The bourbon hits my tongue like liquid amber fire, smooth as silk pajamas and twice as comforting. Miguel's poured me something special tonight—a small-batch Kentucky straight that tastes like oak barrels aged in heaven's own cellar, with notes of vanilla and caramel that dance across my palate like old lovers reuniting.
"Figured you needed the good shit tonight, Mom," Miguel says, his voice carrying that sultry-childlike tone that somehow manages to be both protective and vulnerable. His dark eyes scan the room with the practiced awareness of someone who's learned to read danger in a stranger's posture, in the way hands move toward pockets, in the subtle shift of weight that precedes violence.
The Sanctuary's basement pulses with the bass line of Rush's "Tom Sawyer," Neil Peart's drums cutting through the thick air like precision strikes against reality. The string lights cast their rainbow fractals across faces that carry stories written in scars both visible and hidden, each person here representing layers of marginalization that society pretends don't exist in the same body, the same heart, the same fucking soul.
Grubby sits hunched over their usual corner table, fingers wrapped around a whiskey neat that they haven't touched in twenty minutes. Their silence carries weight tonight—heavier than usual, like storm clouds gathering in their chest. At thirty, they've learned that being intersex in a world that demands binary choices is just the beginning of their complications. Add being Black in a system designed to crush them, poor in a country that criminalizes poverty, and neurodivergent in spaces that worship neurotypical performance, and you get a person who's learned that existing is an act of rebellion.
"Shit's been rough at work," Grubby finally says, their voice barely audible over the music. "New supervisor started last week. She keeps trying to figure out what pronouns to use, what bathroom I should use, whether to put me on the 'men's team' or 'women's team' for the company retreat. Looks at me like I'm some kind of fucking puzzle she needs to solve."
Ezra shifts in their beanbag throne, blue hair catching the light like azure flames. "People get uncomfortable when they can't categorize you immediately. Makes them feel like their whole worldview is unstable."
"Yeah, well, I've never been neat," Grubby responds, finally taking a sip. "Doctor told my parents I was 'male presenting' when I was born, then spent the next fifteen years trying to surgically force me into that lie. Now I'm supposed to make some corporate supervisor comfortable with my existence while she decides which box will make her paperwork easier?"
Della's voice cuts through from the kitchen, sharp as the sizzle of onions hitting hot oil. "You don't owe your supervisor comfort, honey. Your existence isn't supposed to make her job easier."
The smell of Della's cooking fills the space—she's making some kind of fusion disaster tonight, Korean-Mexican bulgogi tacos that smell like heaven wrapped in rebellion. The scent mixes with the perpetual basement cocktail of stale beer, vanilla candle wax, and the particular musk of bodies that have worked too hard for too little, carrying stress in their shoulders like lead blankets.
Marcus slides onto the barstool next to me, his usual exhaustion wearing deeper lines around his eyes. "Rough day at the office. Had to sit through another 'diversity and inclusion' meeting where they talked about supporting their LGBTQ+ employees. Forty-five minutes of corporate rainbow-washing while I sat there knowing they'd lose their collective shit if they knew their 'straight' middle manager goes home to his girlfriend after spending his weekends getting fucked by men in hotel rooms downtown."
"Bisexual erasure at its fucking finest," Keira says from across the room, her voice carrying that particular edge that means she's ready to go to war for anyone in this room. She doesn't need to touch me or make grand gestures—just that voice, that fierce protection in her tone, makes me feel seen in ways that forty years of hiding never allowed.
Dani floats over, scarves trailing behind her like prayer flags, crystals catching the light around her neck. "The spiritual violence of having to fragment yourself is real, Marcus. You're carrying the trauma of multiple closets."
"Multiple fucking closets," Phoenix echoes from the pool table, where they're lining up a shot with River. At twenty-two, they've got the particular exhaustion that comes from being young and queer and thrown away by biological family. "Try being non-binary and Indigenous and broke as fuck. The LGBTQ+ community wants to put me in their poster campaigns for diversity, but nobody wants to talk about how colonization fucked up traditional gender roles in my culture first."
River, still in scrubs from their hospital shift, nods grimly. "And when you're genderfluid working in healthcare, every day you have to decide which pronouns won't get you fired, which version of yourself is safe enough to perform. Meanwhile, you're taking care of patients who might literally try to hurt you if they knew who you really were."
"Fuck," I breathe, taking another sip of that perfect bourbon. The amber liquid burns in the best way, warming my chest like a small sun. "Sometimes I forget how goddamn complicated it is to just fucking exist."
Ezra laughs, but it's not a happy sound. "Complicated? Try being disabled and queer and poor. Accessibility isn't just about ramps, you know? It's about being told you're not disabled enough for services but too disabled for the regular world. Add being non-binary to that shit and suddenly you're fighting for your right to exist on three different fronts."
The music shifts—Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" bleeding through the speakers like liquid nostalgia. Stevie Nicks' voice fills the space with its particular brand of witchy wisdom, and I feel that familiar pang thinking about Gizmo, how we used to sing this song together during long car rides when she was small, before the world taught her that loving me came with a price.
"Intersectionality isn't some academic fucking buzzword," Sage says quietly from their corner, not looking up from the intricate geometric pattern they're creating on a napkin. "It's about how oppression compounds. How being ace and Black and working-class means you don't belong in queer spaces that center sexual liberation, don't belong in Black spaces that prize heteronormative family structures, don't belong in working-class spaces that see your queerness as bourgeois indulgence."
Grubby's eyes meet mine across the room, and I see something there—recognition, maybe. The understanding that comes from carrying too many margins, from never finding a space where all of you is welcome.
"I've been thinking," Grubby says, voice stronger now. "Maybe I just tell her straight up—I'm not a puzzle to solve. I'm a person trying to do my job. She can call me Grubby, use they/them, and focus on whether I'm good at what I do instead of trying to figure out which team-building exercise will make me fit her binary worldview."
Miguel refills my bourbon without being asked, his movements behind the bar smooth as silk. "That's some profound shit, mi amor," he says to Grubby, using the endearment that means family here, chosen family, the kind that sees all your fragments and loves you anyway.
"Yeah, well," Grubby shrugs, finally cracking a smile. "Mom always said complicated people build the best families."
They gesture toward me with their glass, and I feel that familiar warmth that has nothing to do with the bourbon. In this basement sanctuary, where the ceiling fan churns humid air and the walls sweat condensation like tears, we've built something that the world above can't touch. A place where intersections aren't collisions but convergences, where multiple margins create not division but depth.
The conversation flows around me like a river made of voices, each person adding their particular shade to the spectrum of survival. Marcus talks about the exhaustion of code-switching between straight corporate Marcus and queer weekend Marcus. Phoenix shares stories about trying to find Indigenous two-spirit community in a colonized understanding of gender. River describes the particular hell of being genderfluid in a profession that demands binary certainty.
Through it all, Della's cooking smells continue to fill the space, that fusion of flavors that shouldn't work but somehow creates something entirely new, entirely perfect. Like us, I think. Like this family we've built from discarded pieces, fragments that society couldn't categorize so they threw us away.
But we kept existing anyway. Complicated, intersectional, impossible to reduce to single stories or simple struggles. We kept existing, and we found each other, and we built this—a basement kingdom where being everything at once isn't a liability but a superpower.
The bourbon's gone now, just amber traces clinging to the glass like sunset memories. Miguel's already reaching for the bottle again, because he knows I'll need another before this night ends, before I climb the stairs back into a world that wants to split us into digestible pieces.
But for now, in this moment, surrounded by voices that understand the weight of carrying multiple worlds in one body, I'm whole. Complicated as fuck, intersectional as quantum physics, and completely, perfectly home.
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." - Audre Lorde
This story embodies Lorde's recognition that true liberation requires acknowledging and embracing the complexity of intersectional identity. In The Sanctuary, the patrons don't seek to fit into society's predetermined categories but instead create new spaces where multiple marginalizations become sources of strength and understanding. Like Lorde's own experience as a Black lesbian feminist mother, each character carries compound identities that society would prefer to fragment, but together they forge community that honors the wholeness of their complicated selves. The bar becomes not an escape from their intersections but a celebration of them—a place where the very tools of oppression (categorization, separation, hierarchy) are dismantled in favor of chosen family built on radical acceptance of multiplicity.
I'm beginning to wonder if any individual can live in society without conforming to society's dictates. Every time we leave our living space and mingle with other human beings we are required to accept certain constraints. Good manners and/or obedience to the current laws allows great swaths of strangers to coexist. more or less in the same space Maybe not happily coexist but at least able to fulfill our basic needs. At least if you can get a job that pays a living wage. Maybe that's the first constraint. look like everyone else. And "everyone" is defined by where you live or where you are looking for a job.
We talk a lot about authenticity in this series of essays. I think authenticity is a state of mind and a recognition that most people you encounter in day to day activities don't give a flying rat's ass about your authenticity. When you get dressed in the morning, your authenticity depends on what you are going to be doing. You put it on as if it is underwear and outerwear. Doesn't actually mean diddly squat except to allow you to pass unimpeded through the throngs of people you encounter. If you worked as a circus clown but were going to a funeral, your basic black dress or suit would be the dress du jour. You are still authentic in your mind even when you dress to suit the person you are going to honor. That's a silly example but it's the best I can come up with at this late hour.
What I am trying to get to is that authenticity is in the mind and the externals can be modified as needed without compromising your inner truth. If you have a sanctuary, so much the better, but if you don't, what you display to the outer world matters only to the extent that it impedes your progress within society.