Lavender Literary Society Manifesto + Pleasure Activism

10 Oct, 2025

I’m not saying we’ll live to see some sort of paradise. But just fighting for change makes you stronger. Not hoping for anything will kill you for sure. Take a chance, Jess. You’re already wondering if the world could change. Try imagining a world worth living in, and then ask yourself if that isn’t worth fighting for. You’ve come too far to give up on hope. -Stone Butch Blues p387, Leslie Feinberg

SPOILER! You just read the ending of Stone Butch Blues! Now you can go through life knowing a little more about lesbian/queer/trans history. How will you live your life differently with this small taste of liberation on your tongue? Will you imagine a world worth fighting for? Will you define hope on your terms when the world is about to look a lot less hopeful? We are facing an incoming Trump administration, during a continued genocide in Gaza, living within a global imperial empire accelerating the destruction of our planet and communities. You cannot face the threat of fascism without hope in your heart that our world is capable of something better. That you, yourself, are capable of something more. (Note: This doc is best read on Print View/Print Layout or on a computer to read footnotes/formatting.)

How can we build the communities of care, the mutual aid networks, the local support systems that we so desperately need now more than ever? These are big asks that our queer ancestors before us have spent their whole life attempting to answer.

Some things they got right, and some things we look back on to admire the distance our organizing spaces have come. Either way, for us to enter the conversation, it really helps to know what everybody else has been talking about for the past 100+ years. I have been attempting to work on my own queer education (a lofty task considering barriers to information and limited availability of resources, esp growing up in the South) and I have faced three key issues:

• It is very difficult to learn/grow in isolation. Theory can be difficult to get through, difficult to know what is worth my time or not, and especially difficult to connect to my own life to make sure I am actually learning, not just consuming. I am a white, southern, queer femme. I have a narrow lens of the world and to broaden my understanding I need to seek out stories that extend beyond the race, class, gender spaces I have access to in my own life.

• The umbrella term ‘Queer’ can be dominated by discussions of gay men/white voices. Trying to find diversity in published queer perspectives takes an active effort and if you don’t find what you are looking for, can end up feeling even more isolating. This group will be focused on lesbian literature, borrowing the historic, inclusive definition from the introduction of Jaime Harker’s The Lesbian South as: “the lesbian was a nonassimilationist queer before that term even existed,”¹ The goal is for the reading list to pass both the Bechdel and Chitling Test.²

• I want to search for hope and joy. I want to invest in solutions! I want to start building the world I want to live in, instead of wishing it already existed! A key part of this hope comes from activist spaces that allow people to come as their authentic self and feel accepted even at their worst. I want a queer community space that supports people like the neighborhood church. The goal is not to get all the right answers or to win points comparing who is the most well-read. The goal is to listen to the MVPs of radical queer organizing and get ideas on how to make it happen.

One of the best solutions/instruction manuals I have found is adrienne maree brown’s book Pleasure Activism. I wanted to start this group with her essay “Love as Political Resistance” to set our yearly intentions with the components of her ‘radical love manifesto’ in mind: Radical Honesty, Healing, Learn How to Change, & Build Communities of Care. I want to build a community of care focused on growing as pleasure activists through reflection, reading, and making concepts of queer theory/liberation as accessible as possible to as wide/diverse an audience as possible. I am calling this community: The Lavender Literary Society. If you are thinking, ‘I’m not really a reader… ‘ I say: I don’t care! Come anyway. We want everybody in this revolution and we want you specifically to be part of it. World renowned activist Angela Davis’ collection of essays on Palestine, state violence, and how to build collective movements Freedom is a Constant Struggle has a few quotes I’d like to share: What we lacked over the last four years was not the right president but a well-organized mass movement. We can't rely on governments to do the work only mass movements can do. "All my life I've been sick and tired. Now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired." -Fannie Lou Haymer, leader of student nonviolence

Lavender Lit Society Salons

Each month there will be a literary salon from 6-8 on a Sunday to discuss a theme to approach/reflect on queer liberation. I will send a small excerpt of a book for everyone to read and everyone is encouraged to bring their own excerpt to share to respond or expand on the theme.

Everyone should facilitate/lead the discussion they are the most interested in holding in this space. I have provided an example list of Queer/Lesbian Literature I have seen mentioned in my own syllabus research, but the goal is for us to learn from each other. I would offer people a challenge to read/present a topic outside their own identity/experience and the space to suggest any changes/additional foundational texts people should consider covering.

The Pleasure Activism manifesto ends with the call to action to make a commitment with five people to be more honest with each other, heal together, change together, and become a community of care that can grow to hold us all!!! ³

Before the first meeting on January 12, please read and come ready to discuss the two Pleasure Activism essays included at the end of this document, “Love as Political Resistance” and “Principles in Practice,” Get in babes, let’s organize! What feels good is sustainable!! We will build the world we need with each other, for each other, and we will rejoice in it.

Francis Aline Wall Simms, Lavender Lit Society EIC

Example Reading/Author List ⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸

adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism./ Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. / Adrienne Rich/ Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues./ Alison Bechdel, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out for./ Andrea Lawlor, Paul takes the form of a mortal girl./ Sharon Bridgforth, The bull-jean stories. / Verónica Reyes, Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives. / Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina. / Myriam Gurba, Dahlia Season: stories & a novella. / Jenny Fran Davis, Dykette./ Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House./ Krista Burton, Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest To Track Down The Last Remaining Lesbian Bars In America./ Sinclair Sexsmith, Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica./ Eloisa Aquino, Life & Times of Butch Dykes, The: Portraits of Artists, Leaders, and Dreamers Who Changed The World./ Ivan Coyote, Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme./ Joan Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader./ Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramirez, Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History./ Jewelle Gomez/ S. Bear Bergman/ Shayda Kafai, Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid / Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip/ Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice./ Felice Newman, The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us./ Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us Off Our Backs (journal publication)/ Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Anne Carson translation)/ Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender./ Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York 1987-1993./ Simon Doonan, Drag: the Complete History./ Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G., This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color.Persephone Press./ Hull, G. T., Bell Scott, P., & Smith, B. (Eds.). All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave: Black women's studies. Feminist Press./ Judith Butler, Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. / Faderman, L, Odd girls and twilight lovers: A history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America. / Trujillo, Carla. (Ed.). (1991). Chicana lesbians: The girls our mothers warned us about. Third Woman Press./ Rodríguez, J. M. (2003).Queer Latinidad: Identity practices, discursive spaces. NYU Press./ Clarissa Pinkola, Women Who Run with the Wolves.

Week One Readings

Love as Political Resistance

From Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown

Audre Lorde taught us that caring for ourselves is “not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”⁹ And although we know how to meme and tweet those words, living into them is harder. We have a deeper socialization to overcome, one that tells us that most of us don’t matter—our health, our votes, our work, our safety, our families, our lives don’t matter—not as much as those of white men. We need to learn how to practice love such that care—for ourselves and others—is understood as political resistance and cultivating resilience.

We don’t learn to love in a linear path, from self to family to friends to spouse, as we might have been taught. We learn to love by loving. We practice with each other, on ourselves, in all kinds of relationships.

And right now we need to be in rigorous practice, because we can no longer afford to love people the way we’ve been loving them.

Who have we been loving?

• the people who cross our physical or virtual paths, spark the flame of our interest, earn our devotion and respect and protection our own family, because blood
• people we are committed to but don’t like anymore

How have we been loving?

• defining love by obligation
• celebrating love on externally marked holidays
• keeping the realities of love behind closed doors
• framing love as a fairy tale on social media
• framing love as a product we give each other
• framing love as a limited resource that gets swallowed and used up, tied in plastic when we’re done and piled up out of sight prioritizing romantic love over self, comrade, and friend love

This kind of love is not sufficient, even if it is the greatest love of our lives. The kind of love that we will be forced to celebrate or escape on Valentine’s Day is too small.

We’re all going to die if we keep loving this way, die from isolation, loneliness, depression, abandoning each other to oppression, from lack of touch, from forgetting we are precious. We can no longer love as a secret or a presentation, as something we prioritize, hoard for the people we know. Prioritizing ourselves in love is political strategy, is survival.

From religious spaces to school to television shows to courts of law, we are socialized to seek and perpetuate private, even corporate, love. Your love is for one person, forever. You celebrate it with dying flowers and diamonds. The largest celebration of your life is committing to that person. Your family and friends celebrate you with dishes and a juicer. You need an income to love. If something doesn’t work out with your love, you pay a lot of money to divide your lives, generally not telling people much unless it’s a soap opera dramatic ending. This way of approaching love strangles all the good out of it.

What we need right now is a radical, global love that grows from deep within us to encompass all life. No big deal.

To help make this a true day of love, here is a brief radical love manifesto.

Radical Honesty

We begin learning to lie in intimate relationships at a very early age. Lie about the food your mother made, to avoid punishment, as you swallow your tears, about loving this Valentine’s Day gift, about the love you want and how you feel. Most of this is taught as heteropatriarchy 101: men love one way, women another, and we have to lie to impress and catch each other. Women are still taught too often to be sub- missive, diminutive, obedient, and later nagging and caregiving—not to be peers, emotionally complex powerhouses, loving other women and trans bodies. These mistruths in gender norms are self-perpetuating, affirmed by magazines and movies, girded at family dinner tables.

We also learn that love is a limited resource and that the love we want and need is too much, that we are too much. We learn to shrink, to lie about the whole love we need, settling with not quite good enough in order to not be alone.

We have to engage in an intentional practice of honesty to counter this socialization. We need radical honesty—learning to speak from our root systems about how we feel and what we want. Speak our needs and listen to others’ needs. To say, “I need to hear that you miss me.” “When you’re high all the time it’s hard for me to feel your presence.” “I lied.” “The way you talked to that man made me feel unseen.” “Your jealousy makes me feel like an object and not a partner.” The result of this kind of speech is that our lives begin to align with our longings, and our lives become a building block for authentic community and ultimately a society that is built around true need and real people, not fake news and bullshit norms.

Healing

Trauma is the common experience of most humans on this planet. Love too often perpetuates trauma, repeating the patterns of intimacy and pain so many of us experienced growing up in racist and/or hetero-patriarchal environments. Shame might be the only thing more prevalent, which leads to trauma being hidden, silenced, or relegated to a certain body of people. If we can’t carry our trauma and act normal, if we have a breakdown or lose our jobs/homes/children, there is something wrong with us. What we need is a culture where the common experience of trauma leads to a normalization of healing. Being able to say: I have good reasons to be scared of the dark, of raised voices, of being swallowed up by love, of being alone. And being able to offer each other: “I know a healer for you.” “I’ll hold your hand in the dark.” “Let’s begin a meditation practice.” “Perhaps talk therapy is not enough.” We should celebrate love in our community as a measure of healing. The expectation should be: I know we are all in need of healing, so how are we doing our healing work?

Learn How to Change

Most of us resist changes we didn’t spark. We feel victimized, so we try to hold tight to whatever we figure out as a way to survive. We spend too much time watching change happen with our jaws dropped, writing “what the fuck?” over and over. It is time to learn Octavia Butler’s lessons—both that “the only lasting truth is Change” and that we can, and must, “shape change.”2 So we need to observe how we respond to change—does it excite us so much that we struggle with stability? Or do we ignore changes until it’s too late? Or fight changes that are bigger than us? It takes time and assistance to feel into and find the most strategic adaptation.

Build Communities of Care

Shift from individual transactions for self-care to collective transformation. Be in community with healers in our lives. Healers, we must make sure our gifts are available and accessible to those growing and changing our communities. Be in family with each other—offer the love and care we can, receive the love and care we need. Share your car or meals with a healer in exchange for reiki sessions. Facilitate a healing group in exchange for massages. Clean a healer’s home as barter for a ritual to move through grief. Pay healing forward—buy sessions for friends. Let our lives be a practice ground where we’re learning to generate the abundance of love and care we, as a species, are longing for.

This year, commit to developing an unflappable devotion to yourself as part of an abundant, loving whole. Make a commitment with five people to be more honest with each other, heal together, change together, and become a community of care that can grow to hold us all.

Principles in Practice

From Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown p 431-436

I am in multiple communities that put an emphasis on practice. In the Allied Media community, we have articulated principles that matter to us, and we have focused on how we embody those principles as a matter of practice. In the Generative Somatics and Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity circles, we recognize that we are what we practice, and we become what we intentionally practice with our somas, our whole selves. As this book begins with pleasure principles, I would like to land the plane with practices that explicitly bring the principles to life, practices to root us in pleasure activism here and now, and in the future we are shaping. These are practices that make us pleasure activists not just in theory but also in the practices of our lives, awakening a pleasure politics that makes justice and liberation irresistible.

Practices

• Attention liberation. Use meditation to learn to have agency with your attention, bringing it to breath, or sensation, or pain, or solution, or transformation. ¹⁰
• Practice pleasure in your own body and life. Notice what brings a yes to your lips, to your center. Make a pleasure journal. Put signs around your house to remind you of your pleasures. Please yourself, please others. Feel pleasure every day. Don’t let your body or your heart forget why we fight—to feel aliveness and togetherness. We will grow.
• Find the ease. There are aspects of this life that are an uphill battle, and we seem to still be on the ascending portion of that long arc bending towards justice. But we can sustain the struggle if we all find the ease available to us, the places where we can flow together, coast together, and rest.¹¹
• In organizing work, center pleasure as an organizing principle. This means feeding people great healthy local food that nourishes them when they come to a meeting and working together to meet the needs of the people in the space. Take the time to affirm the people and affirm the learning that sometimes masquerades as failure. Be unconditional in your commitment to movement, be transformational in every area of your life and work, and center pleasure and joy as resistance: laughter, dance, taking time for the relationships. When people find movements that meet their needs, welcome them whole, affirm them, commit to their transformation, and actually feel good, they stay, and movement grows.
• Get generative boundaries. And hold them.
• Only say yes when you mean it.
• Take responsibility for your part of this fractal existence, and cultivate pleasure and joy in your life, knowing that authentic pleasure is good for the whole human system.
• Be absolutely committed to your process, to doing what you are doing in the best way you possibly can.
• Be detached from any outcomes.
• Be satisfiable. Learn what enough feels like in your; don’t settle, don’t overindulge.
• You are a miracle. Act like it. Don’t waste it.

The Chitling Test (formally, the Dove Counterbalance General Intelligence Test) was designed by Adrian Dove, a Black sociologist, as a facetious attempt to develop an intelligence test that utilizes distinctively black-ghetto experiences to demonstrate the built-in cultural bias found in most IQ tests. (From Chapter 12 of Papalia, Olds & Feldman (2001).)

#lls #readings