but he informs me there is only one that he knows of. He says Missouri is no better, but his family and community are there. “I have fought for a long time for who I am and who I wanna be. Where I’m at now, with the support group I have around here, I will continue to fight…for the people who don’t have a voice. It’s the youth I’m concerned about.”

I finally get another chance to talk to Brennan. He’s been busy. His voice has dropped dramatically since I saw him. He says testosterone has helped his mental health. He is the only out Trans man in the area. He thinks about moving to Arizona, but his wife wants to stay in Hardy, so he’s staying.

He got involved organizing Ozark Pride just before the first one by answering a Facebook ad. I asked him how he felt about the day. “Well, everything that could have gone wrong happened (but)…Oh man, I looked out at one point and counted 83 people in the bleachers. And to see that compared to the first couple years, it was amazing. To see how far we’ve come in the last three years, it’s such a sense of accomplishment.”

It was something to be proud of, a perfect Pride. It was time to pack up. I drove back to Springfield and found the same hotel parking lot to crash in.

On the drive home the next day, with time to think, I realized I wanted to know more about organizing efforts in Arkansas. The legislative attacks are taking place on a state level currently, coordinated nationally. Full-time, local activist organizations are often the only resource for strategizing large targeted actions to counter these authoritarian efforts in the capital. Often, these organizations are also founded and run by small groups of dedicated individuals, united around a purpose.

Rumba Yambú is one of the founders of inTRANSitive. They migrated to NW Arkansas as a youth and found activism in junior high when they hand-drew fifty flyers announcing the first Day Without Immigrants march in Springdale in 2006 and organized their friends to hand them out.

After emerging as Trans, they were frustrated at the absence of an organization that confronted the intersectional oppressions faced by Trans immigrants. InTRANSitive started as a Facebook presence to organize against TERF recruitment in Fayetteville in 2017.

I hadn’t ever thought of TERFs as a centrally governed entity that engaged in recruiting, but I know conservative strategists have highlighted “gender critical” feminists’ and “detransitioners’” perspectives as an effort to inflate the scope of their anti-Trans campaign. Were there conservative-funded gangs of TERFS hyping Trans controversy in NW Arkansas before the legislative attack?

Yambú tells me inTRANSitive was self-funded until they testified against the gender-affirming care ban at the state legislature in 2021. They think it was no accident this legislation came to Arkansas first. It was a test case. They say Arkansas didn’t have the organizing infrastructure to fight. National LGBTQ funding organizations took notice of inTRANSitive’s efforts and began to invest in Arkansas.

With the funds, they were able to purchase a building and open the first Transgender Community Center in Arkansas in Little Rock. They provide advocacy and services for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. They advocate for and provide translation services for Trans immigrants. They have education and community care spaces for Trans people and have Youth programming. They also provide direct financial support mostly to black and brown Transwomen.

Yambú and InTRANSitive are a strategic leaders against the current anti-Trans legislative attacks. They have organized digital and grassroots campaigns against the massive conservative political agenda in Arkansas. When I asked Yambú if there is anything they’d like Queers in blue states to know, they answered, “It’s eventually going to come to you and there’s proof of that. That’s what I tell funders.”

Tig Kashala, Director of Operations at Lucie’s Place, based in Little Rock, also agreed to meet with me over Zoom. Lucie’s Place was created in 2011 after the suspicious death of Lucille Hamilton, a Trans community member in Little Rock, while traveling to Louisiana. It is a Black-feminist, Trans-led, intergenerational collective providing direct services and advocacy to LBGTQ youth experiencing homelessness.

After being run as a traditional non-profit, the organization was reclaimed by Trans and Queer organizers of color, returning it to its grassroots foundations. Kashala runs their drop-in center with a free closet. Kashala got their first professional credit in costume design at fifteen. They’ve taken their passion for costuming and transformed the free closet into a style consultation resource for gender non-conforming folk that visit.

Kashala grew up in what they described as a religious cult. They have a deep understanding of a Christian Nationalist mindset. “They are not failing at critical thinking, they live in an echo chamber…Conservatives operate in a state of cognitive dissonance. They can’t and won’t come to terms with real situations.” They were kicked out of their congregation as a teen.When asked what they want Minnesota Queers to know, “There are organizers in the South. There is a resistance movement. Southerners need a lot of support right now. Don’t write off Southern states as full of Hillbillies.”

I didn’t personally meet any hillbillies in Arkansas, just a ton of innovative, brave, passionate Queer organizers.

Little Rock is also home to the House of GG — The Griffin-Gracy Educational Retreat and Historical Center. This is the legacy project of Trans revolutionary, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy.If you’d like any more information or are interested in resource sharing or solidarity work, here are some links to your Queer community in Arkansas:

Ozark Pride: https://myozarkpride.org/

InTRANSitive: https://www.intransitive.org/

Lucie’s Place: https://www.luciesplace.org/

House of GG: https://houseofgg.org/

Next stop — Ottumwa, Iowa.

Trans Man in a Van

July 19, 2023 / Ty..Bo / Leave a comment

driving toward queer resistance in deep red america.

Ty Bo Yule

7 min read

Just now

I am a fifty-three-year-old, white, married, educated and happy Trans man living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Last year I bought this sweet 1988 Chevy G20 conversion van. I named her Cookie Monster because of her royal blue velour upholstery and wall-to-wall shag carpet. My wife and I took her on a month-long road trip to California and back.

Even though we drove through Iowa, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arizona, I was never harassed for my gender identity or sexual orientation. We generally pass as a heteronormative couple even though I’m shorter than she is. It’s astounding what people don’t notice when they’re not accustomed to diversity. My gender journey has led me to a life of relative liberty and stability, almost entirely free from the mundane and relentless discomfort I often experienced as a Butch Dyke for most of my life.

I have the privilege of passing. This is not the experience for a great number of my Trans siblings. I often miss being visibly, identifiably Queer. I liked being a Butch. But, I don’t miss my depression. I don’t miss how exhausting and occasionally dangerous the world’s gaze can be. If America could have treated a Butch the way they treat a mediocre, middle-aged white guy, I might have been boring and content much sooner.

I intended to change the world when I was younger. Many of us do. The last time I tried to change the world was in the mid-aughts when I opened a queer bar in Minneapolis to combat the mainstream LGBT movement’s obsession with same-sex marriage and assimilation. I didn’t want to be like everybody else. I wanted us all to stay Queer.

I lost that fight. And after only two years, during the Great Recession, I lost the bar, too. It was the best, hardest thing I’ve ever done. I still haven’t finished processing my grief. Its demise left me broken. I lost my faith in my own Queer resistance. I gave up on changing the world. A few years later, I changed myself.

I don’t regret my choices, but I do miss that inner craving for Queer insurrection. It’s the only beauty I ever worshipped, the only spirituality I ever needed. It’s difficult for anyone to maintain zeal as we age. It has become almost impossible to reconnect to that baby Dyke being outed in high school, in a crappy little town during the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan Era. I can’t remember what it feels like to have existed before visibility and corporate sponsorship, when the full weight of the world’s injustices feels like a personal calling.

In the past twenty years, state sodomy laws were overturned nationally. Same-sex marriage was legalized. RuPaul brought drag into America’s living rooms. Queer Eye made gay men essential cultural professionals then had a an even more successful reboot. We have romcoms and Super Bowl commercials. Gay-Straight Alliance groups in high school, which were non-existent in the mid-Eighties, have already morphed into Gender-Sexuality Associations to accommodate the proliferation of shiny new identities being incubated and nurtured by our youngest generation of Queers.

It’s cool to be Queer in much of America. In Minneapolis, I assume allyship at all events and businesses. If someone were to start harassing me, in some outwardly transphobic way here, I might be temporarily confused, then amused and I might help them find the nearest freeway onramp to make their escape. What is happening in the rest of America, Red America, feels so distant, politically and geographically, it often feels like parody.

My social media feed informs me daily of fresh atrocities targeting Queer children perpetrated by conservative state legislatures, Christian Nationalist militia attacks on drag performers reading to children, and desperate pleading from right-wing pundits to their supporters to preserve the patriarchy by smashing rainbow retail displays and disemboweling cases of shitty beer with assault rifles. I’m awash with memes, highlighting Christian hypocrisy, infantile hysteria over the sexuality of candy, and anything uttered by Marjorie Taylor Greene. And my own echo chamber warns me frequently that “they” — the fascists, the Nazis, the Supreme Court — are trying to take us back. Back to a time before our progress, our normative entitlements, our human rights.

They can’t take us back. The absence of protections and basic humanity that existed for Queers prior to the turn of the century existed in a culture of assumed self-hatred and shame. We assumed that for ourselves, and the world assumed we would remain in the closet. Homophobia was a cultural norm. Transphobia was but a theoretical concern for the mainstream. No one ever thought Trans people would come anywhere near normative America.

What has happened in a remarkably short time is that liberal/urban/blue America has fully integrated Queer inclusion language and protocol into its larger platform, much like recycling and composting. This has created cultural and geographical bubbles of comfort, awkward enthusiasm from heteronormative politicians, and even mundanity for many Queers living in cities or being famous.

This has led to localized, selective apathy within those bubbles. Just two years after Minneapolis lit a beacon fire for anti-racist revolution for the rest of the world, the comfortable neo-liberal majority here voted to not to replace our racist police department with a department of public safety and they re-elected a mayor who doubled down on punitive policing and increased their funding. I cannot imagine there were no Queer voters in support of the status quo here.

The mainstreaming of Queer and the targeted entitlements that resulted also led to a conspicuous psychological disconnect between urban Queers and those Queers living in those places we can’t imagine living. I’m positive we have way more gay Republicans than we used to. I’m not claiming we all used to get along, but we all used to share a common oppression. I feel sometimes footage of a drag ban in Tennessee plays like a Sally Struthers infomercial about starving children in Africa. Urban Queers care, but it’s so distant, it doesn’t seem personal. It seems like another country.

Maybe that’s the plan. Maybe there’s a slow-rolling, legislative secession underway. Minnesota just passed sanctuary laws designed to harbor folks seeking abortion or gender-affirming care. An asylum migration is beginning. But there are millions of Queers that can’t afford to or don’t want to leave their home, their families, their communities.

Our Queer family in red states or areas is in a fight urban Queers can’t remember. How are they doing? What are they doing? My personal exhaustion and hard-won stability is feeling uncomfortable. I can’t watch this live-action Simpsons spin-off with cynicism and incredulity as if I’m a distant, untouchable target.

The legal battles currently being waged against the anti-Queer canon of legislation produced and anointed by right-wing think tanks, seek to nationalize the norms of inclusion and access already established in liberal America. Conservative leaders in red states are striving for an America that never existed. Violence and oppression toward Queers have always happened, but they are now speaking in terms of eradication.

There’s a whole new generation of Queers that’s grown up with the internet, representation in media, and an expectation of civil rights that’s suddenly being confronted with a genocidal spotlight. Their moms love them and are largely supportive. They are furious their kids are being targeted for political profit. There’s a bunch of small-town Queers who may have moved to a big city twenty-five years ago, but that option has been foreclosed by the cost of living in any urban area.

Deviance and defiance were my religion in the Nineties. I’m pretty sure I won’t find my way back to Mohawks and motorcycles, but I don’t think that’s where my potential usefulness resides anymore. I want to meet the Queers on the front lines. I want to hear their stories. I want to discuss strategy. I want to find a conduit for Queer community and my own soul.

Two years ago, I went on a small-town Pride tour and wrote a sweet series of articles about the relatively recently established, heart-warming and kitschy delight of holding a Pride in tiny town.

I’m going on another small-town Pride tour, but I’m specifically traveling to red states and conservative towns. I want to meet the people who organize a celebration of Queer resistance in a place I probably wouldn’t have driven through before my transition. I’m going to write about what I learn.

I’ll also use this series to research and report the specific political and legislative situation in each state I visit. I admit to conflating red states and their collective politics as so much dingalingary. I want to be better informed. I’ll also make every effort to connect with a professional organizer from each state who might be willing to educate me further on their local strategies of Queer resistance.

This is going to be fun. I am fucking pumped to meet some new fierce Queers. And I’m taking Cookie. I haven’t figured out if the money I save on hotels will be canceled by the money I spend on gas, but you can’t put a price on hipster envy.

***Cookie and a trucker hat also play well in the Ozarks. I already went to Hardy, Arkansas on May 20th. I’ve got some good stories to tell, and I’ve got pictures and videos. The next article should be out early next week.

I think this is technically illegal in Arkansas.

Trans Man in a Van

June 1, 2023 / Ty..Bo / Leave a comment

driving toward queer resistance in deep red america.

Ty Bo Yule

7 min read

Just now

Two years ago, I went on a small-town Pride tour and wrote a sweet series of articles about the relatively recently established, heart-warming and kitschy delight of holding a Pride in tiny town.

Pi Love, Ch. 5, “What are we going to do tonight, Brain?”

July 4, 2015 / Ty..Bo / Leave a comment

St. Vern/Virgil, Patron Saint of hats with beavers on them.

Assessing the inventory of discarded treasures that the building still housed was one of the more amusing activities that we indulged in while taking in the weight of new fortress ownership. Highlights on the list include a 22′ shuffleboard game, an impressive air pistol found under an old, but comfortable couch, a bonanza of furniture carts and dollies, various crutches and wheelchairs, and this picture of this handsome guy we named Vern. Later, after we were open, an older hottie with red hair who, I swear, introduced herself as Trixie used to come visit the space on occasion. It had been her bar home when it was the Legion. I took her on a tour during one of those visits including the large room we set aside as office/liquor storage space where Vern’s framed picture was enshrined to the right as you entered. She picked it up and shouted, “Oh my God, where’d you get this picture of Virgil?” And even though the two names are not similar in any way, except that they are both old-timey and start with ‘V’, it was enough to confirm the pre-ordained order of righteousness in the universe and Pi’s place in the history of awesomely fighting the good fight. This was actually kind of a regular phenomenon at Pi, which is one of the things I miss the most because normal life is often not overly filled with hearty pirate-dick-grabbing Fuck Yeah’s.

When we were done newly investigating the crannies, Benny and I had serious work to do. I now owned my very own commercial building. It was also legally owned also by my soon-to-be ex-wife, who understandably didn’t want to hang out there much and my new business partner who was already colorfully expressing her disinterest in understanding magnitude of the build-out process at hand. Mostly she liked to smoke pot and dream of feeling like Sam Malone in Cheers, which at the time seemed relatively benign. Neither one of them were there much at all, so, it was 12,000 square feet of my uninterrupted vision in all practicality. Promise and mold. Benny and I had made it look a little prettier on the outside on our first day. I remember the gleeful blend of terror and some sort of emboldened queer psuedo-nationalism. I felt important. I felt devoted. Then I had to go home.

As I’ve referenced, immediately prior to spontaneously deciding to open a dyke bar in South Minneapolis, I had been obsessively courting a straight woman for nearly a year and a half while simultaneously trying to resist this same compulsion because it was destroying my long-term relationship. If you’re a butch, you’ve probably experienced the addictive rush of a pretty straight woman alternately expressing a never-before-felt, supernatural, inescapable, deeply spiritual connection to you, and then 45 minutes later, acting like they’re struggling to remember your name. This situation can drag on for some time, as you know, as well as nudge your sense of identity into the realm of make-believe. Well, I happened to win this particular round of butch/straight-girl I Want To, But I Can’t, No Wait… and found I had a new girlfriend. Subsequently, my beloved friend and partner of nearly a decade moved out of our house. Most of our friends sided with her, as they should have.

You know when you do something like this to your life, you gotta act like you knew what you were doing all along, right? Meanwhile, whenever I thought about my ex, the pain and nausea was overwhelming. What a coward. Hanging out with my new ‘girlfriend’ also felt uncomfortable from the start. What a coward.

But, my new building offered an unmanagable number of tasks to face every single day. I was also sincerely under the impression that I was doing this in order to provide a necessary haven for the lost and overshadowed in my community. Somebody had to do it. Gay marriage was out to Tone Down our tacky, shitty, fabulous culture. Perhaps I could work off my psychic debt. If I succeed, perhaps I could redeem myself and my character. I would also never really have to go home and face the destruction and failure that dusted every surface in my house. It was only during the short commutes to and from my fractured existences that I would allow myself to cry in fits of self-pity and regret.

Now that we have the protagonist’s emotional low point firmly established, let’s start the training montage portion of our story!

Post #1. Day #2.

After our initial, sunny triumph over the weeds, there was necessarily the following day, and another one, and another one. The building was in such a state of disrepair and decay that it was not even worth developing a list of potential renovations at this time. It seemed reasonable to focus on removing things that smell or were potentially hazardous. Honestly, a good portion of time and energy is expended merely trying to decide what the next step should be. Many prospective restaurant owners hire people for this very task. Lack of money was my only project manager, so specific missions were defined by this driver of ingenuity. Demolition and clean-up can thankfully be done fairly cheaply.

My ego has historically been very attached to my ability to perform long days of hard and messy physical labor. Such is the impoverished identity of an old-school butch. So my initial inclination was to tackle the mess. Benny quickly intervened and told me to go find some money and get us a liquor license. There were only two of us at this time and he also possessed the martyr laborer instinct, but I was the sole vision manager. It was my fault we were here doing this. He would thusly take charge of the demolition and crap removal department. He also independently assumed the responsibility of bringing me turkey sandwiches every day. It was around this point that I became completely unable to shop for or feed myself.

It was time for me to go talk to some grown-ups. Never having even worked in the service industry or received any kind of business training (besides being my parent’s offspring), it is difficult to just decide one day that you should assume that you have any kind of legitimate access to the gate-keepers of capitalism. For us over-educated, life-style underachievers, it feels very much like a private club that perhaps our parents belong to, but our only glimpse of the inner-workings and protocols has been from the lifetime kiddie table at carefully scripted holiday events. But at least I had been to those events, and I grew up around my parent’s businessy super-powers, and I’m white. I instinctively knew my privilege would aid me now.

I knew we would obviously need a liquor license to operate a bar. I did not quite understand how complicated it actually is to obtain permission to sell alcohol in Minneapolis yet. I also had a rudimentary understanding that a Business Plan was some sort of magical document that made banks give you money. These responsibilities framed my immediate agenda.

I made an appointment to finally receive my Liquor License Application. These are acquired at a business licensing office on the first floor of City Hall downtown. They don’t just hand them out. You have to actually have a meeting with a liquor inspector. I was wearing my usual summer uniform, Dickie’s cut-offs and a black t-shirt. I grabbed my bag, a canvas shopping bag from a book store in San Francisco. I had casually grabbed this tote one day from my home and now carried it with me everywhere. It contained my Spiderman notebook, a date book, and the remains of a bag of sunflower seeds that had spilled. It is now one of many priceless artifacts with which I still cannot bear to part.

still contains seeds

I rode my trusty, crusty mountain bike to City Hall one sunny morning. City Hall in Minneapolis was built to look like a kind of old-world stone fortress. I will admit that in all of my many meetings with the necessary grown-ups that police your ability to open a business, I generally felt intimidated and out of place. My mother would have also been appalled by my wardrobe choices. I made my otherness public, contrary to my mother’s life-long advice, but I felt like I was out to change the world, or at least challenge the arbitrarily appointed powers that denied my legitimacy. An adolescent rebellion to be sure, but it provided the requisite resolve to face the faces of authority. (Crap, was all of this to prove something to my mother? Probably, but moving on.)

oooh, it’s so big and hard.

Once at City Hall, I passed through the initial clusters of people who believe in striding everywhere and checked in at the correct plexiglass. I was then ushered into a small office within the licensing department. I was sat at a small round conference table. A short time passed and three large polished older white men in really nice suits with impressive briefcases came in and sat at the table with me. They were followed by a slightly scruffy, compact man in a short-sleeved button-up and khakis. Phil.

Phil sat next to me and began his spiel, carefully distributing professional respect with equity around the table. When he noticed my Spiderman notebook, he told me about his twin two-year-old boys who loved Spiderman everything. He was nice to me.

When the subject of the food and non-alcoholic beverage revenue requirements came up, one of the lawyers on my right informed him that their corporation would be seeking a “nightclub” exemption for their venture. I told Phil that I too was seeking an exemption to the revenue requirement, but since the “nightclub” exemption was only possible in zoned specific areas downtown, I had sought out a location that met the other required geographical criteria that would allow me to sell as much booze as I wanted. When he told me that, after fifteen years as a liquor inspector, he was not aware of such an exemption, I simply recited the pertinent code word for word and even offered the reference number. I do not have an idetic memory, I was simply obsessed.

The smile he offered me then seemed to convey that I had found a magic ally to aid my quest, like running into the scarecrow on the yellow brick road. One of the businessmen chuckled and half-jokingly offered me a job. The amusing contrast of my antagonistic appearance with my casual eloquence was obviously playing well in this tiny room. I was beaming with the potential of eventual success and probably subconsciously, being validated by white men. I had passed through a gate. I left that initial meeting with an application that was, itself, nearly thirty pages in length, each detailing a different leg of the bureaucratic scavenger hunt I was now responsible for completing.

The next important task to begin would be writing a business plan. I called my mother first, who promptly Fed-exed me three different books on the subject. I also looked for templates on the internet. All of this research yielded mostly tips on how to make your plan “pop”. I hate that word used in that context. What I needed was practical step-by-step consultation. Someone told me about Women Venture, a non-profit established, in part, to help female entrepreneurs find funding for their projects. I had high hopes that such an institution had just been waiting for a project like mine. They had even been featured on Oprah who had donated boots to help women get into the construction industry.

This experience would be the first in a substantial list of bewildering experiences where a woman-run or woman-centered company or individual stunned me with disinterest, disorganization, or greedy self-importance. I was a butch woman opening a dyke bar. How much more vagina cred do I require for your assistance and solidarity? It happened with enough regularity that it began to be a source of private, probably offensive humor for me and Benny. It also began to slowly reveal our perceptions of who our people were, who we were really trying to open this bar for. Sometimes, being a lesbian or a gay or a groovy liberal feminist does not make you interesting and brave and insightful. Sometimes it just makes you an unimaginative, self-aggrandizing little punk.

Women Venture requires you to attend an introductory informational meeting. I think it cost $35. I eagerly attended. Surrounded by images of Oprah, they wasted an hour of my time encouraging me to indulge in one of their spa retreats, which would not only provide necessary, relaxing ‘me’ time, but would allow me to network with other would-be professionals. Not one useful word was uttered. After the meeting, I cornered the facilitator, asking if there were people there that could help me write a business plan, or if there were classes, or if they could talk to me about what banks required or how did people get grants from them. She actually seemed confused by my determination to open my own business, which, in turn, confused and angered me. She awkwardly helped me make an appointment with one of their advisors for some individual consultation. This appointment yielded nothing but a “good job, you seem to be on the right track” and cost an additional $80.

I left their offices gape-faced and crazy-eyed, wondering what I was going to do next. Then, as I was walking out of the building, I noticed a small office with its door open. The sign on the door said something about the Small Business Administration. I knew from my online research that this organization had something to do with fostering small businesses. I poked my head in and saw an older man with distractingly bushy eyebrows watching the Price Is Right on a small portable TV sitting on the corner of his desk. I don’t recall the conversation that we had that first day, but turns out, not fifty feet from the offices of Woman Venture, housed in the very same building, the SBA had built a small satellite office and its sole purpose was to help people write business plans. They had free computers to use, with free business plan writing software, and a retired business owner and ex-city councilman would not only help you through the process for free, but take your completed plan home to read and provide free thoughtful feedback. Tom. Tom would also give you free coffee and sometimes doughnuts.

Suck it Women Venture. And Oprah, too. Just kidding Oprah. I’m scared of you like a Catholic school girl is scared of Jesus making her pregnant.

respect

I hung out with Tom for endless hours at least twice a week for the next couple of months. Benny came with me once for support. He fidgeted like we forgot his Ritalin, but I think I just wanted to show him. I wanted someone to know what I was doing. I was writing mission statements and making up projected revenues and pretending I knew what repairs the building needed and how much it would cost and how much we would need for an ice machine and glassware and an initial liquor inventory. It was a lot like playing some ‘build-a-bar’ board game or Facebook app. Tom told me that it was all just guesses anyway. It was most important to promote your idea and yourself…two activities with which I am still quite uncomfortable.

Another theme established at this time was some kind of sick cosmic recurring cycle of facing the crushing disappointment of immanent failure quickly followed by the exhausting exultation of some sort of benevolent, serendipitous, magical intervention that cleared our path for at least the next short leg of our journey. Benny and I came to cautiously expect miracles, Pi miracles. We started to understand we were facilitating a project that was charmed. The business plan and the liquor license, at this early juncture, were my two big projects that loomed like circling dragons on the road between me and the portals of queer glory, but I had already gained the favor of two unlikely straight white male demi-wizards with conventional entrepreneurial powers. It was up to me to trudge forth with my canvas tote of hope.

Benny still had his other job at the coffee shop, but would still come to the bar whenever he wasn’t working. His to-do list was considerably more vague at this time. I had asked him to be my bar manager. We were a long way from having a bar to manage. It was still August at this point in the story. He busied himself throwing away less awesome leftovers from the previous business and demolishing any drywall that was stained with mold. There was also a long hallway of filthy, ancient bar carpet that was welded in place with an overabundance of old adhesive. At a pace of several inches a day, armed only with a 3″ rigid paint scraper, he steadfastly removed it all. I rented dumpster after dumpster.

sad to see the cheese sauce go

the cart and barrel mold abatement method.

All of these projects were happening simultaneously, along with a hundred other details I’ve forgotten, but I do recall a mere day or two after acquiring my liquor license application, barely two weeks into this endeavor, sitting on the steps of Benny’s Powderhorn duplex, I received an unsettling call from another emerging ally, Elena.

Elena was a regular at the coffee shop where Benny worked who flirted with me and Benny. On the surface, Elena was a powerhouse. At the time, she was the director of a nearby important Neighborhood Association, not Pi’s. She loved the intrigue and drama of City Hall and municipal politics and was really good at her job. She was also a hard femme who hadn’t fully explored this aspect of herself and was drawn to Benny and me, Benny for his earnest, and deceptively simple butchness, and me for my history of sexual recklessness and love of obscure 80’s R&B. We had always been friendly acquaintances, but with the initiation of the Pi Project, she gladly made herself our own consultant and City Hall mole.

Elena called to inform us that a prominent City Councilman had already heard about our liquor license application and had been rumored to say that under no circumstances would he ever allow us to get our license. Something about over his dead body, I don’t know. This news was initially confusing because the councilman in question was not only openly gay, but also represented a ward historically inhabited by Minneapolis’ own old school version of the Lesbian Mafia. These women were not the self-proclaimed Facebook Familia. They were the middle-aged lesbian feminists active in the 70’s who now held various respected leadership positions at non-profits, school boards, community organizations, and co-ops. They were all connected through past romances and grudges. Thankfully, Pi was in another councilman’s ward, but it still seemed like a big deal that a City Fucking Councilman had declared Pi anathema.

So, I freaked out a bit. I even called his office to try to talk to him, but was rejected. And then another emotion took over. I was sitting there on the stoop with Benny, asking him whether I should continue trying to open this bar or if I should run away to Hawaii with my new girlfriend and live in a hut on the beach. That fucking Benny face.

I’m so sorry I couldn’t find a better picture and I’m so glad we eventually took testosterone.

It made me want to be brave. It made me want to be not disappointing. My life suddenly turned into a cartoon with the appearance of an actual mustachio-twirling villain, who in real life, irrationally and prematurely, condemned our dreams with a mwah-ha-ha. I had no idea prior to this that anybody was actually taking me seriously. Thanks Councilman Oldtwink. Over the coming months, the circumstantial evidence would become overwhelming that he had some personal grudge against this endeavor and it just made me want to win.

I asked for an audience with my old boss from the co-op who happened to be one of the pillars of the older lesbian guard and had known this councilman when he was still a Woman Studies major at the U. At our meeting, she, of course, expressed concerned about the riskiness of my venture and the fragility of my mental state, but also obliquely intimated that she would ‘make inquiries on my behalf’. I have no idea if any backstage blackmail phonetree actually took place, but I had the feeling that some kind of torch-passing blessing had occurred.

I was now aware that people knew what I was doing. The hornet’s nest had been kicked. Everyone started to transition into allies or enemies. I began to understand that there was more at stake than my personal need for redemption.

Obsession is necessarily melodramatic. One end of the line distinguishing poetic from creepy is clenched in the teeth of the obsessed, the other is held by the people you imagine are watching you. The plausibility of real-world benefit from your compulsive visions is determined by the quality of your hustle. I had serious game just then. I made myself mayor of the Island of Misfit Queers and people were starting to encourage me in real life. I imagined it was like those kids running behind Rocky in Rocky II. A good training montage is a worthy spirituality.

Pi Love, Ch. 4, Queering the Legion

June 4, 2015June 5, 2015 / Ty..Bo / Leave a comment

always cover genitals during astral projection

Even before Facebook quizzes, the question of which super-power you would choose if you could would occasionally come up at parties or on first dates. For as long as I can remember, I have always chosen the ability to see the entire history of a specific location as my superpower. I imagine myself standing still, eyes open but not focused on the present. Maybe they’d get that cool opal cloud covering like Storm in X-Men or the old master in the opening credits of Kung-Fu. My surroundings would begin to morph into their previous incarnations, activated by the ectoplasms of the individuals that have occupied that space in the past. I can see them laughing, drinking, dancing, fucking, and dying in cyclical ceremonies of inhabitation.

I could solve crimes. I could see where rad stuff is hidden. I could reveal the mysteries of the ancient past. I imagine there would be lots of cool hats. Of course, at some point, I suppose I would have to travel to the pyramids in Egypt or Stonehenge, but for a long while I would be content standing and watching the past in old bars.

There is something special about the feeling of refuge and calm that bars create for the loyal misfits that assemble to form clots in them. That warm, tangy aroma of stale cigarettes and old beer that gets pulled over your damage like a fuzzy blanket when you open the front door smells like a secret that belongs to you. Bars are relatively safe places for the more intense versions of yourself that feel vulnerable in the daylight. Many bars are even made to attract a specific segment of the fringe that polite culture would like to forget. I believe in a kinship of consciousness that exists between the bold outskirts of an individual’s bar persona and the audacity necessary for true social transformation. I fully realize and am intentionally ignoring the many fantastically destructive scenarios that also occur at bars, because occasionally, rare moments of the singular clarity of the dangerous beauty of humanity are birthed only by the alchemic orgy of desperation, dance, sweat and alcohol. Bars briefly become Dionysian temples. These shared experiences also create unique tribes, bound thenceforth by special initiation. I could spend a lifetime rewinding through an old building’s secret rituals. Perhaps just to salve an internal longing to bear witness to a human intensity and turbulence that I fear is being irredeemably dulled.

not my favorite dyke bar, but I was there when it opened

The demise of dyke bars in the last ten to fifteen years is just truly sad. In 2006, I had set out to resurrect a dying paradigm. But, there was no alternative. How much queer history has happened in bars? I was truly worried about the kind of legacy we were creating without them. The cultural stability that gay marriage provides is a cushy gig if you can get it, but I had set out to remind the queers that we are at our most fabulous when we are laughing loudly at our own jokes, half in the bag, bedazzled with transgression. For this task, I required an old bar that felt forgotten.

I arranged to meet the owner of the old American Legion building the following afternoon. I do not recall the showing specifically or what the guy looked like. I remember only that I already knew that this was the place, even before I saw inside.

At some point while he was showing me the building, I wedged a rock or something into the jamb of an inconspicuous side exit. I came back some hours later so that the building and I could become better acquainted in private. The ruins of this brotherhood of Veterans had summoned me. Somebody’s shadowy nostalgia stuck to the old school cafeteria tile, reanimating with my footsteps. The mold, the standing water, the rotten carpet, the smell, all faded from perception as I saw what was to occur here and as what had happened here came out to meet me. The decay was meant to deter lesser advocates, and obscure the magic from the unworthy. The building had been waiting for me.

The invisible interaction of past and present occasionally and fleetingly reveals its bustling machinations to the corner of your eye. Right now, I am trying to remember what I felt like and how the building felt to me as I walked through it for the first time. But, considering the unlikeliness of the building’s materialization within the parameters of my obscure geographical criteria and its availability within my shaky financial reach for the purpose of Pi, I have to wonder… what are the metaphysical desires of a space? How do people and events dent and deposit their creature residue onto a particular location, especially one that has been a place of gatherings? When first encountering the abandoned surroundings of a previously well-used structure, there is a natural inclination to sift through the remaining artifacts or make note of smooth, shiny irregularities of wear, fabricating likely or fantastic scenarios of explanation. But this innocent curiosity is not the totality of the negotiation of promise that is occurring. I projected my own desires onto the remains of another clan’s ceremonial hall. The wreckage granted me permission and also gave me a caved-in mirrored disco ball as a housewarming gift.

I bought it the next week. It was for sale, contract-for-deed. What that means is that as long as your check for the down payment clears and you keep up with the monthly interest and tax payments (almost $6000 a month), the owner will hand you the keys to a building you can’t actually afford and you have two-years to get a successful business up and running and create enough credit to convince a traditional bank to pay the owner off and give you a regular mortgage. If you’re unable to secure the financing after two years, possession of the building reverts to the former owner along with all the money you have already given him as well as any improvements you have made to the building.

My half of the down payment was the entire inheritance my mother had given me in addition to half of the total amount that my secret investor was going to invest. I had not even started a business plan yet, which was apparently necessary according to everyone that liked to tell me what was necessary. I also had no plan for how I would continue to make the monthly interest payments, but the urgency and clarity of the vision I had in my head demanded that I proceed. At the time, it felt very much like the point of no return. I constantly had the sensation I was in a movie, one of those movies where improbable things happen to and for the protagonist toward the climactic fruition of a specific dream.

I would quit my regular, low-wage job the next week. My partner, Patricia would move out of our house three weeks later. My only source of income would be my home equity line, about $40,000. With this, I would be paying my house mortgage and bills, the interest payment on the building, and within a few more weeks, I would be paying my best friend to keep me company in my new haunted, moldy castle. There was no other money in sight yet. I had a very limited understanding of even how much money it would take to rehabilitate this derelict shell into a permissable business. I had a laptop, a cell phone, and an old phone book that I found in the building. At this point, a few of my friends tried to talk me down. I just told them that I had been called by god to open a dyke bar. The part of my brain that could not face my real-life grief and self-hatred made anything reasonable or practical taste terrible.

I am sure there is technical diagnostic language to explain my mental state at that time, something fancier and more precise than merely delusional. Also, traditional psychology is not inclined to encourage uncommon states of consciousness in an otherwise functional cultural participant. The correlation to dangerous outcomes is too unnerving. However, I also believe that finding yourself temporarily unmoored to mundane practicalities can open unexpected conduits between the part of you that has been broken and the place in others that is unsatisfied. Most people, if given the opportunity, would rather not give a fuck about all the things about which they are supposed to give all their fucks. I felt like I surreptitiously locked onto an invisible low-humming frequency that called out to the romantics and the lost. It was like my fairy godmother sobered up for a minute. I found, at this time, with shocking regularity, that people and things seemed to gravitate toward the success of my unlikely endeavor, usually exactly at the juncture they were necessary.

The day I rode my bike all the way to some office building in St. Louis Park to sign all the building contract documents and get the keys to Pi, the scenery on the path changed. I had left the Shire for sure. The acquisition of the building meant that I could start my liquor license application. The gravity of the financial doom I was now facing certainly compelled me toward the task of writing a business plan. But on the first day in my new broken-down, smelly-ass building, it was just me and Benny. I don’t know where the fuck Gandolf was. It was hard to know where to start. What would be our first task?

The building and I had a new relationship. I was the one who held the keys. My instinct was to let the building know that it had a responsible new caretaker. I also knew we would have to win over our new neighborhood. We were surrounded by other functioning businesses. I think I had even already had a conversation with a proprietor directly behind us, across the alley, that had revealed her extensive concerns about our future patrons uncontrollably urinating all over her parking lot. I also knew that we would eventually need to get formal approval from the Seward Neighborhood Group to advance our liquor license application. My endless teenage hours spent mowing, raking, and detailing my parent’s various suburban yards suddenly unearthed my father’s wax-on, wax-off karate wisdom. The very first thing we did on this leg of our journey was clean the yard.

Pi had a twenty-four space parking lot and a patch of grass out front. The parking lot was full of cracks, through which a prairie had been trying to emerge for the last several years. We spent an entire Minnesota August day clearing weeds, mowing the lawn, and trimming the bushes. I think I might have even purchased weed-killer for the parking lot, a modern evil that my progressive politics had previously prohibited. I remember Benny and I making jokes about our yard work that seemed like an inconsequential gesture toward the tidal wave that was our to-do list. But, if there is anything that growing up in suburbia teaches you, it is that the maintainance of your yard is the foremost indicator of your sense of responsibility and accountability as a neighbor.

When we would later canvas the surrounding businesses and residential areas for support, almost everyone mentioned their appreciation for the new tidiness of our lot. They believed it would discourage suspicious behavior in the neighborhood and showed that we would be responsible and accessible business owners. Thanks mom and dad.

The old Legion smiled on us and liked its new haircut.

Pi Love, Preface (Do You Still Believe in Fairies?)

August 1, 2014July 3, 2015 / Ty..Bo / 5 Comments

Another Pride Season came and went this summer as it does every summer. What does that mean anymore? Did you go? Were you inspired? The Homocorporate Jamboree is part of Americana now. Should we still bother to believe in the Gay Holiday Spirit? Should we yet look upon the trails of rainbow glitter, dusting the urine-soaked sidewalks with wide-eyed wonder imagining the glorious, radical fairy that may have left us a shimmery trail of hope for profound subversion and true transgressive potential? Do Towanda and the goddess still swell within your vagina as big dykes on big bikes rumble past, engines rattling your diaphragm? Are you truly Proud? Or has the HRC and Absolut Vodka stolen our magic beans forever?

When was the last time you truly felt that gushy, choked-up, heart-pride at the beauty of the solidarity of a bunch of freaky misfits engaging in the simple, profound bravery of resistance? I’m not talking about that feeling that you get when you’re at some awesome, completely self-aware activist fundraiser, watching yet another performance by that local queer artist that seems to land every activist fundraiser gig, that you’re secretly not into, but you can’t wait to tweet about it anyway. I’m not talking about facebook proud. I am talking about that rare moment when you suddenly realize that you are in that spontaneous, organic location of choice… providential, morality-forming choice. And you choose correctly, courageously, with your whole heart. This can happen when you simply chose to be utterly possessed and cosmically aligned to the unexpectedly compelling queer performance art. In that moment, when you watched that aging trans-woman, whose voice was cracking while you were sobbing, sing Christina Aguilera’s “I Am Beautiful”, you understood, completely, you might kill or die for her because nothing else is as important to vanquishing evil in the world as her bravery. You let that experience change you. Good and evil may again reveal themselves when you choose to stay on the front line of a riot because you watched the cops, in full riot gear mace the people standing next to you, who (not surprisingly) happened to be transwomen, and your initial impulse to provide care or help them escape, transformed into fanatical awe, watching five of them simultaneously draw mace from their own purses to return the gesture. The fire-hoses did not move you. And maybe, at some point, you saw, in an instant, an unlikely opportunity to actualize a fantasy of a physical sanctuary and community venue for the purpose of fomenting that exact feeling of pride and that rare potential solidarity you feared was fading with each passing Pride Season? You knew you could actually do something real for the community you have most admired and loved, but it was a huge risk. Would you take it? Even if it meant there would be nothing else in your life? And you could lose everything? Is that swelling in your heart real or are you just having an mid-life identity crisis? Does it matter? Because if you truly believe in the Spirit of Queer Past and you let it fill you with gooey psuedo-nationalistic, epic We Are The Champions Pride, is it any less of a miracle when what you envisioned actually manifests in the world? Is there anything else that you are doing with your life that might end up being as important to you as creating something that touches others and changes things, just a little? What are you willing to give up to see what your heart desperately wants in the world? To overthrow cynicism, even for a tiny fraction of your life?

Queers aren’t what they used to be. It’s probably time to refresh the taxonomy of queer. To me, it feels like a purely emotional and moral classification. Anyone who is not an asshole, but must also be some some sort of awesome. This is important because queer still has potential. Queer still antagonizes the foundational assumptions of the dominant, Western, cultural paradigm – sex and gender. The regulatory norms of the dominant culture still fuck everybody up. They also undergird the principles of colonial capitalism which are, at heart, paternalistic and cause unimaginable destruction and suffering globally. This is not friendly paternalism, dad is an evil dick. Perhaps you’re wondering what this has to do with Gay Pride. The only thing that has ever kept the zombie apocalypse at bay throughout human history is the magnetism of the outcast, the gumption of the underdog, pirate mojo, and the “Pride” of moral certitude in acts of solidarity and resistance to a common evil. Being gay has become kind of boring…and worse than that, lots and lots of the younger generation of queers seem to be pretty ok with that. The rich, old Republican dykes and fags are a lost cause, but it’s the kids I’m worried about. My worst fear is that they never get to experience that cool feeling that is sort of like when a group of improbable heroes in a cheesy action movie are strutting together in slow motion to face impossible odds. That feeling actually happens in real life and it is the only thing that has ever organized people and started movements. Did anybody remember to pass the torch?

I will be the first to admit that I am one of those disparaging, crotchety, aging Gen-X’er that too often and too vocally laments the loss of the nineties. I bark and bark about the demise of the music and the politics, the fashion and the spirit of that decade. I growl about “kids today” and I confess to having called them whiny, overly sensitive, boring, and mostly big pussies. (Don’t talk to me about my use of the word pussy.) And I am not alone in freaky, wrinkly-tattoo, used-to-be-angry-now-I’m-just-grumpy geezertown. Courtney Love wrote a cute little song a couple years ago about (in my reading) an aging nineties rock star’s annoyance toward Millennial’s insipid pop, called Skinny Little Bitch. A lyrical sampling…

And you would be oh so dumb to fuck with me
Cause baby you’re much too young to end up with me…

In my vile sex horror and my cheap drug hell
I am all the things you’ll never live to tell
And you will never see the light
I’ll just obscure it out of spite…

Skinny Little Bitch, Skinny Little Bitch…

God I love that woman. I have also listened to human interest stories on NPR that suggest that the lack of unstructured playtime and over-protective or indulgent parenting might be contributing to a generation of young adults with stunted social coping skills and underdeveloped life strategies. NPR is always so polite. But then I read Jack Halberstam’s recent blog, “You Are Triggering Me: the Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger, and Trauma” which largely echoes many of my own complaints. As I was reading it, I found it wholly entertaining. Yeah! Put a trigger warning on my fat, dyke, tranny, hairy tits and ass! Yeah! I was completely ready to roll my eyes at any critiques. But, I read about four or five responses to his article and found, at least, a handful of compelling counterpoints, most significantly that this esteemed, published, queer theorist in academia leveled critiques at the proliferation of rhetorical constraints on academic queer theory ironically created largely by the work of established queer theorists. This started an internal critique of my own belligerence. I realized that I have friends in their twenties, many of whom have heard my rants, who I like and respect very much. I have experienced a great deal of intelligence and wit from some young people recently. It is not entirely helpful for me to bully youth into adversity or even make them do pushups every time they whine. I don’t want to be an old hater. But, something is nagging at me. Something is missing that I don’t think has ever been missing in a young generation. What is it? Am I just out of touch?

Also, let us not forget to place this whole polemic squarely in the unavoidable poo-pile of privilege into which all mostly white, largely academic, socially urbanized and queerified mo’s are sure to step and then act like everybody’s got shit on their shoes. Young, educated privileged queers, are you sure you have sufficient training and experience to create a fluffy cloud of verbal prophylactics that speaks to and for everyone in the community? And hey, grumpy old gender studies professor, have you done your due diligence and qualified your curmudgeonry with deconstructive, anti-colonial critique? I will point out that nobody in this debate is calling young transwomen, especially poor transwomen, or transwomen of color overly sensitive. And I’d wager that they are probably not present at many backyard safety summits that alter queer custom and speech for their benefit. And that is because transwomen of color do not now, nor did they forty-five years ago, have the luxury of expecting a world free from potential harm. They are still fighting for that. While all the gays are getting married and adopting babies or riding their fixed-gears in a polyamorous peloton, transwomen are still fighting for basic human consideration. In case you missed the first day of Queer History 101, it was transwomen who fought back at Stonewall in 1969. A couple years earlier, it was transwomen who rioted at Compton Cafeteria in San Francisco. It was these events that precipitated the great, slogging, back-biting circus that has been the GLBT Movement for the past forty-five years. Transwomen were fighting against police harassment and brutality. They were fighting against housing and employment discrimination. They were fighting for their personal safety and individual freedom. And we find out from Time Magazine this year, that transgender issues are “America’s next civil rights frontier”. The concerns discussed in the article are exactly the same as they were half a century ago. “It Gets Better”, but not for everyone.

The Time article begins with, “Nearly a year after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, another social movement is poised to challenge deeply held cultural beliefs.” There are so many things wrong with that sentence, that I’ve been unable to move my head for a half-hour trying to figure out where to begin. I’m not going to bitch about Time or the journalist. They both get the ‘way-to-go mainstream publication’ pat on the head. You have exceeded my expectations of you which are zero. However, queers, I have higher expectations of you. It is your fault this sentence was published. First of all, it would appear that the gay and lesbian agenda of legalized marriage is being juxtaposed to simply being transgendered as similar challenges to dominant culture. This might imply that the movements have something to do with each other, but wait, “another social movement is poised”. This mainstream, and traditionally conservative publication has casually named something that should cause shame in the hearts of every Wells Fargo banking, Chipoltle eating, rainbow bracelet wearing, Pride Parade enjoying mother fucker. There was never a T in GLBT. Transpeople and gender deviants have always born the brunt of societal discrimination, violence, and exclusion, not to mention all of these things from within their own supposed movement as well. They started a movement that has been so shitty to them, that it is not surprising at all to find that mainstream America thinks it’s a brand new “frontier”.

To those of you that believe in the efficacy of an incremental civil rights strategy…well, yes, certain things do change, but it appears to be at the cost of reinforcing by renegotiating a timelessly brutal matrix of oppressive power dynamics. By simply expanding the obligatory guest list of those vying for a seat at the table of dominant class entitlements, you just make the bouncers bigger assholes. The categories of exclusions become ever more specialized and aggressively policed (often most enthusiastically by the newly entitled). Racism and classism, you are like gravity, nothing on earth escapes your force. Gender, however it is perceived internally and externally has everything to do with everything you do every day everywhere. These mega-categories influence the power dynamic of every single human interaction we have. And no matter how much you think has changed in the last fifty years, the dominant model of power in the Western World has really not changed at all. That’s why getting married became so much more important to gays than any other queer issue that had anything to do with poverty, race, or gender presentation. But I know why those gays fought for that. They were willing to leave the dominant regulatory norms in place and assimilate as much as possible to the dominant model, to gain access to not only legal entitlements, but a certain gain in social cachet. That happens in all social justice movements. But, something sincerely troubles me about the queers that seem so aware of all of these easily identifiable problems with mainstream G&L politics. Something diabolical has seized the great tentacles of traditional, American, clumsy, shit-kickin oppression, against which it was so satisfying to mobilize, and trained them into millions of tiny, wiggly, tickly tadpoles of easily consumable, oppression-friendly, magic chicken fingers that make complacency delicious.

The real reason that some of us old nineties activists get so grumpy about the younger generation of activists is because it actually seems to us that oppression in the fringe is getting more severe, and the global situation is becoming more dangerous. When we look for signs of clever and functional resistance, we often only find facebook links to Jon Stewart or Beyonce. I honestly don’t have any answers. It’s my fault, too. The main reason I started this blog is that I’ve been having a very difficult time finding my shine. I don’t know how to begin to fight the situation we are in. I have been transitioning for almost four years. I look like a middle-aged white man. Perhaps the absence of daily micro-aggresions has dried up my access to outsider magic. At least I know what I’m missing. Nothing can take away my personal history and my memories. Or my stories. That’s what this personal project is for. Right now, it is all that I have to give. I am hoping, by the end of telling my story, I will have more. However, to those adults who were born after I graduated high school, you killed rock ‘n’ roll, so I have to think that you don’t know what you’re missing. Perhaps you think my emphasis on the emotive power of the Spirit of Queer Past is corny. It is. But, I got to live a real life Fairy tale. I know a story seems anticlimactic after all of my proselytizing , but a good story is a much more efficient way to pass on what you think is important and it is the best reason to risk it all.

So clap for Tinkerbell. And I will tell you a story of fairy dust and pirates, real heroes and real villains, and destiny made. And just like a creepy, animated Tom Hanks movie that makes you cry when the kid hears the jingle bell or a creepy Tom Hanks prison movie that makes you cry when you realize that a death row prisoner is kinda like Jesus or something, you will get that cheesy, childlike gut rush of endorphins and believe again in queer miracles.

This will be the story of Pi. It was a queer nightclub in Minneapolis that I began to envision in early 2006. It closed in late 2008. Though short-lived, the enormity of the experience has delayed it’s telling until now. I will try to be more diligent about posting the chapters of the story in a more timely manner. I honestly have just felt intimidated about writing it. I don’t want to fuck it up.

Me and Caroll and Chaz and Cher

March 23, 2014 / Ty..Bo / Leave a comment

When I was two years old, my favorite TV show was The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. It was 1972. Perhaps this is my first memory or perhaps my mother has told the story so many times that I think I can remember it. I believe I do remember watching one of the many times when Sonny and Cher used to close the show by bringing out Chastity for their final number. I would insert myself into the TV with them. I might have made my first petty comparisons between my cuteness and Chastity’s cuteness, preferring my own. Perhaps I might have thought that I would make a more suitable famous TV child. Apparently, I used to carry around a picture of Cher with me wherever I went. I also told my day-care providers that was, in fact, Sonny and Cher’s child and that I was just on loan to my parents. They must have told my folks, because my parents started calling me Tara Bono, which was eventually shortened to just Bo. This is the name my parents have called me my entire life. Fortunately, it has enduring gender neutrality.

Thus began the paranormal resemblance of my life to Chastity Bono’s. We are almost exactly the same age. We both came out as lesbians at around sixteen. We both transitioned later in life. I didn’t think about it much over the years. It was a cute story my mom liked to tell about my childhood. My mom. She is not like Cher in so many ways. Who is? But, she is pretty and thin. There is also something relatively uncommon about her femininity and presence that is quite Cherlike. My mother has a larger than normal life aura surrounding her, like Cher. Not in a theatrical sense (although she has that side), more associated with her superhuman competency. Think Annette Bening in American Beauty or Robin Wright in House of Cards. I just realized that Kevin Spacey is the husband in both of those shows – weird. She is super capable and really pretty and she is kind of a big deal in her own community. She also has a sense of entitlement that borders on the masculine. Many pretty women know that they can manipulate because of their beauty. Caroll and Cher seem to bend cumulative human folly to their will, using their beauty merely as a jedi mind trick that disguises their true alien forms. Their looks are not the most significant thing about either of them. They are significant people. As to their femininity, there is something additionally performative about it for both of them, almost as if it is not a naturally occurring gender role. There is a similarity to the way Cher wears a Bob Mackie spider web dress and the way my mother dons a St. John’s knit pant suit. They are intimidating, not titillating. I think what I am saying is that my mother and Cher actually are drag queens. What choice did Chaz and I have but to become men?

There is a huge difference between a drag queen and a masculine woman. One is entertaining and powerful. The awkwardness of the other is just uncomfortable for everyone.

Occasionally, we would do our best to make our mothers happy.

But the transitional lesbian mullets happened…

which is actually the fault of…

And this, of course, happened…

but then this…

Unlike my mother, Cher has another child, a son. I think his name is Who Gives a Shit. I believe Cher rolled her eyes upon hearing he was getting married. Cisboys with drug problems are boring. I think Chaz and I have mothers who actually ended up really liking us as people. And I’m pretty sure we are the only ones who understand our mothers.

While I was at grad school in Boston, about a year after I had started transitioning, my mother called one night. Her voice was a bit frantic. “I need you to send me a current picture of yourself. A good one. I can pay for you to have one taken if you don’t have one.” I say, “I think I have one, ma. What do you need it for?” She explained, “I got tickets to Dancing with the Stars…and it’s for the night that Cher is going to be there.”

Because my mother is magic, she just assumed that she was going to be able to meet Cher and tell her the whole story. She also told me I was more handsome and a better dancer than Chaz, but she is my mother. I sent her a picture I had actually taken for my girlfriend back in Minneapolis, so I was trying to look hot, which of course, my mom loved, because she’s just so happy that I’m good-looking now. “You always did suck at being a girl,” is what she said when I told her I was transitioning.

My mother took the picture with her to Dancing with the Stars, but she didn’t meet Cher. They stuck her way up on the third tier in the back. I’m sure Cher would have taken care of that shit had she known my mother was there. I’m not sure if Chaz and I are evidence for some obscure psychological template. This is what happens when magic drag queens raise butch dykes. I’m sure we are very different people, simultaneous hairdos aside. I wonder if Chaz dresses in drag every Halloween like I do. I bet I walk better in heels.

	Ty..Bo on The Next Queer Book You Should…
	CandaceSoVan on The Next Queer Book You Should…
	Ty..Bo on Gaslighting Goddesses
	Can't be bothered. on Gaslighting Goddesses
	Albrecht Durer on Gaslighting Goddesses

chemicallyenhancedbutch

Irritating suburbia since the 70's

queer

Trans Man in a Van: driving toward queer resistance in south dakota.

Trans Man in a Van: driving toward queer resistance in Wyoming.

Trans Man in a Van: driving toward queer resistance in Iowa.

Trans Man in a Van: driving toward queer resistance in Arkansas.

Trans Man in a Van

driving toward queer resistance in deep red america.

Trans Man in a Van

driving toward queer resistance in deep red america.

Pi Love, Ch. 5, “What are we going to do tonight, Brain?”

Pi Love, Ch. 4, Queering the Legion

Pi Love, Preface (Do You Still Believe in Fairies?)

Me and Caroll and Chaz and Cher