Chapter 1
Recorded on May 4, 2067, in the Bronx.
M. E. O’Brien: Hello, my name is M. E. O’Brien, and I will be having a conversation with Miss Kelley. It is May 4, 2067, and this is being recorded at the Cecilia Gentili Social Center in Hunts Point, the Bronx. Hello, Miss Kelley.
Miss Kelley: Hello.
O’Brien: Tell me about this space we are in.
Kelley: This is the main social center in NYC for skinners. From here, I help coordinate our quarterly citywide assemblies, the network of support hubs across the region, and our communications channels. I helped found this place about five years ago. There are four of us regulars who help keep the center going. We have events here every couple of days. Some skill shares, a lot of discussions, the occasional talk or game. We talk mostly about sex, about work in skincraft, thinking about sex as care. A lot of people come in and out, both from around the Bronx and from all over the Mid-Atlantic.
O’Brien: Why is it here, in Hunts Point?
Kelley: There used to be a stroll here, ages ago. I worked it for so long. When I moved here, in ’41 or thereabouts, it was much different than now. Lots of girls working all up and down the Avenue and all the side streets. This was an industrial area. Auto shops, a big produce market, some rail yards, and a lot of abandoned warehouses. I was having a rough time of things. All strung out. Things were getting tense in Chelsea, and I couldn’t hang around there no more. The police was trying to clear us all out, doing sweeps every night. I got arrested a few times, but they told me that if I stuck around they would do somethin’ much worse to me.
O’Brien: What were the police like back then?
Kelley: Well, they was always brutal. Some of my first memories were being a little one and hearing on the news about big uprisings against police murders. But it got worse. The NYPD took over a lot of the drug trade and were starting to try to take control of street sex work. Chelsea had gotten rough. This one cop would harass me for money every night, and made it clear he was running the strip. I will never forget his face. He put these smudges under his eyes, lookin’ like a football player? I don’t know, it was a thing with the cops he was close to. The cops were basically a gang, just one with a lot of guns. I didn’t understand that ’til much later, but the police also changed how they worked with the richies. The police started wanting payment for anything they would protect. Anyone who wanted to do business in the city learned that game. But I think it also showed things were breaking down at every level.
O’Brien: You left Chelsea and moved to Hunts Point?
Kelley: Yeah, I came up here and been here ever since. I grew up not too far from here, in Soundview. I still talk to my granmom. She had a little place in the Bronx River Houses where I could take showers sometimes. I lived with a few other girls in an old print shop on Cassanova, just a few blocks from here. We did it up nice, like with curtains and a couch and all. We paid rent to a cop who came ’round every month … I was not doing so well back then. Strung out all the time on whatever I could get a hold of. I did a lot of coke, but mostly it was tina that had the hold on me.
O’Brien: Tina?
Kelley: Crystal meth. Spent years tweaking. It got me through the nights. Whenever I went off it, I would sleep for days and I couldn’t handle how dead I felt inside. Eventually I stopped altogether, but not until we were in the middle of the insurrection. Where was I?
O’Brien: What life was like in Hunts Point?
Kelley: Even when I was strung out, I still worked hard. Out on the street every night. I wasn’t too safe, or safe enough, but I got lucky and made it through. It’s much safer now, us running the whole show. Girls got the hubs and the comms, and are always in touch with each other, and no one messes around with us no more. But so many girls died, so many didn’t make it through. We did a memorial project here last year, gathered stories from everyone who was working the streets before the commune. Got photos, vids, and holos of who we could, long personal stories from everyone who didn’t make it. Kind of like you are doing now, an oral history project, sittin’ down with everyone we could. It brought up a lot for me, lots of crying, lots of hugging. It’s good for the younger girls to know about because, they don’t know. They need to know why we have to defend the commune, no matter what it takes.
O’Brien: [Pause] This is a memorial for girls who were killed during the insurrection?
Kelley: A few. But mostly it’s remembering those who died before. Young skinners coming up now have a very hard time grasping the intensity of violence that was just a part of everyday life. There was a lot of beauty, and love, and care, and goodness too, don’t get me wrong. But between all the diseases, and overdose, and so much else. It was just a constant part of life.
O’Brien: Are there any particular stories you would like to share? People you want to have us remember here?
Kelley: Yes, I’d like that. Jamie was my house mother. She took me in and really showed me around the scene. She had so much love, took care of so many girls. She would have these huge group meals. She’d take some abandoned warehouse and have us hang fabric and lights and make it beautiful, and then these platters of food. She was from the islands, and would assign us dishes to cook in her kitchen. She taught me how to fry yucca. Everyone could come, but the house would host. Mostly ballroom, and girls who walked the street. These meals were the most loving thing. I think she had a lot of pain growing up and was making up for it. She went into Lincoln Hospital with something wrong in her gallbladder and they killed her. Like she was healthy, and negative, and had stopped using by then. But they botched the surgery and ended up rupturing some of her organs. Lincoln was a chop shop, and so cruel to the girls.
O’Brien: Thank you for telling us about her. You said you moved here in 2041? How old were you?
Kelley: [Raises eyebrow.] A girl don’ discuss her age.
O’Brien: Was it mostly trans women?
Kelley: Sort of. All kinds. A lot of people have notions. Still, after all this time, people come round here asking questions, and they have a lot of ideas about how things worked and who did what, but they don’t really want to listen. They have their own ideas, and their own agenda, and want to shove everything into that.
O’Brien: Are you afraid I am one of these people who just wants to use your story?
Kelley: Of course, you want to use my story honey, that’s why we’ve got stories, to use them. The question is what you want to use the story for. And I don’t really know you.
O’Brien: I understand. Are you up for continuing the interview?
Kelley: [Pause.] I’ll try this dance. You got a jaw a bit like mine. You might be okay.
O’Brien: I … appreciate your trust. What were you like in the forties?
Kelley: I was so beautiful. I had a lot of work done. I was glorious and so beautiful. I used to walk in the balls, and I always won Face. I was a marvel. I thought very highly of myself back then, even when I was strung out on coke or tina. I think in some ways being full of myself kept me alive, kept me going at all. Like I knew I was better than all of them. I never went out in anything but a dress, no matter what. I always looked great, no matter how bad things got. My dresses were just so much color and life. Miss Reginald, she was a house sister and a designer, she would make them for the balls, and I wore them out on the street when I was working. I took up a lot of space no matter who I was with. I was everything. You could see it in my dresses, in how I moved, in how I talked. People tell me I was so full of myself! But everyone loved me for it. Now I got my feet on the ground a bit more, and not so focused in on myself. But also, things are just a lot easier now, so I don’t need the confidence I had back then, no matter what happened. I don’t need to front to keep someone from killing me on the street, or get food on the table, or know if someone may be there to take care of me when I need it. Somewhere along the way I learned a bit about how to listen, and how not to need all that to have something to say.
O’Brien: I’ve heard a lot of people over the years tell me the commune helped them manage their feelings, like made it easier to be able to connect with others.
Kelley: Cert. I was always in fight or flight, for like, years. That is part of why I did so much tina. But my fight mode was all about frontin’, like really making sure I was always beautiful, always confident, so much so I didn’t really see other people as real. First the struggle, and then later the commune, helped me a lot in relaxing that, in being able to actually count on others, to see others, to be able to let other people in.
O’Brien: Tell me about the hunger.
Kelley: Ugh. That’s not really something I like to talk about much. I didn’t know too much about what was going on in the world back then. I was all messed up in the head. There was the war, I know that, it had been going on forever. The men working the Market got older, because all the young ones got sent off to Iran. Then at some point, I don’t know what year it was, everything came tumbling down. Everyone was sick from the cough all that year, and none of the girls could get work because everyone was so scared of the cough. Then everything else started to fall apart. You stopped being able to buy anything. The stores as far as you could walk were empty, the subways and buses shut down. You couldn’t buy fec that year, like the bodegas were all cleared out.
O’Brien: Fec?
Kelley: Like anything? You couldn’t buy anything. Shit. Stuff.
O’Brien: Like feces?
Kelley: Something like that. So, the stores were empty. But the Market was still running! Trucks would roll through all night and day, unloading produce, and then it would get sent down into Manhattan. They had these armed caravans, that were the NYPD, but just hired to guard the trucks. But no food around here, just the shitty brown rice the punks served up under the Bruckner, but you couldn’t live on that crap. It was happening all over, from what I knew. Everyone was getting so mad, and in the summer of ’50, every night people were out fighting with the cops. I had been in a riot in Chelsea way before, when I first got down there. We burned a police van and beat the pulp out of a few cadets. Now it was like that every night. At first, every time they killed someone we would get up in arms, but at some point it all took on a momentum and we felt like we had to win, somehow, and that there was no way back. Some nights I was too strung out, some nights I was busy working, some nights I was too hungry. But often when I was out, I’d come across some kids and the police going at it. Some nights everyone would be out, like granmom went out one night and said she spit on a cop. For a while, the riots were all throughout the city. Eventually the [US] Army put it down. They started these big kitchens where they gave us crap food, protein paste. God, I hated that protein paste. I was doing a lot of tricks with guys that worked the Market, and I had them pay me in pieces of meat or potatoes. Some days I went without, but I often brought a bit of food to granmom, and to Miss Reginald who I was living with. She was too sick to work so I did my best. Thank god I had stopped using by then, because I wouldn’t have made it through the hunger if I also had to hustle drugs. I had been volunteering a bit at this syringe exchange program we set up on the Point, and that helped me get clean. The hunger was so hard. Like it hurt, really hurt. I was dizzy for days, and everyone was getting sick all the time from lack of food. I went through a lot of hard times, but I had never seen anything like the hunger. But we were starting to take care of each other then. All over we started to watch out for each other.
O’Brien: When was the Army takeover in the Bronx?
Kelley: I don’t know. I don’t remember exactly when that was. It was cold as fuck and they served the protein paste cold, I remember that. God, that was fec. You ever have that stuff?
O’Brien: Yeah, I was in the camp at Riis, before I went south.
Kelley: Did you fight in Alabama?
O’Brien: No, but I helped as I could. I was in the Mississippi Delta mostly, after they destroyed Jackson. Before things got exciting up here. You had something to do with that.
Kelley: Cert, I guess I did. You do flatter a girl.
O’Brien: Can you tell us more about drug use and drug addiction, and your process of recovery leading up to this period?
Kelley: That’s a nice question. I could. But I don’t think I will. I’ll tell you about the Market. Let me tell you about the night we took the Market. That I will never forget. It was the most amazing thing any of us ever saw. I told you the Market stayed busy all through the hunger. We’d see these trucks going in and out. When the riots started, the police set up these huge barricades around the Market, like these metal walls five meters high. They all fortified the Bruckner, sealed it off, and used it just for people from Manhattan or the trucks with all the food to go down into the city. For a while, when we were fighting with the Army, the Market became a focus of the riots, because everyone knew there was food inside. All up and down Hunts Point Avenue we’d fight it out. One night we burned a tank! A lot of folks got shot. A lot of girls got shot.
O’Brien: The Martyrs.
Kelley: That’s what people called them later. I don’t know about the term. I get people need heroes. But … I don’t know how to say it. I think I was really drawn to the image of being a hero, like being a martyr, when I first heard people talking that way. I think a bit like being a diva, it was a way of seeing myself as something grand, something amazing, something that was so big that it could shut out the emptiness I felt. And for me, becoming a part of the struggle, later becoming a part of the commune, meant getting over all that. I mean, I still loved being fabulous, don’t get me wrong. But it required actually letting in the pain a bit. Maybe not everyone is like that, but I think that was true for me. So, I could tell you about the girls who were killed—I told you about this memorial thing, so they are really with me. Jakya, Ella, Sydney, Ilaria. I saw Ilaria get shot one night. Like not who did it, just saw her fall in the crowd and when I went over to her, she was passed out and bleeding and didn’t make it … I may not want to be no hero. But I guess I shouldn’t let that get in the way. I should be honoring them. Thinkin’ it through talkin’ with you.…
O’Brien: You were telling us about the events leading up to the insurrection?
Kelley: That’s right. We fought hard, the girls did, with everyone else, as the hunger went on and the Army was treating us bad. Then in ’52 the Army mostly cleared out. The taking of the Market happened at the beginning of May that year. I guess the Army had to go down south or out west, because from what I heard the fighting was really kicking off. The police were still out defending the Market, but the street organizations were getting in shootouts with them all over the Bronx so they were all jumpy as fuck. The street orgs weren’t that active in the Point; the girls didn’t get along with them too well and by then we were pretty well-organized. So, there weren’t a lot of police around, not enough, that’s for sure. In the fighting people started being able to get along with each other, like everyone wasn’t so mean all the time. Some of the street orgs started being more respectful to the girls. I think the commune kind of began there, fighting alongside each other in the streets.
It had gotten hot early that year, sometime in April. It was just brutal, in the nineties at night. The mid-thirties I mean, you know, we used Fahrenheit then. It was hot, there were maybe twenty cadets total guarding the Market, and that night everyone was out. The Army was gone, you couldn’t even get their fucking paste. The punks were still out with their brown rice, but people had grown to hate them for it. It was hot, I was in so much sweat, in this slink, this beautiful thing with sequins that caught the streetlights. A lot of people; a few k. We had these big fires in the street. Why was we setting fires when it was already so hot, I don’t know, but we had these big bonfires and some kids had set up a catapult and were throwing these burning trash cans over the wall. Then someone got a semi, this huge truck, and drove it into the barricade, and the wall came down. We stormed the fucking Market. We beat the crap out of those pigs and the private troops the Market had hired. We torched their offices. Most people ran off with whatever food they could carry. A lot of people hadn’t seen a green vegetable in years, hadn’t seen meat, and here it was, stall after stall filled with the best food you could ever imagine.
I got my friend Cindy to bring Miss Reggie some shrimp, because I know how much my Reggie love her some shrimp. So, all these people were all over the Market. And we stayed. We held that market. Some police came in the morning, and we used that catapult and hurled these burning trash cans at their cars. We took the Bruckner then, shut the whole thing down. It was maybe a hundred people in the morning, and then a few hundred more came in the coming week as we argued about what to do. When I remember the night, I see the trash cans on fire flying through the air and everyone cheering and running over the wall when it came down.
O’Brien: Sounds incredible.
Kelley: Oh girl, it was. It was so beautiful.
O’Brien: That was a turning point in it all.
Kelley: Yeah, I’ve been told. The birth of the New York Commune. The night it all broke open. The Battle of Hunts Point.
O’Brien: We are coming up on the fifteen-year anniversary.
Kelley: Yeah, I’ll be speaking. They are doing a to-do. I have my slink picked out.
O’Brien: What happened after you all took the Market?
Kelley: Well, we mostly had meetings. A lot of meetings. We called them assemblies. People talking for hours. I had never done a meeting before. Well, I had done NA [Narcotics Anonymous], but this was different. People kept coming and going, taking food. At the end of the second day, we decided to start doing distribution systematically. People went door to door all across the South Bronx, and then we started connecting with people in Harlem and slowly across the city. They started trying to figure out who needed food most, how much food people needed, how they were currently getting it. They cleared out the food in thousands of boxes, one per building if we could get a good contact. Then they started sending trucks out to the farms.
O’Brien: Farms?
Kelley: Mostly agriculture within driving distance. I went to visit some of the farms in the Hudson Valley and a big one around Lancaster. Global shipping was breaking down by then. By the time we re-established shipping lines, years later, no one wanted to be shipping food halfway round the world again. Unless it was really special food. So regional agriculture. But at this point, in the couple of years before the insurrection, the farms had mostly been under military jurisdiction. Then the military cleared out, and many of them hadn’t gotten paid and didn’t have any supplies and were pretty freaked out. Some of them had been taken over by farm workers. They worked out these deals with the farms. No money, and not exactly any exchange. But people went out to help staff the farms, others found, or stole, or built the equipment they needed, and they started to build out these networks for getting food into the city that didn’t involve money. Hunts Point became the distribution center for half the city. It was lucky the Army and police were too busy elsewhere, or more and more, were fighting it out with each other.
O’Brien: You say they did all this? Who is “they”?
Kelley: Oh, I guess it was me too. I argued a lot, and I had a lot to say, but it was hard for me to see it as something I was doing too. I had never done anything like that. I guess no one ever had. I have all this political language to understand the insurrection at this point, talking about communizing and all. I guess I learned that lingo once the insurrection started really poppin’ off everywhere, after taking the Market. I had to start seeing what we were doing at the Market as part of something bigger. But in the weeks after taking the Market I focused on what I was best at: taking care of people. About five hundred people came to live in the Market and work on food distribution. I made sure every one of them got taken care of when they were sick, had friends or a sweetie or decent sex, had a safe place to sleep, had ways to learn something new and help out. Me and the girls took charge of caring for everyone. We set up a drug detox, and a kitchen, and a clinic, and a school. Eventually that got shared around, but for the first few years we decided it would be our job to make sure everyone who came our way would get what they needed. It was an inspiration for a lot of people in trying to rethink how to live. I found my role here at the beginning, and I focused on that so I wouldn’t find the rest of it too overwhelming. My role was to make sure everyone was taken care of who came to work here or came to live here.
O’Brien: It must have been a lot of work.
Kelley: I don’t know about that. I guess in a way, but I have rested more in the last fifteen years than I ever did in my decades before. Life before all that was work, the awful impossible work. Compared to all that, this is my retirement … I can’t believe it’s still here. Fifteen years later. I’ve been living here ever since. It’s a big one, our commune, spread out over the whole neighborhood. Our main role is keeping the Market going, in getting food into the city and out to where it’s needed. We also make some farm equipment in the warehouses here and do all these rural/city collaboratives. We think of Hunts Point as the connector between the rest of the area and the Bronx and Manhattan. A million people have gone out from the city to work on the farms for a season or so over the years, and most of that we coordinated. Lots of farmers have come into the city to meet kids in the canteens, to see how people depend on them, or to help with the agricultural science research unit we set up at Hostos. I ran food distribution for three years, but it was too much for me. Too much responsibility and conflict. It kind of makes you the president of Hunts Point, when you are running the food. I keep thinking it should be a group, but people really like to have someone to blame. But I’m still a part of the commune, still here. Now I run the Center here, I guess. A lot of us from those first days are still around.
O’Brien: What does the commune mean to you?
Kelley: It means we take care of each other. It means everything for everyone. It means we communized the shit out of this place. It means we took something that was property and made it life.
O’Brien: There’s the commune where you live, but also the commune of the whole region.
Kelley: Yeah, I started to see that as we took over making sure everyone got fed. That it was all in layers. That me and the girls could help take care of those hauling the food in and out, that they could take care of the borough, the borough could take care of the city, the city could take care of the whole region. And the region could take care of us. It’s all the commune. It’s all for everyone. It took a lot of fighting, and a lot of dying, and every day it seemed impossible, but we made it through. Somehow, we made it through. I may not be as pretty as I was, but that’s okay. I’m proud, not proud in the same way I used to be, but proud of us.
O’Brien: How did you all end up deciding to distribute the food?
Kelley: We fed the revolution; you can know that for cert. They—I guess I mean we—figured out pretty quick that the best way of handing out food wasn’t exactly through families or grocery stores, but through big, coordinated living projects of whole buildings, blocks, or neighborhoods. As people pushed back the army and the police forces, fighting it out neighborhood by neighborhood, more and more people took to living like we did here at Hunts Point. People still had families, I guess, people they would live with in apartments, or raise a kid with, or sleep with. But everything was taken care of for the whole block together, with assemblies to try to sort out the tricky bits. So, if you couldn’t get along easy with someone you could just move into another apartment in the building and it was no big deal, you were taken care of. We would distribute food through these communes, or through neighborhood canteens, and it ended up being a huge support for people breaking into new ways of living. And with a decent place to sleep and eat, people got a lot bolder fighting it out in the streets. For some years, across Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, a chunk of Jersey around Fort Lee and Cliffside Park and Edgewater, and a bit of Mount Vernon and New Rochelle—everyone who was really in the struggle ate from a canteen supplied through the Hunts Point Market.
O’Brien: Was everyone taken care of? What about landlords? Ex-cops? Asshole business owners?
Kelley: Cert we weren’t afraid to starve someone out or take some messier and bloodier steps. So no, no bosses, no pigs, none of them could come around while sticking to their old ways. But if they gave up whatever they had, quit their old jobs, and came to us without property or power—that was a phrase I learned then, I remember people used it, “without property or power”—then sure, we would be happy to feed them just like everybody else. We’d keep an eye on them, though, to make sure they didn’t try anything too sneaky. It was usually the neighborhoods that took care of that. We took care of it for the Bronx, and we made sure that we weren’t shippin’ no food to no owners.
O’Brien: How did sex work change with the commune?
Kelley: Oh, it completely changed. You know, there were years of fights about if we were even allowed to keep doing it. People had all sorts of ideas about what was proper and who should fuck who and how after the Revolution. I never had any time for that. I guess because those of us in skincraft were running things up here right from the go, and we were one of the first communes in the whole city, we managed to shout those people down. But it was like the world turned inside out. No one was using money, or exchange, we decided that early on. And the girls were in charge—like we figured out housing, and food, and healthcare for everyone who came to work the Market—so there wasn’t anyone who could boss us around. Of course, lots of girls stopped fucking and never looked back, or settled down or became agricultural engineers, and that’s all fine and good.
But a lot stayed in the work. I did, I kind of liked being a skinner, as a break from the stress of arguing about food distro. At first, we thought of it like physical therapy for disabled people. Like if we knew someone couldn’t get a good fuck because of how their body looked, a girl would volunteer to work with them. But what people found to be sexy has changed a lot over the years. Now disability isn’t the big deal for sex that it used to be. For a while, we focused on putting on sex parties that were fun and safe and could help people open up to try things they hadn’t. We had some really great ones, and lots of people in the network still organize stuff like that. A lot of girls got trained as therapists, helping people talk through sex. We found sex is really at the center of so, so much. So many emotional problems get tied up with how people relate to sex. Sometimes talking helps sort through all that, sometimes fucking. I have always said the most important thing about a person is what makes them come. A lot of people who got into mental health in the communes kept forgetting that, so we had to be there to keep bringing it up. Some skinners focus on working with people after major changes in their lives, like when they change genders, or go through menopause, or get in an accident that changes how they fuck.
O’Brien: It sounds like sex work—I mean skinwork—became like a holistic therapeutic practice, integrating all these different kinds of care work.
Kelley: Yes honey, that sounds about right. It was so different from what sex work had been in a lot of ways, but the experiences and skills of walking the stroll actually helped out a lot. The biggest difference was that we made sure the skinner always runs the show, and gets lots of support, and is in touch with a network of other people doing work like they are. The girls have to be in charge.
I still call them girls sometime, but I know I shouldn’t do that. These days, most in skincraft are a lot more flexible about gender than I ever was. Everyone feels better when they have a way of contributing. Speaking as someone who is open to having a lot of really different kinds of sex with a lot of really different kinds of people, we find a way to make it into something helpful, and kind, and good for people. That’s where our social center comes in, to be a space for skinners to talk through what it means to do whatever it is we do year by year in a world where work has changed so much.
O’Brien: Anything else you want to share?
Kelley: Somewhere inside I’m still the girl I was when I first came back home from Chelsea. I want everyone to love me, everyone to see how beautiful I am. I don’t admit it too much these days, but I don’t want to be forgotten. So many girls have died, and only a few of us remember them. I want people to remember me. It’s silly to say, hearing myself now, but it’s still how I feel. I try to do all the history projects I can, vids, and holos, and talking to whoever comes my way. I tell myself it’s so everyone knows the history, and knows how hard we fought, and how hard we have to defend it. And that’s true, maybe. It’s true. That history does matter. But I also do it because I know I’m going to die too before too long, one of these days, and I want my voice to stay with people. I want people to remember my face. I guess I’m still trying to take up space after all this.
O’Brien: You enjoy the nostalgia, and you enjoy imagining yourself in that heroic history.
Kelley: Yeah, I guess I do! The battles were so glamorous, like they turned us all into heroes in one way or another. And I had always kind of thought of myself as a queen, like I maintained an inner sense of my beauty even when things were hard … I imagine you must get this a lot doing oral histories. I have gotten to know how I tick over the years, and I see what I get out of it—I like nostalgia, you are right. I like the sense that I understood what was happening when I was young, fierce, and beautiful. Things are amazing and exciting now, but they are very confusing—I have thought a lot over the years about what I get out of thinking of myself as a hero, or as a queen, or whatever the story I’m telling myself is. History is so much actually just people telling the story of themselves they want others to remember.
O’Brien: I think people are going to remember you, Miss Kelley.
Kelley: Thanks love. You are a sweetheart. Thanks for recording this.
O’Brien: Thank you, Miss Kelley.