Free Coal to Diamonds by Beth Ditto

Most of our parents didn’t even have engagement rings because we were so fucking poor. Most of us were getting free lunch at school each day.
    Family Dynamics was insane, absurd, and offensive, but we took it seriously. We had to. The woman teaching us was the same woman who had taught our parents that shit, and it was about respect and tradition, and so we did our best to pass the test given on the difference between a princess-cut and a square-cut diamond. Those were the skills we were taught.

    Meanwhile, my classmates’ gaydar was going off when I walked down the halls at school.
Are you a dyke?
Maybe it was my short, short hair. Or maybe it was that I’m actually a dyke. Either way, it’s uncomfortable to have people seeing your insides before you’re ready to show them. It made me so mad. It wasn’t like it is today. Things have gotten better for queers even in places like Arkansas. Now my little sister roams the halls at that same high school bragging about what a flaming bisexual she is. But I didn’t feel that cocky. All I had to do was think about what happened to Mr. Skate at Fun Time Skate Land and I wanted to crawl away and hide my queerness under a pile of babies.
    Fun Time Skate Land was a roller rink in Judsonia. There was speculation that Mr. Skate was gay. He was very effeminate, round and balding, a soft bear. He was also a nice guy and all the kids really liked him. And we loved Fun Time Skate Land. The DJ booth was on the edge of the rink, and if you skated up to make a request you’d cause the needle to jump on the vinyl and the DJ would give you a dirty look. You could buy fat dill pickles from a big pickle jar. The one year I remember having a birthday party, my tenth, I had it at Fun Time Skate Land, and it was the best birthday I’ve ever had in my life. It was great. But it got shut down in the early ’90s because Mr. Skate had allegedly been out cruising and got busted.
    For those of you who don’t know, cruising is a beloved pastime of lots of gay men: you go out into some area, like a park or a bathroom, and you meet up with other guys who want to have sex, and then you have sex. It happens in big cities and it happens in small towns. It happens in the Macy’s men’s bathrooms in San Francisco and the Fenway Victory Gardens in Boston and in too many truck stops to list all across the United States. Mr. Skate was allegedly cruising at Berryhill Park, a place that gets all lit up with Christmas lights. Unbeknownst to the locals ignorant of homosexual culture, it was where a guy could hang out and meet another guy for sex. Mr. Skate got busted by a cop there.
    At that time, Judsonia wasn’t the only place in the United States that would have gladly persecuted a grown man for having an alternative lifestyle, but if you think about what was going on in 1991 in places like San Francisco and Chicago and D.C. and Olympia, Washington, where Riot Grrrl and homocore punk were brewing, and how that attitude impacted the mainstream, now we live in its aftermath, and things are a little different. All across the country, sending inspiration even into deep Arkansas, the efforts of people who cared about building a better world—one with more acceptance, more outrage toward violence—landed in the minds of real people, and things changed. It was our version of the sixties “revolution”—a loose group of young people who were rejecting the nihilist fashion-punk of the eighties and trying to build punk into a movement that included women, queers, and community values. The very idea that women should be allowed to play guitars and take the mic was in a lot of ways a revelation at the time; prioritizing inclusiveness in musical scenes was shocking because it reverberated outward into an insistence on inclusiveness as a value in life. We were just writing political sentiments into songs, or trying to get our zines into the world, and some people were creating spaces where girls could come and