dyke next door

fun fact: debates about if being transgender is a choice or not are irrelevant, because the fundamental truth is of bodily autonomy - a right that should never be seen as conditional or requiring a suitable, immutable condition.

Increasingly disturbed by the number of posts going around from younger/“new to being femme” femmes posting about “traditional dynamics” in OFOS butch/stud-femme relationships that also talk about being housewives with provider butches. This is in fact not the traditional dynamic. In the era you are seeking to mimic, butches and studs regularly encountered significant employment discrimination (and frankly a lot of them still do in certain fields!) They were regularly out of work, so their femmes used their relative “straight passing” privilege in that era to hold down whatever working class (both office jobs and typically blue/pink collar jobs) they could find to keep things afloat. This is why it’s important to remember that our roots are in working class culture and solidarity, and why these identities are so much more than aesthetics and who we’re partnering with. They’re community based roles. We are in community to support each other.

People put so much into seeing Stonewall as this symbol. And at the time we just thought, ‘Oh, I guess it’s just that time of the month when cops raid the bar, so they can make their numbers for arresting fags for the month of June.’ But people get so concerned about the details. I don’t know about all the crap I’ve heard all these years. Sometimes it’s ‘Oh, someone threw a high-heel shoe.’ Sometimes it’s ‘No, gurl, it was a Molotov cocktail,’ or ‘Somebody slugged a cop.’ All I know is that night, they came in, and nobody budged. I guess we were just sick of their shit. And suddenly we were fighting, and we were kicking their ass. The cops had to back up into the bar. We had them cornered. Next thing you knew, the riot squad was there, and baby, it was on. ‘The night of Stonewall’ is how people talk about it, but it was more like a week. People want to know the little details, but what I remember most is being scared as hell. We were fighting for our lives. They’re still killing us; they’re still not giving us the respect we’re due for putting up with their shit all these years. I’m giving you the facts about how shit’s been from the beginning, and what’s gone on, how the law was in our daily lives—the facts! And so with regard to that producer lady, the whole time I just thought to myself, ‘There’s gonna be so much of me on the cutting-room floor.’