This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.

---

My email used to mostly only contain bitter things. Like a mailbox stuffed full of overdue bills, it was only ever populated with people who had grievances. After burning out from overwork last year, I developed a phobia of the computer. I’d stare at the thin, hard line of its closed mouth. I’d let messages pile up, get to them late, sometimes never respond at all. It took me months to get to the point where I began checking my email every few days.

I check my email multiple times a day now, if anyone’s wondering. When I told a writer friend that I wasn’t checking my email every day, he had raised his eyebrows, seemed confused like I’d just told him I only breathed if I felt like it. I scuttled around the confusion. “I don’t have a computer job like you.”

But that’s not the whole truth.

This past Wednesday at approximately 5:30 p.m., I opened my email to find a death threat. Or at least an implied one. The threat had details about my home address, my car, even the names of my immediate family members and their locations. It had been sent on Monday. The deadline for my compliance with the “blackmail” had already passed. It was supposed to be noon.

I was on a date, or on a mid-way break during a day-long date. We’d made an Important Decision about what to do with the heat and so had gone back to our respective homes to retrieve our bathing suits to go to the city pool. The day had climbed to 96 degrees, and a dip was just it. I positioned my forearms on an old vinyl-upholstered bar stool in my kitchen and leaned forward — a favorite phone-checking position of mine — and braved my way into my email app. The unusual subject line stood out like a crooked tooth. A message had come through my writing website‘s contact form. The subject line referenced a local blog — not a blog of mine, mind you — but a local one I knew of.

I opened it.

With the self-serious gravity of someone who just watched V for Vendetta for the first time, who wrapped themselves in a new celluloid personality, they open with a real stunner: “Believe me when I tell you that I get no pleasure from sending this email.” This email could have been a not-an-email.

They continue after naming the Blog That I Do Not Run and telling me they definitively know I run it, which…let’s return to my computer-based-anxiety — this is definitely not a thing that is happening: “I know it’s you. Just like I know so many other things about you. It’s not great that you’re being doxxed by a Nazi. A Nazi pointed me to you.”

And, you know, I would agree that it’s not great to have “Nazis” focused on you, if that is even true. But also, it’s not like we’re ideologically aligned or anything. Said another way, I’m not…saddened by the prospect of Nazis disliking me, you know? They should hate me. I certainly hate them.

I return to that line again and again: “It’s not great that you’re being doxxed by a Nazi.” Okay, well, okay. I could have less cut and dry enemies, so actually it’s, in a way, expected if not fine.

They close the first paragraph: “I’m a finder. And as such, I found you.”

Cool.

The next paragraph lists my government name (misspelled), home address, phone number, the make and model of a car I had once owned, and a helpful note that there is rust on the rims. They tell me my hair is bleached (I thought everyone was fooled into thinking I was a natural blonde) and claim they saw me “step out of” my house in an outfit I wore recently. Then, bizarrely, they decide to name my ex-husband and ex-fiancee. And look, while I don’t want my exes to be hunted by Nazis, they’re not the nearest and dearest to my heart. Then, “The Finder” names my immediate family members and lists their locations. They also tell me the name of my divorce lawyer, which I’ll have to take their word for because I have long forgotten.

They then make their demands: “Delete the blog by the timeline provided unless you want to see Nazis at your front door.”

***It’s a heck of a threat. A threat I am reading five and a half hours after the deadline.

At first, of course, the adrenaline pulsed. When that email first lodged in my diaphragm, the threat did the same.

I reached out to the blog. They had not checked their emails either. It turns out some people are busy! We have all been blackmailed and have not known about it!

However, the people running the blog are concerned for my well-being and take that seriously. They offer to take the blog down temporarily if deemed necessary for my safety. I pull them into a group chat with supportive friends of mine to talk about this.

Currently, a big question I have about The Finder: How often do they check their email?

Look, sometimes a hot bitch is busy. Too busy for blackmail.

Oh, right, they used the word “blackmail.”

“I need something from you, and I’m here to blackmail you for it [I really want to know what they were listening to when they wrote this…Evanescence maybe?] …You have until Wednesday, July 30th at noon to delete it [the blog]. If you don’t, I dox you.” [Redacted to protect my family’s privacy but there is more here about sending Nazis to visit my family members and also to send in my direction.] “Every single right wing idiot living in your city will know who you are and where you live, what you do and, and what you’re up to.  The Proud Boys that live in the North Hill. The Keystone State Skinheads in Mount Washington. I found you, so you know I found them, too. You will not see it coming, but you will have to leave your life in Pittsburgh behind.  You’re not the only person being monitored here. I will dox your exes. I will destroy your reputation as an activist and as a writer in your city. I will contact autostraddle and let them know I got your contact information from Nazis.”

I also don’t know what Autostraddle would do with an email like that. “Hey, queer and trans website. DID YOU KNOW that NAZIS do not like one of your writers?”

The issue at hand here seems to be a delusion that I “doxxed” someone to Nazis. Which, risk to myself aside, I do not have the time for, nor had I ever actually considered as a possible thing a person could do. It’s like they’re accusing me of baking feces into chocolate chip cookies. Like…I guess you could do a thing like that, and I had not considered doing so until now. And YET even having now introduced my mind to the idea, I am still confident I am never gonna do that in my life.

I’ll just give you the entire diamond-mine of a closing paragraph:

“Now, a few things to think about. Rest assured that no one you know has contacted me and knows me.  You can trust them. Not even your exes, even the ones that may have cause to hate you. As I said, you doxxed someone to Nazis, and those Nazis know more about you than you think they do. You contact anyone to ask who I am, or if they have hand in this, and I will know and dox you. You try to publish anything about this, and I will dox you. Blame someone other than yourself and Nazis for this, and I will dox you. The only way you have to get rid of me is by deleting the blog entirely. As I said, I don’t care if you put all the other information somewhere else. Once the blog is gone, you will never hear from me again. You don’t even have to respond here, but any pleas or attempts to figure out if I’m serious, and I will dox you. There are causes behind this that are way bigger than you are. I don’t care about what happens to you. This is not personal. You’re not stupid and you know this a throwaway email that you will never be able to trace. Delete the blog by the timeline provided unless you want to see Nazis at your front door.”

And I…well, they won for a second. This did freak me out.

Also, their double spacing makes me want to vom.

***Elbows slowly adhering to the vinyl with sweat, I turned my phone screen back on, paused wondering if this was too much, and then just decided to be honest with my date about where I was at because how was I supposed to continue on with the date normally? They took it in stride that I’d received a threat during a very nascent moment in our extremely new knowing of each other. We discussed this heavily while sunning and swimming at the city pool, with their generously allowing me to check in with my newly activated safety crew group chat. Most of the time was spent analyzing the message and encouraging the idea that we do not immediately comply with anything, or else it may lead to escalation. My phone buzzed, the sun shone, my date smiled extremely cutely, the chlorinated waters lapped, I swam away from a Band-AID floating in the pool as fast as I could while squealing because doing that makes the discarded Band-AID kind of follow you.

I saw a ghost at my date’s place that night.

Stress wipes your mind clean. In subsequent days, I’d return to the same task four or five times, forgetting each time I walked across the kitchen that I had intended to get the scissors, leaving, coming back. I forgot I’d seen a ghost almost immediately after it happened, and only remembered while in the car with a friend a day later.

The ghost itself: a pair of legs. Dark pants. A torso, untethered, above. A hint of arms. A guess at a head. It took a scant couple of steps toward me before it steamed away.

My date and I did not fuck that night, but I slept like the dead there, with them and the ghost.

In a few days, when I remember it’s possible to do so, I check the activity log on my website. As I write this, I’m looking at it again: hits from Russia, Belarus, Gibraltar, and one from Pennsylvania. I have to wonder if there are either Autostraddle readers from these places checking my site or just bots.

I tell my neighbors and word spreads up and down my block to keep an eye out for anyone they don’t know who might come up to my house. A couple members of my ad hoc safety crew gave a door knock to someone we suspected was involved. Oddly, it couldn’t have been him directly, but there were echoes of his language in the doxxing threat, as though this person was someone he’d talked to, maybe even just online.

***This also happened to be the week I finally arrived at the end of the gauntlet of joining a local gun club. Some people bemoan that it’s a cult, but also, their membership procedure does keep people who are potentially unserious — and therefore dangerous — out. After a two-hour orientation where the instructor mostly made eye contact with ME in a room of other people who were also options for eye contact — I got to pick up my gate card from a line of three men seated at a plastic table situated at the back of a squeaky-floored banquet hall. Shooting’s allowed at their outdoor range until dusk, so while the rest of the orientation attendees got into their cars and rolled away, I turned my car toward the gate and let myself in. A member riding a motorcycle gave me a funny look, but nodded. I nodded back. They’re just going to have to get used to me. I rolled down to where I knew the steel-target pistol bay sat. Steel targets are exactly what they sound like. Instead of being the kind of thing made out of paper and cardboard where the bullet goes through, these are made of steel, meant to be relatively permanent except for dealing with wear and tear. You can tell you’ve hit one because you’ll hear it, and sometimes because it’ll give you a brief flash of fiery light as the bullet hits the metal.

I parked at the bay, which was empty, and unloaded my gun and ammo, my ear protection that a friend gave me and my prescription safety glasses. Most indoor ranges won’t let you practice a concealed carry draw. Not here. I practice going through the motions, drawing my loaded Glock-19 from concealed carry, fixing it on a target, firing. By the end, I’m pleased that I was able to go from drawing to hitting five targets in succession without a miss. It’s all plinks and flashes and cicadas in the deep green of the Pennsylvania woods. The sun sets and I keep firing until dusk creeps in a little too closely over the targets. The steel target setup looks like a ghost town, or a carnival never taken down, left to rot, with each of the targets in all their different shapes housed in small structures to protect them from the weather.

I packed up and returned to the dogsit, where, luckily, this week I am watching a pitbull who we’ll call Kevin because he does indeed have a silly human name. Kevin loves me, and he does not like when other people approach me. In fact, he’d recently bitten a friend who tried to join us for a walk. Luckily, eir hand wasn’t punctured, no skin broken, and my friend was the definition of calm.

It’s better to treat a threat, though, however asinine, as real. I pay to have my data deleted. I’ve started concealed carrying much of the time, and for most of the nights at the dogsit, I fall asleep on the client’s couch with their dog resting protectively on me, some movie playing on their TV, my gun still on me, pushing into my ribs. For anyone who’s not clear, the threat to send fascists to my door is a death threat — because what else would they be doing there? Trying to sell me something, get my signature on a petition? No, it’s a threat.

Still, one thing I’ve noticed and trained myself to remember over my many years of working for Autostraddle and also writing on the internet is that a person can read the same piece of writing completely differently when returning to it multiple times. If something inspires reactionary anger or offense, a second read-through later on can reveal that the piece was not so offensive after all, that so much of that shit that made your adrenaline shoot through you like you’d just housed two Red Bulls is just not that upsetting. And upon re-reading the note from my blackmailer as I presented it to various people, it became more and more apparent that it was the most illogical, air-headed drivel sent to me in recent memory.

On a video call with my sister, while on that couch with that sweet pitbull in need of socializing and training, we cackle over this being some Burn After Reading shit. The logic is circular. They “got my name from Nazis” but they’ll GIVE IT BACK, and they’re here to blackmail me…with my…home address? That’s not blackmail except for their intent to blackmail. For all the time this person has wasted — both mine and my friends — their threat is ultimately so weak. If I was a militant Nazi or a militant anything or even just me, and someone told me to Definitely Go To This Address to deal with an enemy, I would simply not. That sounds like a trap! And considering how aware they made me of this possibility ahead of time, like some villain telling me the whole plan in advance, and the fact that Pennsylvania has a blend of Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws, it is now definitely a trap.

***I work the door for the next Queer Fight Club with a dear friend. We do a “vibes-based profiling” with everyone who walks in. We tell them where to find masks if they don’t have them and such.

It’s the newly established monthly night to welcome newcomers to the club and get them caught up on all the basics, so the whole thing winds up being nice because I’m able to confirm at the door, with my entire queer-looking ass, that they are in fact at the right place for Queer Fight Club and that they should proceed inside.

At fight club, one of the instructors tells me, when I apologize for being a Problem Child who’s brought danger closer, “Don’t apologize for being you. We wouldn’t have you any other way.” She’s one of the most intense people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, and it means a lot coming from her. In the end, I’m held together, pieced back together by the connections and people around me, whether they’re adjusting to have heightened security, spending extra time with me to get me out of the house, or talking and strategizing endlessly in a group chat and ultimately calming me down and reminding me that giving into demands only invites escalation.

Unfortunately for the people who mean me harm, I think I’m the better for this experience. I’m heartened by the care I’ve received, I’ve intentionally accelerated my practice with pistol shooting (because I hope to be competitive by the end of the season this fall: let’s goooooo) — and, maybe most importantly, I am now checking my email every day. For every email-job worker who feels like they’re so burnt out that it would take having a gun to your head to get you to want to check your inbox, I can confirm that there’s nothing like a death threat to get you to regularly check your email.