In first grade, a boy named John— a notorious troublemaker—systematically chased every girl in our class during recess trying to kiss her on the lips. Most gave in eventually. It was easier to give in than keep running. When it was my turn, I turned and faced him, grabbed his glasses off his weasel face, and stomped on them on the hard blacktop. He ran to the principal’s office and cried.
In fifth grade, I was asked to be a boy’s girlfriend over email. It was the first email I ever received. He actually told me he wanted to send me an email, so I went home and made an AOL account. We went to a carnival and he won me a Garfield stuffed animal, and then he gave me a 3 Doors Down CD. A few days later, he broke up with me, and asked for Garfield and the CD back. I said no.
In sixth grade, a girl in my year gave head to an eighth grader in the back of the school bus while playing Truth or Dare.
In the summer after sixth grade, I kissed a boy for the first time at sleep away camp. He was my summer love. During the end-of-the-summer dining hall announcements, where kids usually announced lost sweatshirts and Walkmen, an older girl stepped up to the microphone, tossed her hair behind her shoulders, and proudly stated, “I lost something very precious to me last night. My virginity. If anyone finds it, please let me know.” The dining hall erupted into laughter and cheers. She was barred from ever coming back to the camp again, and wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to anyone.
In seventh grade, I told my brother I decided when I was older wanted a Hummer. What I really meant was I wanted a Jeep, but I didn’t know a lot about cars. My mother overheard and screamed at me for “wanting a Hummer.”
In the summer after freshman year of high school, I went to sleepaway field hockey camp with many of my close friends. One of them, named Megan, I had been friends with since kindergarten. One night when I was showering, she ripped open the curtain and snapped a photo of me on her disposable camera. I screamed. She laughed. We both laughed when I got out of the shower a few minutes later. After camp was over, her father took the camera to the convenience store to get it developed. When he gave the finished photos back to her, he said, “Your friend [Anonymous] has grown up.”
Sophomore year of high school, one of my best friends Hilary had a party in her basement while her mom was away. We invited some of the guys in our grade and someone’s older brother bought us a handle of vodka. One of the boys who came sat next to me in Spanish class. His name was Thomas. I remember playing a simple game, where we passed the bottle of vodka around in a circle and drank. I remember being happily tipsy and having fun, to suddenly being very drunk. Thomas and I started chanting numbers in Spanish, and he leaned towards me and kissed me. We kissed in the middle of the party, with all of our friends cheering. Then we went into Hilary’s bedroom.
Hilary’s bedroom was in the basement, on the ground floor, with a large window next to her bed. When someone went outside to smoke a cigarette, they realized it was a front row seat to what was happening in the bedroom. It was dark outside, and the light on was in the bedroom. They called everyone outside to watch. I don’t remember getting undressed, but apparently we were both completely naked in Hilary’s bed. A friend of mine told me later she tried to open the door and stop what was happening, but Thomas must have locked it. They said they pounded on the door. I don’t remember hearing them pounding. I don’t remember seeing everyone’s faces outside the window. I remember Thomas holding my head down, and shoving his penis into my mouth. I remember trying to resist, pulling back, but he held his hands firmly on my head, pushing my face up and down. That’s all that I remember.
The next day, my friends and I went out to dinner at one of our favorite local restaurants. I couldn’t eat anything, and it wasn’t because I was hung over. Every time I tried to put food in my mouth, I felt like I was choking. Anytime a flash of the night before appeared in my mind, I felt like vomiting. My friends sat with me in silence. Then they told me a girl named Lindsey, who had briefly dated Thomas freshman year, had stood outside and watched the entire time. Even after everyone else stopped watching. My friends said they didn’t watch.
On Monday, Thomas and I sat next to each other in Spanish. We didn’t speak. We didn’t make eye contact. I went to the girls bathroom and threw up. I hear Lindsey and Thomas live together, now, ten years later.
Junior year of high school, my teacher for Honors Spanish was named Señor Gonzales. Señor Gonzales had all of the girls sit in the front row. Señor Gonzales called on any girl who was wearing a skirt to write on the chalkboard. Señor Gonzales asked a friend of mine, who had broken her finger playing an after school sport, if she broke her finger because “she liked it rough.” Señor Gonzales was a tenured teacher.
Senior year of high school, I got my first real boyfriend. His name was Colin. He was on the lacrosse team with Thomas. He told me that sophomore year, Thomas told everyone on the team what happened that night at Hilary’s. Everyone cheered. Colin said that, even then, he had a crush on me. Even then, he wanted to punch Thomas.
Colin and I lost our virginities to each other. Colin said if I got pregnant, he would make me have the baby. He didn’t believe in abortion. Colin said if I got pregnant, he would make me have a C-section. Colin said that if I didn’t have a C-section, my vagina would be too loose for him to ever enjoy having sex with me again. Colin said that he wouldn’t let our child breastfeed. He said his mother gave him formula, and that he turned out just fine. I didn’t get pregnant.
Junior year of college, I lived in Denmark for the spring semester and studied at the University of Copenhagen. Copenhagen is one of the safest cities in the world. Guns are illegal there. Pepper spray is illegal there. One night, my friends and I went to a concert at a crowded club in a part of the city I didn’t know very well. I brought a tiny purse with money, my apartment key, and my international cell phone. For some reason it made sense at the time to put my purse inside my friend’s purse. Maybe I didn’t feel like carrying it. We were both drinking. My friend left the concert to go home with her boyfriend. One by one, everyone I was there with left the concert, until I was suddenly alone and I realized I didn’t have my purse, or any money for a cab ride home.
I started walking in the direction that felt right. I walked for a long time. I had no idea where I was, and didn’t recognize the area. It was almost 4 am. I was on a residential street when a cab pulled up next to me. I asked the driver if he could drive me to an intersection down the street from my apartment.
I don’t have any money, I said.
I really need your help, I said.
I will do it for free, he said.
Sit in the front, he said.
I sat in the front. We drove in silence for some time, until he pulled over on the side of a dark street.
I don’t want to do it for free anymore, he said.
He locked the car doors and reached across the center console and slipped his hand up my skirt. He grabbed my vagina. Hard. I pushed his hand away and unlocked the door. I ran down the street and realized he had taken me a block away from the intersection I wanted. I walked to my apartment and threw rocks at my roommate’s window until she let me inside. She yelled at me for waking her up. I escaped. Nothing happened. I was fine.
The summer after I graduated college I helped Hilary find an internship. She was an art major and wanted something for her resume besides waitressing. We found a posting on Craigslist to be a studio assistant for a painter in the Bronx. It was listed as an unpaid internship. The toll for the George Washington Bridge was twelve dollars, plus gas, but she got the internship anyway. She wanted the experience.
The artist was a 38-year-old Canadian painter named Bradley. Hilary was 22.There was another intern there, an art student from Manhattan named Stella. Bradley needed assistants to help him make bubble wrap paintings. Stella and Hilary would take a syringe and fill the tiny bubbles with different color paints until it formed a mosaic. Bradley always had Hilary stay after Stella left to clean the paintbrushes and syringes. He told Hilary she was beautiful. More beautiful than his wife, who he only married for citizenship. He told Hilary they had a loveless marriage. He told Hilary he wanted to have her beautiful children. They began an affair. He told Hilary has wife knew and didn’t care. He told Hilary he was going to leave his wife soon.
Everyday Hilary drove to the Bronx, cleaned Bradley’s paintbrushes, and had sex on the studio floor. Everyday she went home with no money, and everyday she paid the toll at the George Washington Bridge. She needed the internship for her resume, she said. It was too late to find a new job, she said.
I could go on. I could tell you a lot more. About the whistles on the sidewalk, the kids who sat at the bottom of the stairs in high school to look up our skirts, my friend who was a prostitute in South Carolina, the men who’ve cornered me in parking lots and bars calling me a tease, the unwanted grabbing on the subway, the many times my father has called me fat, the time I traveled to the Philippines and discovered Western men pay preteen locals to spend the week in their hotel, the messages on OKCupid asking to “fart in my mouth.” About how I wasn’t sure if I had been raped because I was drunk and kissed Thomas back. How he raped my mouth and not my vagina, so that must not be rape. How easy it was for me to escape the dark street in Copenhagen, and how that made it not matter since “it could’ve been worse.”
Men have no idea what it takes to be a woman. To grin and bear it and persevere. The constant state of war, navigating the relentless obstacle course of testosterone and misogyny, where they think we are property to be owned and plowed. But we’re not. We are people, just like them. Equals, in fact, or at least that’s the core of what feminism is still trying to achieve. The job is not over. We’ve made great progress. There are female CEOs, though not very many. There are females writing for the New York Times and winning Pulitzer prizes, though not very many. There are female politicians, though not very many. But these advances are only on paper. The job won’t be over until equality permeates the air we breathe, the streets we walk and the homes we live in.
I think back to how easy it was for me, in first grade, to feel fearless and strong in my conviction to stomp on John’s glasses. I felt right in reacting how I did, because John’s behavior was wrong. But his was an elementary learning of the wide boundaries his gender would go on to afford him. For me, it would never again be so easy.
(in which members of the lgbtq community speak out about why they’re not open about their sexuality with their families.)
poster series
Shari Heck, 2014.
The notions that LGBT people MUST be out or else they don’t respect themselves, or they’re harboring internalized homophobia, or they’re not being TRUE to themselves are SO harmful and SO problematic because there are people like this in situations where the choice between staying in the closet and coming out is often the choice between safety and very real danger.
“Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce.”
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Michel Foucault | On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists (1971)
Folks need to really interrogate their notions of justice with this in mind.
Suck UK has made a laptop replica out of cardboard to act as a decoy so you can get on with computering. It features a scratch pad keyboard, a fluffy mouse and custom slide in wallpaper.
ADD really is one of the worst-named conditions. It should be called Attention Surplus Disorder because when it’s really bad, it’s because we try to pay attention to everything around us at once. When I was younger, crowds and parties could be a nightmare because my brain would try to listen to 10 conversations at the same time.
I always wonder. I was one of the ritalin kids, diagnosed at about age 8 or 9, medicated until my tweens. Ritalin kept me focused and I felt brilliant (math was a breeze, I’d get weeks ahead in class) but couldn’t write a story or draw a picture to save my life. I could either be smart and uncreative or distracted and artistic and I ended up choosing the latter. Since they stopped diagnosing it with the overwhelming frequence of the 90s, do we still have it?
I’m still happy with the choice I made, even if I can’t do algebra in my head anymore and feel dizzy when presented with too many options.
Fifty years ago — Aug. 23, 1965 — the DNT reports the Duluth City Council has granted an on-sale liquor license to Milton Richardson for his Rendezvous Bar at 21 E. Michigan St. The article notes it’s the first time a liquor license has been issued to an African American.
Fifty years ago — Aug. 24, 1965 — the DNT reports the Duluth City Council has granted an on-sale liquor license to Milton Richardson for his Rendezvous Bar at 21 E. Michigan St. The article notes it’s the first time a liquor license has been issued to an African American.
(Note: There is no building at 21 E. Michigan St. today; it’s the spot where I-35 runs behind the Electic Fetus and the Wieland Block. Also, an article in the Aug. 20 DNT referred to the address of Richardson’s bar as “22 W. Michigan St.,” which would be behind the Allete / Minnesota Power headquarters.)
In granting the license, the council set itself up to deprive one of five holders of inactive licenses from opening a new liquor establishment. Four of them were owners of bars in the Gateway Urban Renewal District that were demolished.
The Alcoholic Beverage Board recommended last Wednesday that the five licenses not be issued at this time. It was felt by the board that former Gateway bar owners should not hold licenses because they had no buildings in which to operate bars.
The council, in awarding a license to Richardson, did not indicate which of the former license holders will not be granted a renewal.
William F. Maupins, president of the Duluth Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, appealed for a license on behalf of Richardson.
He said that an important part of the issue was to give a Negro a right to hold a license and to serve Negro people.
“A Negro has never had a liquor license in Duluth,” he said. “He should be treated like a white man and be permitted to have a license.
“A Negro should be able to own a liquor establishment and other Negroes should be given the right to buy a drink in the place.
“If a Negro is ever to have a license, it should be now. There are 700 Negros in Duluth and they should be served.”
The proposal to grant Richardson a license was included in a list of 67 on-sale liquor licenses recommended to the council by the Alcoholic Beverage Board.
The resolution was approved unanimously by the council. But an earlier attempt to amend the resolution to table Richardson’s license application was defeated by a four-to-four vote.
Voting on behalf of Richardson previously were councilmen Robert LaPine, Sherman E. Iverson, John F. LaForge and Albert Colalillo. Those urging that the matter be tabled were councilmen Alfred E. Persch, Dwight Solberg, Leo M. McDonald and Robert Eaton.
All councilmen said they felt Richardson deserved a license. But four felt the matter should be discussed thoroughly before another license holder was deprived of his license.
Andrew Larson, attorney for Richardson, noted that the Alcoholic Beverage Board had recommended on three occasions that Richardson be given a license. He said his client would upgrade a license. He contended that the council did not have to determine which license Richardson would get because they are inactive at the present time.
Tragedy of War Touches All Ages
Too young to realize that she has been orphaned as a result of the war in Vietnam, 20-month-old Linda Dieryck feeds a cooky to her pet collie Susie as her grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Leo Dieryck, Strand Road, look on. Linda’s dad, Marine Corps Cpl. James Dieryck, was killed in action in Vietnam last Wednesday. Her mother, the former Jeanne Wakefield of Clover Valley, was killed last October when she was struck by a truck on the Marine Corps Base at Oceanside, Calif. Corporal Dieryck, a Marine Corps career man with seven years of service, had been in Vietnam since last May. His body will be returned to Duluth for funeral services later this week.–(Staff photo by George F. Starkey.)
Mayor Buys Ticket
Duluth Mayor George D. Johnson is shown buying the first ticket to the 76th annual Duluth Police Benefit Ball from patrolman Walter G. Netzel Monday. The ball will be from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Oct. 1 in Hotel Duluth.
Weary and disappointed, but not unappreciated, Jeff Crisp leads Superior’s American Legion baseball team off the train at Superior’s Union Depot. The team had a 2-2 record in the double-elimination regional tournament.
Ray Nitschke, middle linebacker of the Green Bay Packers, is a warrior on the gridiron and as gentle as a kitten when he’s out of uniform. (AP Wirephoto.)
where are they getting these throwback ass kids from? why they dress like minor characters from good times?
SEE BRUH! I SAID THIS! I SAID THAT PIC OF THE BOY WITH THE WATER BOTTLES LOOKS LIKE THE PIC OF THE BOY HUGGING THE COP!
Bc it is the same kid. I was reading info on the first pic about how the mom of this boy takes around to purposely to pose for these photos.
Yep. The photo’s staged and the child pictured is Devonte Hart, a transracial adoptee whose white adoptive parent uses him as a literal prop in her propaganda. Apparently he really didn’t want to hug the cop in that photo on the left, but his mother forced him into it, that’s why he’s crying.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — white saviors adopters coercing their own child into
unwanted physical contact with an adult stranger who works in the force
that regularly assaults and murders Black people with impunity… that
doesn’t sound like abuse dynamics at all OH WAIT
What a totally random collection of Art Deco photos ! 1) 125 Worth Street, Centre Street side near New York City Hall 2) Stairs to elevator on the Queen Mary, permanently moored about 3 miles from where I live in Long Beach, California (about 5 miles as the crow drives) 3) 30 Rock, New York City 4) Hoover Building, London England
2 I have many photos of. I will post one in a moment.
Many St Paul police officers support her wearing hijab even as some people protest that it is a violation of uniform code:
St. Paul Police Assistant Chief Todd Axtell said all rules, even uniform
codes, were made to be changed. “In the early 1970s, you had to be at
least 5-foot-8 to become a St. Paul police officer,” Axtell said, who is
5 feet, 7 inches tall. “If that rule hadn’t been changed, I wouldn’t be
here today.”
Her hijab has been specially designed to come off if someone tries to use it in a fight to choke her.
👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀 good shit go౦ԁ sHit👌 thats ✔ some good👌👌shit right👌👌th 👌 ere👌👌👌 right✔there ✔✔if i do ƽaү so my selｆ 💯 i say so 💯 thats what im talking about right there right there (chorus: ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ) mMMMMᎷМ💯 👌👌 👌НO0ОଠＯOOＯOОଠଠOoooᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ👌 👌👌 👌 💯 👌 👀 👀 👀 👌👌Good shit
1- I am glorious above all things 2- Eat when hungry, sleep when sleepy, play when bored 3- Affection is given and received on my terms and only mine 4- Show displeasure clearly. 5- NO 6- Demand the things you want. If they aren’t given, demand them again, but louder this time. 7- If you are touched when you don’t want to be, say so. If they continue to touch you, make them bleed.
