The 13 Days of A+ came from all of us, last year, wanting to show you our gratitude for literally keeping the lights on at Autostraddle HQ. (In this case, HQ is a group of queers who all agree to log onto the internet and work toward the same goals, and the “lights” you are keeping on are our computer screens.) Why 13? Riese came up with that because it’s Christmas plus the Devil, so there you go!

As it’s only the second year round of a totally made up but super fun concept, we decided to try something a little different. Same gratitude for you all making sure this indie queer website can keep doing our work, slightly different content. Sally pitched this outrageous time-jumping puzzle series and we built most of the 13 Days this year around that!

Back to the Queer Future

This series was so rewarding thanks to Sally’s hard work and vision, but it was also more complicated to put together than it might seem!

Every day really brings new challenges with it at Autostraddle, and preparation for the 13 Days meant that I was suddenly testing out these logic puzzles when, my friends, I do not normally ever do these for fun. Every few days, Sally would drop a few new ones, each one a DIFFERENT kind of puzzle, and there I would be, trying the puzzles, two, three or four times to see if I could get them, getting up, getting more coffee, finding more scrap paper, typing furiously to Sally whenever I solved one. The Lisa Ben one absolutely stumped me for the record. I have never solved it!

These were a real labor of love, and such a fun addition to our A+ offerings, and I hope you’ll let Sally know if you enjoyed them in the comments!

Adding to the complexity of these pieces were the historical photos. Luckily, we can pay for access to Getty Images, now, which is new and awesome and one of the things that we’ve been able to invest in because of our fundraisers and A+ members like you! That took care of some of the photos, but others were trickier. For one, I had to reach out to the San Francisco Public Library about the photo in puzzle number 5. It’s from the Grace Miller Papers — and at first they thought I was asking if I could print a physical jigsaw puzzle using the photo. That was not the case, though this is a free idea you all can have, in case anyone wants to make a queer history jigsaw puzzle series. That would be neat! This forced me to have to explain my extremely silly situation in the plainest terms (we are a queer publication and we’re making logic games during the holidays for fun?), and then we got the okay to use the photo of Tommy’s Bar in this post featuring, again, the bartender/owner of Tommy’s Bar, Grace Miller.

But why Grace Miller? Why not Rose Bamberger, the person mentioned in the post, the founder of the Daughters of Bilitis? Mainly, it is that there aren’t any photos of her that are accessible to us. However, Sally took care to note that Rose, a young Filipina woman, was the actual founder of The Daughters of Bilitis. The daughters were a social club for gay women created to provide a safe space where they could socialize and dance with one another without fear of police raids. At the time, same-sex dancing in public was forbidden by law. Police frequently raided gay clubs in San Francisco and the Bay Area (and elsewhere, obvs) in the 1950s, and you could be arrested for dancing with a person of the same sex. I have Sally to thank for linking me to these, and so in the spirit of doing Rose Bamberger as much justice as we can, I am going to re-link to this blog post by Malinda Lo: “The Women of Color Behind the Daughters of Bilitis” where you can learn a little more about Rose Bamberger, though our historic knowledge of her is painfully thin — and we can all do our part to resist the oversimplification of our collective history. I also recommend, also a blog post by Malinda Lo, “The True Story of the Raid on Tommy’s Bar.” Lastly, if this era in queer history interests you, then you’re in luck because you can check out Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo which has just won a National Book Award, too! Finally, if you’re ever in San Francisco, you can inquire about the Grace Miller Papers themselves, which are an archive from the life of this bartender and owner of not one, but TWO gay bars. Wow! If anyone does this, do you want to tell us about it? I would be intrigued. Shoot me an email or send an A+ priority box message!

So, yes, this was about getting pictures sorted. I want to point you toward another archive that we link to in the Back to the Queer Future series (puzzle 4). The One Archives in San Francisco house the Lisa Ben papers, or the archive of Edyth Eyde’s life! The photo we used actually came from a trip that Riese took to the archives a few years ago. From the website, “The collection includes Ben’s photographs, short stories, correspondence, and musical instruments; as well as sound recordings and sheet music for her folk songs, including “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write My Butch a Letter” and “The Vice Squad Keeps Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” The collection illuminates Lisa Ben’s unapologetic enthusiasm and her lifelong pursuit of connecting with others through words and music.” If anyone ever retrieves the sheet music for “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write My Butch a Letter,” you’ll tell me, right? Please? (My butch LOVES letters. A couple of times over the course of the pandemic, even though we live together, I’ve sent her sweet notes in the mail because she’s the one who gets the mail. Hot tip.)

Thank you all for being queer history nerds with us!

And a Couple More Things

We kicked off the 13 Days of A+ on December 13th with a look at the 8 Dykiest Things on Kayla’s Shelves, and I tell you, I felt seen by the Stephen King shelf. Kayla also describes king as “famously not a dyke” which is true. This was an excellent entry into the series and I have to emphasize again that I hope you will give it a read. The series came about because some of you all were in the comments on a different post of Riese’s asking about her bookshelf! And so we decided to make it a thing. (You see how the process goes sometimes. Never be afraid to speak up!) I called this series Our Hobbies, Our Shelves both because I cannot resist a pun and because, as originally conceived, it is intended to be expansive and to allow for people to show us what’s on their shelves whether that be books or something else. Each person is invited to make their entry into this series their own. Though Riese and Carmen both presented us with incredible spreadsheets, that is not everyone’s style, and we respect that we are all individual and different humans around here. So don’t be surprised if this series starts going to some different places in the future! Honestly, that just makes me more excited about it!

For December 23rd latest entry into the A+ erotica series S L I C K, we were THRILLED to work with Jenifer Prince on the illustration. The story “Take Me to Church” — by Shelli Nicole, edited by Ro White — will light your Christmas tree right up!

On December 25th, we brought you the ADORABLE pets of Autostraddle because we know that, for many people, this can be a day where you could use some internal warm fuzzies — and if we can do a little something to give that to you, we will try to do it! 💗

AND THAT concludes a mish-mash of editor’s notes for the 13 Days of A+! Thank you for being with us this year. Thank you for being a huge part of making our little queer home on the internet possible. We hope you’ll stick around for 2022 and for everything we hope to achieve together. In the meantime, go forth and check out your local archives! Hug your local pets! Dig up a recipe from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook! Be sure to let us know what you thought of this year’s installment of the 13 Days of A+ in the comments! Don’t forget to make sure you’re opening up your weekly Saturday A+ e-news to get the latest, well, A+ news and other insider info. And don’t forget about that A+ Priority Contact Box. We love to hear from you!

I’m wishing you as many good things as are possible for the New Year (plus a few extras), sending you tons of love wherever you are in the world, and looking forward to seeing you all in 2022!

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