Dear Readers,
Sometimes I perform as many as 6 miracles before breakfast. I've gone quieter in my old age. Less people are listening but my voice carries to those who need it most. I have been wondering why I've been writing so much less. I've become constantly busy with people & messages & social media upkeep. But I know there is more down time than that. I know I Could find the time to write.
I have a lot to say.
I have not found any new secrets to keep but I have been helping women in a far more powerful way than I used to be able to in the past. My arsenal has grown. But I feel compelled to protect their stories because they felt confident enough to confide them in me.
Soon I will overflow & the stories will all spill out onto the collective consciousness that is the internet. The World Wide Web. I prefer to think of it that way. That the proper spider could dance their way across it. That it's a force that we discovered that connects us all.
But we discovered it. We did not invent it.
Our web is designed after webs of human connection that has existed far longer than data tabulating machines have.
Women call to me.
In their greatest times of need.
I feel they do to my mother & that they did with my grandmother's too.
I have known clients in my salon who forget who they are but still know they are supposed to go to Abraxas.
what a small word for all it encompasses.
Abraxas.
People often ask Me what it means. As if that is any sort of a simple answer at this point.
It is my everything. My mother built it. My grandmother's supported it to every extent they could when they were still here. My community makes it thrive. Abraxas is a concept in a Herman Hesse book, referenced on the back of a Santana Album but I do not for one second that men can understand or speak for Abraxas.
I read an article this morning in Lesbian & Gay News that was incredible. I should actually link to it, it was that good.
I had a hard cry about my mom's best friend & business partner Gabe. I thought about how when he died in 2010 he still had never lived his life entirely out as a gay man. We knew. Some people knew. Few people knew he was a Vietnam veteran & few people knew he was gay. It always seemed obvious to me, but I was a small child raised to believe there was nothing wrong with being gay. Many people can't see what they don't want to see.
When my mom was in high school, 1969 to 1973 was exactly the era of the Stonewall Riots & the pamphlets that sparked the gay rights movement.
Gay rights are not won for everyone in the world. Not even close yet. There are still many places where people are beaten for being gay or murdered for being gay. LGB organizations are being harassed by straight people who fetishize homosexuality because of their pornography use. Which is let's face it what's happening when Lesbians & Gay people are called transphobic for wanting their own advocacy groups. Because gender identity & sexual orientation are not the same thing & they require different actions.
Radical feminism gave me the tools to free women from domestic violence. But it also reignited my alliance with the lesbian & gay community that I've had since I was born but had felt ripped away from my by abusive men hiding behind the veil of being gay when they are really using it to excuse their misogyny.
I saw a post by a gay man on twitter whose content I love & who fully supports women's rights. I got choked up reading it & felt compelled to write about Gabe being gay & dying mostly in the closet except for a small group of friends publicly for the first time. It helps that since being permanently banned from Facebook my online community is made up of women I barely know & a few well vetted men instead of local people in my daily life.
I feel like a social media outlaw. Keith told me the etymology of outlaw the other day. That's why I love him, of course I live outside of the prescribed laws under patriarchy, unprotected by the Kings Law. I'm half a step away from the Gulabi gang & implementing vigilante justice. I already have become a hotline, someone women call first before they call the police. Because calling the police is terrifying & often useless but right now there is no other solution being offered to victims of male violence.
I have a client & lifelong friend of my mom who recently learned how to shoot a gun. Her & her other retired friends over 65 are learning how to shoot & handle weapons. I fully support them even though I'm the most anti gun advocate in the world. I want to start an all female police force to respond to women's issues. The way that the slave patrols were implemented to control the slave class. I want a female police for to control the male class.
I call it the United States of Radical Feminism.
It spans continents & countries. Our only aim is to free women, children, & gender non conforming people from male sexual violence & the culture that grooms people into finding sexual violence acceptable in a democratic society.
I look forward to gaining more working class allies as time goes on. I have found the middle ground. I've found the middle class. I'm going to take what collective power we have & I am coming for the oligarchs. Whose with me?
Love,
Jackie Fucking Lane
PS- If by some chance you found this blog through a search engine instead of the link from my own Twitter or Instagram. Find more about my life or my knowledge of feminist herstory @JackieLane2020 on either Instagram or Twitter.
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