The Birth of Bitch King: Naming

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One night, as I was walking home from a local art show, I noticed a guy was watching me from the sidewalk as I approached my apartment door. As I turned around, he began to walk toward me, shrouded in shadows. My heart leapt, but I kept my composure and said “hello.” He said nothing, but doubled his pace as he approached me. I opened my door, jumped inside and slammed the door shut. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I told myself, until I saw him staring at me though an open window. I slammed the window shut, and completely freaking out, I ran around my apartment making sure I was securely locked in. I felt marginally safe until I peeked out my front window and saw him staring at my front door. With a kitchen butcher knife in one hand and the phone in the other, calling my neighbors to come help me, I was the perfect image of a woman trapped, calling for others to help her while preparing to defend herself from the worst. After he was gone, and my shaking stopped, I was again transformed with rage, as I always am after an episode like this: why should I be scared to be out after dark? Why am I an object of scrutiny by the male gaze? Why did I feel safer calling friends than the police? How can I reclaim my home and my mind from this incident? And more importantly, why didn’t I threaten him, or even tell him to leave me alone? I went and dug around until I found some sidewalk chalk, then I went out and wrote phrases like “Beware of Angry Dyke” and “Bitch Xing” all over my front porch. Then, I sat there and enjoyed my neighborhood, the peace and sometimes chaos of it. There, in semi-darkness, dragging hard on a cigarette and feeling my vulnerability and pain mix with the rage I felt, this stranger, a man who I would never see again, came up and asked for directions. I told him where to go, then we chatted for a moment. Right before he left, he looked at BITCH XING, what I thought said “Bitch Crossing,” on the porch, asked me what a “Bitch King” was. And then it made perfect sense: a Bitch King is someone who feels intensely what it is to be oppressed, who wrestles with it, cries about it, gets scared, but then gets up, enraged and ready to kick some white supremacist patriarchal ass. In order to stay alive, or to stay conscious, or just to survive the pressure of being a feminist in this time and place, the third revolution in my writing, and my zine, Bitch King, were born on the same night—it became a call to all my sisters and brothers to write with their blood and tears, because as they transform themselves, they transform their community.