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I learned how to line dance and met Z, the only other black woman there. One day I headed over to The Q, for country western night. I spent many hours hunched over the bar nursing a bitter gin and tonic, playing bar video games. I was very shy so I was not at all good at introducing myself to anyone to make friends or anything beyond that. I smoked like a chimney because that felt like the most accessible way to be cool. I wore pride rings all the time, and a lot of vests and Doc Martens and jaunty hats. My car bumper was festooned with rainbow flags. Did I need to get my haircut? Where could I find a hairdresser who could give me that specific haircut? How was I supposed to ask a girl out? How could I tell if I should ask a girl out? When did I need to reserve the U-Haul-after the second date or a few weeks later? There were so many questions. I was one of the lucky ones but I was also lost. I did not know any queer people in Nebraska until I started going to the Panic. I awkwardly imitated them while playing pool very, very badly. They helped femmes hold pool cues while standing behind them, legs pressed together. Butch women used it in really elaborate ways to express their butchness and demonstrate their swagger. It was dark and dank but there was a nice patio, and a pool table. The Panic was just a notch above a dive bar. And still, there was a gay bar, The Q, and Panic Bar, where the lesbians hung out.
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It was a much smaller town, which is saying something because Omaha isn’t all that big. I lived an hour away in Lincoln, the state capital.
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There was a bar called The Omaha Mining Company and there was a bar within a bar called The Mineshaft which, I think, is self-explanatory. There was a gay community, which always surprises people who have strange ideas about the Midwest and who actually lives in the “flyover” states. My earliest queer years were spent in the Cornhusker State. Eventually, I would find my way to Audre Lorde. I was obsessed with Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts and the pulp fiction of Ann Bannon. As an avid reader, I initially tried to piece together my identity, a clearer sense of how to be, from books. I didn’t really have anyone I could turn to. I was not very worldly when it came to women. My family was not thrilled with the news that I was a lesbian but they never turned their back on me, either so all thing considered, I was one of the lucky ones. And that may be a macabre way of thinking about it, but their deaths were and remain a reminder of the precarity of being part of the LGBTQ community in certain circumstances. This was around the time of Brandon Teena’s murder but before Matthew Shepard’s murder. It was the summer of 1993 and while cultural attitudes toward the gay community were changing, it was a slow shift, especially for a Haitian American girl from Omaha, Nebraska. I came out when I was nineteen years old. And we also often have to parent ourselves simply to figure out how to be who we really are in a world that wants to deny us our right to live and love freely. We are a community of people who often have to parent ourselves when we’re most scared, or fragile, or needful. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain.” I was reminded that the queer community and the trans community especially, are communities without many elders. In Torrey Peter’s debut novel Detransition, Baby, Ames says, transfolk are a “lost generation.