The basement air hung thick with vanilla-tobacco candle smoke and the sharp bite of Della's blackened catfish sizzling in the kitchen. I pushed through the alley door, my knees screaming their usual fuck-you symphony after another shit-show day of pretending the world above gave two fucks about people like us.
"Mom!" Ezra's voice cracked through the haze from their beanbag throne, blue hair catching the string lights like some discount store aurora borealis. "Thank fuck you're here. Elaine's giving Lisa the full lesbian taxonomy lesson and it's fucking glorious."
Miguel caught my eye from behind the bar, already pouring something amber and questionable into a chipped glass. The bottle read "Old Forester" but the pour looked more like Old Dumpster—that peculiar shade of brown that only bottom-shelf bourbon achieves after sitting too long in a basement that sweats more than a Baptist preacher at a pride parade.
"Your usual medicine, Mom," Miguel said, his voice carrying that particular rasp that testosterone and cigarettes had gifted him. The liquid burned like liquid regret mixed with cinnamon fire, coating my throat with the familiar sting of another day survived.
At the far table, Elaine held court like some graysexual lesbian professor emeritus, Lisa hanging on every word with the desperate attention of someone who'd spent sixty-something years in the wrong fucking costume only to finally find the right wardrobe.
"So a butch," Elaine was saying, gesturing with her rum collins that had gone more watery than useful, "is like... imagine if masculinity got divorced from men and decided to have a really good time with flannel and competence. And a femme—" she nodded toward Della who was now plating something that smelled like heaven had a dirty one-night stand with cayenne, "—is femininity saying 'fuck your heteronormative bullshit, I'm doing this for me and my butch.'"
Lisa's farm-weathered face scrunched in concentration. "But wait, I thought... Christ, I don't know what I thought. Sixty-three years on this earth and I'm just now learning there's a whole fucking manual I never knew existed."
"Honey," Elaine cackled, "that's because you were too busy trying to make yourself fit into spaces that were never meant for you. Now, on the one side there's stone butches who don't want to be touched but will rock your fucking world. Then on the other side there's pillow princesses who receive like it's their goddamn birthright. There's switches who flip between topping and bottoming like they're conducting a symphony of pussy—"
"Jesus fucking Christ, Elaine!" Lisa choked on her beer, but she was laughing, that particular laugh of someone discovering they're allowed to want things they never knew had names.
"What? You wanted the Disney Channel version? This is the shit they don't teach in straight world, farm girl. You came out at sixty—you don't have time for the kiddie pool."
Julie sat nearby, nursing her diet Coke and Jameson (because somehow that made caloric sense in her mind), watching the lesson with the fascination of an ally who'd found her people even if she wasn't quite one of them. "I never knew it was so... complex," she murmured to no one in particular.
“Everything's complex when you're not allowed to talk about it above ground," Sarah shot back from the pool table, where she was trying to adjust to the new table's perfect level. "Fucking thing doesn't lean anymore. How am I supposed to calculate my shots without that reliable right drift?"
"That's because you shoot like shit and aim cross-eyed," I called out, the bourbon giving my voice that particular whip-crack edge. "The table was never your problem, Sarah."
"Fuck you, Wendy!" She belted back, not even looking up from her impossible angle.
"You wouldn't enjoy it," I chortled. "I'd just lay there asking if you'd started yet."
"Jesus Christ, you two," Della called from the kitchen. "Get a room or get therapy, but stop pretending your bickering isn't foreplay."
"It's not—" Sarah and I said in unison, then glared at each other while the whole bar erupted in laughter.
Across the room, Phoenix sat curled into all of Miranda’s words like a scared kitten learning to trust warm hands. River had just left for another overnight shift, and Phoenix's anxiety about their relationship was written in every tense line of their constantly color-shifting body—today's hair was sunset orange, yesterday's was midnight blue.
"But what if they finds someone normal?" Phoenix whispered, using River's current pronouns with the careful precision of new love. "Someone who doesn't need explanations at every fucking doctor's appointment, someone whose parents don't—"
"Stop." Miranda's voice carried the authority of someone who'd navigated these waters and had the scars to prove it. "You think every trans or queer person doesn't wake up wondering if today's the day our person realizes they could have it easier? But here's the fucking truth—River chose you. Not some hypothetical 'easier' person. You."
Leila had gravitated toward Eileen at the bar, both of them nursing beers and discussing the upcoming protest at city hall. "The key," Eileen was saying, her flight attendant training evident in how she commanded attention without raising her voice, "is making them see us as human first. Then you hit them with the policy shit while they're still processing that we're people."
"Fuck that respectability politics bullshit," Leila countered, but her tone held curiosity rather than condemnation. "Sometimes you need to burn things down."
"And sometimes," Eileen replied, "you need to know which battles get you in the door and which get you arrested. I've been doing this since before you were born. Trust me, there's a time for Molotov cocktails and a time for manipulating city council with their own bureaucratic horseshit."
Keira slid onto the stool beside me, her presence like a warm blanket on a shit day. "Look at you," she murmured, her voice carrying that particular tone that made my insides go liquid, "sitting here watching your children learn from each other like some wise lesbian Yoda."
"Fuck off," I muttered, but I was smiling. The bourbon had started its work, turning the edges of everything golden and soft.
Lisa's voice cut through the ambient noise: "So wait, you're telling me there's an entire culture? Music, books, fucking... protocols?"
"Protocols!" Elaine shrieked with delight. "Listen to you, already talking like a baby dyke. Yes, there's protocols. There's the U-Haul joke that's not really a joke. There's the ex-girlfriend web that connects every lesbian within a fifty-mile radius. There's the unspoken rule that you always help another dyke move, even if she's your ex's ex's new girlfriend."
"That seems... mathematically impossible," Lisa said, her pragmatic farm brain trying to process.
"Oh, sweet summer child," Elaine patted her hand. "You'll understand after your first breakup. Which, by the way, will happen approximately three weeks after you meet someone, fall in love, move in together, adopt two cats, and merge your Netflix accounts."
The night deepened, and the lessons continued. Lisa learned about dental dams from Elaine ("Think of it as Saran wrap for your pleasure palace"), Phoenix absorbed relationship communication from Miranda ("You have to actually say the scary shit out loud"), and Leila took notes—actual fucking notes—while Eileen outlined thirty years of activism strategies.
"This is what they took from us," I said to no one in particular, the bourbon making me philosophical. "When they kicked us out, when they told us we were wrong, broken, diseased—they stole this. The chance to learn from our elders, to have someone explain the terrain before we had to navigate it blind."
Miguel refilled my glass without asking, this pour even more suspicious than the last—something that might have been brandy in a previous life but had given up and chosen violence instead. "We're making our own fucking space down here," he said. "Sanctuary Bar, school of hard knocks and harder truths."
"Where the curriculum is survival," Keira added, "and everyone gets a fucking PhD in resilience."
The music shifted to Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side," and suddenly everyone was singing along to the Holly verse, even Lisa who was three beers deep and discovering that sixty-something was just the beginning when you finally found your truth.
"You know what this is?" Ezra said from their beanbag, slightly stoned and entirely profound. "This is us becoming our own ancestors. We're the elders now, teaching the shit we had to learn through bloody knuckles and broken hearts."
"Fuck," Leila breathed. "That's actually beautiful."
Julie raised her diet Coke and Maker's Mark (she'd switched brands, as if that made it healthier). "To all of you. For showing those of us who love you what we never knew we were missing. My ex-husband never taught me shit except how to hate myself. You all... you teach each other how to love."
"Careful, Jewels," Elaine warned with a grin, "keep talking like that and we'll convert you yet."
"I'm seventy-one, honey. If it was gonna happen, it would've. But I'll be your loudest fucking cheerleader from the straight section."
The night wore on, lessons layered on lessons. Lisa discovered that coming out late meant she got to skip some bullshit but had to speed-run others, Phoenix learned that love didn't require perfection from Miranda, and Leila understood that sometimes the longest game was the strongest revolution from Eileen.
The string lights painted everyone in rainbow fragments, and the basement felt less like a hideout and more like a cathedral—one where the sermons were survival stories and the communion was whatever rotgut Miguel poured.
"Hey Mom," Phoenix said, approaching me near the end of the night. "Thank you. For... this. All of this."
"I didn't do shit," I said. "I just come here to take the edge off, same as everyone. This is all of us, teaching each other what the world refused to."
From across the room, Lisa was practicing the word "butch" like she was learning a new language, which she fucking was. "Butch. Buuuutch. It feels like power in my mouth."
"That's what she said," Elaine cackled, and even Lisa—pragmatic, sixty-something, farmer Lisa—dissolved into giggles that sounded thirty years younger.
"Jesus, Lisa, you're already putting your mouth on things?" I called out, the bourbon making me bolder. "You've been out for five minutes and you're already talking like that?"
"Fuck off, Wendy," Lisa shot back, but she was still laughing. "At least I'm not laying there asking if it's started yet."
"She's got you there, Mom," Phoenix said, grinning as they headed back to Miranda.
"Traitor," I muttered into my glass, but the warmth in the room had nothing to do with the bourbon and everything to do with watching Lisa bloom into herself at sixty-something, finally learning the language she'd been meant to speak all along.
The vanilla-tobacco candles had burned low, and Della's catfish had been devoured down to the last crispy bit.
"Dat catfish," Remy said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, "almost as good as my maman could make. Almost. But she'd have used more cayenne, cher. Always more cayenne. Woman believed spice could cure anything from heartbreak to revolution."
"Your mother wasn't wrong," Della called from the kitchen, and Remy raised his beer in salute to both women—the one who taught him to cook with fire and the one who kept that flame burning in this basement.
This basement, this beautiful, fucked-up sanctuary—it had become a university where the professors had survived their own curricula, where the textbooks were written in scars and triumphs, and where every lesson came with a side of "fuck you, we survived anyway."
Miguel's mystery bourbon burned one last trail down my throat as I watched my chosen family become each other's teachers, each other's guides through the minefield of queer existence. The world above could keep its traditional education. We had something better—truth learned through blood, wisdom earned through survival, and professors who'd never, ever bullshit you about the cost of being yourself.
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates
The basement had become Athens, and we were all philosophers now, teaching each other the only truth that mattered—how to exist authentically in a world that would rather we didn't exist at all. Each lesson passed between us was a small revolution, each piece of inherited knowledge a fuck-you to everyone who thought we'd disappear if they just ignored us hard enough.
One day, Wendy, we will have to have a discussion about what I know, don't know, guess, and am too embarrassed to ask. Until then, this has enlightening moments.
I asked my son if I had farm girl vibes and he got confused... LOL
Old Forester! A blast from the past.