There is something about the sort of feminism I dig, the sort that tends to be embodied by most of all my closest and most-admired lady writer friends. You know how earlier eras of feminism sort of forgot that there were poor women? Or the lavender menace of queer women butting in with their own experiences, messing up the hetero sisters’ stab at media acceptance? I think that the people who made up Sister Spit, the all-girl performance tour that tore up the United States at the end of the last century, were the living, breathing, writing responses to those particular overlooked patches of feminist experience. We were the lavender menace and the broke-ass menace, we were the never-been-to-college menace and the drunken menace, we were the shove-your-dogma menace and the my-poetry-can-beat-up-your-theory menace. This was not a conscious thing, this acting out. We were grinding our axes when we arrived, the combination of cynicism and idealism pumping through us, through our very nature, unnoticeable. We were all feminists who knew exactly how and where feminism had failed us with its assumptions or its ignorance. We knew the best revenge would be to wrap our stinky, drug-addled, badly behaved selves in feminism, which also, we knew, saved our lives. We would kick out some space for others like ourselves: slightly feral, inappropriate, hungry to connect—with each other, with ourselves, with strangers—wild, reckless, and feminist.
I’m probably speaking on behalf of a bunch of people who don’t agree with me. I don’t mean to say that everyone who ever toured with Sister Spit was a poverty-stricken alcoholic with little formal education and a penchant for starting bar fights. There were middle-class girls in the van. Clean and sober recovering alcoholics and addicts somehow managed—how?! How did they do it?!—to tour with us, and there were others who miraculously just weren’t big drinkers. There were college graduates. There were girls who weren’t even queer, despite their best efforts. Some even had had relatively happy childhoods. There were performers who hated the bar fights instigated by others, correctly naming them dangerous and juvenile.
Somehow we managed to get along with each other, mostly. Somehow everyone’s candida diet or vegan needs were met, mostly. Incredibly, the money we made, a single wad of cash, never got lost, though it was found lying around unattended in at least three places—a Nevada gas-station parking lot, blatant in the van window in New Orleans’s French Quarter, and sitting lonely at a table in New York City. That wad was not enough to pay us, but it got us from city to city.
When our van—bought for $1,500, the fruits of a full year of benefit shows, from an indie rocker whose own band had just upgraded—set off from San Francisco, we had no reason to believe that fate wouldn’t have us turning around and driving back home in, like, two days. Why would anyone come to our shows? We were two vanfuls of nobodies, with a couple of underground sensations we were hoping would pull in enough of a crowd to fill the gas tank. Why did we think we could pass through America unmolested? We all had friends who were fearful for us, going out into our hateful country, leaving the bosom of our cities. So many people commented on how we were bound to all hate each other that I made a plan in my head about how to handle anyone who got too bitchy: drive their ass to the nearest Greyhound bus station, and leave them there. Nobody’s fears came true. We took right to the road, hanging our feet out the window, chain-smoking, buying real scorpion paperweights at truck stops, watching the sun set to classic-rock stations, scrawling new poems in our notebooks. No one got dumped anywhere (except that time we inadvertently left one person behind at a Mexican restaurant in Albuquerque). And, most amazingly, though none of us necessarily believed that the world cared about us or our poetry, people came to our shows. Sometimes quite a lot of people. We were astonished. Entering a coffeehouse in Athens, Georgia, I felt nervous at what would happen when the large crowd drinking coffee was confronted with a bunch of queer, feminist, debaucherous storytelling. I was shocked to realize they were actually there to listen to us! A crowd that had gathered to hear us in the basement of a sushi restaurant in the South clapped wildly for us before we even said anything, they were just that proud we had even made it to their town. And they were right to applaud, it was a huge accomplishment. With no money backing us, no cell phones, no credit cards in case of emergency, no laptops, no technology to navigate us to the next town, and often no actual plan of where we would all sleep that night; we made it to our shows, rarely, if ever, late. And we always had a place to sleep at night.
Sometimes the shittiest, most oppressive thing about being a girl is how good you’re supposed to be all the time. And sometimes that feeling of an enforced, expected goodness can come from feminism. The thing about being a poet, a writer, an artist, is, you can’t be good. You shouldn’t have to be good. You should, for the sake of your art, your soul, and your life, go through significant periods of time where you are defying many notions of goodness. As female artists, we required the same opportunities to fuck up and get fucked up as dudes have always had and been forgiven for; we needed access to the same hard road of trial and error our male peers and literary inspirations stumbled down. We needed the right to ruin our lives and crawl out from the wreckage, maybe wiser. We needed the right to start a stupid brawl and emerge victorious or with a black eye. We needed to cheat on our lovers and quit our jobs. We definitely needed to shoplift. We weren’t everyone’s role models, but if we were yours you’d know it.
In a ton of ways, the tour itself was an act of defiance. We were, largely, a group of people who had heard the word no a lot. No to being queer, to wanting to be artists, and to thinking anyone would want to listen to our attitudinal manifestos. To think we could do what people in bands did, tour the country delighting audiences and racking up adventures, was a more than a little gutsy. It was possibly delusional. It was amazing that we did not get seriously hurt, or arrested. That we were two vans, thirteen people total, helped a lot. If a creepy cop pulled one of us over, he inadvertently pulled both of us over. That’s a lot of bother if he was just looking to fuck with some freaks. And we were freaks. Our hair was blue or it was pink. It was short to the scalp or looked like it had never been combed. We had tattoos, many of them not too well executed. We had scars, many of them deliberate. Our clothes were mostly secondhand, if not third or fourth. Many of us were butch, not recognizable as girl or a boy but as some new human the gas-station denizens had never seen before. Soon into each tour—there were three major cross-country ones, a bunch of shorter, regional trips—we would have to figure out who was the most normal looking. That person would be called upon to deal with the authorities, be they cops, auto mechanics, or hotel workers.
We lost our first van due to an oil leak that blew a rod in the engine. This happened on the Mississippi–Alabama border, around midnight on a weekend night. The tow truck driver was drunk and scary. Some of the performers were towed away in the van. I can’t remember why we thought that would be a good idea. We stayed overnight in a hotel room, one room for all thirteen of us, I believe. We snuck in through a side door. In the morning everyone had to dump some of their luggage in order for us to keep going. Someone had brought a skateboard; someone else, a tennis racket. A health-food store back in San Francisco had donated tons of healthy food to us. We still had a lot of it, and all of it was dumped in that hotel parking lot. One of our more financially stable performers had an honest-to-goddess credit card, and was able to rent us a van. A cargo van. With no seats in the back. The one menopausal writer claimed the only actual seat in the air-conditioned cab; the rest tumbled around the back. It felt, perhaps, like going over the falls in a barrel.
It is illegal to have passengers in the back of the cargo van. Of course, it is also illegal to drink in the van or do drugs. Or buy drugs, though many times we were simply given the stuff. Once, a yellowed page torn from a paperback and soaked in LSD was donated by some guys selling tie-dyed thong underwear outside an adult bookstore in Reno, Nevada. Stealing is illegal. So is assault. I think these were all of our transgressions, and mercifully, amazingly, we never got arrested. A Cambridge police officer let me go in spite of my belligerence, screaming in the streets, drunk, in velvet pants and a rainbow-spangled tube top. We always had style. And smarts. When a southwestern cop wanted to search the van, because the devil stickers in our windows led him to believe there were drugs in there, the performers knew their rights and didn’t let him in. There may not have been drugs in the van that time, but that particular van—our second—was so shabby that if you shut it off it wouldn’t necessarily turn back on. Allowing the cop to come on board could have cost us that night’s show.
There were truly frightening moments. The man at the sandwich shop in Mississippi who said if he had his gun he’d blow our heads off. This was unprovoked—we were just ordering po’boys. A gang of security guards was called to wrestle one of our “men” out of the women’s room in Niagara Falls. A Catholic townie from Boston took great offense to our antics at a bar there, prompting a brawl replete with flying glass jars of mustard. We had befriended a group of circus performers, straight dudes, and they fought alongside us for the right to whip out your dildo in a public establishment.
Our friends and supporters were not always who we expected them to be, nor were our foes. An East Coast dyke promoter was majorly offended by our onstage drinking and public revelations of shoplifting PowerBars across America. Bar dykes in Buffalo, New York, tried to kick our ass, ostensibly for flicking cigarette ash on the floor of their dive bar, but really I just think they thought we were freaky nerds, with our weird hair and our poetry. At a bar in Ohio, other lesbians tried to prevent us from performing, then heckled us throughout our show. They couldn’t wait till we were done so they could turn the k.d. lang back on and slow dance on the light-up dance floor. Seriously. The tragedy is, these ladies should have been our comrades. A great many assumptions about who we were stoked a resentment to our presence in their neighborhood bars—their second homes—but truly, I felt we had a lot in common (working-class backgrounds, scant college, alcoholism) and that our differences (mullets, acid-washed jeans, dream-catcher earrings) were largely cosmetic.
But for all the asshole guys and aggro dykes we encountered, the scary rednecks and the coppish cops, there were more folks who embraced us. We charmed the Carhartts off a bar full of punkabilly and assorted frat-like dudes in Las Vegas; one performer even sucked a hickey on the neck of a jock who had, inspired by our performance, penned his own poem, a sappy-sweet ode to everybody being friends with everyone else. We heard him on the pay phone after the show explaining to his girlfriend that a lesbian had given him a hickey. Some Christians stuck around for our performance in Atlanta, much more open to us than we were to them. A bunch of older dykes let us camp on their lesbian-separatist land and swim in their pond, which was awesome, except for the biting fish. L Word prototypes who we judged on sight bought up all of our merchandise in Los Angeles.
All across the US, we wrote and caused trouble, and wrote about the trouble we caused, and read it all each night to actual audiences. It was stunning. To have our improbable ambitions validated. To have the chips on our shoulders polished and praised. To have our zines and chapbooks purchased by brand-new fans who wanted us to sign them, like we were real writers! Some of us already had books published before Sister Spit, but the majority did not. To know that there would be strangers in North Carolina and Arizona and upstate New York reading our writing was incredible. We were writers. People bought us drinks and took us home to stay in their beds. They cooked us food. Mostly we were grateful for this, but occasionally our generous hosts had ulterior motives: observing our bravado and braggadocious sluttery on stage, they thought they’d get lucky back at home. What they more often got was turned into a can-you-believe-it?! story, to be told and retold, often from on stage at our next show: the woman who whipped off her shirt when we got back to her house, all casual; the woman who walked into someone’s shower to recommend a bar of soap that smelled like “sweet woman’s pussy” (she didn’t understand that, after three weeks in the van we were desperately trying to wash away the smell of pussy); the girl who left baskets of sex toys around her house and, unexpectedly in a bad way, shoved her tongue down my throat. Of course, people did get lucky; mostly in the van, with each other. Performers hooked up in ways both discreet and mind-blowingly not discreet. Like, leaving lube-y hand prints on the back windows. Like, getting it on in a room you’re sharing with three other people. Like, steering the van with one hand while fisting someone with the other.
That Sister Spit was a success is partly a miracle and partly a testament to how queer and feminist subcultures take care of their own, be it in big cities or small towns. It is partly proof that some sort of deity watches over the drunk and foolish, and definitely proof that if you want something badly you can make it happen through sheer will, ingenuity, and community support.
Our tour across America proved to all of us that our writing was important, at a time in our mostly young lives where, without such tangible proof, we may have been discouraged away from it by the rigors of everyday living in a world that devalues art—especially the first-person narratives of such a band of ruffians. And it gave us a platform to spectacularly misbehave, to feel temporarily invincible, to feel safe in a world that had taught us firsthand to fear it.
First printed in Word Warriors, published by Seal Press in 2007.