There was a terrible stillness, I felt like I’d been caught.

I’d be wrapping my blackened mouth around the voice of Siouxsie Sioux and would suddenly freeze: What if he was watching me right now? My room suddenly turned eerie, spooky. Painting band names on the linoleum with nail polish, playing with make-up, lip-synching in the mirror. I loved to be inside it, reading books and magazines, listening to records, sneaking cigarettes out the window. To see such a nice man, a man who finally loved me and my mom the way a father-person should, a man who went to the courts to adopt me, who bar-brawled with my birth-father at the local Moose Club over his love for us, his family-to know all this and then think that he’s watching me? Sexually, I guess? What a creep. How could he be spying on us?įor years I lived with the understanding that there was something wrong with me. He took delight in cooking extravagant family dinners-3-alarm chili washed down with pint glasses of lime rickeys, gutted limes scattered across the kitchen table filling the house with the sharply optimistic smell of summer. He was always nice to my mom, and to the rest of us. He’d played drums in bands and had a pierced ear and a homemade tattoo on his finger. When he came home from work adulterously late and fucked-up on booze or pills, we didn’t know what we’d be getting. The dad he replaced had not been cool, he’d been a moody alcoholic who’d fight with my mom ’til she cried. Throughout my teenage years I’d lived with the suspicion that this was happening, a state of mind that had me tipping on a chasm of anxiety and denial I feared might end with me going totally insane.

I had just learned that my stepfather had been spying on my sister and me through holes he’d stealthily carved in the walls of our home-the bathroom walls, the bedroom walls.

I make light of it, but it was a dark and dangerous moment in my life. I had retreated into the desert of Tucson, Arizona, in the midst of what I now refer to as my Radical Lesbian Feminist Nervous Breakdown. I was thinking a certain way when I first came across the SCUM Manifesto. Men who think a certain way are in the men’s auxiliary of SCUM. In other words, women who think a certain way are SCUM. There’s no organization called SCUM… It’s not even me… I mean, I thought of it as a state of mind. SCUM_cover_FINAL_REV.jpg 4100.png Foreword by Michelle Tea

Scum manifesto