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watched the stalks of a lavender bush by the bus stop dip and sway from the sheer amount of fat little bumblebees on it and you know what. some things in this world are good
My latest comic for The Nib was written by my friend Mike Thompson- itâs his first published comics work!Â
The Nib has been a steady source of income and a huge support to me and many other indie cartoonists for years. They publish amazing work, but will be cut loose by their financial backer in July. You can read the official post about it from editor Matt Bors here. They are still running their kickstarter-funded print magazine, but have to put digital publishing on hiatus until they figure out their next steps. If youâve been thinking about supporting their membership program, now would be a good time. They have levels from $2 to $40 per month. I really donât want this to be my last Nib piece!Â
you know what, THIS is how you address historical queer folks of all stripes in a respectful way. you refer to them the way they chose to be referred to, and you say âitâs impossible to know how they wouldâve identified in todayâs society, but theyâre part of our history regardlessâ.
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It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghostsâskeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredientâthe cannabisâwas donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Maryâs brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Clubâthe first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
Edited To Add: The wiki entry should be in here vs the history.com link - so here you go.
In which my uncle is the best de facto parent of a queer kid ever
Itâs Pride, and also the first anniversary of my uncleâs death, so I want to type up a story about him. (NB: my aunt, his wife, is equally cool, but sheâd want this story to be about him too.) So here goes.
I skipped town when I was 16. Nothing interesting about that part; just standard queer kid in a conservative place in the 1990s stuff. Iâd just gotten my driverâs license (this took a while; Iâm good at other things), it was the beginning of summer break, and my parents had recently bought a new car and were planning to fix up their old one to sell. In the meantime, the old car (whom Iâd named Harold Godwinson because one of his headlights kept exploding) was sitting all by himself in a corner of the driveway, and I thought he might be down for a little adventure. So, one night, I threw some stuff in my backpack (documents, journals, a few changes of clothes, my $235 in babysitting cash) and snuck out after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep.
Harold Godwinson and I hit the highway. The thing about him was that he started shaking violently at speeds over 57 mph, but in fairness so did I â Iâd driven on the interstate in driverâs ed, but, like, twice, and for 5 minutes at a time instead of several consecutive hours â so we made a good pair. We were lucky enough (seriously: I cannot stress enough how lucky we were in this) to have a destination in mind, and we reached it just as the sun was coming up.
My uncle was in the kitchen making breakfast for my aunt, whoâs not a morning person, and he did not look surprised at all to see me coming up the path with my luggage. He met me at the door and said, âWell, hey there babygirl, we were just thinking you might want to come and stay with us for a while, and Iâm so glad you read our minds.â I ate my auntâs breakfast and then faceplanted in the attic bedroom while he called my parents to tell them where I was and that Iâd be staying. (I could hear the yelling even through the adrenaline crash; I think thatâs the only time I ever heard my uncle yell and, believe me, I did a LOT of dumb shit in front of him over the years.)
The next week my uncle and I went out to run an errand. Iâd thought we were just going to the hardware store â we were forever putting up shelves together â but instead we drove 45 minutes to the stateâs only âalternativeâ (plausible-deniability term for âgay and lesbianâ) bookstore. He walked me inside, poked his head into every room while I watched, confused, from the entrance hall, and then came back over. âOkay, babygirl. Hereâs a twenty, you should, uhhhhhh, buy yourself some, uhhhhhh, alternative books. Back in one hour, I gotta go to the grocery.â At this point he looked around and realized that the cashier (who, I was about to learn, was permanently cosplaying Mo from Dykes to Watch Out For) and a nice middle-aged lesbian couple were trying very hard not to stare at him. He bowed slightly toward them, said âLadies,â and then backed out the door in what might have been the most awkward little shuffle ever.
âYour dad is really sweet,â said the cashier. I didnât bother correcting her.
Okay so tis the season to reblog this and I have a key addition to the story, which is:
We were all hanging out at my auntâs house earlier this month to celebrate my uncle. We drank a toast â cheap scotch, his favorite â and after a while of telling stories about him I asked something that shouldâve occurred to me a lot sooner: how did he find out about the queer bookstore? It was so obviously not his natural habitat.
My big cousin swallowed his scotch the wrong way and my aunt said, âOh, youâre going to love this. He asked around at church.â
Back up for a second: most of my side of the family is Catholic, but through various plot twists in her life my aunt became a member of one of the earlier groups of women to be ordained in the Episcopal church. Not one of the Philadelphia Eleven or anything, but pretty early on. Of course, not everybody â particularly in more conservative parts of the US (like, say, the south) â was cool with women priests right away, and things could get a little hostile at times. My uncle never had much truck with any form of religion or philosophy whatsoever, but he did believe in my aunt, so he would periodically show up at whatever church she was assigned to and stare down anyone who was looking at my aunt in a funny way.
Fast forward again to just before I showed up at their house: my aunt and uncle figured they might ask me to come stay with them, and my uncle, in preparation for this, decided to find some places I might like to hang out. He didnât find anything in the immediate neighborhood, so one Sunday he tagged along with my aunt, who was then working in a church about 45 minutes from their house. During the coffee hour he approached a group of random church ladies and this happened. (Bear in mind that these ladies saw my uncle only once a month or so, when he showed up for his periodic glaring at the conservatives.)
My uncle: Morning, ladies! What a nice service that was. [Pause while they all stare blankly at him.] We hope that our niece will be coming to stay with us soon. [More blank stares from the ladies. Uncomfortable pause.] She has always been a tomboy, and â
One of the ladies, who was about to become my friend Amelia: OHH!!! Okay. [Turning toward the coffee urn.] HEY! POLLY! WE NEED YOUR EXPERTISE AND GUIDANCE!
Polly â imagine the woman from âRing of Keysâ and youâll have it â came right over and said: Oh, a tomboy? Okay, Iâve got you. Let me just get some paper.
Anyway, happy Fatherâs Day to those who celebrate.
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Chromatic Gesture II - 25 x 40 in - 63 x 102cm - 2025
I explore the expressiveness of colour and gesture through textile collage. By layering fabrics, I seek to create compositions making colour and value the protagonists. Each fragment of fabric, with its texture and hue, becomes a brushstroke that contributes to an abstract visual narrative, where intuition guides the creative process.
The first leg hair I saw on a woman was my own hair on my own legs. My mum is very naturally hairless and I knew like one woman who didnât shave her armpits. When people talk about just preferring being shaved and doing it for themselves I do wonder like, how many women with body hair have you ever actually seen? In real life or not? Because I feel like there are places you could go nearly your whole life only seeing your own, and then hardly ever even seeing your own because youâre always shaving it! And itâs just like well yeah of course having no body hair just feels right to you. You have no frame of reference for hairy women outside of like jokes and insults.
Okay, I am an asexual lesbian currently living in Russia. I've been inhibiting queer English-speaking online spaces for more than 7 years and boy does it feel incredibly weird sometimes. Our queer community is HUGE and incredibly diverse, we have our own culture and history spanning centuries, but to the outside world we're practically non-existent. Due to the current laws we can't even talk about our identities and experiences, tumblr is the only place where I feel relatively safe, only because nobody gives a shit about tumblr.
The experiences of queer people in conservative spaces are wildly misunderstood by people who have not lived in them. Little queer communities are often formed naturally, because queer people tend to gravitate towards each other almost instinctively, united by the shared sense of alienation and loneliness. That has been my experience, but I've been incredibly lucky to be surrounded by fellow queer people for almost my entire life.
I lucked out with my parents as well. My mom, step-dad and my father are all accepting and supportive. I feel like the assumed reality of most "queer people in conservative spaces" is that their families are the problem, or at least a huge part of it. That has not been the case for most of my friends. Sure, some of them have awful abusive parents, some are still in the closet, some had issues that have been sorted out by now, but A LOT of Russian parents are supportive of their queer kids. The bigger problem is the law never being on our side, the living in a state of neverending fear and stress, the constant looking over your shoulder.
I knew a girl in my year in high school who had two moms. I don't know what their situation was, but I know there are are a lot of same-sex parents in Russia, even though it is incredibly illegal and they are always at a huge risk of losing their child.
I know a few trans people as well, a couple of them have transitioned, although I genuinely have no idea how they even accomplished that. Their very existence is at a constant risk. They don't get talked about very often even by our own community.
And of course a lot of people, including myself, desperately want to move somewhere safer. Looking at photos of irl pride events genuinely makes me cry every single time. But of course it's not physically possible for everyone to move wherever they want to. You know how migration policies are like. The class inequality in this country is genuinely insane, the vast majority of people are somewhere between "dirt poor" and "struggling lower middle class". In a country where being queer is like thisđclose to being fully illegal, of course queer folks specifically are at a huge risk of unemployment and homelessness. My parents knew a gay man who was fired explicitly because his employer found out about his sexuality. More recently my friend told me about a fight her gay coworker had with his boss, during which a friend of said boss shouted out "what were you thinking, hiring a f*g in the first place?!" He's a nail tech, by the way.
So what we're left with at the end of the day are a lot of queer folks, who don't have the opportunity to move, who are at a constant risk irl, who are prohibited to exist online by their own government. It makes me sick.
And I understand why nobody wants to talk about it or to hear me talking about it. We're The Bad Place. The oppressive imperialist force in so many ways. I get it, that makes me feel sick too. But the queer voices need to be heard. Just like the queer voices of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the American South, the rest of the Eastern Europe and so on and so forth deserve and need to be heard.
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Your parents and grandparents worked one job because they had unions supported by Democrats. Republicans starting with Reagan busted the unions and allowed corporations to pay slave wages while taking away healthcare and pensions.
i don't know if people know this but the idea that AGAB is useful in medical contexts is actually actively dangerous
one of my friends has CAIS. they were assigned female and have a prostate. they have been denied prostate exams multiple times on the basis of "being assigned female" despite insisting that they had valid concerns about symptoms that aligned with prostate cancer. guess what happened when they finally got an exam? they ended up having prostate cancer
it fortunately is now in complete remission, which is why they're comfortable with me talking about it, but you see the issue here? biology is never as simple as assigned sex, by judging the care someone needs by their proximity to maleness or femaleness any mixed or otherwise "abnormal" sex characteristics they have are completely ignored
it doesn't just affect intersex people either, you're throwing trans people under the bus as well. transitioning does change your sex characteristics, trans people should have access to medical care that is catered to their body and not to their assigned sex
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