A Year Without a Pride Flag

Sourcing Joy in Our New Medieval Era

Banner Image - This is a Performance, 1, Molly Larkey

Dear Diary,

It’s so grim, is it not? For weeks now I haven’t written, partly because I’ve been busy traveling and whatnot, but also partly because I fear that so much of what I have to say is just a lot of Debbie Downer Negative Nelly barf. I mean, you all are smart people. You see what is happening. We are on the same page. Right? My page is waking up this morning to learn that the highest court in this doomed nation has decided its legal for folks to discriminate against me and my family and my friends. This on the heels of a (not unrelated) uptick in fascist activity in Glendale, California, where I make my home. Nearly a month ago a rabid pack of fascists, Proud Boy-affiliated goblins and self-hating homos calling themselves - CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK TW TW - ‘Gays Against Groomers’ (Really? Really???) stormed school district office a block away. I knew something was going down thanks to an alert from Maebe A. Girl, my favorite queer person running for congress, and I’d planned to show up to support the parents, students and assorted local queers who were arranging themselves in a loose counter-protest.

But what is the P?

The fascists were convening because the school district was gathering to vote on whether to recognize June as Pride Month, as they have for the past few years. That’s it - whether to just, like, have a rainbow flag in school hallways and whatnot. They showed up in matching shirts, debuting a deeply depressing ’straight pride flag’ that looks like the banner of the dystopian nation it is. They showed up in novelty-oversized MAGA hats and slick, professional banners that seemed to accuse local city council folks of heinous acts. They showed up with music and bullhorns and big trucks with shitty billboards. They were on one side of the parking lot, and we were on the other, with a moat of cops in between. They like us, one of the fascists bragged, referring to the cops, and the cops did not suggest otherwise. This band of goons, who would ultimately erupt in violence, punching and pepper-spraying, trailing queers in their trucks, terrorizing a friend into stopping to grab a random brick to protect herself against what felt like an imminent gaybashing, their ringleader is a failed Glendale City Council candidate whose run was supported by the Glendale Police.

This is real.

Glendale has a shitty history. It was a ‘sundown town,’ meaning physically unsafe for people of color after dark. Today it has an citywide anti-racist coalition and there is a growing queer presence thanks to OutGlendale, the local org that seems to have turned my fave dive bar, Dave’s, gay! Dave’s - where I once saw a middle-aged man lug a guitar and an amp onto the karaoke ‘stage’ behind the pool table (there is no stage) to accompany his karaoke performance of Rebel Yell - has been flying the queer flag for months now. Unlike my own house, which has been flying a yellow nylon flag stitched with giant, blobby strawberries made by someone’s grandma and bought at a thrift store in Florida. I have a queer flag; after Target contributed to my current seasonal depression by caving to violent goons and throwing their stupid pride merch back in the closet I felt I had to do some consumer activism, and made a point to buy a fucking flag at the Galleria location. I also felt I had to purchase a TRANS PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS EXIST t-shirt from Ash + Chess after Target outright cancelled that particular design during their massive cowardly meltdown. It is a cute shirt, and the sentiment is true. That Target canceled it seems to co-sign the aspirational genocide transphobes are working to enact, and fuckig upsetting. Anyway, I have the flag, but don’t feel safe flying it this year, not when the guys who work at the bodega across the street, where I frequently purchase my shameful packs of secret cigarettes not to mention luscious tubs of labna and the softest, flattest loaves of shoti puri, were seen returning from the psychotic fascist rally down the street, for which I started a fight with them. Sigh. I don’t want my family to be in danger, not my eight-year-old son nor my 72-year-old mother, and not my trans husband, and not me, so I probably should not have run up to the bodega dudes and yelled at them, but I felt crazed for the helicopters buzzing over my head and the audible roar of fascists down the street, and I confronted them. All things considered, I really can’t hang a flag this year.

Which brings me to this sidebar - the current spike in flagrant queerphobia is forcing me to embrace all sorts of things I actually sort of hate at this point, such as, pride flags, pride in general, chanting at protests, drum circles, having to organize with my beloved comrades for the sake of bettering this stupid, rotten world. I couldn’t believe it when a bullhorn was thrust into my face at the counter-protest, demanding my voice. Every cell in my body withered, it was a physical feeling. The dread that came upon me hearing the half-hearted chants. I did this with verve and fresh anger literally thirty years ago, with ACT-UP and Queer Nation and NOW and WAC. So much has happened and I am weary. I gathered with some radiant queers to sort out a second coming of Queer Nation. I went rogue and devised a sort of newfangled, 2023 phone tree, with the hope of slowly but surely motivating people to come out to the various events that could use queer joy and anger - not just that school board meeting but another school board meeting later in the month, and a city council meeting where the four intrepid queers who dared to show up were deeply traumatized after being shouted out of the room by a hoard of fascists calling them pedophiles. There was the Drag Queen Story Hour in Eagle Rock that got trounced by fascists, and the one in Hacienda Heights that got attacked by christians. There was the Drag Queen Story Hour here at the Glendale Library that was canceled - against the wishes of the actual library - by the city council. After seeing with their own eyes the violence being directed at queers in the city they serve, they chose to cancel queers rather than double down in their support and protection. This attempt at organizing is called Q-TIP, Queers Together in Protest (inspired by artist Miriam Klein Stahl’s legendary Queers Together in Punkness series from 1990s San Francisco) and if you live in southern California please follow on Instagram and check for updates. There is a Google form you can sign up but I think it’s fucked up because I’m bad at even remedial tech even though I’m an Aquarius and it’s supposed to be my wheelhouse.

Miriam Klein Stahl, Promote Queer Visibility

My husband wants to move, but the thought makes me want to cry. Moving is so, so awful, is it not, and my kid has been moved around way too much these past years - this house has been his stability. It’s enormous, enough room for my love and the kid and my mom and the dog and the cat and the lizard. I can walk to Goodwill and the nail salon and to three different movie theaters, two malls and three grocery stores (not counting the bodega, which is now dead to me). I just can’t do it. Besides, the fascists have just burned a queer flag outside an elementary school in nearby Burbank, as well as attacked various Drag Queen Story Hours. The idea that we would be safer elsewhere is, I think, an illusion. It does feel creepy that my local grocer was at a fascist rally - I already think way too much about the history of neighbors turning on neighbors, starting or contributing to wars (why? why do I think about this so much??) - but, the homes on either side of that market house families of color with adorable children, and the man across the street is very kind and loaned us a screen to project a movie in our yard, and the sober, punk, ex-bank robber author I know from San Francisco literally lives two doors down with his gorgeous goth wife. There are good people here and there are bad people here and we are going to have to see how it all shakes out.

In the midst of all this I was on a panel with Honey Mahogany, who I look forward to voting for sometime - maybe governor? And Amy Whelan, Senior Staff Attorney for National Center for Lesbian Rights, she was on the panel too. It brought me a loot of joy and relief to be seated, in this rather rotten moment, between two life geniuses working against the current onslaught in tangible ways. Sometimes, like when I read about how the parents of trans children are, in some places in the US, risking imprisonment by caring for their children, I get wicked anxious and am like, is someone on this??? And, yes, literally, Amy is on it. And many others, at NCLR and the ACLU and elsewhere. But it was intense and meaningful to hear about her work with these families. Sometimes really understanding that there are forces working to counter all this bullshit gives me a moment to breathe. And sometimes I just wonder, But, who’s helping them?

At some point the panel moderator, Shane McCammom, a really wonderful queer litigator, asked how, in the midst of this moment, you (me, us) access queer joy. And I immediately thought of art. I’d recently been at Michael Felix Gallery taking in the sculptural work of Molly Larkey, and it gave me a huge, oomphy boost of giddy queer glee. It came upon me as I took in a piece called Beginners 11, which looked to me like a very faggoty brick. Pleasingly odd in its angles, painted in chalky pastels and having what I decided was a sort of glory hole (for, like, little gay elves or something), I expressed my thoughts about it and she laughed approvingly, and shared that it is a ‘utopian brick.’ It makes you feel so smart when what you get from a work is what the artist meant, doesn’t it? I would like to live in a room somehow built of these optimistic, gay bricks, a room in a home one could certainly hang a queer flag upon without concern for the safety of one’s elderly mother. Made from stucco painted over metal and then dashed with bright color, it’s part of a series called Beginn-ers, cinderblocks that aim to start something, cornerstones of new futures where play, irreverence and mystery are given the same precedence as order, function, history. They are like queers ourselves, aren’t they - bright and textured with a hard-as-nails interiors. You might be able to chip the happy away but there is no destroying the core.

Molly Larkey, Beginners 11

All of Molly’s work struck me as similarly utopic and gay. A giant, metal X, The Not Yet (Signal 20), is part of a series in which she sculpts a new alphabet. It’s not that she’s suspicious of established forms as much as she is acutely aware of their limitations. We queers (and Molly is, duh) come up against the Saturnian borders of the established ways daily, hurling ourselves against it not only to simply make room for ourselves - whether that be a paper pride flag pinned to a middle school corkboard or a more accurate pronoun etc etc etc - but to make the whole world a more livable place for everyone. It’s worth mentioning here that during that initial Glendale school board meeting, as fascists unleashed the violence they’d had every intention of unleashing, inside, at the actual meeting, a strong and outspoken force of community members spoke with love and support of queers, and the school board did as well. Then they all had to shelter in place until the melee in the parking lot subsided and it was safe for them to leave. A friend had been in there speaking, mom of two weird and wonderful kids in the district, and when she left her car was surrounded by fascists and so she walked a block to my place and hung out with my mom for a minute while the losers went home. Most of them don’t live in Glenadale, and don’t have any kids at risk of spotting a pride flag on their way to the lavatory.

Anyway, back to Molly. She old me about how a lot of her new work is inspired by alchemy, ancient alchemy, the medieval practice somewhere between science and witchcraft which studied the transformation of various materials while working to transmute the more common elements of nature into more holy, sublime forms. It is excitingly apt to see Molly Larkey’s creative drive as akin to the alchemist’s inspo, gazing around at the world we know and thinking (hoping, praying), there’s got to be more than this, something we just can’t see, something that with a little effort we can transform into something so much more magnificent. Is it meaningful, also, that alchemy is a medieval art, when I think so, so often about the medieval era, using it as a sick balm to console myself when I think about how bad things are getting, have gotten. I think, At least I probably won’t ever be forced to wear a scold’s bridle, a spiked, iron muzzle favored when punishing women, which keeps the victim drooling, suffering and humiliated, particularly when being dragged about the village on a leash. Yes, at least there are no scold’s bridle’s, or racks to have my bones cracked upon, or any other device conjured from the imagination of a fellow human with the intent of just majorly ruining someone’s day. Why, just last night, as my mom watched a news show about ‘swatting’ - a new (Is it? I don’t know) trend in which some troll sends a SWAT team or some other massively fortified gang of cops to your home for literally no reason. One family had been swatted upwards of 40 times (do the SWAT teams not catch on that, like, it’s not a thing?). My mother expressed a sentiment, how awful the world is becoming, fair enough, but I always think to history, and how awful the world has always been, and I landed on the medieval era, as I do, and was like, It could be worse, at least it’s not the Medieval era. So, alchemy in the era that had ‘witches’ - people - being burned alive in the town square, and Molly Larkey’s utopic vision in this, our era where christians and everyone else can refuse service to queer people because they’re in a strange sky-god cult and they think think there’s going to be a big party for them after they die for being such assholes on earth.

Molly Larkey, The Not Yet (Signal 20)

Need more joy? I do, too. Lares Feliciano is an artist I became aware of when they were recommended to me as a filmmaker during the creation of Valencia, the sprawling, feature-length art movie adaptation of my memoir. Knowing that my filmmaker friends couldn’t (and probably didn’t want to) embark upon a full adaptation of the book, I enlisted over twenty of them to each shoot a chapter, as a short. With artist (and contributor) Clement Goldberg, we stitched them all together into a full-length film with a multitude of tones, styles and ‘Michelle’s. Lares’ chapter is one of my favorites, with roaring dyke march footage and legendary performance artist Annie Danger as some excellent version of ‘me.’ I got to work with Lares again in a recent writing workshop, and when they learned I was going to be in their hometown of Denver, teaching at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Lit Week (another enormous source of joy, not just working with the writers who signed up for my essay class but getting to listen to readings by and conversations between Rachel Kushner and Sheila Heti (swoon) and getting to read with my townie comrades Andre Dubus III and Patricia Smith (!!!) and getting to witness the intense and, yes, joyful charisma of Amitava Kumar), they invited me to see a sculpture they’d had up at the Denver Art Museum, now in its final days after a two-year run. A filmmaker, writer and a sculptor? Some people are so lucky.

Lares’ sculpture, Memory Mirror, is a sort of room one steps into, in installation, a sculpture you can immerse yourself in. The three walls that form the space are covered with blown-up silkscreens of vintage wallpaper on swaths of nylon - ecstatic, enormous poppies and roses, all blowsy and hyper-colored, and forming a type of jungle around collaged photos the artist solicited from the community, setting into the rollicking scene sepia baby pictures, olden photos of parents, a childhood portrait now rising from a bloom as if a bird from a nest. Lucky enough to get a tour, she pointed out a picture donated by a woman who spent much of her kidnapped childhood in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II; a photo of a local hero so infamous for his generosity he had a street named for him; a group of 70s-era Latinx activists; a picture of her own partner cradling her newborn stepchild, and even an adorable cut-out from a 90s-era Sears catalog of young boys decked out in the decade’s fashion. The parts of the walls not plastered in this art were artfully painted in bright, mod stripes and arcs, and curio boxes holding tiny toys from eras past hung like specimens in a natural history museum. There were thrift store armchairs to lounge upon and take it all in, as well as a 70s television, encased in ‘wood’ advertising a number to call and offer your own memory to the titular mirror.

Lares Feliciano, Memory Mirror

And the Mirror was an actual thing, a magical oval hung on a wall, screening filmic representations of shared memories; images and objects floated by as the narrator spun their yarn, the flickering surface looking like a portal, like it could take you deeper into this sort of wholesomely psychedelic landscape. Maybe it was how inviting the portal seemed; maybe it was the Big Bird figurine displayed in a cubby, but it made one of my own memories surface, being so enchanted by Sesame Street that I told my mother I wanted to take an ax and break the curved glass of our television set, so that I could crawl inside and finally be where I so longed to be. My mother, of course, was horrified, and tried to explain to me that Sesame Street was not inside the TV, the TV was not a window, and if I tried to smash it I’d cause a fire and burn the house down. Sigh.

Memory Mirror struck me as a gorgeously generous piece, humbly honoring the importance of everyday life, everyday people, our little triumphs and failures and funny stories, the momentous moments that fall through the cracks. I often think that anyone. everyone’s stories are as riveting as anything we might ever read or watch, if only we could know them. When I had the incredible opportunity to write Beth Ditto’s memoir, Coal to Diamonds, I was struck by this a lot. Of course, Beth’s life is extraordinary - she’s a celebrity, extraordinary in itself and made more so by the fact of her beginnings in Arkansas and her irrepressible queer, fat, feminist punkness - but I also felt that, really, anyone’s life could be held in such a way, by someone intending to transform it into art, and it would be amazing, and I had the impossible wish to be that person for the world, an inspiration so futile its immediate flare-out was almost painful. As it was, it was was a big enough task to do justice to the incredible life I was charged with.

Lares Feliciano, Memory Mirror

I was so happy to get to walk through Memory Mirror, and to sit in the makeshift living room with Lares, near an honest-to-Goddexx rotary telephone (a prop), chatting about the piece and marveling at it. She’s spent the past couple years hanging out, a fly on the wall of her own massive piece, eavesdropping on museum-goers, listening to folks rag on millennials or spontaneously start talking about their own history. In the brief time we were there I heard numerous folks gasp with delight at the curio boxes, exclaiming how they had had that troll doll or that same Smurf.

I guess at the end of the day it is art that gives me joy in the face of all this yuck, in that art feels like the exact opposite of the urge to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a couple of gays, or show up at a school board meeting screaming about how gay teachers are trying to instruct children about anal fissures (True story. I mean, no one is teaching children about anal fissures. But some crackpot who has too much time on her hands now that masks and vaccines have faded into the background did in fact show up in my neighborhood raving such wild nonsense). Art - especially work like this, Molly Larkey’s utopian alchemy, Lares Feliciano’s communal memory portal - feels like the best of human expression. I, the afflicted, am greatly comforted. It’s not going to drive the Proud Boys out of my neighborhood (well, actually, many of Molly’s statues could be used as weapons, and queers have quite a history with bricks, don’t we?) but it gives us a glimpse of the worlds we are actually striving, dreaming, of inhabiting.