Several years ago, I started distilling down the things I thought were interesting enough to me that they might be interesting to others. They boiled down to a motley assortment with a few common threads. Things like queer & femme culture, kink, underground art happenings in California and the world, other “embodiment practices,” and anything relevant to advancing social justice kept coming up and wouldn’t go away. The importance of explicitly centering efforts to challenge imbalances in power seems critical; it’s not good enough to reinforce the status quo, the way we see it. And it’s clear that there’s room for more accessible, practical information on how to start and run small, entrepreneurial, and creative business endeavors, especially from down-to-earth people who are figuring it out.
I grew up since college experimenting with what I’d like to think is enlightened hedonism, so that’s a natural area of interest for me. However, in the last few years, festival and “EDM” culture has become mainstream, and it’s evolved into something I hardly recognize from the early days of PLUR, which for me was the mid to late 1990s. A lot of what I have to say, these days, critiques these scenes, though from the perspective of a long-time participant and someone who believes they’ve made me who I am, if not a better person. These spaces demand particularly focused criticism precisely because so many, myself included at a time, saw that the potential for these spaces for transforming people and society. But it takes real work for real change to happen, and most people having a good time aren’t really up for real work. But we’ll pay it forward with some labor to break down what’s going well in kink and festival land, and what’s not working.
Covering underground scenes has some immense challenges, but as a trans woman, I at least have some personal experience with diverse views of marginalized people being misrepresented through misrepresentation or outright lies, and I’m not a fan of it, so I give a lot of care to how people’s stories are conveyed. And that’s what this is really about, sharing insights into people’s lives, what’s interesting and stimulating, and maybe some ideas that can change us and the world.