Dykes on Bikes Go Dancing

Reposted from Tightrope:
We were a herd of girls on bikes stringing through the streets of San Francisco. Riding under the elevated highway supported by fat green pillars that stretches its concrete fingers from Market Street, through SOMA, and out of the city, we made our way toward Haight Street, a blur of skirts and boots and black fabric punctuated by the pulsating red lights that were affixed to our backs. We could have been invincible but for the traffic that zipped along Market Street, the cars humming inches from our bodies. Safety in numbers was an illusion that made sense on this almost warm summer night. The day had been unusually hot and the breeze off the Pacific hadn’t yet kicked in. It was June, and we were ready to dance. After weaving down the bike path by Safeway and up Fillmore, we arrived in the Lower Haight. The whole pack of us girls pulled up across from the club on our bicycles and scattered to affix them to parking meters with heavy locks.

We must have stood out on the street for awhile deliberating and watching the locals mill around tweaking, drunk, or in search of lost cats; because when we entered the club, some classically San Francisco dyke involved in planning the party approached our group and asked, “Were you the bike girls?” I shed my layers of black, my protection from the San Francisco night, and sat down on a tall bench in the corner that was upholstered in black vinyl. My feet dangled comically from my perch, and looking around at my fellow bike girls who had hoisted themselves onto the bench, I noted that theirs did as well. After a minute, we moved to the back of the club, where a few people had already begun to take to the dance floor.

We danced like the bike girls that we were, each in our own style, unconscious of anything but the music and the movement that emanated from our body like a dense fluid. We shifted our motion depending on the rhythms that DJs pushed through the sound system. We circled our hips to the sounds of salsa and reggetone. We felt the hard bass of hip hop, and the light sway of pop. The sound governed our bodies and our dances were our armor against the world of the night.

Then the Hawaiians discovered us. To them, we were mysterious San Franciscans. To them, we were girly-girls with roughed up edges and colored hair contorted into new and alluring shapes on top of our heads. We were a part of the local flavor, and just happened to be shy enough to appear easy targets. A girl in a baseball cap and jeans, with long brown hair reaching to her waist approached me and asked me to dance. She looked like she had just stepped out of a suburban mall. And she was drunk, gyrating her hips to the beat of the music and holding her beer away from her body with one hand and somehow managing not to slosh the beverage onto me who had quickly become her embarrassed dance partner. My friends were watching me from the sidelines as I instantly lost my coordination and my sense of rhythm with this girl. I am not adept in the art of partner-dancing, especially when it involves the sort of contact that she was expecting. First, she used her protruding belly to knock against my person. When that didn’t seem to be succeeding, she turned around and attempted the same motion with her ass. There was obviously a disconnect so she asked me if I was uncomfortable and wanted to stop. I don’t believe I gave her a definitive answer, so she stopped for a moment, marched up to my friend, and lead her across the room where she passed her off to another member of her posse. Maybe we are both good at hiding our social awkwardness behind masks of cool. We are mystery girls rather than shy girls, because we have elevated our quiet demeanors into an art form. But as soon as another drags one of us onto the dance floor at least half of the mystery fades and we are like awkward teenagers dancing too far from our partners, missing the other person’s beat altogether. At some point we fled our dance partners and congregated in the small patio outside to discuss our adolescent inclinations that lead us onto the patio in the first place.

My dance partner found me soon after I returned to the dance floor. She was a bit more drunk and pulled me to her with on hand dangerously grasping the back of my neck. I pulled the hand away and she wondered why she had overstepped some unvoiced personal boundary. I was quick, this time to slip away.

The third member of team Hawaii seemed to be more of a go-between. She was assessing the situation, and learning more about San Francisco that way, talking to all the girls her friends picked out of the crowd and asking them questions. She asked me why I had difficulty finding her friend attractive. My vague response was that I have a weakness for punkier types. Mall-rats just don’t do it for me. So she asked me if I thought the bar-tender was cute, then tried to give me inebriated tips on how to pick her up. Her advice might only seem rational when emboldened by some potent elixir that I wasn’t partaking of on this particular evening.

Toward the end of the night, the mall-rat who had taken a liking to me earlier was careening around the room like she might topple over at any minute, top-heavy from too much beer. I was dancing with my back to the crowd in a small circle of friends. And the night was obviously winding down. People had paired off and were obliviously clutching each other and crowding out those less drunk, and not fortunate enough to have found another body to cling to. My Hawaiian approached me, teetering just slightly when she walked. As she passed, her teeth found my shoulder. This only took a moment, but time slowed down. She was either too drunk or not vicious enough for her teeth to really meet my skin so that they stuck. Her mouth merely grazed my flesh as she passed, and I made sure that I gave her a firm glare to let her know that biting is not a socially acceptable activity even when you are drunk, especially when you don’t even know the other person.

The lights came on a few minutes later, right as she had found a few others who were drunk enough to appreciate her style of dancing. We gathered up our jackets and headed outside to our bikes. As we unlocked them from the parking meters to which they were hitched a few boys were drunkenly leering at the short skirts sported by a few members of our party. “Dykes on bikes,” they yelled as we began to roll away. “Dykes on bikes!” they yelled again, then a bit quieter, one of them said “I especially like dykes on bikes when they are wearing skirts.” As we coasted down the gently sloping street, they thought they should count us rolling by. “Three dykes on bikes,” they said as a few of us took off. “Two dykes on bikes,” they chorused as the remaining two members of our party glided by on silent wheels with red safety lights flashing at their backs.

Extra Excellent RADAR

The following is reposted from Tightrope:

As Michelle Tea notified us in her official email announcing this month's RADAR reading at the SF Public Library, it was definitely "extra excellent." I wrote a little snippet about Dorothy Allison's performance, but every performer really deserves some applause. Michelle Tea closed the evening by saying that it was the only RADAR reading to ever receive a standing ovation, which was certainly well-deserved. The featured readers/performers at last night's event, Imani Henry, Nalo Hopkinson, Kate Bornstein, and Dorothy Allison all gave engaving performances.

Since I was not one of those people in the audience with a gigantic digital camera snapping photos during the event, I had to do a bit of research to locate a flickr photo-set of the event. It only took a few seconds to locate these photos by a flickr user called allaboutgeorge. They not only document the readers, but also Michelle Tea on her mad dashes about the room to provide delectable cookies to those audience members bold enough to ask questions during the Q&A session.

Read more about the event on Tighrope.

Tags: RADAR,Queer Arts Festival, Reading, Dorothy Allison, Imani Henry, Nalo Hopkinson, Kate Bornstein, glbt, Michelle Tea, San Francisco, Library, sfpl, queer, Writers

Coco Rosie

One member of the band came on stage with a full feathered headdress and a white mask. I had expected a dramatic entrance. This particular duo could't get away with less. The other band-member strutted across the stage and picked up her mic. When she turned to face the audience, it was obvious that she was sporting a moustache. While the masked faux Cherokee princess wailed with an operatic vibrato, the moustached hipster crooned with the voice of a young child and a very old lady fused into one. Two cocky Frenchmen provided the backup--beat-boxing and eerie vocal accompaniment.

Really, the crowd obscured my view of the stage, so I mainly had to surmise what was occuring. The Cherokee princess removed her mask and began jumping around on the stage. She looked too old for this kind of behavior. The moustached sister remained calm on one side. I wanted an aerial view, but I was hemmed in by the crowd, and an escape to the balcony at the Great American Music Hall seemed nearly impossible. People were elbowing me from all sides. The boy behind me was drinking this beer that he kept on getting entangled in the hood of my sweatshirt. It didn't help that he was constantly commenting on the surroundings in a very loud voice to his friend. Considering that the music was on the quiet side, his commentary seemed excessively loud, and about innane subjects like when he would begin watching the World Cup the following day. Even if I couldn't see the stage, I could watch the video that was projected above the stage-- of the band-members strolling through trains in headdresses and running through border towns in masks.

Boys on Friday Night

Mission kids. We move to San Francisco from all across the country, hailing from small insignificant places in search of something bigger, something more exciting. And all we want to do is party. Well, this is the perspective of some bitter long-time San Franciscans who have a lot better to do than go out after work on a Friday evening for a beer. Hey, we have a lot better to do as well. Because, yes, we are artists, those downwardly mobile dirty hipster bohemian types who write poetry and engage in conceptual art, or the creation of theoretical works of creativity that no one can understand. The rest of us have normal jobs, probably as web designers--or something else flexible or freelance. I don't know where I exactly fall into all of this. What I do know is that I found myself sipping a margarita out of a pint glass last Friday with a few co-workers who I never actually talk to. Of course, I have exchanged a few words with one or two of them, but I couldn't call them friends. We are sitting in this patio filled with picnic tables overflowing with hipsters and their bicycles. Everyone is drinking beer. The place is absolutely packed. I suppose it could be deemed interesting in terms of a Friday evening activity. After a bit, people began to filter off in other directions, heading toward new destinations to continue their evenings. I remain in this crowded patio. This guy approaches my co-worker and I and in a over-dramatic display of false shyness, asks us if he could buy us some drinks. Our conversation, or merely our presense, is the currency in this exchange-- Beer for conversation, beer traded for proximity, with the hope of a little something more. The exchange went on for too long--down the street and into the next bar: some pseudo-punk haunt where hipster kids bounced to bad 80s tunes encased in cigarette smoke in the back room. I played along with the activities of the evening. I had nowhere to be. I am young, and this sometimes necessitates risky behavior. The boy was convinced he had me for the night. He was convinced even in spite of this brief exchange:

He surveyed the crowd with approval, then leaned over to me through the haze of smoke and yelled over the din of some New Wave madness, "What kind of guys do you like?"
"I like girls."
He was good at masking the disappointment, mostly because it is difficult for any man to take this comment seriously. Mostly, it is a dangerous thing to admit in their presence because it immediately conjures up images of threesomes and tacky porn flicks.
"Who do you think is hot in this room?"
I looked around the room. Everyone looked tacky in their faux hipster apparel and badly dyed hair. A gaggle of girls sat at the other end of the room giggling to one another. It was obvious that he found them all attractive in his somewhat inebriated state. His friend was trying to ply them with conversation. They didn't look too impressed. He probably wanted to ditch me for one of them as well, because they looked easy. I suppose that I had looked the same way earlier--some innocent new to the ways of The Mission and nightlife in general. They had assumed that I was just barely old enough to be granted entry into the place in which I was standing. The music was loud and everyone was dancing, so we rose too to writhe to the beats. But it was getting late. I wanted to go home. We all finally managed to exit. And the boy refused to speak to me. He was throwing a silent tantrum--the kind that small boys throw. He wanted a girl to go home with him. And I was not that girl. So as he sulked under a street sign, I headed off in the other direction, towards home.

Club Games

The club was filled with really normal people who thought they were really hip. They weren't hipsters, but they weren't your average 9-5 yuppies either. The partiers were party people all grown up who still party more than they should, but less than they were able to when they were younger. Everyone had been partying all day, a result of San Francisco's celebration of Carnival and the holiday weekend.

The Russian was drunk, sitting with her boyfriend on a long bench that was pushed up against one wall providing an excellent view of the dancers. She was bored of the party feeding its heavy bass into her ears, attempting to stimulate her senses that were already dulled from alcohol and the general sensory overload from the club's atmosphere. Her boyfriend wanted a new form of entertainment, and he wanted her to provide it for him. They began watching the dancers noticing who had rhythm, who did not, who danced in couples and who danced in groups. They both noticed a loose knot of girls, virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd except that their style of dancing was a bit more excessive, a bit louder than the rest.

The Russian and her boyfriend had a brief, inebriated tête-à-tête. They communicated with drunken telepathy, a form of communication that is only possible when normal mental barriers are broken down by alcohol in the blood. She rose, slowly, making sure of her footing, waiting a moment until the room righted itself in her eyes.

The girl with pink hair was dancing, absorbed in the club in that way only those who are familiar with that sort of atmosphere can be. She was also taking in the energy of those around her, feeling the music and keeping an eye out for someone who would draw her in--or who she could draw towards the electric beacon of her hair and absorb into the magnetic field of her dance.

It only took a moment for the Russian to adhere to the beat of the other girl's dance. Once she approached the candy flame-headed dancer, she was hooked. She knew what she was asking for just as much as her boyfriend, who watched from the bench, a spectator in the raucous sport of clubbing. Neither of them seemed to mind being observed, like a pair of strange birds from the sidelines.

After a few moments, they found themselves on the bench. The Russian had no idea what she was getting herself into, because she was drunk, and because she hadn't really anticipated that she would be drawn to someone who would want to take a step closer to her than the dance could offer. The girl with the colored hair leaned in to her ear and whispered something inaudible. It was the act, not the words, that counted. From there, her lips migrated toward the neck and the words became kisses. For a moment, they were lost in the sound, and the proximity of each other's skin, and the alcohol rising from each other's breath. But the moment faded and allowed thought to occur. The Russian's boyfriend was still watching the game. And she hadn't expected this much to occur within a span of five minutes.
"I have to go," she said, and rose from the bench, heading for some temporary sanctuary.