Reference Source: NPR Code Switch: Dispatches from the living memory of trans people of color
I heard a line on Code Switch recently that stuck with me. A simple, quiet preamble: “I’m going to stay in my own lane. I can’t speak for you.”
So this is my lane. I’m not your hero. I’m not your blueprint. I’m just a man with a handful of stories — potatoes in a rock soup — about identity and how quickly it can go from power to peril when the world decides it’s time to pull the rug.
The Vampire Door
I first understood how identity can be both sanctuary and trap when I left D.C. for Norwich, England, in 1990. A small farming city, not exactly London. By day you’d see farmers in muddy wellies, barber jackets, big rough hands. By night, some of those same men would slip through the door of the town’s single gay disco — a pint in hand, glitter on the collar, a nod to the bouncer who knew. A quick orbit on the floor under Donna Summer, then cloak up and gone before dawn.
It was the vampire door: a portal where you could be fully seen for a few hours, then invisible again when the sun rose. I carried that with me ever since — how the door always swings both ways.
Foggy Bottom, Dupont Circle, and the Fever Dream
But really, I’d seen it before I ever crossed the Atlantic.
I started at George Washington University in Foggy Bottom in 1988 — just a short walk down 16th Street from Dupont Circle, which at the time was one of the queerest, loudest, bravest neighborhoods in America.
D.C. then was a neon fever dream: drag races down 17th, block parties, fetish shops, basement bars — whole blocks that felt like a portal. The vampire door again, but bigger and sweatier.
My friends and I — queer, straight, shape-shifters all — learned early that the bar at seven is a family reunion, but the bar at eleven is the pack. You wanted to glow. You also wanted to make it home.
In 1990, Norwich sharpened that lesson for me. Back in D.C. in 1992 to finish my degree, same streets, same door. I’ve never forgotten it: Step through when you need to. Slip out before the wolves get curious.
The Walled Garden
Later, when the Internet was still dial-up and a blinking cursor, I found that same vampire-door logic online. I was part of The MetaNetwork, The WELL — small proto-communities you couldn’t just stumble into. You needed a password, an invite, sometimes even a personal vouch. A digital lodge. A fire circle.
It’s the same reason I love my Freemason lodge. Anyone can see the building. The charity dinners are public. But when the doors close, there’s a man with a sword. Not because we’re hoarding treasure — but because context is fragile. Meaning leaks when the wrong eyes peek. Leak the lodge, salt the garden.
Stealth Is Not Shame
People hear stealth and think it’s fear. Sometimes stealth is strategy. I once heard a concealed-carry instructor say: “The best weapon is the one nobody knows you have.”
Don’t print. Don’t brandish. Don’t talk big. You keep your cloak close because you know the street outside is still 1950. Sometimes stealth is how you stay alive long enough to shout again tomorrow.
Whitman’s YAWP and the Uranium
But the truth is — we still YAWP. Walt Whitman was America’s big queer bard long before Pride was a float. He wrote about hips and lips and alleys. And the same country that would’ve tarred him in another life made O Captain! My Captain! required reading for every child.
America loves the YAWP once it’s embalmed. It’s the living, raw version it hates. The louder you get, the more you build antibodies against yourself. You become uranium: radiant, potent, impossible to ignore — and the perfect fuel to refine, spin up, and point back at you when the machine decides it’s time to push you back under.
Sanctions Are War
This is how they do it now. Not with clubs or a rope, but with money. You don’t need a pickup and a chain when you can pull the public funding.
Look at the Supreme Court’s Skrmetti ruling in 2025: upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. No more puberty blockers, no more hormone therapy. It didn’t outlaw trans kids — it just turned off the faucet. Starve the care. Starve the identity.
Or Planned Parenthood — same year, same knife. The Court said states can block them from Medicaid money for anything — not just abortion, which was already off the table for public dollars, but contraception, cancer screenings, the stuff they do for millions who can’t find another doctor. They didn’t need to ban abortion outright. They just made it so expensive you have to cut off your own arm to survive.
That’s how sanctions work. It’s the same trick we use to squeeze Cuba, Iran, or Russia — turned inward. The system says: “Want to stay funded? Just amputate the piece that makes us squirm. Cut out the drag shows. The hormones. The trans kids. The pronouns.”
And if you won’t? The pack says, “Fine. Starve.”
The Wolves at 11
That’s the real vibe shift. The bar at seven is your found family. The bar at eleven is the werewolves — and the pack is bigger than a club. It’s the lawyer with a ballot. It’s the think tank with a donor list. It’s the 1950 ghosts still living inside the court, the city hall, your neighbor’s vote.
You can’t extrapolate from the sweaty pride parade to the rest of the country. The pack is always circling. Your YAWP is real. So are the antibodies it summons.
My Lane
So this is my lane. I was never the hero. I was the shape-shifter who knew when to slip back through the vampire door before the vibe turned. Pretty enough to drink your Absolut, straight but not narrow enough to leave before I had to answer for it.
I’m not telling you to hide. I’m not telling you not to shout. I’m saying: Be careful what you ask for.
Visibility is power — but only if you understand how the pack moves.
Stealth is not shame. It’s strategy.
Context is a garden. Spill it for clout, and you salt the soil.
Your YAWP is holy. So is your cloak.
Stay submarine when you need to.
Always gone before 11.
Chris Abraham is a writer, uncle-mage, and digital elder. He once drank your Absolut and slipped out before the lights came up — and he still wants you to make it home safe.
✨ APPENDIX: The Cloak, The Door, and The Wolves
A Rock Soup Field Manual for Staying Seen, Staying Safe, and Staying Submarine When You Have To
This is not your blueprint. It’s just my lane. Take what’s useful. Leave what’s noise.
📜 Timeline & Context — A Pocket History for Your Back Pocket
Not exhaustive. Not gospel. Just a breadcrumb trail so you know we didn’t get here overnight.
1924 — Society for Human Rights, Chicago — first known U.S. gay rights group. Shut down within a year after police raids and arrests.
1950 — Mattachine Society founded in LA — early, mostly secret, aimed to “normalize the deviant.” Small cells. Pseudonyms. Proto-vampire door.
1955 — Daughters of Bilitis — first sustained lesbian rights organization in the U.S., started in SF. Mostly house parties at first — literally closets turned safe rooms.
1969 — Stonewall Riots: A flashpoint but not the start. The mafia-owned gay bar got raided by NYPD — routine. This time, trans women, street kids, drag queens, hustlers fought back. Sylvia Rivera. Marsha P. Johnson. The vampire door became a battleground.
1973 — APA removes homosexuality from the DSM-II: Officially no longer a “mental disorder.” It took votes, resignations, and brave psychiatrists to break that door open.
1981 — CDC reports on HIV/AIDS: The first official mention. By 1985, half the known U.S. cases were dead. By 1995, over 300,000 Americans had died. The quilt was the vampire door — a record and a shield.
1993 — “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: Compromise that let queer folks serve in the U.S. military — if they stayed stealth. Over 13,000 were discharged anyway.
2003 — Lawrence v. Texas: Supreme Court strikes down anti-sodomy laws still active in 14 states. The last shred of legal “privacy crimes” for being gay goes out the vampire door.
2015 — Obergefell v. Hodges: Same-sex marriage legal nationwide. 5–4 decision — it was that narrow.
2020 — Bostock v. Clayton County: SCOTUS rules that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ workers. Another 6–3 split.
2025 — United States v. Skrmetti: SCOTUS upholds Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors. Signals states can define “child safety” however they want — as long as they say it’s in the kid’s best interest.
2025 — SCOTUS lets states block Planned Parenthood from all Medicaid funding: Not just abortions — but contraception, cancer screenings, routine care for millions who use Planned Parenthood as their primary doc.
⚖️ Key Details — What the Skrmetti & Planned Parenthood Rulings Actually Mean
United States v. Skrmetti (2025):
Upheld 6–3 by the conservative bloc, citing states’ “compelling interest in protecting minors.”
The Equal Protection Clause was the target — plaintiffs argued bans singled out trans kids for worse treatment. SCOTUS said states get broad leeway if they claim “health & safety.”
As of 2025, over half of U.S. states have pending or passed bills limiting puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or requiring detransition protocols for minors.
It doesn’t automatically ban adult trans care — but insurance carriers and clinics may restrict access to avoid lawsuits.
Planned Parenthood Medicaid Ruling (2025):
Also 6–3. SCOTUS found that Medicaid patients can’t sue states for cutting off providers.
Medicaid “freedom of choice” is now more theory than fact. States can defund by claiming they dislike “the moral character” of the provider.
Abortion funding was already mostly off the table under the Hyde Amendment — this expands that power to everything else.
Think of it like sanctions we use on hostile countries — but turned inward on communities at home.
🕳️ Vampire Door Field Guide — Where to YAWP, Where to Cloak
A vampire door is not a myth — it’s a real threshold, usually a place or moment where you can be fully seen without worrying the wolves are watching too closely. Subcultures build them. Governments raid them. The Internet tries to flatten them. Protect yours.
🌙 Where to Find Yours (and How They’ve Worked Before):
Queer bars and discos: Think 17th Street, Dupont Circle, the Stonewall Inn, DC’s Velvet Nation. Before apps and open flags, this was where you glowed.
House parties: Sometimes safer than bars — no bouncer, just a circle that knows how to watch the door.
Bathhouses and saunas: Crucial for generations who had nowhere else to touch, heal, or just breathe together.
Ballrooms, drag shows, underground clubs: The MC, the door fee, the unspoken rule: what’s inside stays inside.
Online “walled gardens”: Password-protected forums, Discord servers with manual vetting, locked group chats — they still exist. They’re fragile, too.
Faith communities: Not every religion is a closet. Black churches, queer-friendly synagogues, radical convents have all served as doors.
Lodges, covens, reading circles: Groups that protect context, that close the door when the world would flatten your nuance.
Solo vampire doors: Your night walk. Your playlist. Your hand-written diary. You might be the only one who sees it — and that can be enough.
💡 Small truth: A vampire door only works if it stays partly hidden. Once you broadcast it, you invite the pack in. That’s not gatekeeping — that’s garden-keeping.
🧥 10 Ways to Stay Submarine — Practical, Not Paranoid
1️⃣ Keep your circle small enough to notice when something shifts.
2️⃣ Separate your public face from your private garden. An alias is armor, not betrayal.
3️⃣ Watch for the vibe shift — the bar at 7 is your family, the bar at 11 can be the wolves.
4️⃣ Don’t dox the door.
5️⃣ Keep records — screenshots, receipts, your own timeline.
6️⃣ Encrypt if you can. Signal is free. Proton is cheap. You deserve that line of defense.
7️⃣ Practice blending. The “Gray Man” mindset is centuries old: monks, witches, queer kids slipping out the side door.
8️⃣ Strategic silence beats an unforced error.
9️⃣ Stay linked — your people should know if you vanish.
🔟 Remember: stealth is not shame. It’s how you get to build the next door.
📚 Code Switch & the Living Memory
I borrowed the line “I’m staying in my lane” from an episode that sat with trans elders of color.
They survived by knowing which room to shout in — and which room to slip through before dawn.
They watched a generation build radical visibility, and they feel pride and fear for them at once.
I carry that dual truth with me.
If you listen to just one thing, make it this: NPR — Dispatches from the Living Memory
✅ True / False — A Few Bullets to Keep Straight
✔️ TRUE: The Skrmetti ruling greenlights state-level bans on gender-affirming care for minors.
✔️ TRUE: The Planned Parenthood decision makes it harder to sue when states yank all Medicaid dollars.
✔️ TRUE: These rulings use funding as leverage — the same tactic we use abroad, turned inward.
✖️ FALSE: These bans “make being trans illegal.” They don’t — they just starve care and scare clinics.
✖️ FALSE: “This won’t spread.” It already is. Some blue states will copy the playbook for different moral lines.
📖 Glossary — So You Don’t Have to Pretend You Know
Vampire Door: A place or moment of safe, temporary radical being — until the vibe shifts.
YAWP: Whitman’s word for the raw, defiant self: “I sound my barbaric yawp…”
Uranium: Identity that’s powerful, but volatile when spun by the machine.
Sanctions as War: Using money and policy to erase instead of outlaw.
Gray Man: Stay unnoticed when it keeps you alive.
Wolves at 11: The family room that can turn — the pack arrives when the vibe shifts.
🔑 Final Note — One More Nerd Fact
If you remember nothing else, remember this:
The vibe shift is real. It always has been.
Every vampire door in history has been raided, infiltrated, or exploited when the coordinates leaked.
But new ones always grow — because the YAWP can’t be killed, only cloaked.
Keep it alive. Guard your garden. Leave before 11.
— Chris Abraham
Writer. Digital elder. Wonky uncle who still wants you to make it home safe.
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