A quick note:
Friday Letters has moved platforms and can now be found at:
If you are a new subscriber from March 4, 2023 onward, your subscription will n ot transfer from Substack. You must sign up here.
A quick note:
Friday Letters has moved platforms and can now be found at:
If you are a new subscriber from March 4, 2023 onward, your subscription will n ot transfer from Substack. You must sign up here.
This is Friday Letters, an AGAINST THE LAW edition.
Before the year’s-end I thought I’d share…
I’m going offline (mostly) until 2023! I’m writing a book and it’s called A Woman Is Against the Law and it’ll be out from Little, Brown in 2024. Which means I need to turn it in sooner than you think.
I did start setting up over on Mastodon—the movetodon tool was a fun walk down been-following-these-people-since-2006 memory lane— and you can find me at @journa.host/melissagira.
Also in the business of getting off Twitter, I’m just starting to move some of the people and publications I read daily over to NewsBlur (thanks, Kendra) which (from the “Try Out NewsBlur” feed especially) feels especially Old Internet, maybe in a promising way?
But, always, always, you can find me at melissagiragrant.com, my corner of the web since… 2004? At least? I’ve had a personal website one way or another since 1997. It’s still a solid move, given everything especially. (The current one is itself going on nine years old, and once my book is done and off to the printer, I’ll start thinking about a redesign.)
And: starting in 2023…
this newsletter will be on Ghost!
Get a sneak preview here, it’s still coming together on the back-end.
To the new paid subscribers who helped make this move happen, thank you! I feel so fortunate to get to get back on platforms I can take indie if/when I want.
I’m leaving this part pretty speculative for now, because since about March 2020, planning much solid for the future has been more like an exercise in not-knowing.
I’m playing around with the idea of creating some kind of narrative to the newsletter. As much as a this-week roundup seems simple, it doesn’t create its own momentum. I know some writers especially are trying to port their reflections over to the newsletter form, with the loss of Twitter, but it just doesn’t translate—for me. Twitter is/was its own form. You need to be in the flow of other posts to make sense of things (a kind of time-imposed thought encryption! I barely understand my own posts from a year ago) and I don’t think that very particular experience of writing publicly will survive Twitter, not until something else comes along to expand and/or redefine it.
The new book (AGAINST THE LAW) might impose another kind of narrative. Sometime next year, the manuscript will be done and I’ll know what made it in and what didn’t. I’ll know what I can share here, in other words. I’ll know what to plan to save for something else, too. (I’ve said this more than once, I know, but AGAINST really started when I saw everything that PLAYING THE WHORE could not contain.)
The surer thing to do right now, then, is lay ouwhat I was reading (external to the book) as the year wound down, knowing that’s going to take me to the next thing:
Re-reading The Invisibles
A raft of Beatles-related books (The Beatles: All These Years—Volume 1 Tune In; Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties; Beatles ‘66: The Revolutionary Year; John Lennon: The Life)
A similar raft of books on fascism and variations thereof (Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, Cohen; The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton; The Second Coming of the KKK, Gordon; A Brief History of Fascist Lies, Finchelstein; Defying Hitler, Haffner; They Thought They Were Free, Mayer; Surviving Autocracy, Gessen; On Tyranny, Snyder; Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood)
Of all these, some of the fascism books, despairingly, are most likely to end up influencing the new book.
As of this writing, the book’s playlist is five years old and clocks in at 7 hr 46 min. This is the Beatles Revolver-era b-side “Rain.”
This is Friday Letters, by Melissa Gira Grant (me).
Thanks for reading. More TK.
x
MGG
This is Friday Letters, an AGAINST THE LAW edition.
First off, thank you not just because it’s the holiday week that it is and when that’s expected, but thank you because with all of your support, I’m able to move Friday Letters to a new platform. It may be a few weeks yet still before the move is complete, so stay tuned here—once the move is done, though, you won’t actually have to do anything: your subscription (both free and paid) will continue seamlessly.
It has been a very tough last few days—the death of Carol Leigh and the massacre at Club Q (and the ongoing “purge” alongside the re-platforming of fascists on Twitter) are each weighing heavily.
But what I want to share today is:
A curated selection of some ways to give
Folks who work at Club Q are going without work and pay, and will until they are able re-open after the mass shooting. Del Lusional, who was performing that night, has shared this list of how to help them all out.
Whose Corner Is It Anyway—the sex worker-run mutual aid org through which “low-income sex workers have created a regular community and organizing meeting for ourselves—a haven” is always in need of financial support, especially monthly donors, and especially now, when they have been operating with a skeleton crew, “distributing cash honoraria, food, drink, cigarettes, reproductive health items, hygiene items, informational handouts on harm reduction/health and sex work topics, lockboxes that clinics mandate for COVID-19 methadone take-home bottles, and a stockpile of harm reduction supplies to members instead of holding meetings.”
Digital Defense Fund has been doing critical work since Dobbs to meet the vastly expanded needs for infosec as individuals and communities facing the criminalization of abortion and pregnancy. Their zines and other cybersecurity resources are free to download. (Hacking//Hustling also has this free self-directed Doxxing Harm Reduction Training.)
Indie co-op bookstores Bluestockings and Red Emma’s—who have been maybe the singularly most supportive bookstores in the US re: sex workers’ rights—each have monthly membership programs, where you can help them keep events accessible and offer everything from harm reduction supplies to community education and many other free resources. (You can also directly support the Bluestockings/Project NIA free store.)
No More Police authors Mariame Kaba & Andrea Ritchie have merch now to celebrate the book’s release, with “all benefits going to Survived & Punished, a grassroots organization that works to end the criminalization of trans and queer survivors, defend survivor self-defense, and advocate for criminalized survivors.”
In the spirit, though, of also recognizing that there’s room for glamour and lightness in the midst of all of this, a few things that have been keeping that going for me despite everything are:
… the Silent Films perfume from Goest (love the reviewer who says “Def more of a night time scent, it feels weird to put this on after you get out of the shower in the morning, like how it feels weird to watch dramatic TV during the day.” even though I disagree on both counts) … this Le Creuset mug in “Sea Salt” (for the mornings I do need to calm) with Revelator’s “Misfit” coffee … the reMarkable tablet which is what I read on the most for my book (you can draw on documents!) and everyone always asks about it if you take it out with you … and always black post-it’s with white ink for making notes, mostly of the problems re: the book to sort out tomorrow.
Before I go, if you are moving off Twitter to a similar platform, the only one I’m using at all right now is Mastodon and you can find me at @journa.host/melissagira.
And if you’re brand new here, I’m writing a book and it’s called A Woman Is Against the Law and it’ll be out from Little, Brown in 2024.
As of this writing, the book’s playlist is five years old and clocks in at 7 hr 43 min. This is George Michael’s “Freedom! ‘90.”
This is Friday Letters, by Melissa Gira Grant (me).
Subscribe now, if you haven’t already, and thanks for reading.
x
MGG
This is Friday Letters, an AGAINST THE LAW edition.
I don’t have much to offer or say this week. But I want to add just one thing to mark the life of Carol Leigh, also known as Scarlot Harlot, who died this week.
I knew that the massage parlor she first worked in was, if my geography is right, right around the corner from my San Francisco apartment between Nob Hill and the Tenderloin, about thirty years before I lived there. Before she was a prostitute, she had met a feminist who “confessed” to her that she had been a prostitute, too. That made it seem possible. “I remember how Gloria Steinem went to work as a Playboy bunny and then trashed them,” she said in 2017, and so she decided to go work at a massage parlor. “As a feminist I realized, how just one act of sex would be determining my whole identity? Well that’s not very feminist.”
Within a year, she coined the term “sex work1.”
I remember when I first met her and felt like I knew nothing. She was doing a speaking and screening tour that brought her to Western Massachusetts in 2002 or 2003. I was debating moving to San Francisco, to be an activist, to be a writer, to have a sex worker community that wasn’t just me and my girlfriend and a few of our friends. Telling her about all of this could have felt ridiculous but it didn’t. She spoke to me like it had already happened. She saw us coming up in her influence and greeted us with nothing but kindness.
Carol Leigh always showed up, so fully.
Lorelei said it beautifully:
Carol Leigh gave her whole life to people in the sex trades, and never stopped learning, growing, and questioning her own analyses. She was the rare icon who also made herself a student of younger activists. She gave me so much, and I'll hold her in my heart always.
It would be impossible for me right now to fully describe what Carol meant to me. Every part of my life would be different without her. I owe her so much but she would never accept the idea that any of us were indebted to her. What makes her so, so unique as a movement elder is she always was there with the next generations as a peer.
The last time I think we were together was for a panel Hacking//Hustling organized last year. She wasn’t on the panel; she just came as a participant. Here was this group of sex workers who started a new project in 2018, and she was there to learn from them, and with them. Seeing her name there in the chat, I could hear her voice.
One last thing: I didn’t know she grew up in Jackson Heights in Queens, and I only learned today that her parents were “socialists in the 1930s,” as she recounts her family story as part of her ACT UP Oral History, that she was a red-diaper baby, and that her family was Jewish. (All of these she shares in common with so many of the women in the new book, which feels nice today, to have that thread.)
Carol Leigh’s papers will be kept at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, alongside those of COYOTE and Margo St. James, Susan Brownmiller and Angela Davis, and many, many others. It’s also the archives I’ve spent the most time in for the book. I’ll write something here when I go back.
A break from the playlist this week. This is “St. James Infirmary,” for Carol.
This is Friday Letters, by Melissa Gira Grant (me), and I am still on Twitter, but not for long? Who knows.
Subscribe now, if you haven’t already, and thanks for reading.
x
MGG
I told a version of this “sex work” origin story in my book, Playing the Whore:
This is Friday Letters, an AGAINST THE LAW edition b/w (All Aboard the post-twitter) Night Train
I don’t even know where to begin except to say something about the website1 that you probably signed up for this newsletter from, and is going through it right now.
I’m not leaving Twitter yet, but I share the general doomsday prepper vibes we’ve been riding out over there for a few weeks. It did really occur to me today though that writing a newsletter should be as easy as typing together the dozens of posts (I have no idea, I am not going to check) here.
I’m going with that, until, well—who knows. Isn’t it great that there’s still an internet, even if this corner is owned by (as shortform queen Barbara Kruger might have called them, too) “a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers.”
The midterms were this week, and I hope I never have to write about Kari Lake ever again. But if you are just getting into her whole deal, here’s what I’ve been able to assemble2 over the last few months, going back to her primary:
Kari Lake and the Mama Bears of Massive Resistance // Lake’s run for governor in Arizona was only on my radar at all because she was one of the candidates who seemed to have most closely allied herself with the cadre of “just moms” who were taking over school board meetings since summer 2020, spreading weird stuff about queer and trans teachers, amongst much more…
Kari Lake Still Wins If She Loses // Lake started unfurling the Stop the Steal narrative even before election day, and she refused to commit to honoring the results. Which—as the reader mail I got after this piece suggests—was at least for some people not immediately disqualifying.
Stop the Steal’s Last Stand // And this is where we are now, still waiting for Maricopa County and the rest of Arizona to do the normal election shit they do and count votes, despite the conspiracy theories. (And even though Kari Lake did all the groundwork to cast doubt on the election before if was underway, I don’t think the winds of “Stop the Steal” are really with her. Or anyone.)
In A WOMAN IS AGAINST THE LAW updates this week, I’m getting drawn deeper than I probably need to be (always) into what was just a few sentences in an Ida B. Wells essay, and is now the obvious throughline in a chapter that’s been stop-and-start, not for lack of a map but because adjusting to writing with a chronic illness is not great. Still, something satisfying started coming together, on the question of penitence.
As of this writing, the book’s playlist is five years old and clocks in at 7 hr 35 min. This is “Night Train” by James Brown (the version from Live at the Apollo).
This is Friday Letters, by Melissa Gira Grant (me), back on Fridays again.
Subscribe now, if you haven’t already, and thanks for reading.
x
MGG
Each subscriber builds the operating fund that will ensure the independence of this newsletter from any platform. Thanks to all of the subscribers who have been here from the start.
For people reading this in 1000 years: there was this thing called money, and then this thing called debt, and a man who thought he was going to build a rocket to Mars but first he bought a website loved/hated by hundreds of thousands of people (n.b. I was one of the first 75,000) and then when he could have just left well-enough alone he chose to do the equivalent of burning up on re-entry, and the re-entry was to… whatever quasi-democratic hollowed out world his pals have tried to bring about. Hope they lost!
Using the titles I gave them, originally, before SEO etc.
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