Beware the Pure Spirit, Let the Flesh Instruct the Mind

Listen my children and you will hear of the struggles and burdens of what it was like to be Queer (before Stonewall). Before the Stonewall Inn riots, our kind were really living in “the apartheid of the closet.” Even as today, there was a concerted effort to regulate homosexuality. Before 1900, gender inversion was the focus of regulation.    The characteristic rules used to police gender nonconformity were laws prohibiting crossdressing and prostitution. Laws and ordinances prohibiting public lewdness, sexual solicitation, indecent assignation, disorderly conduct and degeneracy, lewd vagrancy, and independent exposure were adopted, by and large, to control prostitution (a type of gender inversion). Sodomy laws, originally adopted to prohibit mainly anal but transformed to cover oral sex and target “female impersonators” were also significant. There were at least three watershed moments of the early 20 th century that directly contributed to the emerg...

The following was part of an exercise that was used in a facilitator training session for SafeZone.  I may be tweaking this until I get it right, but here is what I have for now.  This is taken from Writing to Change the World. I am from Mickey and Freda, Papaw Fitzpatrick and Virginia, Roger and Judy. From Central Appalachia and mid-plateau of southern West Virginia, from old mountains and creeks / rivers full of hellbenders, bluegill, catfish, and copperheads. From dirt roads paved with "red dawg" and sprinkled with waste oil to keep down dust.From campsite stories of haints, Mothman and "The Mad Butcher of Fayette County." From pots of brown beans, onions and butter, cornbread, venison, home grown maters, cucumbers and onions floating in vinegar, and poke salit. From fiercely self sufficient stock, extreme poverty, and Jesus only with ciggies and backey spitoons made from Folgers coffee cans. From large extended families, 2nd and 3rd cousins all account...