One of my favorite parts of working at For Them and Autostraddle is making friends with my colleagues who come from many different backgrounds, including generations. I’m the youngest team member and often find myself learning really cool things about the world from the oldest team member, Autostraddle founder Riese. I’m not sure exactly how old she is… I just know she sends me photos of her kid at daycare and sometimes I have to teach her how to use Instagram. So she’s maybe 65?

In a recent team-wide meeting I referred to Riese as a “queer elder” because of her status in the queer community. This sparked a lot of debate, mostly with HR, about whether or not Riese is a queer elder. So I figured I’d sit with her and chat about what life was like to be out and queer in the 2000s.

Here’s what I learned.

Motti: Okay so first off, if you ever need a break to take your medicine or a sip of prune juice please just let me know. I can also help you increase the font size on your computer if you need.

Riese: thank you but i have already increased it myself and i am drinking a mango juice already

M: Great, I am proud of you

R: Thank you

M: You started a blog in the 2000s. What was it like to be at the forefront of groundbreaking technology?

R: I think much like the first upright homo sapiens to walk across the verdant plains of the planet earth, it was exhilarating and confusing, and also much less crowded

M: What was the most confusing part

R: Well sometimes I would wake up and read my blog and think “who wrote that?” and it turned out that it was me who wrote it, after taking an Ambien

M: Do you find yourself forgetting things a lot these days?

R: Yes. like; I forget to put the link and excerpt for the post into an Airtable, and I usually forget that I have therapy until my therapist gently texts me to say she will wait for 10 more minutes for me to come to the Zoom room. I forget a lot of things. But it’s hard to know if that’s because i am a queer elder or if it’s because my son wakes up every day no later than 4am.

but i do suspect there is some kind of capacity that can be reached where there’s suddenly less room for stuff and so you start forgetting old stuff

like an entire tv show that i watched or book that i read

M: Speaking of an entire tv show

R: Are you going to ask about I love lucy

M: What was it like watching the L Word live? Are there any current/recent weekly release shows you can compare it to? was it like the early 2000s lesbian version of White Lotus

R: No nothing will ever be like watching shows live in the pre-streaming era, you kids will never know or understand the glory

M: Tell me what it was like. Did you snail mail a letter inviting friends to come over via horse and carriage to watch?

R: No we did telegrams

Actually to be honest we did emails

We did a lot of business on emails back then. There was no such thing as a group chat

M: I can tell, from the epstein files

R: Exactly, right

M: You should release the Riese Files and it’s all your emails about the L Word

R: Do you think anybody would read them

M: I would

R: Thank you

M: Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when gay marriage was legalized

R: I remember that it was dyke march day in dolores park, the day after it was legalized, and so i was there with my future fiancee (they proposed to me a week later), and other queer friends, and everyone was so happy

it was sunny and everyone was a little buzzed and tan and hot and hopeful

including me about this relationship that did not in fact end in marriage

M: I figured as much

R: How old were you when this happened

M: I was pledging my sorority

a freshman in college

Our chapter was founded in 1917. Were you out as queer by then?

R: Yes

M: That must have been hard

R: It was. because of world war 1. but we called it the great war, at the time

M: What was the 2000s equivalent to “trans men can’t be lesbians” tiktok discourse?

R: Gosh you know, it might have been ’trans men ARE lesbians who have so much internalized misogyny they’ve decided to become men and now we are losing all of our strong butch women”

M: Oh so pretty much the same

R: “Bisexual women will always leave you for a man”. yeah, everything old is new again. we just have the same fights over and over

M: Does that make you feel old or young or neutral

R: All of the above. Timeless. infinite, maybe

M: What do you hate most about the new generation of queers

R: Oh sheesh where to begin

M: You can only pick one

R: This is hard. although you know there’s stuff to hate about every generation, very much including my own of course.

M: Well of course

R: Let the record show a long pause

I think there’s often a really harsh tendency towards absolute judgment of others — even for things these others did and said many decades ago, or things these others have apologized for and declared an intention to change afterwards — that is easier to carry out when you haven’t lived long enough or been through enough changes in culture, politics and your own personality and internal evolution to have messed up at some point. or to do or say something that *did* make sense at the time even if it seems crazy to you in retrospect. There’s this real obsession with moral purity. And maybe it’s real — growing up constantly on camera in a surveillance culture, knowing your personal business can be easily shared and spread, surrounded by really dogmatic cultural expectations around what’s acceptable behavior, maybe you actually make different choices. but i think some of the best art and personal growth comes out of making mistakes, being messy, being cringe, really fucking up your own life. I hope younger generations still make space for themselves and for others to mess up and even face brutal consequences for doing so; without it staining them for life.

M: That was a really nice and thought out critique of the generation. Do you often think you’re better than younger queers?

R: I don’t and that’s ok!

M: What was it like getting in trouble within the community in the 2000s? you’d get an email about it? people would tell you to k*ll yourself via email instead of public comment?

R: They’d send a horse girl in the dead of night with a lantern and a scroll of complaints

M: pitch forks?

R: yes literal pitchforks. I have scars to this day! but honestly they would just comment on your blog

Which actually makes more sense you  know? like the people involved in the conversation were just the people who’d chosen to read the post — because they subscribed on their rss reader or checked the website regularly. Now because of social media, everybody is invited to join in, even people who wouldn’t have read the piece unless they’d been alerted to its virality or controversy. Although if you wrote something really wild, then a bigger blog would link to you and non-readers could come in anyway.

then there would be spikier pitchforks.

more horses

pandemonium

panic on the streets of morningside heights

M: What advice do you have for younger queers who agree with you that it’s too much exposure and too many voices weighing in on too many opinions. How can they channel their ancestors (you) and live a more protected/smaller scale life but still maintain community?

How do we exclude more people from our conversations, I guess?

R: I think you have to learn how to churn your own butter. How to quilt, how to send telegrams, ride horses, etc.

but honestly I wish I knew. Maybe they can tell me!

M: And for those who don’t know, not me, though, I definitely know… what is a telegram

R: I think it’s like….. ummm you call… the telegram office (??!) and give them a message in code (morse?) and they turn that into a written message, and then they deliver that message to your recipient. I think via horse, to be honest.

Once in 2008 my friend sent me a telegram because we were like, do people still send them do they still exist

It wasn’t delivered to me on horseback tho

I think it was just a person who came to my apartment to deliver me a telegram that said RIESE LOOK IT’S A TELEGRAM

M: Wait, you’re joking. That’s soooo much work.

R: Well it was like an 18th 19th century thing

M: I thought a telegram was like an evite

R: *frowns*

M: Were you scared of Y2k?

R: No, on the night of y2k i was hooking up with a cute boy who i’d gone to high school with for a minute, who definitely would not have hooked up with me back then, but on new years eve 1999 i was 18 and experiencing 15 minutes of hotness and therefore was making the most of it

I was unafraid

M: Any advice to leave us youngin’s with?

R: My advice is a quote from the classic 80s film st elmos fire

“Jules, y’know, honey… this isn’t real. You know what it is? It’s St. Elmo’s Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors would guide entire journeys by it, but the joke was on them… there was no fire. There wasn’t even a St. Elmo. They made it up. They made it up because they thought they needed it to keep them going when times got tough, just like you’re making up all of this. We’re all going through this. It’s our time at the edge.”

M: I’ve never seen it

R: My advice is to see it

M: Well thank you for your wisdom

R: No problem, i’ll be alive for ~20 more years or so if you ever need more