The Dyke Bar Chronicles

A few doors down from the bar there’s a very fancy Japanese restaurant, if you look in the window you’ll see people in formal clothing in a rustic-chic setting, surrounding tables with embedded grills for cooking bits of your dinner as you’re eating it.

This night, a group from the restaurant comes in, led by a sweet short-haired Japanese dyke with a superstar aura. Her friend, she calls her “sister”, translates for her, and gives us background information for context.

Her sister tells us she has just had a breakup of a 13 year relationship, and wants to meet women. Sister tells me she likes blond women, and then gets corrected to say Indian women too (LOL). Her brother used to own the restaurant, before passing away three years prior, She misses him very much, and right now she really wants to dance, and maybe sing, because she is a famous singer from Osaka. She wants to sing “I will always Love you”, the Whitney Houston version, not the Dolly Parton version.

So we figure out the microphones and turn it up, and she takes one and starts singing. The whole bar turns to watch and listen to her, many of them part of her large Japanese chosen family entourage, and some start to sing along. I can feel tears welling up in my eyes, and I see that the singer is also crying as she belts it out, her Japanese accent ornamenting the lyrics perfectly, so that it sounds like a completely different song.

Hearing a song performed live has a very special electricity about it. By the end of the, everyone is singing along with her, leaving space for her to hit the high notes solo, and breaks into huge applause as the final note concludes.

She is crying and smiling at the same time, and we, the workers, are dumbstruck at how this total stranger has strolled in from another country and fully pulled us into her world, and emotional life, over a conversation that led into a song, which left most of the room in our feelings.

culi: tikka you're soaked

me: drenched

culi: saturated

me: dripping

culi: it's big rains out there

me: a deluge

culi: a flood. put your jacket on a hanger already weirdo.

a bored looking dude, tall and wide, was kinda idly sipping on his drink... his friend comes to the booth and points at him and tells me he wants something his pal can "split to"

I ask what KIND of split. his eyebrows go up.

"You know exactly what i am talking about..."

So now they're having a splitting convention on the dance floor. Just splitting left and right. It's a lot of big boys doing big boy splits.

Nobody is idly sipping anything, everyone is actively splitting everywhere.

Whoa. It was a room packed with QTPOC chanting my name at Color Me Queer tonight. That was a very intense and karmic dj set 🙂. We totally got vulnerable and communed.

Took myself to India for gay pride one year, and ended up on a beach, where a rock seller told me and my cousin and my friend about an india only rock called CAVANSITE. Grows in the part of India i was visiting.

this is a tiny blue rock that grows inside the geode, on top of quartz. he said it makes your dreams more palpable.... it's a vision stone.

My cousin, my friend and I each got one. But mine fell out of it's setting, or it's hiding on a shrine somewhere. I've been trying to find it for a while!

On Saturday i got to my gig a little too early and stopped in an import shop on 14th street to get a ring for myself to remember the weekend... and i found a cavansite ring... which I have never seen before in the US.

Then, when i was paying for it, the cashier was like... You're a really famous DJ and this is a stunning rock.

Homotown just made it into the New York Times Henrietta Hudson! Our baby is all grown up! Just four years of grind nbd.

thank you Jenna Wortham / @jennydeluxe

Also so many gorgeous QTPOC focused parties on the list... yesss all our babies just got shine!

My first almost gay pride, my high school crush (who was a mean girl turned riot girl, alpha femme etc) showed up at my doorstep in a tight short mini skirt and halter top to take me to see Ani DiFranco in battery park, 1998.

My mother, who is a very conservative Bengali LADY, answered the door. I was sitting on the steps, mortified... as a massive screaming fight about autonomy and self-determination erupted between the porch and the foyer. I stayed quiet because they did not let me interject lol. also matriarchy and femmepremacy are real in my worldview because Hinduism and Shakti etc...

I was banned from all things gay at that point onward tho.

But... a year l ended up dating her.

And then we were together through our 20s. If you know me from that time, you know her too.

Everyone has their sun sign, their rising sign, their moon sign... but nobody ever talks about their drunk sign. Which is the zodiac sign you become after a few too many.

they're vogueing around the pingpong table.

i kid you not, on the first weekend of june i was walking in prospect park and saw and heard a baby dyke singing ani difranco songs in the acoustic underpass... to her girlfriend who was watching adoringly from the bench :)

I went out last night, and the way the night started was with me standing between a gay boy in a red t-shirt, and a very boisterous dyke on my right,. And the bartender wearing a lovely red dress.

The dyke on my right starts complimenting the bartender, calling her "the lady in red"

and on my left side, in his perfectly fitted red t-shirt, this lovely gay boy says, thanks gurl I know. snap snap.

And all 4 end up cracking up together.

This pride season I'm thinking a lot about this book I read, (thanks Teána) called Radical Dharma. It's written by a Black Queer Buddhist teacher, named Lama Rod Owens.

He talks a lot about how when we become part of an identity group like "queer" or "buddhist" or "POC", our individual, intersectional struggles get muted in favor of belonging to something bigger than ourselves. And that it's good to pay attention to and honor the parts we are muting. and unmute those.

And that the practice of cultivating empathy and compassion can actually be mobilized for intersectional awareness etc...

this weekend i got to show my bio fam what my chosen family life looks like, and i think... she agrees... I totally traded up lol. She called them kind, brilliant, loving, and committed. It's all true. They are. and it's been a slow and thorough process of us all getting on board for mission chosen family.

Fathers Day is hard for a lot of people (including me) and I just usually take this day to honor the people around me who do stuff that society might label "fatherly".

I've had some really solid father figures, and mother figures in my life, besides the ones i was born with. They have modeled aspects of awesome parenting that I probably reflect back to the younger people that walk into my life now. Stuff like gentle boundary setting, expressing vulnerability, showing up consistently within capacity, and treating love like the infinite gift that it is.

there's a woman in here who is doing great with life now. dancing with her friends...

last time she came through, she had a car load of her boyfriend's stuff, from her apartment, that she was taking to throw in the river or BURN, after she found out he was being dishonest about some really important things. She said... I'm DONE WITH MEN. MEN ARE TRASH. (you can say that really loud at lesbian bars, and people are used to hearing it)

She came straight to the lesbian bar after dumping him. At like... 2am. We all hugged her because she was crying. With a car load of man things she needed help drowning/burning.

there's a leather party here rn.

love it when i see my elders dance to WTP, which stands for "work this pussy". They also like the my neck my back song. there's a lot of love for the profane in queer culture... like... addressing taboo so directly