The HAGS are dead. Long live the HAGS.
September 4, 2018 7:16 AM Subscribe
"It’s unclear if the HAGS understood what a spectacle they were in the queer-dyke landscape of 1990s San Francisco. When they poured into a bar my breath caught in my chest."
In The Believer, Michelle Tea shares the story of a circle of friends who bashed back against homophobia and creepy dudes, and how ultimately addiction and a rare and devastating illness ended some of their lives.
Content warnings: death, violence, drug use, addiction, some fairly graphic descriptions of flesh-eating disease, mentions of sexual abuse. It's not an easy read.
In The Believer, Michelle Tea shares the story of a circle of friends who bashed back against homophobia and creepy dudes, and how ultimately addiction and a rare and devastating illness ended some of their lives.
Content warnings: death, violence, drug use, addiction, some fairly graphic descriptions of flesh-eating disease, mentions of sexual abuse. It's not an easy read.
Metafilter: a mixture of political opinions and scene bullshit
posted by MrBadExample at 8:23 AM on September 4, 2018 [18 favorites]
posted by MrBadExample at 8:23 AM on September 4, 2018 [18 favorites]
I lived in SF during this time, and I saw those tags EVERYWHERE.
I swear to god I thought they were a band that I never saw fliers for or play out.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 8:51 AM on September 4, 2018 [3 favorites]
I swear to god I thought they were a band that I never saw fliers for or play out.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 8:51 AM on September 4, 2018 [3 favorites]
My ex-girlfriend used to hang out with a bunch of HAGS. She was mostly clean and sober by that time but had a penchant for fucking things up so she enjoyed their company, if not their junk anymore.
posted by Sophie1 at 10:28 AM on September 4, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by Sophie1 at 10:28 AM on September 4, 2018 [6 favorites]
Michelle Tea is an excellent writer.
posted by lisa g at 10:43 AM on September 4, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by lisa g at 10:43 AM on September 4, 2018 [3 favorites]
This was such an amazing story that gave me tough feels in a way I can't possibly describe.
posted by redsparkler at 10:52 AM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by redsparkler at 10:52 AM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]
in that you could easily have, like, punk rock opinions about people you would never meet in places you'd never visit - a mixture of political opinions and scene bullshit.
Immortalized in the Mountain Goats' We Do It Different on the West Coast.
posted by praemunire at 11:26 AM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]
Immortalized in the Mountain Goats' We Do It Different on the West Coast.
posted by praemunire at 11:26 AM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]
The article needs a TW for the use of deadnames and old pronouns
Tobi Vail (Bikini Kill) posted this tweet about the article, a lovely picture of her and Stacey Quijas together.
I was born in 1990, so this was before my time. But my older sister, a Gen Xer, this was her scene. It was common for her friends to have brightly colored mohawks, spikes, piercings, bruises, cuts, etc. She still has a misfits shirts from the 90s that is barely held together with safety pins. A 6'x6' square poster of the cover of Out Come the Wolves.
Like the HAGS, we grew up in an abusive environment. I remember more than once, being loaded into the car in the middle of the night with my parents to go retrieve her from some trailer or house party. When I was around 7 I stayed with my grandmother, and my other sister, while my parents when to Georgia to find her. She ran away a lot.
Her core group of girls made it out alive. They mostly still live in the area, one's in NY now and another in florida. They've all struggled with addiction, and diseases from it, like hepatitis. A lot of them didn't make it, though. Suicide, alcoholism, gun violence.
I understand logically, and perhaps on my best days a little sympathetically, this sort of reaction and identity-building as a response of what we were going through. But I can't relate. My sister and I aren't talking right now, and haven't been for months. Its probably for the best, at least temporarily. But it's hard. The three of us were inseparable, we sort of made this silent pact when we shed our parents and their abusive natures, we were going to stick together. Family first.
She and I are very different people, and I see her all over this article. The loud, anarchist, i'll-hate-you-before-you-hate-me, tough, feigned invincibleness, it's her. The part where they talk about the customs agents hits hard. As a child I couldn't comprehend that sort of bravado. I wanted someone, anyone, to notice the bad things happening, and here was my older sister fucking off like it didn't matter. I can recognize it now just as another way to handle the pain. But I didn't want to drink, didn't want to do drugs, didn't want to do the things that my parents did that made me unsafe.
Even though I had made that decision (not to follow in her footsteps) it also seemed to have been made for me. I didn't like the elitism of the scene ("we eat riot grrrls for lunch") , the snobbery of the music taste, the constant bragging, competition, what i perceived as the limitedness of the life. I'm a lesbian, and knew even back then, but I wasn't introduced to any gay punks until I was 15, and it was from my foray into the genre. I had felt alienated by her social life and identity, and I can say that I still do. That's not to say that there aren't things I admire about her that are directly tied to her self-upbringing as a punk. She has a sort of matter-of-fact self reliance that can sometimes be seen as defeated. She knows she can handle anything by herself, because she's been by herself and had to handle things. I can relate to her this way. It's hard for that to lift your self-esteem when you didn't really have any choice in the matter.
This was an excellent read. Michelle Tea wrote it perfectly. Is it self centered to keep coming back to myself, or is it the prowess of the author to illicit the right feelings an nostalgia in me? When I was a sophomore in highschool, my sister was 23, married, and had her first kid (you should have seen the multicolored, tattooed, studded waiting room outside labor & delivery). My dad caught a particularly terrible case of necrotizing fasciitis. My mom was clean from alcohol at that point (but later became addicted to opioids, thanks to this same bout of disease). My middle sister and I basically became his lobbying force inside the hospital, while my mom worked nearly around the clock to keep the house from being repossessed. The only reason we had groceries was because my girlfriend at the time food runs for us, leaving bags of soup and pasta on our doorstep while we were out.
I remember one day, in particular, we came into my dad's room, he was in a fever hysteria, walking around, leavings trails of pus and blood behind him. He'd yanked his dressing off because it had started to seep, and now the full wound from knee to hip was uncovered, bright red and putrid yellow, a gaping hole from where they tried to cut the sickness out. Shortly after that they put him in a coma, and he stayed there for weeks. It was a race, just like Tea says. Up the thigh and into the gut, through the colon, onto the stomach, part of the liver. It had made it to his liver. He survived. What had saved him, his total hip replacement from years and years of grueling, manual labor, stopped it but if only for a few days, gave enough time for the doctors to catch up halfway through, but even then it took out several organs before it came to a full halt.
I don't remember if I was said when the doctors had given up and told us that all we could do is wait, and it will probably be for nothing. I don't think it was because of hatred, it's just that there's something in your brain that clicks when you see the person in front of you, except they're covered in holes and missing so many parts of them. It makes sense they're not coming back.
I guess I just felt a lot, reading this. About femininity, lesbianism, abuse, the struggle I'm having with my sister, the fact I haven't talked to my father in, i don't know. 7 years? 8?, gender, grief. I know this comment reads like an essay, but i don't really have a conclusion.
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:57 AM on September 4, 2018 [42 favorites]
Tobi Vail (Bikini Kill) posted this tweet about the article, a lovely picture of her and Stacey Quijas together.
I was born in 1990, so this was before my time. But my older sister, a Gen Xer, this was her scene. It was common for her friends to have brightly colored mohawks, spikes, piercings, bruises, cuts, etc. She still has a misfits shirts from the 90s that is barely held together with safety pins. A 6'x6' square poster of the cover of Out Come the Wolves.
Like the HAGS, we grew up in an abusive environment. I remember more than once, being loaded into the car in the middle of the night with my parents to go retrieve her from some trailer or house party. When I was around 7 I stayed with my grandmother, and my other sister, while my parents when to Georgia to find her. She ran away a lot.
Her core group of girls made it out alive. They mostly still live in the area, one's in NY now and another in florida. They've all struggled with addiction, and diseases from it, like hepatitis. A lot of them didn't make it, though. Suicide, alcoholism, gun violence.
I understand logically, and perhaps on my best days a little sympathetically, this sort of reaction and identity-building as a response of what we were going through. But I can't relate. My sister and I aren't talking right now, and haven't been for months. Its probably for the best, at least temporarily. But it's hard. The three of us were inseparable, we sort of made this silent pact when we shed our parents and their abusive natures, we were going to stick together. Family first.
She and I are very different people, and I see her all over this article. The loud, anarchist, i'll-hate-you-before-you-hate-me, tough, feigned invincibleness, it's her. The part where they talk about the customs agents hits hard. As a child I couldn't comprehend that sort of bravado. I wanted someone, anyone, to notice the bad things happening, and here was my older sister fucking off like it didn't matter. I can recognize it now just as another way to handle the pain. But I didn't want to drink, didn't want to do drugs, didn't want to do the things that my parents did that made me unsafe.
Even though I had made that decision (not to follow in her footsteps) it also seemed to have been made for me. I didn't like the elitism of the scene ("we eat riot grrrls for lunch") , the snobbery of the music taste, the constant bragging, competition, what i perceived as the limitedness of the life. I'm a lesbian, and knew even back then, but I wasn't introduced to any gay punks until I was 15, and it was from my foray into the genre. I had felt alienated by her social life and identity, and I can say that I still do. That's not to say that there aren't things I admire about her that are directly tied to her self-upbringing as a punk. She has a sort of matter-of-fact self reliance that can sometimes be seen as defeated. She knows she can handle anything by herself, because she's been by herself and had to handle things. I can relate to her this way. It's hard for that to lift your self-esteem when you didn't really have any choice in the matter.
This was an excellent read. Michelle Tea wrote it perfectly. Is it self centered to keep coming back to myself, or is it the prowess of the author to illicit the right feelings an nostalgia in me? When I was a sophomore in highschool, my sister was 23, married, and had her first kid (you should have seen the multicolored, tattooed, studded waiting room outside labor & delivery). My dad caught a particularly terrible case of necrotizing fasciitis. My mom was clean from alcohol at that point (but later became addicted to opioids, thanks to this same bout of disease). My middle sister and I basically became his lobbying force inside the hospital, while my mom worked nearly around the clock to keep the house from being repossessed. The only reason we had groceries was because my girlfriend at the time food runs for us, leaving bags of soup and pasta on our doorstep while we were out.
I remember one day, in particular, we came into my dad's room, he was in a fever hysteria, walking around, leavings trails of pus and blood behind him. He'd yanked his dressing off because it had started to seep, and now the full wound from knee to hip was uncovered, bright red and putrid yellow, a gaping hole from where they tried to cut the sickness out. Shortly after that they put him in a coma, and he stayed there for weeks. It was a race, just like Tea says. Up the thigh and into the gut, through the colon, onto the stomach, part of the liver. It had made it to his liver. He survived. What had saved him, his total hip replacement from years and years of grueling, manual labor, stopped it but if only for a few days, gave enough time for the doctors to catch up halfway through, but even then it took out several organs before it came to a full halt.
I don't remember if I was said when the doctors had given up and told us that all we could do is wait, and it will probably be for nothing. I don't think it was because of hatred, it's just that there's something in your brain that clicks when you see the person in front of you, except they're covered in holes and missing so many parts of them. It makes sense they're not coming back.
I guess I just felt a lot, reading this. About femininity, lesbianism, abuse, the struggle I'm having with my sister, the fact I haven't talked to my father in, i don't know. 7 years? 8?, gender, grief. I know this comment reads like an essay, but i don't really have a conclusion.
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:57 AM on September 4, 2018 [42 favorites]
This started off giving me some nostalgic feels, though I lived up the coast at that time and only made it to SF infrequently, driving down in a crappy car with friends more than once. It was like the promised land for us too. I was one of the college lesbians mentioned in the article though I made myself feel edgier by letting people know I was in art school and mostly painting huge paintings of women masturbating or having sex. A bit like the writer I looked at punk lesbians with a mixture of lust, admiration and fear. They were like another level of dyke. I loved watching but knew I could never be them. As I read the nostalgia turned to sadness. It reminded me again what a debt I owe to all of the in-your-face activists, even those who get there accidentally or because they don’t have any other choice, maybe especially them. The closest I got was dating someone on the periphery of that sort of messed up childhood drug dealing/taking world. It was exciting until it became a big enough nightmare that I left running. That was enough to convince me that a boring, comfortable life was something to aspire to. Because of that I took solace in the boring, comfortable lives at the end of the article. I’m glad some of them made it there.
posted by Cuke at 12:09 PM on September 4, 2018 [11 favorites]
posted by Cuke at 12:09 PM on September 4, 2018 [11 favorites]
I think this piece about the HAGS by Michelle Tea also appears in her new book Against Memoir.
The L7 EP "Pretend We're Dead" has an image of Stacey Quijas's L7 tattoo on the back of her legs.
I used to see Stacey and other Hags around Queers Together in Punkness shows at Epicenter Zone in SF in the early 1990s as well as other places around the Mission.
posted by larrybob at 6:03 PM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]
The L7 EP "Pretend We're Dead" has an image of Stacey Quijas's L7 tattoo on the back of her legs.
I used to see Stacey and other Hags around Queers Together in Punkness shows at Epicenter Zone in SF in the early 1990s as well as other places around the Mission.
posted by larrybob at 6:03 PM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]
This was really hard to read. I was a little too old - as my younger lesbian punkrock zine-producing roommates were a little too stable - to be part of this scene. For several years in SF in the '90s I was part of a public health group that worked with homeless youth in San Francisco to educate about HIV transmission. Larkin Street - a youth-services entity mentioned in the piece - was our principal recruitment center. The kids were called throwaways. If memory serves, that was a self-appellation, one that applied after bad foster-care homes, or for the LDS kids, extra-judicial incarcerations. There were so many gay kids on the streets. So many were working the streets, so many were fucked up on meth and tar. They were just not clued into how to care for themselves at all - and of course, how could they be? They had little experience of care.
posted by goofyfoot at 8:58 PM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by goofyfoot at 8:58 PM on September 4, 2018 [2 favorites]
Hmm. I usually like Michelle Tea's writing, but have mixed feelings about this one. Probably know too many people in it. Dunno why she deadnames some people but not others, but it feels weird.
posted by gingerbeer at 11:15 PM on September 4, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by gingerbeer at 11:15 PM on September 4, 2018 [4 favorites]
« Older ...And Maybe Get Some Custard After | “I should be training young people to do my work.“ Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
I have a copy of There's A Dyke In The Pit. I bought it at Motor Oil Industrial Coffees in St. Paul Minnesota some time around 1993.
Fanzines and records were like a slow version of Twitter - you would know about things and people across the country, especially things from California. All these very small scenes were at the same time sort of stretched across the country, in that you could easily have, like, punk rock opinions about people you would never meet in places you'd never visit - a mixture of political opinions and scene bullshit.
posted by Frowner at 8:13 AM on September 4, 2018 [25 favorites]