I like to arrive before dark if I’m going to be camping somewhere. But here I was, driving down the dirt road an hour after sunset, going nowhere but deeper into the country. I sent a voice memo to the woman I was meeting up with and tried to make the best of it. At least I could see all the lit-up Halloween decorations people had out.

At my destination, a friend had revived a century-old tradition on a farm she’d inherited from her family. The family before hers had held “barn dances” in the expansive upper floor of the farm’s larger barn. I’d attended her inaugural one, arriving early to help set up. A barn dance, in this case, was a public event, open to anyone who wanted to come — family, friend, neighbor, or stranger. The night involved a potluck, various coolers and bags of bring-your-own beverages, and a live band. People from the surrounding farm community and folks who went to these kinds of dances attended. But also, because of the person who’d now revived the dances, a lot of queer people, especially sapphic-leaning folks, now showed up to dance, too, making the crowd an odd mish-mash of people who’d maybe done some farm work that morning and city queers who’d driven up from Pittsburgh or over from Erie.

As for the dancing, the style was contra dance, a kind of folk dancing with mixed European origins. The fiddle is the main instrument in the band, and the band needs to be skilled, to keep tempo for the dancers. One notable thing about a contra dance is that you can attend it alone — it’s considered good manners to dance with different partners song-to-song. And while experienced contra-dancing enthusiasts attend these barn dances, you don’t have to know what you’re doing to go. A “caller” explains the various movements and continues to call throughout the song, telling you what to do.

I’d met a woman at the last barn dance. We’d gotten to chatting and hit it off, but I’d left my phone back at the place I was staying with friends, and hers went from being on 1% charge to shutting down the minute she tried to enter my number. I had to go on a quest for paper and a pen as people filtered out of the barn with their empty ceramic potluck dishes and crockpots. We laughed at how I gave her my number the old-fashioned way. We were texting the next day and continued to strike up a flirty friendship. It seemed to me like we were both feeling it out, seeing if it could be more. So we decided to meet again at this next barn dance. It wasn’t just her I was meeting either, but also her gay mountain biker friends — “my wives,” as she called them, because they were two sets of wives.

I parked on the side of the dirt road in front of the farmhouse, lunchbag of beer and Trader Joe’s baked goods in my arms, and walked as carefully as I could through the dark toward the sound of fiddles. Clouds covered the moon and stars, blackening the sky. The yellow lights of the barn blinded me to anything below my feet until I stood in them. When my eyes adjusted, the friend who organized the dance was right there in front of me. We chatted some, and I asked her where to park to camp in my car, only for her to tell me a room in her house had just opened up and I should take it. It felt like the good luck brushed off some of the dust of my lateness.

I climbed the wooden steps past the compost toilets and emerged to find a couple dozen dancers skipping and spinning across uneven floorboards to high energy fiddling, with just as many onlookers talking, taking pictures, and munching on what was left of the potluck dinner. A giant farm table was littered with carefully labeled dishes: salads, pastas, breads, meatballs, chicken, pork, cheese and chips. Some of it was lovingly homemade, some of it clearly deposited there by some other overworked millennial who’d just bought something. The dessert table was the same. I put my baked goods down — no need to label, that was on the packaging — and went to go find my friend. I spotted her dancing with a person who looked extremely enthusiastic about touching her, taking her by the hand, by the waist. I found another person I knew who was filming shamelessly and joined her, capturing a video of the dance, and my date? Was she my date? That was unclear. But video footage, nonetheless, of the woman I’d come to spend time with having a great time dancing with someone else, and then turning to me, waving with that bright smile. The dance ended, and she ran toward me, grabbed me into a hug, and immediately told me she’d already promised the next dance to someone else.

“Did you eat? Go eat. Eat.” Her bossiness cracked me up.

I got a little food and found a wooden bench to sit on and watch the dancers. While watching yet another queer person who I’d met at the last dance swing my friend around, I made fun of myself a little in my head. Sad at the barn dance because the lady you like is dancing with someone else? How many of my ancestors had felt that? How many people had felt that feeling in this barn over the past hundred years?

I could smell the hay and the night air and the food and the wood, hear the fiddle music and folk songs so old they’d emerged before the people I’d come from ever set foot on this continent. It felt like I’d become a part of a line stretching back through the ages, connected with the dudes in my family tree, accessing a memory deep in my bones — a bit jealous, a bit mopey at the barn dance, hand in the pocket of my overalls, drinking a beer.

Accessing a new ancestral feeling, though, is kind of fun. There needs to be a word for this one specifically, like how a Tumblr user had long ago coined the word “sonder” to describe the overwhelming sense that everyone you pass is living a complex and totally unknowable life all their own. I’d been contemplating that word on the drive up. It’d been a lonely little trip, coming up here solo instead of with a group of friends — they were all working, nothing big. But it feels like I’m doing more and more just by myself these days, and it does get to have a certain stoney taste to it after a while of just going it solo without a break in the flow.

The fiddling paused, and my friend came back over, a bit frantic, glowing a little. She swigged from her alcoholic seltzer, and I asked her if she was down to dance or if she needed to rest.

“No, let’s do it.” She turned, all high energy, and paced right back into the middle of the floor.

The caller was a commanding woman who might have been in her seventies. She stood tall with rigid-straight, incredibly shiny gray and white hair that went past her shoulders with impeccably neat curtain bangs. She had sparkling hair tinsel in and wore a country-style colorful dress that went to her ankles. With microphone in hand, she directed us to our starting places and walked us through the dance moves. It’s hard to stay mopey when there’s fiddle music like that and you’re trying to remember when you spin or turn to face a different person. I could see how these dances served as an antidote to loneliness, a way to glue a community together. How can you be mad when you’re all holding hands and skipping under an arch made by two people holding hands?

My friend insisted on being the “man” role for this dance, and I agreed to be the “lady,” which confused some of the straight people because I am several inches taller and more masc than my dance partner, so they kept trying to make me the man. We wound up switching halfway through the dance, which we agreed was perfect anyway, that we’d gone into the dance with one gender and come out with another. My friend punctuated our discussion with just, “Gay!”

Between dances, my friend pointed out two people she’d met on apps, and it turned out she’d been on a date with the woman I saw her dancing with before. So, that was where that energy came from. I also met a pair of wives from Erie who identified, cheerfully, as “Queeries.” It was good I caught them when I did, though, because despite being rugged mountain bikers who certainly had the cardio for dancing, they tapped out halfway through a complicated dance and decided to call it a night. My friend made faces about it when they said they were going, but there was no dissuading them.

The band took a break, and I wound up at a table with my friend and each of the other queers she’d danced with.I watched what appeared to be some one-way flirting from across the table while we all talked and took a group selfie I’ll never see on someone’s phone.

The band finished their break, and the louder of the two other queers at the table asked the one flirting with my friend to dance, and I breathed deeply. A sigh of relief at the barn dance because the person who’s after the person you want to dance with got whisked away by a helpful person who has no idea they just intervened on your behalf? Another new ancestral emotion unlocked.

I asked my friend to dance with me again, and we found our way to the middle. This dance involved a lot of spinning my friend around with an arm around her waist, and it felt like there was a spark there, especially when she told me how she liked not having to think too hard about where she would wind up after the spinning because I just put her where she needed to go. But what was truly silly and fun was the final dance, a waltz. This one had no calls, no changing of partners, consisted of just pairs of people spinning around the floor — or in our case — not knowing how to waltz and making shit up. We twirled each other around and, at one point, I asked my friend if I could dip her just for fun. She agreed, but when I leaned her down, she let out a SHRIEK. I was not even close to dropping her. Her straight friends were sitting and watching, and oh they heard. They laughed, and we cracked up while the band played on, locked in as usual, right next to us. We tried the dip again, and she did not shriek again.

My friend had work in the morning and was in a hurry to go, so, as one does when they’re not sure if a thing is a thing, I asked her if she wanted me to walk her to her car. Unluckily for me, her straight friends needed to get back a radon testing kit from my friend that they’d let her borrow. Of all the things. We walked her to her car as a group of four, and my friend gave me a long hug under the watchful eyes of her straight friends before climbing in and pulling away. I waved and then went to find my room in the farmhouse.

After some contemplation, I sent my friend a text. Would it have been welcome if I’d asked to kiss her? Obviously I COULDN’T, because her friends were right there. That would have been a move. She replied quickly, saying that I was so funny, and that she wanted to make out with me, but she couldn’t do anything casual, that she was too monogamous and she got too attached. It was the old “we want different things.”

I had accessed my final ancestral emotion for the evening: rejected at the barn dance. Or really, after the barn dance. Had my offer of a goodnight kiss turned down after the barn dance. I felt solidarity with whoever had felt this in the past and took a lot of comfort in knowing that while it was maybe a more unique permutation of rejection in 2025, I certainly am not alone in the vast sea of humanity throughout time, many of whom have certainly been rejected at the barn dance, and some of them even had to be gay.

Like you do when it’s dark and country-quiet, I slept hard. I woke up to crisp morning and went into the kitchen to help my friend prepare brunch. I met her friends, ate with strangers, and learned about the guinea hen that one had heard die in the night while he lay awake in his tent.

“I heard a distress call from one in one place, and the others call out to it, and then another few calls, and then the distress calls stopped.”

My friend went to check on her guinea fowl while we ate. I went for a walk when I finished so the group, who all seemed to know each other, could talk and I wouldn’t have to keep being the odd one out. The walk was pleasant. The air was still not cold enough for an October morning, but at least it was getting there, the leaves changing some, plants dying back. When I returned to my car, my host had also just gotten back. I hugged her, and with tears in her eyes, she told me she’d buried the hen. We talked for a while about her thoughts on getting a protector donkey, which, honestly, yes. That would be the perfect addition to the farm personality-wise. And when the mood was a bit lighter, I got back in my car and drove alone back to Pittsburgh, stopping at a farm market along the way for ridiculously fresh produce, making things as pleasant as I could for myself on this solo day.

The sun was out, the fiddle music still rang in my ears, and I tried not to think too hard about the guinea hen who’d been killed in the night when she was separated from her flock.

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This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.

In the heart of Manhattan’s West Village, a haven for queer New York Liberty fans comes alive. Inside The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, lovingly known as The Center, a vibrant floor hums with the rhythm of basketball, history, and queer fandom.

A poster with a bold declaration — “EVERYONE WATCHES DYKE SPORTS” — hangs proudly against a cream brick wall on the fourth floor of the library and archive space. Nearby, there are snapshots of lesbian couples and fans beaming from the stands of New York Liberty games, draped in the team’s signature seafoam green, posed with players or holding handmade signs. Interspersed among them are childhood photos of fans alongside the early Liberty team, capturing the roots of a lifelong connection. These photos lend a personal touch to the wall that makes you feel as if you’ve stepped into a family reunion for women’s sports fans. Together, they tell a story of visibility, belonging, and celebration both on and off the court.

Playful, vibrant fan-made signs that read “LESBIAN FANS ARE LEGION” and “LIBERTY: LESBIAN FANS ARE FILLING YOUR STANDS!” call to the viewer, encouraging them to bask in its joy and resistance.

Everyone Watches Dyke Sports: Queer Histories of New York Liberty Basketball examines how deeply intertwined queer identity, fandom, and community are within the culture of women’s sports. What began as a collaboration with the New York Liberty — featured initially at the team’s annual Pride game — has since expanded into an exhibition now on display at The Center. Curated by a group of Liberty fans at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the exhibition foregrounds the voices, memories, and artifacts that made Liberty games a hub for lesbian life in the city.

“Lesbian fans have filled the stands of Liberty games since the earliest years of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) in the late 1990s,” says The Center’s exhibition description. “As always, lesbian fans have helped propel the league’s surging popularity. This exhibit tells the story of lesbian fan cultures and their role in the leagues history.”

This thriving fan culture didn’t just develop by chance. It speaks to a larger history of queer community-building and visibility in spaces where LGBTQ+ presence has often been overlooked or excluded. For many lesbian fans, attending Liberty games wasn’t just about basketball, but claiming space, forming connections, and experiencing a sense of collective belonging that was a powerful alternative to the heteronormativity that defined much of mainstream sports culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The spirit of community and resistance is at the heart of this exhibit. From personal photographs and handmade signs to vintage Liberty merchandise, each piece offers a glimpse into the ways lesbian fans have claimed visibility and belonging within (and beyond) the stands. Together, these objects form a visual narrative of creativity, resilience, and joy that has long thrived in spaces where it wasn’t always recognized.

To understand the emotional weight and cultural significance of this fandom, you only need to look at the artifacts themselves.

An original 2002 Liberty ticket stub, from the team’s early days playing at Madison Square Garden, hangs on the wall. Its weathered edges and faded ink are a testament to a different era of women’s basketball. That season, the team was led by Teresa Weatherspoon, Becky Hammon, Vickie Johnson, and more — a powerhouse roster of trailblazing athletes whose talent, charisma, and resilience helped define the early WNBA and laid the groundwork for the visibility and popularity of women’s sports today.

Just beneath the ticket stub, handmade paper glasses and paper fans sit carefully preserved behind glass with a vintage Liberty t-shirt and headband. The glasses, decorated with doodles of stars, hearts, and basketballs, proclaim “Lesbian Fans Fill the Stands!” The handmade memorabilia echoes the same cheeky slogan, but nods to the spirit of Lesbians For Liberty, a group of Liberty fans who protested the team’s management in the early 2000s for their failure to recognize and celebrate its deeply lesbian fanbase.

At the time, despite the visible and vocal presence of queer fans in the stands, the Liberty’s marketing and outreach remained largely silent on LGBTQ+ representation. In response, fans organized under Lesbians For Liberty to make their presence impossible to ignore. They brought protest signs — many of which are featured in the exhibit — wrote open letters, and applied pressure to the organization to acknowledge and celebrate the community that had long supported the team. Among the materials preserved in the exhibit is a flyer with detailed instructions for a “Lesbian Time-Out Kiss-In for Liberty,” inviting “all lesbians, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer people” to stand and share a kiss during every time-out in a game as a peaceful act of protest and visibility.

Lesbians for Liberty not only challenged the league to recognize its queer fanbase; it helped open the door for greater visibility of queer players themselves. Over time, the Liberty began to more openly embrace LGBTQ+ inclusion both in its public messaging and in its celebration of out athletes. A pivotal moment came when former Liberty player Sue Wicks came out in 2002 to Time Out, making her one of the first gay athletes to come out in the WNBA. In the exhibition, an archived page from Time Out featuring the interview with Wicks is on display.

The exhibit uses archival materials to highlight how fan activism helped transform professional women’s basketball into a more inclusive space. This not only honors those who demanded visibility, but also invites reflection on building a sports culture that strives for all identities to be seen, valued, and celebrated.

“It’s been fun to watch people’s eyes light up when they see it,” said Lou McCarthy, The Center’s Director of Archives. “The direct action legacy it depicts, rooted in the work of the Lesbian Avengers and ACT UP, is proof that we can change institutions and the world around us on so many levels.”

Everyone Watches Dyke Sports: Queer Histories of New York Liberty Basketball is on view at The Center until September 28.

This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.

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My email used to mostly only contain bitter things. Like a mailbox stuffed full of overdue bills, it was only ever populated with people who had grievances. After burning out from overwork last year, I developed a phobia of the computer. I’d stare at the thin, hard line of its closed mouth. I’d let messages pile up, get to them late, sometimes never respond at all. It took me months to get to the point where I began checking my email every few days.

I check my email multiple times a day now, if anyone’s wondering. When I told a writer friend that I wasn’t checking my email every day, he had raised his eyebrows, seemed confused like I’d just told him I only breathed if I felt like it. I scuttled around the confusion. “I don’t have a computer job like you.”

But that’s not the whole truth.

This past Wednesday at approximately 5:30 p.m., I opened my email to find a death threat. Or at least an implied one. The threat had details about my home address, my car, even the names of my immediate family members and their locations. It had been sent on Monday. The deadline for my compliance with the “blackmail” had already passed. It was supposed to be noon.

I was on a date, or on a mid-way break during a day-long date. We’d made an Important Decision about what to do with the heat and so had gone back to our respective homes to retrieve our bathing suits to go to the city pool. The day had climbed to 96 degrees, and a dip was just it. I positioned my forearms on an old vinyl-upholstered bar stool in my kitchen and leaned forward — a favorite phone-checking position of mine — and braved my way into my email app. The unusual subject line stood out like a crooked tooth. A message had come through my writing website‘s contact form. The subject line referenced a local blog — not a blog of mine, mind you — but a local one I knew of.

I opened it.

With the self-serious gravity of someone who just watched V for Vendetta for the first time, who wrapped themselves in a new celluloid personality, they open with a real stunner: “Believe me when I tell you that I get no pleasure from sending this email.” This email could have been a not-an-email.

They continue after naming the Blog That I Do Not Run and telling me they definitively know I run it, which…let’s return to my computer-based-anxiety — this is definitely not a thing that is happening: “I know it’s you. Just like I know so many other things about you. It’s not great that you’re being doxxed by a Nazi. A Nazi pointed me to you.”

And, you know, I would agree that it’s not great to have “Nazis” focused on you, if that is even true. But also, it’s not like we’re ideologically aligned or anything. Said another way, I’m not…saddened by the prospect of Nazis disliking me, you know? They should hate me. I certainly hate them.

I return to that line again and again: “It’s not great that you’re being doxxed by a Nazi.” Okay, well, okay. I could have less cut and dry enemies, so actually it’s, in a way, expected if not fine.

They close the first paragraph: “I’m a finder. And as such, I found you.”

Cool.

The next paragraph lists my government name (misspelled), home address, phone number, the make and model of a car I had once owned, and a helpful note that there is rust on the rims. They tell me my hair is bleached (I thought everyone was fooled into thinking I was a natural blonde) and claim they saw me “step out of” my house in an outfit I wore recently. Then, bizarrely, they decide to name my ex-husband and ex-fiancee. And look, while I don’t want my exes to be hunted by Nazis, they’re not the nearest and dearest to my heart. Then, “The Finder” names my immediate family members and lists their locations. They also tell me the name of my divorce lawyer, which I’ll have to take their word for because I have long forgotten.

They then make their demands: “Delete the blog by the timeline provided unless you want to see Nazis at your front door.”

***It’s a heck of a threat. A threat I am reading five and a half hours after the deadline.

At first, of course, the adrenaline pulsed. When that email first lodged in my diaphragm, the threat did the same.

I reached out to the blog. They had not checked their emails either. It turns out some people are busy! We have all been blackmailed and have not known about it!

However, the people running the blog are concerned for my well-being and take that seriously. They offer to take the blog down temporarily if deemed necessary for my safety. I pull them into a group chat with supportive friends of mine to talk about this.

Currently, a big question I have about The Finder: How often do they check their email?

Look, sometimes a hot bitch is busy. Too busy for blackmail.

Oh, right, they used the word “blackmail.”

“I need something from you, and I’m here to blackmail you for it [I really want to know what they were listening to when they wrote this…Evanescence maybe?] …You have until Wednesday, July 30th at noon to delete it [the blog]. If you don’t, I dox you.” [Redacted to protect my family’s privacy but there is more here about sending Nazis to visit my family members and also to send in my direction.] “Every single right wing idiot living in your city will know who you are and where you live, what you do and, and what you’re up to.  The Proud Boys that live in the North Hill. The Keystone State Skinheads in Mount Washington. I found you, so you know I found them, too. You will not see it coming, but you will have to leave your life in Pittsburgh behind.  You’re not the only person being monitored here. I will dox your exes. I will destroy your reputation as an activist and as a writer in your city. I will contact autostraddle and let them know I got your contact information from Nazis.”

I also don’t know what Autostraddle would do with an email like that. “Hey, queer and trans website. DID YOU KNOW that NAZIS do not like one of your writers?”

The issue at hand here seems to be a delusion that I “doxxed” someone to Nazis. Which, risk to myself aside, I do not have the time for, nor had I ever actually considered as a possible thing a person could do. It’s like they’re accusing me of baking feces into chocolate chip cookies. Like…I guess you could do a thing like that, and I had not considered doing so until now. And YET even having now introduced my mind to the idea, I am still confident I am never gonna do that in my life.

I’ll just give you the entire diamond-mine of a closing paragraph:

“Now, a few things to think about. Rest assured that no one you know has contacted me and knows me.  You can trust them. Not even your exes, even the ones that may have cause to hate you. As I said, you doxxed someone to Nazis, and those Nazis know more about you than you think they do. You contact anyone to ask who I am, or if they have hand in this, and I will know and dox you. You try to publish anything about this, and I will dox you. Blame someone other than yourself and Nazis for this, and I will dox you. The only way you have to get rid of me is by deleting the blog entirely. As I said, I don’t care if you put all the other information somewhere else. Once the blog is gone, you will never hear from me again. You don’t even have to respond here, but any pleas or attempts to figure out if I’m serious, and I will dox you. There are causes behind this that are way bigger than you are. I don’t care about what happens to you. This is not personal. You’re not stupid and you know this a throwaway email that you will never be able to trace. Delete the blog by the timeline provided unless you want to see Nazis at your front door.”

And I…well, they won for a second. This did freak me out.

Also, their double spacing makes me want to vom.

***Elbows slowly adhering to the vinyl with sweat, I turned my phone screen back on, paused wondering if this was too much, and then just decided to be honest with my date about where I was at because how was I supposed to continue on with the date normally? They took it in stride that I’d received a threat during a very nascent moment in our extremely new knowing of each other. We discussed this heavily while sunning and swimming at the city pool, with their generously allowing me to check in with my newly activated safety crew group chat. Most of the time was spent analyzing the message and encouraging the idea that we do not immediately comply with anything, or else it may lead to escalation. My phone buzzed, the sun shone, my date smiled extremely cutely, the chlorinated waters lapped, I swam away from a Band-AID floating in the pool as fast as I could while squealing because doing that makes the discarded Band-AID kind of follow you.

I saw a ghost at my date’s place that night.

Stress wipes your mind clean. In subsequent days, I’d return to the same task four or five times, forgetting each time I walked across the kitchen that I had intended to get the scissors, leaving, coming back. I forgot I’d seen a ghost almost immediately after it happened, and only remembered while in the car with a friend a day later.

The ghost itself: a pair of legs. Dark pants. A torso, untethered, above. A hint of arms. A guess at a head. It took a scant couple of steps toward me before it steamed away.

My date and I did not fuck that night, but I slept like the dead there, with them and the ghost.

In a few days, when I remember it’s possible to do so, I check the activity log on my website. As I write this, I’m looking at it again: hits from Russia, Belarus, Gibraltar, and one from Pennsylvania. I have to wonder if there are either Autostraddle readers from these places checking my site or just bots.

I tell my neighbors and word spreads up and down my block to keep an eye out for anyone they don’t know who might come up to my house. A couple members of my ad hoc safety crew gave a door knock to someone we suspected was involved. Oddly, it couldn’t have been him directly, but there were echoes of his language in the doxxing threat, as though this person was someone he’d talked to, maybe even just online.

***This also happened to be the week I finally arrived at the end of the gauntlet of joining a local gun club. Some people bemoan that it’s a cult, but also, their membership procedure does keep people who are potentially unserious — and therefore dangerous — out. After a two-hour orientation where the instructor mostly made eye contact with ME in a room of other people who were also options for eye contact — I got to pick up my gate card from a line of three men seated at a plastic table situated at the back of a squeaky-floored banquet hall. Shooting’s allowed at their outdoor range until dusk, so while the rest of the orientation attendees got into their cars and rolled away, I turned my car toward the gate and let myself in. A member riding a motorcycle gave me a funny look, but nodded. I nodded back. They’re just going to have to get used to me. I rolled down to where I knew the steel-target pistol bay sat. Steel targets are exactly what they sound like. Instead of being the kind of thing made out of paper and cardboard where the bullet goes through, these are made of steel, meant to be relatively permanent except for dealing with wear and tear. You can tell you’ve hit one because you’ll hear it, and sometimes because it’ll give you a brief flash of fiery light as the bullet hits the metal.

I parked at the bay, which was empty, and unloaded my gun and ammo, my ear protection that a friend gave me and my prescription safety glasses. Most indoor ranges won’t let you practice a concealed carry draw. Not here. I practice going through the motions, drawing my loaded Glock-19 from concealed carry, fixing it on a target, firing. By the end, I’m pleased that I was able to go from drawing to hitting five targets in succession without a miss. It’s all plinks and flashes and cicadas in the deep green of the Pennsylvania woods. The sun sets and I keep firing until dusk creeps in a little too closely over the targets. The steel target setup looks like a ghost town, or a carnival never taken down, left to rot, with each of the targets in all their different shapes housed in small structures to protect them from the weather.

I packed up and returned to the dogsit, where, luckily, this week I am watching a pitbull who we’ll call Kevin because he does indeed have a silly human name. Kevin loves me, and he does not like when other people approach me. In fact, he’d recently bitten a friend who tried to join us for a walk. Luckily, eir hand wasn’t punctured, no skin broken, and my friend was the definition of calm.

It’s better to treat a threat, though, however asinine, as real. I pay to have my data deleted. I’ve started concealed carrying much of the time, and for most of the nights at the dogsit, I fall asleep on the client’s couch with their dog resting protectively on me, some movie playing on their TV, my gun still on me, pushing into my ribs. For anyone who’s not clear, the threat to send fascists to my door is a death threat — because what else would they be doing there? Trying to sell me something, get my signature on a petition? No, it’s a threat.

Still, one thing I’ve noticed and trained myself to remember over my many years of working for Autostraddle and also writing on the internet is that a person can read the same piece of writing completely differently when returning to it multiple times. If something inspires reactionary anger or offense, a second read-through later on can reveal that the piece was not so offensive after all, that so much of that shit that made your adrenaline shoot through you like you’d just housed two Red Bulls is just not that upsetting. And upon re-reading the note from my blackmailer as I presented it to various people, it became more and more apparent that it was the most illogical, air-headed drivel sent to me in recent memory.

On a video call with my sister, while on that couch with that sweet pitbull in need of socializing and training, we cackle over this being some Burn After Reading shit. The logic is circular. They “got my name from Nazis” but they’ll GIVE IT BACK, and they’re here to blackmail me…with my…home address? That’s not blackmail except for their intent to blackmail. For all the time this person has wasted — both mine and my friends — their threat is ultimately so weak. If I was a militant Nazi or a militant anything or even just me, and someone told me to Definitely Go To This Address to deal with an enemy, I would simply not. That sounds like a trap! And considering how aware they made me of this possibility ahead of time, like some villain telling me the whole plan in advance, and the fact that Pennsylvania has a blend of Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws, it is now definitely a trap.

***I work the door for the next Queer Fight Club with a dear friend. We do a “vibes-based profiling” with everyone who walks in. We tell them where to find masks if they don’t have them and such.

It’s the newly established monthly night to welcome newcomers to the club and get them caught up on all the basics, so the whole thing winds up being nice because I’m able to confirm at the door, with my entire queer-looking ass, that they are in fact at the right place for Queer Fight Club and that they should proceed inside.

At fight club, one of the instructors tells me, when I apologize for being a Problem Child who’s brought danger closer, “Don’t apologize for being you. We wouldn’t have you any other way.” She’s one of the most intense people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, and it means a lot coming from her. In the end, I’m held together, pieced back together by the connections and people around me, whether they’re adjusting to have heightened security, spending extra time with me to get me out of the house, or talking and strategizing endlessly in a group chat and ultimately calming me down and reminding me that giving into demands only invites escalation.

Unfortunately for the people who mean me harm, I think I’m the better for this experience. I’m heartened by the care I’ve received, I’ve intentionally accelerated my practice with pistol shooting (because I hope to be competitive by the end of the season this fall: let’s goooooo) — and, maybe most importantly, I am now checking my email every day. For every email-job worker who feels like they’re so burnt out that it would take having a gun to your head to get you to want to check your inbox, I can confirm that there’s nothing like a death threat to get you to regularly check your email.

Q:

I went through a really bad breakup earlier this year from someone who constantly made me feel bad about myself, lied to me, etc etc. I don’t need to get to into it because I’m processing it plenty in therapy and I know where I stand with her. Which is that we’re not on good terms! I would prefer to never see or speak with her again. She claims to want the same. We live in different parts of a pretty large city so this should be easy to do.

And yet. She keeps showing up at all my go-to places. In particular, she has been hanging out at my absolute favorite bar in town. It isn’t a queer bar technically but it’s mostly queer people who hang there. There are other queer spots to go to though. ((AND honestly I feel like I’M a big part of what turned it into such a queer place to begin with! I’m a longtime regular and I started bringing my friends there. They started bringing people, etc.)) I introduced my ex to it. She’d never set foot in it before. Now she’s showing up all the time and also seemingly bringing DATES there which bums me out. Not from jealousy clearly. Just from wanting to tell these women she’s on dates with to run even though I know it’s also none of my business.

I’m just so angry. Any decent person would let me have “custody” of the bar. When I see her there I end up leaving. It’s like I’m letting her win. I hate it! I want to ask her to just give me this one thing and stop coming to one of my favorite places in the world but I feel like that could backfire or like it also just isn’t who I am. Ultimatums and big demands are her bag not mine. Do I have to give up this place I love so much? That seems so unfair!

A:

You’re right, a lot of this seems unfair! I hate “losing places” in a breakup, though I can concede that a lot of the places I lost access to in my last big breakup belonged more to my ex than to me. I’ve never had to stop being a regular at a place I discovered first because of an ex. The exact situation you’ve described sounds like my personal nightmare! I get very attached to places! Especially de facto queer spaces!

Given where you’re at with your ex in terms of not wanting to speak or see each other, I don’t think this is going to be resolved by a conversation, especially if the relationship was as volatile as you describe. I respect your desire for firm boundaries with her. I also can’t fully know her motivations for continuing to go to this bar, but it’s possible she’s indeed courting drama and trying to get a rise out of you. So engaging could be exactly what she wants and also allow her to continue to have some sort of hold over you. I doubt she’d be surprised to learn how upset you are by her presence there. She knows it’s your spot, and she knows how you feel about her.

Unfortunately what this all comes down to is the fact that you can’t really change or control someone else’s behavior. But you can change or work towards changing your own behavior and in particular the way you react. There are certain situations where I’d say yeah you should just protect your peace by not going to the place your ex keeps showing up in. But in this instance, that indeed would be too big of a loss! You’re used to this place being a safe space for you, and even if you’re in a big city with plenty of other queer bars, this one is special to you, and having that sense of community and belonging somewhere is actually so important.

So, how can you get to a place where you get to keep going to this bar even if your ex shows up? One step may just be time. Maybe you do have to take a little bit of time off from going there. Not forever! Just for a little bit! While you’re still healing from the breakup, going to therapy, maybe talking about THIS in therapy. Time can help so much. Then you can try going back and see how you feel. You can also recruit your friends to help make it easier to navigate sharing the space with your ex. You could have a friend arrive a few minutes before you to give you a heads up about whether your ex is there or not so as not to be surprised by her presence. It’s not a perfect solution, sure, because your ex could always show up after you. But maybe you also have a friend sit facing the door to give you the heads up when that happens. Sometimes it can be easier to regulate our stress and reactions when we’re not totally blindsided. That little heads up from a friend is small but could make it so you have a second to check in with yourself before laying eyes on your ex.

It also seems possible to me that if you were to take a break from going or get to a place where you don’t have to immediately leave when your ex shows up then your ex might indeed stop showing up at the bar so much. She could be doing it all precisely for the reaction from you (or in hopes you’ll try to say something). If you stay but don’t engage, you take that away from her. I’m not sure how big the bar is, but are there different spaces in it? Like a patio or different rooms? Don’t stay if you feel like it causing you too much anxiety or anger, but if you can get to a place where you’re able to control some of your response to her presence, you might be able to take away some of her power here. Talk to your friends if you haven’t already. They can put themselves between you and your ex, distract you as needed, and remind you that there are still good people who love you in this space and she can’t change that.

I think you’ll get your bar back. I think it’ll just take time and for the wounds to feel less fresh. In the meantime, don’t feel bad for getting worked up about all this. A breakup is so disorienting and shattering on many levels, changing our contexts and associations with places. It sucks to feel like a place that used to provide you comfort is now a place of heightened emotions. You’re not letting her win; you’re trying to take care of yourself by removing yourself from a place when her presence makes you feel bad. It’s not wrong to leave when she shows up, but I do think it’s obviously hurting you to do so given how much you love this place. So if you can tip the scales a bit in order to be able to sit with some discomfort and quite literally reclaim your space, I do think that’ll also de-incentivize her to show up. If you were to stay, maybe she’d be the uncomfortable one.

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1071 articles for us.

Do we all love a frothy, overpriced, nut milk latte made by a queer barista who’s cooler than us? Yes. Do the size of city apartments require us to seek out multiple second spaces to live our life? Absolutely. But getting work done at a coffee shop is more than a pleasure or a necessity. It’s a radical, vulnerable act of seeking connection with one’s neighbors.

I’m not talking about full-on conversations. Interrupting a stranger’s pitch-deck-building-time to talk about your date with your ex’s ex is not conducive to the weekday coffee shop environment of quiet, growing doubt. Instead, I’m talking about parallel play: The intimate act of getting something done while another person sits beside you and gets a separate thing done. Or, if you live in New York, while thirty people sit directly on top of you and sort of get something done. It’s what we’re all seeking and I think it’s about time we let one another in on that secret.

I did something radical last Tuesday. Instead of shrugging my shoulders when I saw all eight, two-seater tables were occupied with one participant (leaving a row of eight chairs empty), I bothered a woman at the table closest to the door.

“Mind if I join you?” I asked, phrased as classily as I am.

“Go for it,” she responded, looking up from her matrix of a computer, which was skillfully completing a set of numerical functions while she lifted her fingers from the keyboard. What a lovely, whimsical response. Go for it! And go for it I did. I sat with my coder for two and a half hours. Within that time period, we had quite the relationship. I watched her stuff while she went to the bathroom, commiserated with her when she learned the East Village coffee shop did not in fact have a bathroom (which I already knew but didn’t share so as to avoid being an overbearing desk partner), and helped her locate an outlet for her tired, intelligent computer. We didn’t break any new ground. We left the coffee shop as we entered it, strangers. Yet, for those two and a half hours, we sat together. And that was more than enough.

Of course we are all busy. That’s the nature of New York. And if we suddenly reverted to a Midwestern way of behaving I think the whole city would just about burst into flames. (I remember the first time I rammed into someone in Chicago they said “excuse me” and followed it up with “have a good day, miss.” I felt like I was in Disney World.) But I’m certain a middle ground exists between over-familiar and don’t-even-breathe-in-my-direction strangers.

When I polled a (super skewed) group of my queer friends, none of them had even thought to ask to sit with a stranger before. One points out that it sounds like “literal hell” and getting work done after that interaction would be “impossible,” out of fear of making your table partner uncomfortable or getting in their way.

On the opposite extreme, I am constantly shocked at the rate to which men invite themselves into conversations. Just the other night, one inserted himself into a catchup with my dear friend from Chicago and my cousin with the line: “I have something relevant to say to each of you.”

Even my dad, a certified girl mom, talks to strangers. He means no harm, but my sister and I needed to inform him that making comments about a stranger’s appearance and/or state of being, even when extremely positive, is not welcome, especially when directed to people who work in service whose job it is to converse with you. And especially coming from a six foot four, fifty year old man who played football in college (outside lineman).

I’m not suggesting we throw caution to the wind and enter conversations with the fervor and gall of a straight man, but I’d argue we can be a little less careful.

When I forced myself to do standup, I had an impression of how it looks when men check women out (a long, drooling scan down the body) versus how queer people tend to check someone out (sporadic, quick glances that you could easily miss or pass off as ordinary). We are socialized to read unspoken, social cues. So it makes sense that we take the “invisible no” (she says with risk of using pseudo-intellectual speech) in contexts where we see the other person not having a clear and easy out.

A self proclaimed “feminist dating coach” whose work I admire, Lily Womble, instructs her clients to “make the first move one hundred percent of the time.” Her addendum, which I find the most interesting, is to give the person you’re approaching a clear “out.” For example, one could provide an out in the form of “I’ll let you get back to your drink,” giving the receiver the option to say “No, please don’t! You’re so hot!” (Or something like that. I don’t know. That’s how they usually respond to me.)

Of course, this advice is geared towards fishing for a longer term connection than an afternoon coffee co-worker. But the ethos still applies.

My question is: When we’re sitting beside one another for an entire afternoon, why are we pretending not to see one another? Why are we not acknowledging a sneeze? Or a need for the wifi password? The most common embrace I see shared between strangers is that of: “can you watch my stuff while I use the restroom?” Which is a great start. It makes the asked feel like they were the most clean, responsible adult in the room. If we were a little less careful with one another we could get one step closer to the dream: the modern day equivalent of the “water cooler chat.”

I received an ARC of So Gay For You in March, about a month into my paternity leave. I wasn’t planning to read it right away. I knew it was a book I’d be writing about for work, and therefore it’d make more sense to wait to read it until I was back at work, closer to the book’s release date, because I had promised myself, after all, that I wasn’t going to do work on leave.

But there it sat, on the dining room table — the book jacket with its stylized photo of Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig in denim, their jean jackets buttoned to one another’s, their bodies angled outwards with the posture and facial expressions of precocious child detectives — and its scrawled promise of “Friendship, Found Family, and the Show That Started It All.”

Maybe I could just take a small little peek?

Twenty-four hours later, I’d devoured the entire thing, reading a lot of it out loud to my newborn. I’m sure he had a great time and hopefully will remember Mia Kirshner’s breakfast order.

But, you see — my inability to put it down speaks to a truth So Gay For You illustrates beautifully: sometimes, the work is the joy. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like work at all. Sometimes it feels like a blessing. “We couldn’t believe we got to keep doing it all,” Kate writes of her time spent in Vancouver, filming The L Word. “Living this utopian life for six months at a time, away from everyday stresses. I likened it to prolonged vacation because it rarely felt like work. There were moments where it was possible to think the good times were never going to end.”

“Every day on the first season of The L Word was a pot of honey,” Leisha writes. “I couldn’t believe I was a working actress on such a special show…. we had a shared goal, a collective mission, and that was to do right by the characters we had the honor of playing.”

So Gay For You excels in so many ways — as a loving portrait of queer community, as a roaming time capsule of queer pop culture, as a platonic love story, as a behind-the-scenes almanac to a groundbreaking show and as a juicy celebrity memoir. It’s a thoroughly entertaining read, conversational and introspective, full of pain and joy and wit and insider info.

But its most resonant achievement for me is its tribute to a workplace that actively fostered queer and female voices and stories, how those spaces can be crucibles of inspiration and, almost inevitably, disappointment. Between charming anecdotes of cast hijinks and collaborative character-building, both women chart their own long, winding roads of self-discovery and artistic purpose, much of it intertwined with creating a show that profoundly impacted so many of us — and them, too.

My unhinged, scholarly relationship to The L Word and Autostraddle’s L Word origins are well documented. I began recapping the original series in 2006, incorporating quotes and photos of my friends from our watch parties. In an era of minimal queer representation in the media, and with most of the queer writers and bloggers I followed writing anonymously behind pen names and gravatars, I wanted to make the most of the privilege we had to be visible. My friends became “characters” in my blog and recaps, their faces recognizable to readers, who told me my work offered a window into a more accessible, less economically advantaged “real life” L Word, with all of its talking, laughing, loving, breathing, fighting, fucking, crying and drinking. It didn’t matter that the show was bad a lot of the time, what mattered was that it gave online communities a reference point to start from to build connections with each other. My readership grew and eventually I parlayed the blogging and the recapping — including those friends I featured and met along the way  — into launching Autostraddle, itself. Later, I’d recap Generation Q, and launch To L and Back, a podcast that recapped the original series and the reboot. I am also a huge Uh Huh Her fan! Did I feel like this book was written for me specifically? I did. But if you’re reading this, it was likely written for you, too.

The memoir’s early chapters, detailing Kate and Leisha’s formative years, are filled with familiar queer markers: thee sartorial relief of Reality Bites-era androgynous grunge, Jo from The Facts of Life as a gateway, copying haircuts from girls in Gap ads, and the magnetic pull of New York City — that mythical, gritty land where you could really find yourself and your people. Iconic ‘90s moments abound — we breeze through Leisha’s freewheeling twenties in New York: working at a bakery, living across from the Chelsea Hotel, playing with The Murmurs, and roller-skating to the Cowboy Hall of Fame for discounted lunches with her girlfriend. We follow Kate getting high and dancing at the Limelight, doing summer stock theatre, and navigating the modeling world as “waify heroin chic” waned. Leisha is scouted for All Over Me, Kate does a gender-bending stint on the short-lived WB drama Young Americans, Leisha dates kd lang and plays Lilith Fair.

Leisha’s awareness of her sexuality bloomed earlier and more definitively than Kate’s; and while both are searching for something as they yearn towards adulthood, Leisha is headstrong and confident, while Kate is more uncertain and eager for guidance. But there’s a hunger that unites them, even before they knew the other existed — a hunger that prepares them and sets them on a path to meet each other, and become best friends forever.

Their candor about their romantic relationships and personal lives in general is remarkable. Prior to launching their podcast, both were relatively restrained when it came to discussing their personal lives with the press, Kate particularly. She writes about her understandable frustration with the press’ early focus on her sexuality when she wasn’t ready to talk about it, how she had enough to deal with personally without the pressure she felt after the show first came out. Eventually, she chose not to officially “come out,” but just to “be out.” In these pages, she’s able to speak entirely for herself on her own terms, and does.

Their time on The L Word, much like our experience watching it, was a tapestry of romantic, artistic, and personal triumphs and tragedies. They loved it and each other. They felt heard and valued, like real collaborators, and invigorated by the seclusion of their annual Vancouver filming cocoon, where they built a vibrant social universe for themselves with the cast. They were frustrated and flabbergasted by Dana’s death, by Season Six, and by Generation Q in general. Because it’s that intense love, that belief in the potential of the work and the awareness of how good it can be, that we are most primed for heartbreak when it lets us down, or when new leadership can’t capture the spirit of the original product.

What lingers is how unfortunately rare that experience is. In today’s television industry of rapid-fire cancellations and a seeming new standard that 8 episodes constitutes an entire season of television, with years passing between seasons, with renewals or cancelations coming months after a season airs — will we ever see another L Word? (The ruthless cancellation of A League Of Their Own suggests “no.”) How often do queer actors have the opportunity to enjoy sets and crews and teams like the one Kate and Leisha found, year after year? As the show ends, Kate begins a run on Three Rivers, playing a straight character, an event which required flying in a special wigmaker from France to heterosexualize her hair. “Was I feeling under-the-surface homophobia or was I just horribly miscast?” she wonders.

But what we do have, after this oft-medicore show brought them together and all of us together, is the work we keep on doing. For me it’s this website, and all the collaborations it has spawned. For Kate and Leisha, it’s their podcast. It’s this book.

For the record, when it came time to sit down and write about the book (yesterday) I decided to do a little flip-through just to refresh my memory. 24 hours later I’d read the entire thing all over again. Maybe you will, too.

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So Gay For You is out now from St. Martin’s Press. You can read an exclusive excerpt from the book right here on our website.