lauren, that's not very heterosexual of you.

If capitalism didn't make it so the only option was "spend money at a business or don't exist in public" then a ton of people who don't have money to spend would have other places to go and be able to organize meet ups for free at those spaces.

Churches run on tithes, because they need money to maintain the building and services.

Ye olde pub still needed to sell drinks and food to stay open. This is true in 2026, and it was true in 1600.

To a lesser extent, public parks still need tax money. You don't pay at point of service, but the resources have to come from SOMEWHERE. Someone has to maintain the grass and walking trails and playground equipment.

I think that the US transfemme desire to disown drag/ballroom is a symptom of both white culture’s destruction of ancestral ties and the importance of cultural continuity, and of the predominantly white ignorance of it as a gentrified Black art form similar to how whites treat other Black art. They want a destruction of it because they see the effects and results of the gentrified version and assume that’s all there is/was.

In particular it’s frustrating because while some drag queens are cis, a lot are trans women, non-binary, or otherwise transmisogynized and drag/ballroom and the tipping culture associated with it existed in part because the transmisogynized are so fucking unemployable and it provided/s a method beyond mutual aid for the redistribution of money, through the labor of performance.

In relation to trans women, I view drag queens as a pathway to transness similar to crossdressers, femboys, (unfortunately) sissies, and similar - where although the perception of them currently may cause harm to the perception of trans women at large due to the ways they compromise with predominantly white cishetero society to allow transfemmes to explore their gender, they are, in fact, still functionally people within the spectrum of transfemininity even if they haven’t fully accepted their gender expansiveness for themselves. Harm they cause to the perception of transfemmes does not lessen them from that societal assignment, any less than we can say Caitlyn Jenner, Blair White, or Kelly Cadigan are less trans women because of the harm they’ve done to the perception of trans women. They are all, in effect, varying levels of transmisogynized whether they realize it or not.

When I was in DC I knew a lot of drag kings/queens and literally 95% of them are trans and either came to drag/ballroom as a way to explore their gender through art and/or make money bc poor, or started it and it was a gateway to unlocking their gender. Not counting the cis performers elevated by stuff like RuPaul, who is explicitly transphobic, I think I can count on my hands how many cis performers I’ve met. Hell, even with RuPaul shit a number of drag artists who have been on his shows later come out as trans (such as Bosco, who I literally grew up with), in part because they suppressed their transness publicly to maintain their career until they reached a point the blowback of coming out wound impact them less. Pulling a F1NNSTER to keep cash flowing for survival, if you will.

Iunno like. The earliest Balls we have records of were literally 1880-90s, predominantly Black (the oldest drag/ballroom performer we have records of was a Black trans woman from DC), and was one of the only safe places for trans people to exist as themselves. So I find the idea of writing it off due to a much more recent gentrification and commercialization of it as ignorant as how people often treat other demonizes or commercialized Black art.

“I just don’t like the spectacle it makes of transness and harm it causes-“

Baby all Blackness is spectacle to crackers and An Amount of modern drag is white people doing minstrelsy of all Black women - not in the sense of gender at all but in the sense of race.

Like. A lot of Black culture in the US specifically is Big and Loud *because* of the repression of it we’ve faced and the force towards respectability politics, which has echoed to queer culture because queer culture in the US is made vast majority from Black culture. Our existence is a spectacle so why not make a show out of why they hate us and try to erase us so that they can’t get rid of even more.

Hating “the spectacle” of an actual performance art form is solidly rooted in white supremacy and white cultural notions of propriety/respectability. Many aspects of “spectacle” seen in drag are directly taken from Ballroom or adapted from it/vogueing.

In summary: traditions are meant to change with situational, cultural, and environmental need but still be sustained as part of a culture. Gentrification is a poison to this that makes it harder for those the culture belongs to to practice it as it should. White ancestral shame is a poison that makes them think they should nuke everything historic/cultural that makes them uncomfortable regardless of whether it’s theirs or whether it’s something they stole and gentrified. Also yeag like,,, it’s a job/gig income predominantly for societal “undesirables” to make money when they’re under/unemployed due to marginalization. And it’s also been gentrified to *gestures at RuPaul, et al.*

No matter what you think about drag or ballroom, poor predominantly racialized trans folks still gon be doing it because it is part of our culture no matter what tv shows and big names and people who have only seen those do to it, and it’s always going to be seen as one of the “disreputable” pathways to transness that makes other trans people look down on them because of the complicated ties to transmisogyny, because until someone publicly says the words “Im also a trans woman”, WE also view them as a personification of what we fear the world sees us as—a man in a dress—rather than an egg finding their way to gender in a way we deem unacceptable because it doesn’t align with how we think it “should” be done.

And I think that’s on us honestly, not on them. If we say it can take as long or as quickly and as easily or messily for someone to sort out their gender as needed, this also has to be extended to the transmisogynized we view as “disreputable” regardless of if/when they reach a conclusion we deem acceptable or whether they die in the shell, never able to remove their masks fully.

Like, as an example, I *hate* sissies because of the racism endemic to sissy culture, but I still recognize they’re transmisogynized regardless of the harm they do or the disgust I feel towards them.

I also had someone comment on it as a facet of US cultural imperialism, of which I do want to note - drag/ballroom based on Black origins was spreading outside the US back in the 1800s/early 1900s too, there’s photos from other countries of balls explicitly influenced by Black Balls mainly started by Black folks in said countries, an example being early 1900s photos from France of both transmasculine and transfeminine Black people. While modern gentrified drag is 100% exported as part of US cultural imperialism, its original spreads outside of the US were via Black diaspora in-culture. I honestly couldn’t tell you definitively where it stuck and where it didn’t from that original wave, but it’s important to know it existed that way.

me: yeah i know, they’re all primary colors, it’s perfect

When you go for an MLS (Master’s of Library Science, which is a thing, and which is usually required for “professional-level” library work [which is also a weird and contentious concept that I won’t go into here]), one of the things you study is the organization of information. This deals with how to determine what a book or other material is “about"—a concept we tongue-in-cheek call “aboutness"—and how to convey that to a potential user of the item and make it easy for them to find. Things like keywords and subject headings, do I put this book about how often wild birds attack aerial drones in with books about birds or with books about technology, if its a fictional novel do I put fantasy in it’s own section or mix it in with all of the other fiction, so on and so on.

OP is organizing books by how they would look for them. OP’s partner is thinking in terms of aboutness. This is a system that works for OP because it’s their personal library: they know basically what books they own and they only own books that are relevant to them, and if they know what the book looks like, that can be a quick way to find it.

In a library that assumes the public (or people who do not own that particular collection of books) are using the collection, that doesn’t work. Books are often re-issued in multiple covers, or re-bound in new covers when they get worn out, and if the user doesn’t know what the book looks like or is expecting a different cover, they’re lost. That’s why non-personal libraries used standardized cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress System to organize a book by what it’s “about”, and then put books about the same or similar topics together, marked with labels and signage so a person unfamiliar with the book or collection can find their way to it.

Basically, OP’s system works for their own personal library, because it’s best suited to how the primary user—OP themselves—looks for books. OP’s librarian partner is coming from a background of thinking in terms of a public-facing collection, where aboutness is the key criteria and communicating it to a user unfamiliar with the collection is the priority.

I knew a rapist who was an absolute ride-or-die friend to his gamer bros. Like, give the last dollar from his pocket to a friend who got a flat tire, and then turn around and go rape a Freshman that evening.

I knew a vicious child abuser who wept like a baby when her dog died.

The nastiest human being on the planet nevertheless feels obscurely melancholy sometimes, or has high spirits when they step out doors on the first warm day of spring, or has opinions on their favorite TV show and which side the toilet paper should hang on and whether or not the room should be cold or warm when you go to sleep.

We're all still just people. Complex, with fully-realized interior worlds.

None of that will save you from becoming a monster, if you decide to do monstrous things.