Self-proclaimed queer, queen and incest survivor Mattilda Sycamore kicked off Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer month Thursday by sharing her thoughts on activism and gender identity and reading excerpts from her new memoir, “The End of San Francisco.”
In the first event of her fall tour, hosted by LGBTQ studies program, Sycamore discussed leaving home life to discover who she was going to become at a University of Wisconsin lecture.
A victim of incest, Sycamore said when she first started having flashbacks about being sexually abused by her father, she was in a relationship with someone who had already dated another incest survivor, and was surrounded by friends and neighbors familiar with the situation.
“We knew we were all queer and vegans, but we didn’t know we were all incest survivors,” she said about other friends while living in San Francisco.“[It was] a great environment to articulate being an incest survivor,” Sycamore said.
People talked about rape all the time and it was really empowering, Sycamore said. Sycamore said it was something she never had to hide and it became easy to talk about.
At age 19, she found sanctuary in the “fringe” of San Francisco. Sycamore lived in the Mission neighborhood of the city, where queer activism flourished as the community fought against the conventional gay agenda.
“We were rejecting the worlds that rejected us,” Sycamore said on the start of the Gay Shame movement.
Sycamore said the movement’s aims were to contradict gay politics concerning gay marriage and militarism. She said the problem with these agendas was that they were largely viewed as ending points as opposed to starting points for gay rights and said these distract from more important issues like housing security and health care.
Sycamore’s activism work began as a student at Brown University. She discovered direct active advocacy struggle in group, Act Up, which worked to improve the lives of people living with AIDS. Sycamore made a difficult decision to move to San Francisco after a year in college.
“It was a great place to be queer…there wasn’t really a silencing of queers,” she said.
Universities are a place to use skills of analysis to instigate change and activism, and can bring rigorous engagement to see new possibilities, Sycamore said. However, people have to return to the time of openness experienced in her own college days, she said.
“It’s a place to discover radical politics, but it needs to be brought out,” Sycamore said.
– Elizabeth Koskiewicz
