Notes on August

Another random grab bag of notes

Hi, friends! I’m writing this from my hometown of Belmont, Massachusetts - between a Portland wedding, a Vermont wedding, a family vacation on Cape Cod, and now this time in Belmont, I’ve spent most of August away from Philly. I will be so happy to return home in a few days! I also have a bunch of new subscribers to this newsletter - hello if you’re new, and thank you for being here! This is another *bits n pieces post,* much like my last post in July, but I want you to know that this is not, like, now the format of this newsletter! Just a fitting format for my mushy summer brain. I have some new composed essays cooking that I’m excited to make moves on once I’m home, including a bunch of lesbian culture and history stuff. I also have some home reno updates and How to Open a Lesbian Bar updates for paid subs coming in September! But for now, please enjoy this random assemblage of notes.

-I feel like my newsletter needs a new name? It’s really not as much about domesticity as I thought when I started writing it two years ago :/ Name suggestions welcome!

-If you share my interest in lesbian history (which you probably do if you subscribe to Dyke Domesticity) then you must read Marina Magloire’s essay “Moving Toward Life,” published in the LARB. The essay is an archivally researched examination of conflict between Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Adrienne Rich over Zionism/support for Palestinian liberation in the 1970s and 80s. Lorde and Rich eventually came to oppose Zionism, but Jordan’s support for Palestinian liberation came earlier and was deep and unwavering over the course of her writing career, and the gulf between the three women’s beliefs about Zionism in the early 80s became the basis of a community conflict from which Jordan and Lorde’s relationship never recovered. Magloire posits that Jordan’s unflagging support for Palestinian resistance indeed may be one reason why Jordan remains a lesser-known and less-celebrated figure compared to Lorde (or Rich). Part of the crux of the conflict between Jordan and Lorde/Rich came down to deeply different visions of lesbian feminist multiracial coalitional work - a topic I’m very interested in, in my dissertation and beyond. This essay really got my wheels turning, and I plan to write a longer post in conversation with Magloire’s research. Anyway, read the whole essay, it’s brilliant.

-On a much, much, much stupider note, what the fuck is up with Billie Eilish? As a millenial, perhaps I am not built right to connect with Eilish’s whole deal, but I was moving through life blissfully neither knowing nor caring what she was up to. Then I saw this:

This is cringe on a level that causes me actual pain. Why are we as a society allowing her to dress like a 90s rapper to such a cartoonish degree? Why is she making this face? Why is Charli doing all these remixes that (other than the Lorde one) are far worse than the original tracks? Billie (and her guest verse on “Guess”) just gives me a serious, serious ick. I actually got into a heated cross-faded dance-floor debate with Clover’s brother at their cousin’s wedding about this. Clover’s brother is a straight man who loves lesbian culture. He literally reads Autostraddle. He loves Chappell Roan and he does not care for Charli. I was pointlessly arguing with him about why Charli is actually good, and then I mentioned the “Guess” remix to say that I did not like it and in fact it made me question Charli’s taste. He was taken aback, as (surprise, surprise) the Billie “Guess” remix was his favorite Brat-related output. For me, it comes down to this: Charli has a horny, confident, adult heterosexuality about her that I really like. Billie has a horny, insecure, adolescent lesbianism about her that repels me, though I wish her the best. Charli and Billie, both of you, please do better. We as a culture do not need this:

-Okay this is truly some random lore. So, as you know from the top of this newsletter or possibly from knowing me in real life, I am a suburban Boston Masshole by birth, and I am also a Harvard graduate student (albeit one who has absconded to Philly). I therefore have a begrudging affinity with greater Boston area shenanigans. Therefore, when the NYT magazine published this scintillating oral history of a twenty-person Somerville polycule in April, I was obsessed. Clover and I read the whole thing out loud to each other, pausing frequently to add our own analysis. (Highly recommend reading this article out loud with a trusted shit-talking loved one, btw.) The polycule apparently is made up of a bunch of bi gf-straight bf couples with a few random floaters, including some people who do not date or fuck anyone in the polycule and whose membership consists solely of being in a group chat! There are so many ridiculous details in the article, but I feel that if I identify them here I will reveal to you all how mean I secretly am and I’m scared! Anyway, I was FASCINATED to learn of this behemoth of a polycule and dying to know if I had any degree of social connection to their sphere.

FLASH FORWARD TO TODAY, when I learned that a friend of mine who lives in Somerville has recently become acquainted with a mysterious new friend group, who are all SUSPICIOUSLY FLIRTY. Some of them know each other from tango classes. They have parties where everyone has to make a donation to Planned Parenthood. They are all coy about how they know each other, and when my friend asks “oh how do you know X [her bridge to the friend group]” they do an expression with their eyes that clearly conveys “I FUCKED HER.” I am convinced that they are The Polycule or a segment thereof. I am putting the heat on my friend to find out if these people are indeed The Polycule - or in fact evidence that Somerville has multiple twenty-person polycules, which would maybe be even better. If you have goss about the twenty-person Somerville polycule, please email me straight away. I won’t tell anyone except Clover.

Tiny troll doll owned by my friend MJ. Of the doll, they said, “it makes me feel CRAZYYY!” I felt similarly.

-Maybe premature to share at this juncture, but I’ve started writing a novel, lol. Actually probably a novella. I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s based on an extremely vivid dream I had about a year ago and told a bunch of friends about and then mostly forgot. Then, sometime a few months ago, friend and occasional Dyke Domesticity collaborator Agnes posted on Instagram about how she’d had a very vivid dream about a delicious sandwich, and then she made it in real life (Agnes, feel free to drop the sandwich deets in the comments, it sounded good). Anyway, I saw that and thought….what if I did that with my dream?

I’m plugging away at this project very slowly, and I have no idea how long it will take but I genuinely believe that it will be good, lol. I won’t share any info right now about the premise or plot, but I will share a constellation of influences that I am drawing on as I go: Women by Chloe Caldwell (read Maddy’s interview with Chloe in

TV Dinner

here!), All This Could Be Different by

Sarah Thankam Mathews

(read Maddy’s interview with Sarah in TV Dinner here!), Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Call-Out by Cat Fitzpatrick, Carmilla by Sheridan La Fanu, The Idiot by Elif Batuman. So, that type of book!! If you have recommendations for novellas that use the form particularly well and/or horror books that contain an element of satire/humor, please send them my way!

-I took a day trip to Providence, RI, where I lived for a year in 2021-22. Going there always brings up an interesting bouquet of feelings for me. The city is so cute, and my friends there all have really charming apartments. The Rhode Island coastline is so beautiful, and I love being close to the water and watching boats (living there made me realize I’m a boat guy). But the year I spent there was a fairly unhappy one. I was really lonely, and I lived by myself in a cursed apartment inches from a highway onramp. The world was still in semi-lockdown, and I had individual friendships but no community to speak of. My building was owned by a scummy slumlord, and next door lived a multigenerational family who owned their house and tended to a massive colony of feral cats who liked to sunbathe on the roof of my car and make eye contact with me through my bedroom window. My neighbors understandably had negative feelings about my landlord buying up most of the block and renting it out to med students and the like (though they were always kind and friendly to me). One of the family members was a young nurse close to my age, and close to my move-out date, she invited me to go out with her friends sometime in a way that made it pretty explicit that she thought I was a sad loser who never left the house, lol. I was like, I need to get out of here.

Driving around the city and seeing friends, so many memories came rushing back. I passed the poorly-planned intersections where I was nearly mowed down on my bicycle on numerous occasions and the coffeeshops where I stopped on long, lonely winter walks. I tried to go to India Point Park, where I spent many evenings reading a New Yorker and watching the sun set, but it was raining and the park was undergoing some major construction. I pissed in a bush and then stood under my umbrella and remembered going to the park my first week in Providence. Clover was living in Worcester then, and we were imminently planning to break up when she moved to Portland, so emotions ran high. I was crashing with my friend Aaron in Fox Point, near the park, and there was an enormous, GORGEOUS mahogany ship docked smack dab in the center of the park’s waterfront. I assumed that the boat was a permanent feature of the park owned by the city or something, but I soon learned that it was The Peacemaker, a tall ship owned and operated by the Twelve Tribes, a Christian cult. They had somehow finagled an arrangement with the city where they were allowed to dock in the park for “educational purposes.” Clover and I took a free tour of the boat, offered daily, and saw women in long prairie dresses making ceramics on a wheel on one of the ship’s balconies. The group was not openly proselytizing or recruiting, but they were selling the aforementioned ceramics as well as their own line of canned yerba mate. We learned that the boat had been built by a Brazilian rich guy in the 80s for his adult children, who promptly shipwrecked it. It then sat for decades in a mud flat in Savannah, where the Tribe members found it, bought it, and rehabbed it, to sail around the world peddling yerba mate I guess. Though the Twelve Tribes was undoubtedly creepy, I was sad when the ship sailed away, and every time I go to India Point Park I half expect to see it docked there.

The Peacemaker, aka the Cult Boat

Me and Clover in love on the Cult Boat in 2021 :’)

-I got this text from a friend, which I was of course thrilled by:

If your therapist brings up Mommy Baby Tyrant Serf, LET ME KNOW!!! Okay that’s all for August, I’ll be more on top of things in September lol.