They Can't Get Rid Of Us — Our Parties Are Too Good

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I feel a few years younger today than I did a few days ago. That's because I helped to put together and host two local events here in San Francisco that made me feel more connected to my local communities, and in the process restored some of my faith in people. 

The Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl, on Saturday, was a bookishly rowdy celebration of our love for local bookstores. And last night, Writers With Drinks benefited massively from happening during Banned Books Week: we heard powerful, ringing defenses of our right to read, and the importance of libraries, from Annalee Newitz, Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Maia Kobabe, while also hearing some powerful, brave storytelling from those folks as well as Kemi Ashing-Giwa, Jaime Cortez and Susan Stryker. I honestly feel like I got a bit of my soul back.

Like I wrote a few weeks ago, organizing event means telling a story with the help of everyone who shows up. It's creating an alternate world where we all get to live for a while. There are books I've read — or even stories I've written — that don't stick with me as much as some wild art parties I went to years ago. Like someone said to me the other night at Writers With Drinks, this world is utterly brutal, and creating spaces where people can share 

(I'll be honest: I wrote a lot about event organizing and why it gives me hope for that talk at XOXO Fest, and ended up cutting most of it out of the final talk. So this newsletter is partly outtakes from that talk. Waste not, want not.)

When I tell my own origin story as a queer absurdist writer, I usually say something along the lines of, "Oh, I was part of all these queer and trans spoken word events and hung out with all these other writers who influenced me, like Justin Chin and Michelle Tea, and I learned how to write gooder." But I honestly don't think I'd be the writer I am today if I hadn't also attended or helped out at a ton of random events that often didn't involve any talking whatsoever.

I moved to the Bay Area in 1999, and immediately started volunteering for tons of things. I joined the editorial staff of Anything That Moves, a nationally-distributed magazine for pansexual/bisexual people, which meant helping to run ATM's fundraising dance parties. I also became a slush reader at Black Sheets, a magazine about queer sexuality, and helped out at Perverts Put Out, an erotica reading series that raised money for the magazine. I also helped out with a bunch of other local queer and sex-positive organizations.

I also briefly got to be involved with the Cacophony Society, a notorious group of pranksters that helped inspire Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club and the movie of the same name. My main contribution involved a big glossy store that Microsoft had opened in a mall in downtown San Francisco, featuring dancing robots and fancy toys that didn't actually seem to be for sale. It felt like a temple where you would go to worship Microsoft, rather than a place to buy Microsoft products — so I suggested we organize a religious pilgrimage there. Someone else came up with clever chants begging Microsoft to deliver us from BSOD (the Blue Screen Of Death) and scrounged up monk costumes. (In the end, alas, we were kicked out of the mall the moment we showed up in our cool outfits. Sigh.)

I already wrote a few weeks ago about the Ballerina Pie Fight, which was probably the wildest event I ever helped to put together. (A dozen ballerinas, hundreds of pies. We covered everything with tarps, but the cleanup was still endless — we thought we were finished cleaning up at three in the morning, only to look up and see a dollop of pie filling still clinging to the ceiling.) I also did a ton of other weird events in the early 2000s. Like the reverse strip tease, where a bunch of us came out on stage mostly naked and then put our clothes on. There was also an event in a hair salon, where people read sexy stories about haircuts, and a couple of folks did a striptease while getting their hair cut (which requires some coordination and will probably not result in the best haircut of your life.) 

And I took part in tons of other events, some of which were sort of adjacent to Burning Man or the Radical Faeries. There were flamethrower robots, and a guy doing a whole erotic routine on a unicycle. I went to huge weird events in the warehouse district, between the Dogpatch and Hunter's Point, where everything took place in truck trailers and cargo containers: you would enter the back of a truck and find an ornate space where someone would tell your fortune or give romantic advice with puppets. I went to a swimming pool where people did an aquatic version of the Wizard of Oz at midnight. I saw drag shows that pushed drag to its farthest limits of weirdness. I saw clown drag kings with rubber-chicken strap-ons. 

Not all the events I cherished were that weird or transgressive, though: a woman named Skipper Kim used to organize a monthly skipping meetup near Justin Herman Plaza. A whole bunch of us would get together and then just skip down the street. Group skipping was great exercise, a bonding exercise, and also an extremely silly way to get around. 

Event organizers are my favorite people: bleary eyed but cheerful, obsessing over countless random details, while taking the time to think about accessibility, safety and stopping harassment. This kind of work is usually thankless, except that you get to see the community coming together, which is definitely a form of thanks in my book. When you're running an event, chaos is your enemy — but chaos is also a huge part of what makes an event into a story.

I think a lot about trans social gatherings that don't exist any more and queer open mics that have gone away. I was so lucky to get to marinate in so many other people's brave weird stories. I still get to go to some silly and delightful events where people come together to dance or flirt or act like total goons. 

I honestly can't think about community without thinking about silliness, because a certain amount of silliness has almost always been the thing that made me feel close to a group of people. 

And when I look at history, I think about all the queer creators and unruly weirdos who kept making art and building supportive spaces during periods of repression and conformity in the past. All the beatniks and female impersonators in the 1950s, all of the zinesters and punks in the 1980s, all the anti-racists and queerdos of the early 2000s war on terror. They have never once been able to get rid of us, they've never shut us up. Our parties are just too damn good.