Tag: intimate communities

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Zeph’s story

by Zeph Fishlyn

I’m a mid-forties white genderqueer person born and raised in Montreal and raised again as an adult queerdo in the Mission District in San Francisco. I came from an owning-class Canadian WASP family. I can thank them for good teeth and education and vacation opportunities and also for legacies of silence, repression and anger. In 1987 I landed in San Francisco desperate for connection and found it among all the small-town escapees, queers from every quarter who had managed to walk-crawl-run to a city where they could find others like themselves.

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In defiance of all that splits us

Do you know Aurora Levins Morales? She is a much beloved writer, historian, poet, and activist. I first read her writing in This Bridge Called My Back (now shockingly out of print), and lately I’ve been reading her blog, where she writes about disability and chronic illness, imperialism, poetry, capitalism – read this post about her experience returning to the U.S. after some months in Cuba receiving medical treatment:

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On crisis and community

I’ve seen more cops on my block in the past 24 hours than I have in months; a series of fights and muggings have brought them out in ever-increasing force, reminding me vividly that I have been wanting to write about violence, about crisis and trauma in communities, and all the ways we deal with those things. I’m thinking about this in the context of the US Social Forum and the Allied Media Conference on the horizon, the convergence of so many queer/POC/women-led groups doing powerful anti-violence work (lots of links embedded towards the end of this post), and also in the context of my own relationship to violence and safety as a white person, as a trans person, as a person with class privilege, as a person read as female, as a survivor. Continue reading “On crisis and community”

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Community Reparations Now! Tyrone Boucher and Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia Talk Revolutionary Giving, Class, Privilege, and More

Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia is the cofounder (with her late mama, Dee) of POOR Magazine, a grassroots arts and media-justice organization in San Francisco. Tiny and Dee were houseless for much of Tiny’s childhood, evading various systems that threatened to institutionalize, exploit, and incarcerate them. They survived and fought back by remaining fiercely dedicated to each other, creating independent microbusinesses to make ends meet, becoming underground avant-garde art celebrities, and creating POOR Magazine to make silenced voices of poor and indigenous people heard through media and art. Tiny tells their story in her 2006 memoir, Criminal of Poverty: Growing up Homeless in America (City Lights). Continue reading “Community Reparations Now! Tyrone Boucher and Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia Talk Revolutionary Giving, Class, Privilege, and More”

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Letter To My Dad About Giving Away Money

by Tyrone Boucher
I wrote this letter to my dad as part of an ongoing dialogue we were having shortly before I turned 25 and began to get some access to the trust fund he set up for me. I wanted to explain why I planned to give away the money, why I thought it was important and useful, and why I wanted him to be involved.
Hey dad,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful response to my email! I read it several times, and I’m sure I’ll return to it frequently as I continue to think about this stuff. Everything you wrote about economics was really interesting, and gave me a lot to think about in terms of how I view wealth accumulation. I have a lot of thoughts prompted in part by some really awesome books I’m reading right now about the racial wealth divide and political economy respectively, and I would really love to talk more this stuff as I finish those books and pull my thoughts together.
For right now, though, I want to respond to some of the more personal stuff you wrote – as well as bring up stuff that is really timely right now in regards to my giving and my own relationship to wealth.

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Reflections from a Homownersexual

by Ezra Berkley Nepon

BUYING

In 2001 I bought a house in Philadelphia in partnership with a close friend. We called our new relationship “homownersexual” because we were queers in a committed partnership with each other that had nothing to do with marriage or monogamy. We bought a three story, five bedroom house that was in good shape for $25,000, with a personal loan from her grandparents and an agreement to pay it back at a relatively low interest rate (7%). We collected a total of $625 month from the combined rent of the housemates (including ourselves), which paid the mortgage and bills plus a little for home repair savings.

We and our various housemates were white flamboyantly-gendered queers moving into a neighborhood that was 99% working poor African-American. Prior to this move, I had been living for a number of years in the Baltimore Avenue neighborhood of West Philly, where gentrification is a major issue, but where the neighborhood had also long been home to a mixed race and class community. Though the neighborhood (now called Cedar Park) that I had lived in was majority African-American, there were also a number of African and Asian immigrant communities, multiple white communities (in this case I mean sub-cultural communities), and the income/class breakdown of the neighborhood changed dramatically from block to block. In that context, it was easier to feel part of a community with lots of different people, even if that was rationalizing. Continue reading “Reflections from a Homownersexual”

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Class Stuff

I’ve been thinking about class and community. I’ve been thinking how hard it is to build cross-class community. Lots of stuff comes up in my cross-class relationships. Stuff about money of course, but really, it’s not just the money. There’s stuff about talking, stuff about eating, stuff about dressing. There’s stuff about how close you stand and who you touch and how far in advance you make plans. There’s stuff about how often you do laundry and who has your spare key and how you feel about the kids on the corner. Continue reading “Class Stuff”

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Enough: Questions

by Jess Hoffmann

What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth?

What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth?

What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth? What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth? What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth? What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth?

If I say it enough times, three, twenty-three, one hundred and ten, every morning before I open my eyes and at night before bed; if I say it over and over like an incantation; if I obsess about it, months-into-years on end, alone; if I ask everyone I know to weigh in, will the answer come?

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Buy One, Get One. Free.

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Debt is spelled with a silent “be”. (I mean to use the passive voice.) Debt is spelled with a silent “be”, an empty letter holding space next to unopened bills. Debt is spelled with a silent “be”. As in “be quiet, feign ignorance and master the timing of smiling and leaving.” But I learned this before I learned to spell.

My mother learned from my father that debt was the American way. A $9 trillion US deficit backs this lesson up. From letters dropped out of my mother’s mouth I learned that money was something we never had enough of, something we needed urgently. From cards dropped out of my father’s hands I learned that money was not real. From the hypocritical narrative of consumer capital I learned shame and silence. I learned that we were less than empty, that we were less than zero.

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