the main perk of working today was that I did the intake assessment for an elder queen and trans person who is native to philly and we got to just talk and cut up for a long time and it felt really, really good to have that social and spiritual well filled up in me for a while

also they were telling me about how 40 years ago there were these private clubs in south philly where the italian mob guys would hang and how my patient’s elder mentor was one of the first they knew to have bottom & top surgery & all the mob guys treated her as a queen

they said she was the most perfect Black queen, the most perfect model of womanhood, and she was the most coveted by all the really rich, connected men in the city so she never had to work and spent all her time mentoring younger people

and there was a club called the black banana and they were like royalty there with the mob guys. my patient said that their mentor kept them safe and told them that they didn’t need a gender or a body or a body politic but that they were just who they were and that was perfect

they told me how it felt to be different before people even had the word “transgender” and how they felt that the word was sometimes confining to them and their peers rather than liberating, and boxed them in and built a wall on the opposite side too

that their suitors felt they had to be Heterosexual now and couldn’t be with a trans person, especially not a non-binary trans person. It was just so interesting and they told me all of this local geography about philly that has been developed out

but it was just wonderful to spend time with another queer nb person, it felt so easy and fun and free and special just to listen to them talk for a while and sit with them on the bed as they pointed out the window at various former cruising spots they could see from their room

also when is their book dropping about how Black trans people felt the safest in pre2000s philly when they were with the Italian MOB

like the first medical transitioning in philly being made affordable because al capone dudes wanted it for their kept women is wild to me