Tuesdays are my ritualistic self-preservation days.
On Tuesdays, I finish a bookselling shift, then rush directly to the St. Pete Fight Team dojo for back-to-back karate practice and self-defense class. For karate, I decorate my body with my belt (currently gold) and my gi, symbols of the commitment I uphold to myself and the community I train with. Though I remove my karate uniform for the subsequent Pink Pony Fight Club sessions, this commitment remains at the forefront of mind and body in our practice.
Here, we don’t hit as hard as we can (unlike some Fight Clubs), but as hard as we feel comfortable receiving strikes on our own turn. We run drills with imaginary foes, then our instructors, then our classmates. This fight club is a carefully curated space of safety for queer and femme bodies, for those of us who never quite feel free of the giant target cis men often see on our backs.
Here, we cultivate our own safety. We do this with consent, communication, and collaboration. We do this to build one another’s strength and confidence. We do this to protect both ourselves and each other from the suffocating weight of the world around us.
It’s no secret that Florida, my home, is a complicated place — especially for a queer person.
I’ve survived years of DeSantis’s fearmongering and targeted attacks, years of scrutiny from other states, years of cultural tug-of-war. I’ve meditated long and hard on leaving for my safety. I realized that’s simply not who I am. I didn’t want to back down, to allow my home to succumb to the fascist horrors grasping it. At least, not without a good old-fashioned fight.
The best position to strike back from is in the empty space of a failed strike against you.
In 2020, I began graduate school from behind a Zoom screen while mass death shut down the world. It was through a surreal, two-year fog that I completed my Master of Arts degree. Socratic seminars in sterile breakout rooms, teaching writing to traumatized freshmen for a comically small paycheck, and ultimately forced to return in-person by state demand.
I stayed and began a PhD in the same program because I wanted to write.
Essays buzzed constantly through my mind, always chased by the academically conditioned voice telling me this was the best way, the only way, to get my work and writing into the world.
But I was also running out of money. While watching in fear as Don’t Say Gay legislation grew heavier and heavier on the horizon.
Despite an overwhelmingly full plate of responsibilities, I picked up a few hours at an independent bookstore in Tallahassee: my beloved Midtown Reader. I had no idea how drastically this decision would shift the course of my life.
While attending and teaching courses, my disenchantment with academia became unbearable. I had prepared to shield myself and my students from legislation, but I had not prepared to respond to creeping conservative sentiments from my peers. A switch flipped in my mind the day a white woman announced to a seminar that Oscar Wilde simply hated women while we discussed his queerness and The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
The hours of my days not spent reading syllabi or grading essays were spent at the bookstore. I gradually picked up additional responsibilities, taking new tasks under my wings, discovering how well I fit into this space.
Around my birthday that year, I found myself leading my dream gender studies literary course — except it was a book club at my local independent bookstore. My research, my labors of love, accessible in the way I had always desperately wanted it to be. Free to the public, populated by excited attendees, and hosted explicitly in the spirit of community. I found my space in this bookstore, far away from the grasp of government control.
I only lasted one semester in that PhD program, and quitting was one of the greatest decisions I have ever made for myself.
I parry the striking hand away, seizing it with my own.
After a year of full time bookstore work, an opportunity fell into my hands. A bookstore was opening in Gainesville, just a few hours away, and they needed managers. It would be a bookstore with a mission, and indie built to be a lighthouse and a fortress for LGBTQ+ and BIPOC folks in the heart of Florida.
Applying terrified me. While I knew how hard I had worked to take on a role like this and knew I could build this independent bookstore into a space of resistance, fear and anxiety haunted me throughout the process.
I got the job. Saying “yes” and moving across the state to take on this ferocious, intentional battle was a multi-month adrenaline rush. A blur of construction, planning, and coordination swept me away as The Lynx manifested its physical form. My anxious monologue dimmed with every box checked off on the to-do list.
The day The Lynx opened its doors, it seemed as though the entire city had appeared on our doorstep. The line wrapped around the complex for hours and hours. Thousands of attendees descended on the bookstore, excitedly ready to defend their home and their community. That day remains one of the proudest of my lifetime. The day our risks and labors paid off. The day our Florida community showed up in a way I could only have dreamed of. The fortress was working.
I had known indie bookstore magic, of course. This, though, was a moment of stunning indie bookstore power.
I step into my opponent’s space. I set my feet. I brace my core. I breathe.
My hand still seizing my opponent’s wrist, I wrap my other arm around their neck. From here, as with most of our strikes, the power comes from the hips. With a quick sidestep and shift of my center, I throw my opponent across my body and hard to the floor. I’m pretty sure we got air that time.
My targeted body, from a vulnerable space, has protected itself from outside harm.
It tastes like freedom.
Last fall was a season of intense emotions and change. I watched through my fingers as a fascist ran for president again. Two back-to-back hurricanes swept through St. Petersburg, my home, as I watched from behind a screen two hours away. The fascist won the presidency.
I was deeply, bitterly homesick. For my family. For my community.
It was a heavy choice, but the right one. It was time to pass my torch at The Lynx forward. I had helped build something beautiful for Gainesville, but my Tampa Bay community tugged my soul home.
I started working for another bookstore, Book + Bottle, which prides itself in being a third space for community connection. I found a home under 20 minutes from my parents and every one of my siblings. I joined St. Pete Fight Team, where my siblings have practiced for years and whose building sports a mural hand-painted by my father. I joined Pink Pony Fight Club, run by two of the dojo’s black belts (one of whom happens to be my coworker).
The comforting small town-ness of the city I grew up in embraces me like I never left.
I’m writing in a way I never have before now. It consumes me with the same urgency as my bookselling work, whispering to me to keep fighting and thinking and moving.
This is how we build. This is how we change. This is how we keep one another safe.
I stand over my opponent briefly, enjoying the moment of pride as my classmates cheer. I reach my hand out in offering, smiling down at them on the ground.
“Same time next week?”
