Reclaiming Dykes
Dyke. It's a word that packs a punch. It can be a grievous insult—a warning or a term of self-love and pride in the best of places. Love it or hate it; its power is undeniable.
It's the kind of word that feels good in your mouth and looks good on the page. The "d" has a pleasant pop when it flies from the lips. The "y" is flirty, and the "k" lends style. In its sound and appearance, it reminds me of the first dykes I knew, the tough girls with short hair and swagger who stood out like fireflies on the streets of my hometown when I was in high school.
Whenever I caught a glimpse of those women who were so obviously queer, I would think about them for a long time afterward (assume for yourself and laugh about what that means.) I wondered how they made their hair stick up and where they bought their clothes and how they got the confidence to pull it all off. I wondered how they got their toughness. Was it earned? Were there many nights of incremental progress and a few held back tears? I wondered if I could ever look masculine and feminine at the same time like they did. I craved their company, their touch, and their approval. I loved dykes, because they seemed to love themselves, and that made me believe that they might love me, too.
A dyke is both a curse and benediction. The word has a long history as an insult, a way of calling a queer woman ugly and perverted. Nowadays, the widest use of the word dyke is as a self-descriptor. Of course, some institutions have tried to save queers from the danger of calling themselves dykes. Facebook has banned queer women from using dyke to refer to themselves, and the US Patent Office tried to prevent Dykes on Bikes from registering a trademark claim (they won their case in 2017.)
The word dyke may just be the most thoroughly reclaimed insult in English.
In the hands of self-described dykes, dyke is a word of rebellion. It's unruly and promiscuous in its appeal. That's why it is my favorite word. Long may it reign.
Picture it: Portland, 2018. You're a young queer person from Northern California, in the big city for your first-ever pride parade. You're scared shitless, horny as hell, and trying to look cool. You've managed to score prime real estate on the parade route because, in your nervousness, you accidentally showed up early. Eventually, other LGBTQ+ people start trudging up next to you, complaining that the parade always starts way too early and that they and everyone they're there with are totally hungover and they might throw up. This is the most thrilling conversation you've ever heard in your life. The parade is about to start and You. Are. Pumped.
Suddenly you hear a noise that is getting the crowd excited, but you can't make it out. Whatever it is, it's deafening, and it ain't no marching band. The noise starts to reverberate in your chest as it gets closer, and the women around you start to go wild. And that's when you see a dozen or more of the leather-clad, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, femme, butch, genderqueer, nonbinary bois and gurls that make up the Dykes on Bikes.
Like drag queens, transgender people and leather folks, the Dykes on Bikes represent a subculture of the queer community that's often called out for not representing a palatable image of LGBTQ+ people.
Advocates, however, argue that they are profoundly visible icons of our community who refuse to assimilate to America's arbitrarily prescribed behaviors and gender roles, and they actually remind us of the queer folks who kicked off the Stonewall Riots in the first place.
LGBTQ+ bikers have represented what the straight world often still can't comprehend: queer men not as dainty stereotypes but as masculine, rugged guys celebrating their sexuality, and queer women, not as sexless old maids, but as tough, in charge of their own lives and narratives, and challenging conventional ideas of what it is to be women.
"I can be a fucking dyke, I'm a fucking woman. I can fuck a woman! I'm a fucking mess. I can be a big ass dyke and still like to get my fucking eyebrows done! It doesn't fucking matter, dyke means something different to everyone," said Cassie Moore, the president of the Portland chapter of the Dykes on Bikes, looking up at me over the rim of her glass.
I met Cassie at a biker bar on the edge of town called Parts & Service. She only drank Jameson, and she downed three before I'd even stepped into the place. It was a Portland-kind of biker bar with a dark leather interior. The bartender wore a Harley Davidson t-shirt and had a red scarf in her hair—tin can lights—a row of hogs out front—shiny new machines meeting shiny, hipster people—a vintage Triumph Street Twin resting on the creaky wooden floor— Georgia O'Keeffe photos in the bathroom.
We sat outside and drank in the hot summer sun. Her wife, Katrina, had decided to join us. I was a little thrown off at first since she was apparently, according to Cassie, "the hardest damn New Yorker she knew." I learned pretty quickly that Cassie had told her crew about the interview and that she had some questions for me too.
"Okay, but seriously," Cassie inhaled. Her eyes raised to meet mine. I wriggled a bit on the picnic bench. "Dude. Dude! But….have you tried sugar waxing?" she asked me.
"It's got to smell better than Nair, right?" I replied, laughing.
"It's amazing. It doesn't fucking hurt!" she chuckled, chattering her teeth in tune with the ice in her whiskey.
She wore a wife-beater and a leather vest, a tweed paddy hat and a clean cut. She was the first patched member in Portland and was voted in as president a few years ago. A cut, in this world, is everything. When you walk into a biker bar, as long as you’re cut, it doesn't matter who's looking—everyone just wants to know how you ride.
"You know, I've never had any problems. I can walk into just about any place. People don't give a shit about your gender or anything like that. I've been very lucky that way, and they just want to know what you ride," she told me.
"We link up with a few other groups around here, the shadows, which are sort of an offshoot from the hells angels, and border riders and people like that. We're accepted in the riding community, that could just be a Portland thing or an Oregon thing, but generally we don't have any problems," she said.
Portland's Dykes on Bikes is one of the newer chapters. They started up in 2013, under the rule of a trans man. "Look, I mean, some DOB chapters get sticky when it comes to who's a woman and whatever the fuck. But we are all-encompassing. We take everyone. Be gay, ride a bike. That's it," said Cassie. The sun darkened her transition lenses, and her blue eyes swam behind them. "It's funny, like, you ask people what letter they are, and if they say queer, you know it's going to be a long ass conversation. It literally could mean anything," she said with a chuckle erupting from deep in her stomach.
As tough as the Dykes on Bikes may seem, they have a long history of community support, from their advocacy for local queer organizations to people suffering during the AIDS epidemic. In recent years, exclusively transgender bike clubs have been popping up on the coasts, riding as a unit and protecting alt-right groups from harassing Black Lives Matter protesters.
"We've also started doing security for Antifa and the Trans March, things like that. We just try and make a space for people who have a challenging time doing that. Visibility is so important. You know, we go to places in Oregon that don't even have a pride parade and roar up and down the street," she told me. "There was a young girl who came up to me in Woodburn all excited, and she told me she didn't know there were this many gay people, or that they could be this cool, so I think about her a lot. That's why I'm doing this. We just try and make space for people to do and say what they need to do, you know?"
After her fourth margarita, Katrina did all she could to not vomit into the street. She leaned over the wooden railing and rested the weight of her drink on its planks. Her eyes started to cross. She turned her head away from me and rested a contemplative hand on her chin. There was yet another margarita spilled on the table, and she started to mop at it with the sleeve of her coat.
Katrina pawed at her wife's arm. "Yeah," she slurred, "it's really about inclusion and invisibility." Cassie and I started to laugh. "No, wait, don't write that down. It's visible. It's about visibility," Katrina butted in.
"Oh hun, you’re so cute when you get your hiccups," said Cassie teasingly. Katrina hiccuped again and stood up a little taller. She pulled at strands of grey hair hanging across her forehead. Her brown eyes creased to keep out the sun. "Sometimes I send her out to go ride just because she is getting stirrrr crazy. It's her happy place. It's zen time."
The glint of the chrome. The thunderous roar. The swarm of black leather and red lipstick. When you see the dykes ride, there are a few rules you can count on:
Stoplights are to be ignored. Helmets and clothing are optional. Just thinking about it, Cassie unpacked a quick smile.
"When I ride, I finally understand why birds fly," she told me. "It's just so empowering. It's a pure sense of freedom."
Katrina got up to use the bathroom. Cassie rested her forearms on the table and leaned over to me. In the middle of our conversation, she whipped her head toward the street, and I become worried. We're a bunch of queer women in a seedy biker bar, and she's clearly heard something that has grabbed her attention.
"Fuck yes. I'm so glad we could do this. I want you to meet Sugar too—" she said, her eyes still fixed on the road behind me. The roar of a wide-open throttle interrupted us, and a Harley pulled up next to the table.
"Hey! Sugar! I think we got one!" Cassie chucked, her eyes glancing in my direction to gauge my reaction. I took another sip of my beer and laughed along with her.
"I mean, you're not wrong." I replied.
Cassie leaned over to me and whispered, "She's a Harley girl…so, you know, I mean, that's alright, but like...come on, right?" she said, shrugging it off. With a little wink, she said, "don't you fucking tell her I shit on her bike."
Sugar hopped off her bike and waltzed over to the table. She pulled off her riding pants and pulled down a green mini skirt. Her long black hair was braided neatly into rows, and she used a small hand mirror to check her purple lipstick.
"Don't get it twisted. She'll fuck you up with the one hand and fix her makeup with the other," Cassie whispered, wiggling her eyebrows at me. Katrina came back to the table and slumped her weight onto the bench next to me.
Sugar sat down too, ordered a lemon drop, and crossed her legs. "So hun, you're writing some sort of article?" she asked me. I told her I was and that I was curious about the dyke of it all. I wanted to know how the masculine and the feminine collide in the biker world.
"Well, look, I'm a dyke too. I'm a high femme. A dyke means something a little different to everyone, I mean," she looked over at Cassie, on the far end of the table, "I mean, you know we've got the whole damn alphabet!" she pointed a long wiry finger at Katrina. "And we've got hiccups, too if you want to put that part in," she said, laughing.
Sugar worked as a mechanic in a woman-owned shop in East Portland. She told me about her friends, her shop, and the best Fleetwood Mac song to listen to while you're changing an air filter. "It's important that people know how to take care of their shit. If you go to any other garage, they'll try and charge you for shit you don't need. Lots of women are intimidated by that stuff, and they shouldn't be."
For the next few hours, we talked about music, carburetors, and curly fries. And no one, in the end, could answer my nagging question about what the hell a dyke actually is. It's a lot of things. It's a slurrrr. It's a rallying cry. It's rebellious and crude. It's for the femmes, it's for the pixie cuts, and for everyone in between.
"Look, when you walk into a room carrying a helmet, you’re instantly a part of a culture," Cassie told me. "But, you know, I will say, you being there fucking adds something too. It's as simple as that."
Contributor
Ryleigh Norgrove
Ryleigh Norgrove is an Oregon-based journalist, poet, and photographer. Her work has been published across the Pacific Northwest. She's hitchhiked through the highlands, sailed the Pacific, and has been most recently working in the U.S. National Parks system, subsequently riding the rails, getting off track, and losing her train of thought.