Against Memoir E-Book

Michelle Tea

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 463

Beschreibung

'I must find my own complicated junkie to have violent sex with. In 1994, nothing seemed like a better idea, save being able to write about it later.'Michelle Tea is our exuberant, witty guide to the hard times and wild creativity of queer life in America. Along the way she reclaims SCUM Manifesto author Valerie Solanas as an absurdist, remembers the lives and deaths of the lesbian motorbike gang HAGS and listens to activists at a trans protest camp. This kaleidoscope of love and adventure also makes room for a defence of pigeons and a tale of teenage goths hustling for tips at an ice creamery in a 'grimy, busted city called Chelsea'. Unsparing but unwaveringly kind, Michelle Tea reveals herself and others in unexpected and heartbreaking ways.Against Memoir is the winner of the 2019 PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Best known as writer of fiction and memoir, this is the first time Tea's journalism has been collected. Delivered with her signature candour and dark humour, Against Memoir solidifies her place as one of the leading queer writers of our time.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FORAGAINST MEMOIR

‘From its opening sentence to its finish, Michelle Tea’s Against Memoir is a bracing, heaven-sent tonic for deeply troubled times. Its clarity, hilarity, range, nonchalant brilliance, and decades of experience in ‘art and music, love and queerness, writing and life’ remind me over and over again of the adventure, the party of it all – the joy of raucous thinking and loving and making – that’s fundamentally ours.’

Maggie Nelson

‘These essays blow my mind with their algebraic rhythms by which Michelle Tea manages pain and bliss. They take turns erupting in a pulpy and marvellous parade: landscape, passion, morality, family, cigarettes – each cited frankly and exquisitely like a smart kid with a dirty crayon explaining to us all how she sees god.’

Eileen Myles

‘The essays in Against Memoir remind us how pleasure, pain, wisdom, and delight come from the ground up, by and through the body, and in this case, a body unapologetically firing all her desires, pleasures, fears, and dreams like lightning. A hardcore delight, a queer blood song picking the scab off the skin of culture.’

Lidia Yuknavitch

‘When I read Michelle Tea I don’t know whether I want to be her, be with her, or just listen in awe to her speak. I’ve loved every one of her books, and this is no exception: fierce, raw and tender.’

Kirsty Logan

‘From the beautiful trenches of our affections, Michelle Tea’s Against Memoir brings home that queerness is universal.’

Rita Indiana

‘If you want to know how the best queer writing comes out of community, lived experience and political urgency, start here.’

Isabel Waidner

‘Eclectic and wide-ranging … A palpable pain animates many of these essays, as well as a raucous joy and bright curiosity.’

The New York Times

‘The best essay collection I’ve read in years.’

The New Republic

‘Bristles with life and a fierce intellect.’

The Millions

‘An entrancing collection of irreverent and flamboyant essays.’

Kirkus Reviews

‘Queer counterculture beats loud and proud in Tea’s stellar collection.’

Publishers Weekly

‘Against Memoir is a must-read for hopeless romantics and anyone passionate about life.’

BUST

‘A thrill to read, and an essential look into lives too often relegated to the margins of literature, instead of where they belong: front and center.’

Nylon

‘Tea’s conversational tone and her way of writing deeply personal experience appeal to a certain universal that is also countercultural, subversive, and presents a very necessary counter-narrative to mainstream histories of American punk, feminism, and sexual identity.’

The Brooklyn Rail

First published in the UK by And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

First published in 2018 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

Copyright © 2018 Michelle Tea

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book. The right of Michelle Tea to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 9781911508625 eBook ISBN 9781911508632

Typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; Cover Illustration: Rose Stallard; Graphic Design: Ryder Design.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

And Other Stories is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

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For Dashiell, for everything, forever.

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Contents

Art & MusicOn Valerie SolanasAndy Warhol’s Self-PortraitTimes SquareOn Erin MarkeyOn Chelsea GirlsGene Loves JezebelPurple RainMinor ThreatSonic Youth’s MagicLove & QueernessTransmissions from Camp TransHow to Not Be a Queer DouchebagPolishnessHard TimesHAGS in Your FaceHow to Refer to My Husband-WifeWriting & LifeThe City to a Young GirlPigeon ManifestoSummer of Lost JobsTelling Your Friends You’re SoberSister Spit FeminismI Had a MiscarriageBabaDire StraitsAgainst MemoirAcknowledgments

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‌Art & Music

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‌On Valerie Solanas

It’s hypothetical. No, hypothetical is the wrong word. It’s just a literary device. There’s no organization called SCUM … It’s not even me … I mean, I thought of it as a state of mind. In other words, women who think a certain way are SCUM. Men who think a certain way are in the men’s auxiliary of SCUM.

Valerie Solanas, Village Voice, 1977

I was thinking a certain way when I first came across the SCUM Manifesto. I had retreated into the desert of Tucson, Arizona, in the midst of what I now refer to as my Radical Lesbian Feminist Nervous Breakdown. I make light of it, but it was a dark and dangerous moment in my life. I only just learned that my stepfather had been spying on my sister and me through holes he’d stealthily carved in the walls of our home—the bathroom walls, the bedroom walls. Throughout my teenage years I’d lived with the suspicion that this was happening, a state of mind that had me tipping on a chasm of anxiety and denial I feared could end with me going totally insane.

The thing was, my stepfather was cool. The dad he replaced had not been cool, he’d been a moody alcoholic who’d fight with my mom till she cried. When he came home from work adulterously late and fucked up on booze or pills, we didn’t know what we’d be getting. But this new dad was a cheerful alcoholic. He’d played drums in bands and had a pierced ear and a homemade tattoo on his finger. He was always nice to my mom and to the rest of us. He took delight in cooking extravagant family dinners—three-alarm chili washed down with pint glasses of lime rickeys, gutted limes scattered across the kitchen table filling the house with the sharply optimistic smell of summer. How could he be spying on us?

For years, I lived with the understanding that there was something wrong with me. Something dark and perverse. To see such a nice man, a man who finally loved me and my mom the way a father-person should, a man who went to the courts to adopt me, who bar-brawled with my birth father at the local Moose Club over his love for us, his family—to know all this and then think that he’s watching me? Sexually, I guess? What a creep. What a creep I was.

What a fishbowl my teenage bedroom was. I loved to be inside it, reading books and magazines, listening to records, sneaking cigarettes out the window. Painting band names on the linoleum with nail polish, playing with makeup, lip-synching in the mirror. I’d be wrapping my blackened mouth around the voice of Siouxsie Sioux and would suddenly freeze—What if he was watching me right now? My room suddenly turned eerie, spooky, I was a girl in a horror movie. There was a terrible stillness, I felt like I’d been caught. To break the spell, I’d do something bizarre, or lewd—grab my crotch, squeeze my breasts, squish my face into the mirror, my tongue lolling out. I’d look like a madwoman. I wouldn’t have done that, touched myself there, if I really thought my stepfather was watching. So I didn’t really believe it, and so it wasn’t happening.

Later, before sleep, I’d burrow under my neon-striped comforter to touch myself. I tried to make my face look really, really still in case he was watching. I didn’t want him to know what I was doing. I tried to put my face under the covers, but felt smothered. I popped my face back out into the cool air. He couldn’t be watching. He couldn’t be watching because if he was then I couldn’t masturbate and I really wanted to masturbate. What a creep. What a creep I was.

This was a long-term, low-grade crazy, a steady hum I could live with. When I found out it was all true—that there were holes in the bathroom door that fit perfectly with a hole in the jamb, creating a tunnel that aimed your eye right at the toilet, where I would sit and pee or poop or smoke a stolen cigarette or masturbate. That there were holes carved into my bedroom wall, holes a person could access by walking into the back hallway, nudging over a stray piece of paneling, peeling off the electrical tape (dry and curled from being pulled so many times), and looking through the hole in that wall right into the hole in my own. I looked through that hole myself and saw it all—my bed, my posters on the wall, my clothes strewn on the linoleum, the mirror I knelt before, lip-synching. When it all came down I got a new, sharper crazy. I couldn’t hide it like I’d hidden the schizoid feelings of being watched and being creepy. I was filled with an electric hurt, a frenzied rage. I was sick, sickened.

My mother rushed to take his side, to protect him. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, we had spent the past three or four years fighting weekly, if not daily, about the way I looked, my white face makeup and dyed-black hair, my torn clothes. People would beat me up for looking the way I did, men and boys. I got into fistfights or they just threw things at me from car windows, they just spit at me in the street, they just called me a freak and a slut as they sped by in their cars. That was how it went outside. Inside, it was a war with my mother, who thought I’d brought it on myself. I didn’t have to look that way. And then I went queer and that was a problem. And then the insanity I’d been staving off, I think my dad is watching me, erupted into reality and I sort of lost my mind.

Having to leave my house, I moved in with my girlfriend, a prostitute. Needing more than the minimum wage I was making at a Greek deli, I became one too. Notice I didn’t say I “got work as a prostitute,” “found a job as a prostitute,” “was hired to do prostitution.” Prostitute is not a job, it’s something a woman becomes. Me and my girlfriend would keep the phone numbers of the men we saw and crank call them after. We’d tell their wives. Make fun of what they’d wanted, make sure they understood we had not enjoyed it. Ask them to please stop calling prostitutes. I stole things from their homes, little things—a candle, a photograph, a toothbrush. I wanted them to feel unsafe, to become vulnerable. I felt so unsafe—every call I went on I gathered in my mind my exit plan, what I would do if something went wrong. Would I know if a man was planning to kill me? I feared my intuition was destroyed from all those years of doubting what I’d known and turning it back on myself. I scanned penises for anything that looked unhealthy, trying to keep myself safe in that way too. None of these men would ever know anything about a life like this, a girl’s life.

It was clear to me now that men could do anything they wanted. A man could move into a family and secretly get off on the daughters for years, and when the truth came out, nothing really happened. He would have to deal with the shame of being caught, but he kept the house, the daughters had to flee. He kept the wife the daughters would never again be able to trust as a mother. He came into the family like an invasive parasite, killed it, and inhabited its dead body.

I ran away to Tucson. No reason, it was just where my girlfriend wanted to go and she was all I had now. She was my housing and she shared my rage. In Tucson, I was a prostitute and read books, feminist books. I read The Courage to Heal, the sexual-abuse survivor’s bible. I read Mary Daly and learned about the murdered witches, about widowed Indian women forced to fling themselves on the funeral pyre. I was learning about the global history of male violence against women and how all social systems accommodated it, from the government to my family. I started seeing so much it hurt. I started thinking that if I pushed my brain a little harder I could see into a person’s mind. It scared me too much to do it, but I knew that I could. It’s easy to lose your grip on reality when your entire world is suddenly laid bare as a surreal conspiracy horror show.

I read Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy, and the concept of killing men as a feminist action was introduced to me. A lighter read, Lesbian Land, enchanted me with the reality that I could live in a world without men, that other women before me had begun to create these places and I could perhaps run to them. I visited one outside of Tucson. The woman who gave us a tour was straight and brought her male lover in at night, which was okay with everyone. She slept on a mattress rigged up on a pallet and concrete blocks right there in the middle of the desert. I saw a naked woman giving another naked woman a massage on a massage table set up in the shade of a mesquite tree. I met the land’s owner, a sixty-something-year-old woman high up in some scaffolding, building herself an octagonal house.

I thought I would move to that land someday. Meanwhile I lived in a rented adobe downtown, close enough to the university to stage “tit-ins” on the lawn there, inciting women to take off their shirts to protest the laws that made women keep their shirts on, sexualizing their breasts, allowing them the freedom to be topless only in places like strip clubs, where men could profit and get off on them. My house was close enough to downtown that I could walk to the liquor store for mezcal, pausing to rip the busty St. Pauli Girl posters off the wall and dump the Slurpee I bought on the way at 7-Eleven on the porn rack. Before I left home, I’d stopped by my mom’s house and stuck Queer Nation stickers all over my stepdad’s porn mags. Especially over the women who looked like me, with their punky hair and ripped fishnets.

My house was close enough to frat row, that line of adobes housing frat boys, that I’d been hollered at by them passing by and learned not to turn down that street. I thought about blowing one up. I was very serious. I thought it would be fairly easy and we could probably get away with it, and if we didn’t I was actually prepared to go to prison for my part in this war. Because that’s what it was, a war. Men got to do anything to women and women got to walk around scared and traumatized and angry. Men got to do anything, period. Men got to do everything. Something had to take them down. The only reason I didn’t blow up the frat house is that, once she learned I was serious, my girlfriend refused to do it with me. I didn’t want to do it alone. That would mean I was crazy. If I did it with others I was part of a movement. Sisterhood Is Powerful. I could be sitting in jail right now. An act of violence and that one moment in my life—traumatized and desperate, unable to cope with what I’d experienced—could have become the rest of my life.

There’s no way for me to talk about Valerie Solanas without talking about all this, the trauma I experienced as a female sensitive to misogyny in this world. Valerie suffered sexual abuse from her birth father, then didn’t get along with her stepfather and was sent to live with a grandfather, and then her grandfather beat her up. She ran away at fifteen and was impregnated by a married man—I’ve no understanding of the nature of that relationship, but it’s safe to presume it was at a minimum statutory rape. Valerie’s kid was taken away from her and she lived on the streets from then on.

“The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas touch—everything he touches turns to shit,” Valerie writes in the Manifesto. From where I sat, on my porch in Tucson, Arizona, drinking a glass of mezcal and paging through it, she got everything right on.

From the start, I understood the Manifesto to be totally for real and totally not. It was an ideal, a utopian vision too out-there to ever be realized, and its dense, dark humor struck me as exactly correct. It was outlandish. I’d done die-ins with ACT UP and kiss-ins with Queer Nation, I’d waved coat hangers at Christians trying to block clinic doors, so I had a deep appreciation for the way Valerie used humor as a device to hit the truth like a piñata, again and again, throughout the tome. To see the SCUM Manifesto’s humor, to let it crack you up page after page, is not to read it as a joke. It’s not. Valerie’s use of humor is not unlike any novelist’s use of fiction to hit at the truth. The truth of the world as seen through Valerie’s eyes is patently absurd, a cosmic joke. The hilarity in the Manifesto is fighting fire with fire. Humor such as this is a muscle, a weapon. It was the truth, and the truth is so absurd it’s painful.

Valerie did her work in the sixties, when it was legal for men to rape their wives, when girls who bled to death from back-alley abortions deserved it. In 1969, a year after Valerie’s famed shooting of Andy Warhol, feminists, like Shulamith Firestone, who rose to speak at the New Left’s counterinaugural to Nixon’s inauguration in Washington, were greeted by audience cheers of “Take her off the stage and fuck her!” and “Fuck her down a dark alley!” And these were the progressive men.

I’m thinking that going totally fucking insane is a completely rational outcome for an intelligent woman in this society, and I think this idea only becomes more solid the farther back in history you go. The writer Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a supporter of Valerie during her dark days, says,

I look at someone like Dorothy Allison, who was a teenager when we started rabble-rousing, and how she testifies that it was women’s liberation that saved her life. Here’s a person that was routinely raped by her stepfather for her entire childhood, and from the time she was about eight years old, lived in the most horrible conditions. She was the very kind of person who could have ended up like Valerie Solanas had women’s liberation not been there.

I live in a large community of would-be Valeries—queer people, formerly or presently female, many of whom have survived the violence of their heterosexual families. Writers with sharp intellects and incredible talent whose stories are routinely rejected from the still male-dominated literary worlds, both mainstream and underground, independent and corporate. Author Red Jordan Arobateau, in a review of the San Francisco production of Valerie’s contested play, Up Your Ass, writes, “The reason I’d like to get on my knees to give Valerie a blowjob is because I identify with her and know she needed more joy. So much of my own life was hell, being a butch dike (now Transman) typing manuscripts in a hotel room, lonely, unpublished, not a dime to my name, not a friend in sight, and finding johns a lot easier to get then the love of a woman.”

To be living so low yet so close to the largest artist of your time. To have caught his interest and been put in his films. All around you ideas are flying, becoming real. To be so near to power, to hand him your work, to know how he could help you, to hope that he would.

“Did you type this yourself? I’m so impressed. You should come type for us, Valerie.” This is what Andy reportedly said as he received it. That he never returned the play, the sole copy in a time before computers and Kinko’s (never mind producing it), is history. The existence of Up Your Ass in Warhol’s archives at his namesake museum in Pittsburgh suggests the artist did indeed have the work the whole time. Why didn’t he just give it back to her? She probably wasn’t worth his time.

Genderqueer Valerie, a big dyke. On top of everything, she walked around in her newsie hat, her scruffy hair, baggy men’s clothes, cursing and smoking. It’s irresistible to think of Valerie in 2013, when templates exist for so many genders. Would she be a butch dyke? A genderqueer in-betweener, bashing the gender binary? Would she transition, after all that, to male? She certainly wouldn’t be the first trans man with some rabid man-hating in her past.

Brilliantly minded, bold enough to present herself honestly—she took the Village Voice to task in 1977 for writing that she wasn’t a lesbian, “I consider the part where you said, ‘She’s not a lesbian’ to be serious libel,” during a time when writing about someone actually being a lesbian was grounds for a very profitable libel case. “The way it was worded gave the impression that I’m a heterosexual, you know?”—Valerie’s understanding of gender was limited by her place and time. The Manifesto’s fatal flaw is also the very thing it requires to exist: strict adherence to a binary gender system and its attendant biological determinism, all in spite of Valerie routinely being in the company of trans women such as Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, and Candy Darling, who lived in the same SRO hotel. Perhaps it is the influence of these women that inspired Valerie to allow for the survival of “faggots who, by their shimmering, flaming example, encourage other men to de-man themselves and thereby make themselves relatively inoffensive.” I read faggots, in this entry, to include queens and transgender women, as there was scant consciousness about trans lives and faggot existed as a catchall slur for anyone presenting as queer or genderqueer.

Again and again as one reads the Manifesto, one asks, What the hell is this? It is so, so funny that it’s hard for me not to condemn anyone bothered by it as painfully lacking a sense of humor. Check this out: “SCUM will conduct Turd Sessions, at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence: ‘I am a turd, a lowly, abject turd,’ then proceed to list all the ways in which he is. His reward for doing so will be the opportunity to fraternize after the session for a whole, solid hour with the SCUM who will be present.” Hilarious and begging for a performance-art enactment, SCUM is also a very unfunny critique of American culture, then and now, delivered with the fearlessness of someone so thoroughly rejected by the system that she has nothing left to lose. Many of Valerie’s notions are excellent and plausible, such as, “SCUM will forcibly relieve bus drivers, cab drivers, and subway token sellers of their jobs and run buses and cabs and dispense free tokens to the public.” (Clearly the vision of a broke New Yorker.) The Manifesto is as much a call for a class war as a gender apocalypse, with “eliminating the money system” coming in behind overthrowing the government and before destroying the male sex in the opening mission statement. Indeed, the hysteria at a woman threatening to kill men within a culture where men kill women regularly has been so great as to even now distract from the class rage inherent in the book. Is that why Valerie never found a home among her feminist peers? Although Valerie worked and wrote alongside the tremendous second-wave feminist revolution of the sixties and seventies, Alice Echols writes in her history Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America,1967–1975, “Radical feminists in New York Radical Women knew next to nothing about Solanas until she shot and nearly killed pop artist Andy Warhol in June 1968.” Valerie had been to college, but every academic line she writes is followed by something completely potty-mouthed or shocking. Her writing has less stylistically in common with feminist writings of the time and more in common with the absurdist manifestos of art movements, or with punk rock, which hadn’t even happened yet. According to filmmaker Mary Harron, who went on to memorialize Valerie with the wonderful film I Shot Andy Warhol, the SCUM Manifesto is “deadpan, icily logical, elegantly comical: a strange juxtaposition, as if Oscar Wilde had decided to become a terrorist.” Declares the Special Collections Library of Duke University, “Solanas is not generally considered to be a part of the Women’s Liberation Movement.” Who will claim her?

Though she does employ the adjective groovy in reference to the ideal SCUM woman, Valerie was certainly not a member of the moment’s male-dominated anti-establishment proto-hippie counterculture. “Dropping out is not the answer; fucking-up is,” she wrote, calling bullshit on what looked like a culture of narcissistic male navel-gazing, but also she’s really not a joiner: “SCUM will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike to attempt to achieve its ends… . SCUM will always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil disobedience basis.” SCUM is a manifesto written by a criminal—a queer when queer was illegal, a prostitute, woman who looked like a man living by her wits, an artist.

In the end, it may be the criminals, the prostitutes, and the artists who claim her. In the 1990s when I was prostituting and writing my own manifesto in a café, I was approached by a queer woman who looked like a man and wanted to bum a piece of paper off me. I vaguely knew this person, her name was Fiver and she was part of a San Francisco dyke street gang called HAGS. She was sitting at a table with a few other HAGS, all butch dykes and all, for the record, hot. Valerie would not have looked out of place among them.

“We’re making stencils,” she explained. “About Valerie Solanas. You know, she wrote the SCUM Manifesto? We’re going to tag them around the Tenderloin, she died in a hotel there.” That’s how I found out that Valerie had lived and died in my own city, from drug addiction and the poor health that comes with it, that comes with street prostitution, shitty housing, mental illness, and lack of community. I wanted to join the HAGS in their Valerie crafting, but I was scared of them. They were a real gang and pulled crimes and did harder drugs than I did then. They loved Valerie, and they lived and died like her. In a few years, Fiver and another dyke would be killed by a batch of heroin tainted with flesh-eating bacteria. Another, Johanna, her mental illness would flare up severely, keeping her homeless until she died of cancer, struggling with her addiction right until the end. Most surviving members of the gang got sober and/or transitioned to male, saving their lives.

This is who Valerie stood for, and these are the people who will not just remember her but cultivate a remembrance of her. April 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death, and a performance I had curated to explore her complicated legacy was canceled when an unexpected controversy grew large enough to make me concerned about the safety of such an event (plus sucked the fun out of it). Gay men accused me of giving voice to a person they likened to Hitler, Jim Jones, and Harvey Milk’s assassin, Dan White (all men who I believe would have fallen first to Valerie’s sword). Trans women, understandably traumatized by the trans hatred in so much second wave feminist rhetoric, sparked intense internet debate. As time wore on, response to the event grew to a stressful clamor. A trans female performer who previously had no conflict with performing (and from whom a trans critique of the Manifesto would have been hugely welcome) considered withdrawing and instead enacting her performance outside of the venue in support of a transfeminine protest. The surviving ex-HAG who had planned to talk about what Valerie meant for that gang of queer bandits was frightened of taking the stage and thought about canceling; another writer I’d invited to read from the Manifesto did cancel. The woman working the door feared for her safety and asked if I could find someone to work alongside her. Possibly Valerie—loyal to no demographic but her own constructed, imaginary SCUM woman—would have appreciated the hoopla, but I was frankly too exhausted and bummed out to carry on and pulled the plug on the event, which was meant to benefit the St. James Infirmary, a free clinic in Valerie’s old neighborhood that serves sex workers and trans people and could have, had it existed earlier, prevented Valerie’s death at age fifty-two. Inspired by the “dialogue” (a generous word for an emotionally heated Facebook fight), one writer held a response event, inviting everyone who had weighed in on the internet to show up and have a conversation about Valerie’s legacy and the problematic legacy of second wave feminism. Nobody came.

Instead of hosting the event, I spent the evening of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Valerie’s death at an artist’s talk by the photographer Catherine Opie, a butch dyke whose early work documented the sexual and gender outlaws of San Francisco. In another time she could have been Valerie, a disadvantaged genderqueer artist panhandling at the edges of the art world. Today she’s an art star, giving a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art. It seemed the perfect start to a night that ended outside the Bristol Hotel in the Tenderloin, on the street where Valerie made her money. We drew a chalk circle on the sidewalk and stood around it with candles, each reading a piece from the Manifesto. All around us the drug-addled swayed, curious, then darted away, perhaps mistaking us for Christians or something. A woman exited the bar behind us and fell onto the ground, too drunk to walk. We posted Valerie’s picture on the hotel door, and someone handed out tiny women’s symbol earrings. We all put them on, all of us SCUM members whatever our gender, because as she said to the Village Voice in 1977, back in New York after her stint in jail and follow-up incarcerations in mental hospitals, SCUM is a state of mind. And to those of us who “think a certain way,” the SCUM Manifesto will always be a fascinating, confusing document: a product of a place and time that remains sadly relevant, a piece of political literature, pre-riot grrrl riot grrrl, pre-punk punk, prescient and perturbing and revelatory. For all of its enduring controversy, or perhaps because of it, this work will be with us for the ages, to be wrestled with and fought over and never quite figured out. Congratulations, Valerie, you made a work that sticks. May you rest in peace.

First published in AK Press’s 2013 edition of SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas.

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‌Andy Warhol’s Self-Portrait

In my home there was no art and in my schooling there was no art, but Andy Warhol was so big that even my family knew about his Campbell’s soup cans. Is that art? My family didn’t think so. My family were the sort of people who believed art was a scam pulled by high-class grifters. I could do that was a frequent and appropriate response. My family was insulted that an artist, a rich person, would try to pass off shit from our pantry—dented cans of soup, a box of Brillo pads for scrubbing the Hamburger Helper from the frying pan—as art. It was like he was making a joke of them, and they weren’t going to help him out by going along with it and calling it art. That’s not art. But Andy was from Pittsburgh. He loved Coca-Cola because everyone drank it, the rich and the poor. Andy’s American supermarket was a sort of kingdom of heaven, its narrow automatic glass doors a bit tough for the rich to slide through.

Andy said, “Art is what you can get away with,” and Andy got away with it, laughing all the way to the bank, as my mother would say. He started painting money because it was his most favorite thing and, really, isn’t money everyone’s most favorite thing? I woke up thinking about money this morning, like a lover who haunted my sleep. Lying in my bed, I wondered where my money was. Would my money run out on me? What could I do to make my money stick around? Andy kept it real about the fake, sort of humbly authentic within the land of total artifice he both observed and cultivated. He wanted to be plastic, he wanted everything to be identical; when not saying “um,” he said the most marvelous, honest things, like a crazy, bewigged oracle, his tone total Quaalude. “An artist is someone who produces things people don’t need to have.” Now that sounds like my family talking. Chelsea, Massachusetts, is a lot like Pittsburgh.

I act like I got Andy, but really I didn’t know anything. And there was art in my house. It came from these parties my mother hosted, Home Interior. Like a Tupperware party. A bunch of women came over and my mother baked brownies from a box and the Home Interior woman brought all these little suitcases. When she opened them up the inside was wallpapered and hung with a sconce and a bronze butterfly. You purchased the whole set, and your house could look like the inside of the suitcase. My stepfather, a nurse, was an artist in the tradition of Bob Ross, whose kit he purchased and whose televised direction he would come to follow. He also would trace Disney characters in Magic Marker to woo my mother. This is all very Warholian, is it not? What is the difference between my stepfather tracing a drawing of Mickey and Minnie outside Cinderella’s castle, and Andy’s soup can? Is it the difference between Carnegie Mellon and the free nursing school at the VA hospital? Or is the difference that Warhol may have loved the soup can, really loved it, but he didn’t believe in it. Or he believed in it but he could see himself believing in it, which broke a certain spell. My family totally believes in Disney. They went bankrupt taking so many vacations to Disney World, going on Disney cruises where sculptures of Donald Duck, carved from butter, adorn the buffet table. They have no distance from Disney and no distance from their belief in Disney. In their world, Campbell’s soup cans contain soup, and soup contains warmth and nutrition and maybe even love. My stepfather believes in the Eeyore he is tracing with his Sharpie, which totally ruins it.

Sometime during the eighties, in my parents’ home in Massachusetts, I woke up to the world around me. I started to see the produced world—the world of soup cans and cartoon mice and Home Interior butterfly wall sconces—and got that taking this world seriously was the wrong way to live. But raging against it wouldn’t work either, what a drag that would be, to fight the landscape all day every day. Like a maddening Zen parable, Andy’s way was the proper way: gleefully embracing the produced world while seeing through its bullshit, and all the while observing yourself in the midst of it, for you are part of the produced world, and so there must be a way to embrace yourself as well while not taking yourself too seriously. This is Andy Warhol’s middle path. Touring with the Sex Workers’ Art Show I tried to convince the performers to all get matching dollar-sign tattoos. “It’s the sex workers’ art show not the sex workers’ money show,” snapped one hooker. If I believed in that hooker’s dollar I wouldn’t want it on my body either. But there is a dollar behind the dollar, winking at you like a Warhol soup can, and I watch myself loving it. I am so going to get that tattoo.

I couldn’t believe it when I learned Andy Warhol died. I heard it from a radio DJ, in my bedroom, when I was sixteen. From his gallbladder! Gallbladder seemed like something poor, old people died from, wasn’t he rich? His work sold for the most a work has ever sold for, and still he died the death of an immigrant from Pittsburgh. I was sad. Knowing little about his art, I loved Andy the artist: that you the person can be the art, because your hair is so big and your suits so stiffly wonderful and you say weird and witty things and hang out with colorful people and most of all, most importantly, you see the world in this very special way, and what you see is true. Fearing I had no talent but yearning deeply for the excitement of a creative person’s life, I clung to Andy Warhol. Plus, I too had big hair, and an unpopular way of seeing the world, and so far, this had not been celebrated. How could I market my point of view and become so exceptional, so famous, like Andy Warhol? I wanted to run away from home, to New York City where everyone spectacular lived, away from teenagers who would laugh at your exquisite hairdo, away from crabby, Disney-loving parents who always said what was not art but never, ever said what was. I wanted to find Andy. When I wonder now about which of his pieces I like best, I imagine him lying in his coffin in a cashmere suit and sunglasses, his perfect wig glued to his head. “I never think that people die,” Andy Warhol said, “they just go to department stores.”

Speech given in 2010 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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‌Times Square

Times Square was shot on location in Times Square in the year 1980, and in that way it will remain forever a historical document of that place and time. The director, Allan Moyle, whose later film Pump Up the Volume may be more familiar to you, cast the neighborhood itself as a main character, with its denizens—street folk, OG hip-hoppers, pillheads, hookers, primarily people of color—as the vital, living, breathing landscape. The flashing neon lights, sex cinemas, and liquor stores aren’t sinister, they’re the blinking, cheerful midway of the neighborhood’s carnival. There is a moment in the movie when the teenage heroines are on the run from the cops and outwit them by dashing through a porn theater. One girl stops briefly to mock the sex on the screen, and all the perverts in the audience cheer, and cheer on our outlaw girls. Times Square illuminates Times Square as a sort of community of outsiders—sexual, chemical, economic—who have each other’s backs. And, of course, there are other, darker sides to the story, but we know those movies—girls get exploited, raped, hooked on dope, murdered, etc. We don’t know this one—the playfulness, freedom, and community that exists on the outskirts of sanctioned culture.

So, what is this movie about? It’s about two young girls looking to find safety in the world, and they access it, briefly, in one another and in this seedy, dismissed neighborhood. Pamela Pearl is privileged, the motherless daughter of a wealthy politician running for mayor of New York City on the platform of cleaning up Times Square. During puberty, some of us acquire an invisible set of antennae that allows us to begin to see the world as it really is. It is a sometimes-cataclysmic revelation, inspiring and clarifying and crazy-making and terrible. Our Pammy is waking up to the hypocrisy of her father and, through him, the hypocrisy of the elite world she was born into. When she dares speak out, her father has her tossed into the loony bin, “for testing.” Her roommate, whom she is instantly captivated by—to the point of writing poetry—is the flower-eating, cigarette-smoking Nicky Marotta, a butch street punk, the same age as Pammy but a million years older. Nicky seduces Pammy into sneaking out of the psych ward by lingering outside her door blaring “I Wanna Be Sedated” on her busted-up boom box. Together they steal an ambulance and make their way to an abandoned warehouse on the river where they begin to play house.

Times Square is a butch-femme queer-girl love story. There were actual lesbian make-out scenes shot, but they got cut per the order of a producer who had just made a bunch of cash off of Saturday Night Fever and didn’t want any underage homosexual love mucking up his chances for another box-office smash. He also weaseled some disco into the incredible punk rock/new wave soundtrack, and drove the director off the project—which is why the movie ends in such a disappointing manner, but we’ll get to that.

I want to dissect the butch-femme dynamic that exists between these young lovers, because it is very familiar to me. Pammy, who is more functional than Nicky not only due to her upbringing but also because of her gender normativity and lack of PTSD and mental illness, makes their ramshackle squat a home. She nurtures Nicky, listens to her song lyrics, and Nicky listens to Pammy’s poetry. It’s a freaking punk rock runaway Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. For Nicky, a nobody, someone who risks falling through the cracks daily, who arguably already has, safety comes from being seen, and fame offers the ultimate protection, artistic fame in particular. She wants to be a rock star—she is one by nature—but like so many cast-off queers of past generations, there is no path for her. Pammy, with her wider, class-based belief in possibility and her understanding of opportunity, nurtures Nicky and pushes her to actualize her dream. With the help of Johnny LaGuardia, a sleazy radio DJ with ulterior motives, Nicky’s music creates a movement of young women who also feel both ignored and abused by the culture—Sleez Sisters. As Nicky’s anthem goes—trigger warning—“Spic, nigger, faggot, bum / your daughter is one.” A sort of sloppy stab at intersectionality; a proclamation of alliance, using the language of the street and the day. A young girl defiant, fumbling the commonality of struggle, the common roots of xenophobia. Knowing it intuitively, via emotion—the young girl’s genius—and allying herself with the objects of racism, homophobia, homelessness. Your daughter is one. I had that painted on the back of my leather jacket in 1994, in a banner floating above a dumpster-diving dyke in a trash can, eating a piece of secondhand pizza. The name of the song is “Sleeze Sister Voodoo,” and another chorus chants, “Stick. / Pins. / Into. / You.” Sympathetic magic. All girls are witches.

Although Nicky and Pammy’s relationship is one of the most passionate and romantic I’ve ever seen on film, their affair is also horrifyingly dysfunctional. Is it because I first viewed this film at the tender age of twelve, my body teeming with hormones, desperate for romance, that their specific dynamic imprinted itself on me, setting me up for decades of valorizing and romanticizing, really worshipping, the gender misfits I nurtured and supported? Is this why it took me into my forties before I finally understood that that certain something, that spark, the je ne sais quoi that mysteriously drew me to those I would love, was actually a stormy gray cloud of mental illness? Anxiety, depression, sociopathy, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, Nicky seems to have them all, as have many of my lovers. Unlike those I love, I am traditionally female, gender conforming, and there is no underestimating the way that this has protected me in the world. Though Nicky and Pammy’s passionate love checks all the boxes of fantasy love, it is in reality a codependent femme’s nightmare—trapped in a relationship with a person so reliant on you, who drains your many resources, who you feel too guilty to leave because you understand all too well the honest way they have come by such damage. Never mind your own female damage acquired from this world, the way you’ve been molested or date-raped or casually humiliated your entire life. You get a job stripping and support your unemployable butch. Which is what Pammy does, though magically she gets to keep her clothes on. Which probably fucked me up more than anything else in the movie.

But the way Nicky and Pammy’s affair unravels is also a butch’s nightmare: the straight-passing, normatively gendered female begins an intrigue with a cisgender man, one who possesses all the power and cachet the butch never will, one who wears the same indicators of masculinity and is never punished for it but celebrated, and is ignorant as the dumbest beast of this privilege in the world. The butch sees they were wrong to trust the femme, that her gender privilege will be traded upon, the potential for straight privilege latent in bisexual women actualized while the butch remains cut off from society. Ugh.

I was oblivious to all of this when I first found Times Square at the age of twelve thanks to Night Flight, a deliberately strange, proudly countercultural punk and new wave TV show that aired on USA Network Friday and Saturday nights from midnight to 6:00 a.m. from 1981 to 1988. I vividly remember lying on my scratchy wool couch printed with autumn-colored flowers, an afghan knitted by some random neighbor draped over my body. The couch and the afghan and the throw pillow I laid my head upon, my hair and my skin and everything around me smelled of cigarette smoke, because I lived in a house of smokers. I gazed out at the television set over a coffee-table landscape of ashtrays, empty plastic cups sticky with soda, and crumpled bags of potato chips. Saturday Night Live had just ended, I flipped to MTV to see if anything interesting was on. Nope. I surfed over to Night Flight, which screened documentaries about the Clash, a show called New Wave Theater featuring Gary Numan and other sexy androids, concert footage of Lou Reed and Fear. Cult-classic films, black-and-white movies like Reefer Madness screened ironically alongside ridiculous horror films and newer, cooler productions like Times Square. I watched the film and I watched my dreams and fantasies and longings take shape and stream out of me, into the dark colors of the film and back through my unbelieving eyes. Two girls, alone together and free in late-seventies New York City. This was everything I ever wanted. To run away. Always I waited to see if my life would get bad or weird enough to call for it, but never did it. Yes, my mother’s boyfriend woke up drunk and pissed in the corner of the bedroom, hallucinating a urinal. Yes, tough kids regularly menaced me in the streets. Tough girls slapped me, tough girls I was too frightened to slap back for fear I’d be slapped even harder, forever. Packs of boys on dirt bikes following me in the street, barking because I was ugly like a dog, but still it never felt like enough to break my mother’s heart. Oh, how I longed for Times Square, where I could hook up with girls like Nicky who used her toughness for good, not to bully. I would find clothes on the streets and dress like them, in men’s leather and gauzy scarfs. I would no longer suffer through school, so boring and irrelevant, so many nuns, and instead spend days doing what I wanted to do: writing, making music, maybe becoming an artist, maybe I already was an artist, but I would never learn this about myself stuck in smoky, sad, racist Chelsea, Massachusetts. I would have to go to a city to become an artist. I would have to go to a city to become myself.

A major theme of Times Square is gentrification. The enemy, Pammy’s dad, sees the whole neighborhood as a scab needing to be ripped off in order to allow a healthier neighborhood to heal there, one with Trump towers and fifty-foot LED advertisements crawling with Disney characters. Pammy’s stand for truth is a stand against gentrification and the idea that the people who go there are somehow disposable, throwaway people. We queers, artists, activists, intellectuals, misfits, know with the instinct of any migrating animal that we must go to the city to find ourselves, our lives, and our people. Times Square shows beautifully what is lost to us when we lose our cities, our scruffy, scuzzy, cheap, and accessible cities; our inspiring, cultured, miraculous, dangerous, spontaneous, surprising cities. A place that’s not the suburbs, where everything is already known and experience is as prefabricated as the houses. In the city anything can happen and so everything happens, the kinds of things that happen when so many people from so many backgrounds come together in respect and mutual need. Times Square ends before gentrification wins, but we all know what has happened.

Queers have always needed the city. And now the city is a suburb. As Sarah Schulman writes in her brilliant book The Gentrification of the Mind, “To me, the literal experience of gentrification is a concrete replacement process. Physically it is an urban phenomenon: the removal of communities of diverse classes, ethnicities, races, sexualities, languages, and points of view from the central neighborhoods of cities, and their replacement by more homogenized groups. With this comes the destruction of culture and relationship, and this destruction has profound consequences for the future lives of cities.” I watched Times Square as a jaded adult, on my thirty-ninth birthday, when I rented out the lovely, dumpy Red Vic Movie House on San Francisco’s Haight Street, a co-op theater collective you could join, seeing movies all the time for free in exchange for working the box office or snack bar—a snack bar that had shakers of nutritional yeast for your popcorn, a theater whose seats were couches and that once a year screened Harold and Maude, handing you a daisy as you exited the lobby, a theater that buckled under the city’s now-famous gentrification, run out of town. I rented the theater for $300 and invited everyone I knew to come watch Times Square with me. I wondered, because how could you not, where Nicky and Pammy would run to today. Patti Smith suggests Detroit. “New York has closed itself off to the young and struggling,” she has said. “New York has been taken away from you. Find a new city.”

I want to return to Nicky and Pammy’s relationship dynamics and the way I lived those dynamics in my own life. Coming of queer age in the 1990s, to love queers was to love damage. To love damage was a path to loving yourself. Perhaps this is changing—I believe it is changing, perhaps in some locations the transformation is complete. But in the nineties and in decades earlier and surely so very often today, queers do not come out of the minefield of homophobia without scars. We do not live through our families’ rejection of us, our stunted life options, the violence we’ve faced, the ways in which we’ve violated ourselves for survival, our harmful coping mechanisms, our lifesaving delusions, the altered brain chemistry we have sustained as a result of this, the low income and survival states we’ve endured as a result of society’s loathing, unharmed. Whatever of these wounds I didn’t experience firsthand, my lovers did, and so I say that, for a time, it was not possible to have queer love that was not in some way damaged or defined by damage sustained, even as it desperately fought through that damage to access, hopefully, increasingly frequent moments of sustaining, lifesaving love, true love, and loyalty, and electric sex.

So in this way Times Square gave me a real notion of queer romance, the kind that happens between gender-variant and gender-normative females. In this way, it provided me with a Romeo and a Juliet, role models of passion and glory, so that I could know that the difficult relationships that broke and squeezed and fucked my heart were this kind of love, a Nicky-Pammy thing, like when Nicky makes them practice screaming one another’s name in the industrial wasteland of their squatted home, NICKY! PAMMY! NICKY! PAMMY! until it is no longer bearable, because she knows that their world is dangerous and that they must have one another’s back, they must know with their whole bodies that they are there for one another, that they will answer each other’s screams.

But they don’t. I hate the end of the movie, hate it worse than people hated Thelma and Louise with their fatalistic drive off the cliff. I wish Nicky and Pammy jumped into the East River together, their lungs filling with garbage. No, instead Pammy betrays Nicky, by doing worse than intriguing with Johnny LaGuardia—played by sexy Tim Curry, after all, so who could blame her—by returning to the safety and privilege of her father, her family, and all that it—I was going to say symbolizes, but it’s not a symbol, it’s the real thing. White, heterosexual, moneyed, patriarchal power. After all Pammy has experienced—goofily mugging dudes under Nicky’s tutelage, go-go dancing at the Cleo Club, experiencing the nightly bonhomie on the streets of America’s most vilified neighborhood, and most of all, loving Nicky Marotta—still, she goes back to her normal, privileged life. She watches Nicky’s big show with the girls below, and it’s the smile that gets me, this condescending little smile, like she’s proud of Nicky. Why does this irk me so? I want her to be humbler in the face of Nicky. I don’t want to see her proud. There is a sadness in the smile, but a light sadness, sweet, and you can see the hint of nostalgia that will grow, and see how she will come to look back on this moment with a type of gross wistfulness, sharing the stories with future lovers, men and women from her own class background: “Yeah, I ran away once and lived with this street girl, she was really a genius but so troubled …” At the end of the movie Pammy returns to her life, which makes her a slummer in Nicky’s reality. And at the end of the movie there is every reason to presume that Nicky goes to jail.

Oh no, did I just shit-talk my most favorite movie in the whole world? It is only because I love it so and have thought so much about it. Times Square is an inspiring document of New York City during possibly its last lively era, its last era of possibility. Nicky is a completely authentic late-seventies teenage butch, played to raspy, passionate perfection by Robin Johnson, a straight woman by the way, who last I knew made her living doing traffic reports for a Midwestern radio station. In 2016 there is nary a rough-and-tumble scuffed-up butch who wears her working-class history on her sleeve on the television. There is Bullet from The Killing