Caty

I'm a fledgeling activist working mostly on anti-prison expansion, syringe/access needle exchange in Massachusetts, decriminalizing prostitution, and abolishing psychiatric abuse. (Maybe not so fledgeling--I'm being featured in this mainstream lesbo mag that I fondly remember from my baby dyke days flipping through it at the local suburban Borders--Curve magazine--in an article called "10 Top Activists Under 25.) I work with the best organization ever, Arise for Social Justice in Springfield, MA, a multi-issue low income rights membership based organization. (Tired of the leftist community action jargon yet?) I also work with the Freedom Center, an organization by and for people labeled with "mental illness" promoting alternatives to traditional psychiatric treatment and working against abuse within the mental health industry. Blah blah blah blah. To make all this bearable, I also lead another life as a junkie ho. (Errr, sex worker with strong ties to drug culture.) (Conversely, being an activist makes being a junkie ho bearable.) Other than that, some identifying characteristics: I'm a theory and philosophy geek, I talk constantly and interrupt people often, I'm a new category of femme I've made up all by myself--sloppy or instafemme, in which I glamor myself up with shoplifted and scavenged goodies and apply my makeup in five seconds flat. Any more effort would relegate me to high femme, and that would just be tragic. (Actually, lately I've been getting higher femme lately due to a boredom induced obssessive need to buy bath and beauty products. "She's in the drink agai," the boyfriend says. I take too many baths, as I am fucking in love with our clawfoot tub, and I like the endorphins and how the blood drains out of my brain. I like pumice stones and I've lost my fear of exfoliants. Plus I recently got my first manicure ever. Our little girl is becoming a voman.) I have a weird past life as a Russian immigrant Orthodox Jewish teenage overachiever, snagging all As at a school with a ten hour school day and generally overcompensating for a lot of things. I got into a prestigious Seven Sisters school only to find out that the girls there thought feminism meant women could be CEOs too, and also that I hated college and capitalism in a very childish but vehement manner and wanted something totally different. ("Even the gay girls were straight, and even the Asian girls were WASPs," I always say--whatta debutante school.) I'm a Kroptokinesque/Marge Piercy (heh) anarchist, and I get all starry eyed talking about community, communal living, and mutual aid, though I don't live up to these ideals half as often as I'd like. The End until I think up some new bit of supposedly witty self description. I live with my boyfriend of three years--an Italian American Manhattanite born and bred ex-street urchin who's been in the black market for centuries and did three tours in Vietnam, who, contrary to public opinion, I am NOT slumming with--and my girlfriend of one year, a student of the black market as well who's also a recovering JAP from New Jersey, as well as a recovering Hampshire student---in an apartment that's surprisingly beautiful for surprisingly little money relative to the ugly Northampton housing market. We have a black teenage cat named Gadget whom we recently saved from extermination in the death houses of the MSPCA. I used to work for a great organization called the Freedom Center, by and for people labeled with mental illnesses advocating for psychiatric patients' rights, alternatives to traditional treatment and accurate information about prescribed psychotropic drugs, only now I'm being forced out through a ridiculous. and if I may, oppressive fiasco. The moral of the story is not to ever date the cofounder of an organization you're working for. Certainly don't break up with him and expect to live to tell the tale.