Devotion as an Orienting Strategy

Devotion as an Orienting Strategy

Written by Liam Whitworth, Photography by  A. Klass

Liam is a Portland-born artist, producer, and community builder whose work centers queer history, collective care, and what it actually takes to hold community together. In this guest post, Liam explores devotion as a guiding practice, choosing where we place our attention, labor, and love amid the real tensions shaping queer life today. It’s a thoughtful, grounded reflection on identity, transition, class, and belonging, and a powerful invitation to move away from purity politics and back toward shared responsibility and care.

What drew you to Portland’s queer community?

I was born in Portland and grew up in rural Oregon with a working-class family. I was raised primarily by an autistic single father. This is important context around how I conceptualize my queerness. Devotion is central to us as autistic people, and devotion is central in rural culture. Portland’s queer community has a legacy of activism, care, and creativity, and I see all of that as being rooted in devotion. Devotion is an orienting strategy when I think about the queer community and how I show up at Lesbian Culture Club. Devotion is the practice of choosing where we direct attention and care.

What do you do professionally and creatively in Portland’s queer community?

I am a working artist raising money for and producing others' events and films, and, when I have time, raising money for and producing my own events and films. Before that, I worked in creative tourism. My first spouse and I ran a sapphic hospitality business here for several years. Currently, I have six projects going. Most of them have to do with preserving archives around the Pacific Northwest.

How would you love to see Portland’s queer community grow and evolve, and what part do you hope you and Lesbian Culture Club might play?

I would love to see Portland’s queer community be more graceful with each other. We are going through a challenging season. We’ve had so, so many “unprecedented times”. I could really use some precedented times. It’s the holidays, and I know a lot of queer Oregonians are feeling isolated. I get it. I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, or Christmas. I see Lesbian Culture Club as reimagining participatory care, shared process, and queer ritual. Loving kindness from chosen family can soothe the pain of abandonment by blood family. People I’ve met at Lesbian Culture Club events have described feeling more open, more tapped in, less alone. We’re not healed from COVID. We need gatherings that operate as public health interventions. We need embodied space for processing trauma and rekindling joy. I’m seeing a lot of tension in the queer community, not only left versus right, but also division between transgender and transsexual people, and between various types of newer Gen-Z queers and old-school, hard-line lesbians. I’m seeing tension between urban and rural people and between people with advanced education and autodidact/homeschool types. Portland’s queer community is under pressure to perform unity when the actual relations are complicated. I’m seeing class tension. Portland lesbians are not one group; most are working class and barely getting by. Some are comfortable. A few are completely financially secure. Resource differences shape how conflict shows up. It’s comforting to believe that queer people are automatically family with each other, but the last ten years have shown us that might not always be the case. I’m seeing more extreme, dangerous ideologies take hold, such as the “LGB without the T” movement in Great Britain. Instead of fighting over who counts as what, I want us to return to devotion.

When I get tangled up in politics, I consult my elders and mentors. I look to Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Carol Maso, Tove Jansson, Elena Ferrante, Emily Grosholz, Jo Ann Beard, leatherdÿke Cosima Bee Concordia (AKA @bimbo.theory on Instagram), and Fleur Jaeggy. I look to Kathy Belge, the journalist who ran the popular femme/butch advice column “Lipstick and Dipstick” for Curve Magazine, Miss Major Griffin Gracy, a trans activist, poet KB Brookins, Sappho, bisexual writer and swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch,  who wrote “The Misfit's Manifesto”, Leslie Feinberg, who wrote “Stone Butch Blues”, and Marsha P. Johnson, a trans artist who cofounded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries to support homeless queer youth. Devotion is the way I re-locate myself in community when our internal politics feel chaotic. Intention matters more than diction. Feinberg used multiple pronouns: she/her, ze/hir, and sometimes he/him. I use all pronouns. I am not especially attached to the word transgender. I prefer the word transsexual.* But I would even more prefer to re-direct conversations away from semantics, as Feinberg advised us, towards more pressing issues like classism, racism, and genocide. 

How have your identity labels changed over time? 

For some years now, I’ve been living as a "trans" "guy", but the economic realities of my life are deeply rooted in lesbianism and in womanhood. Identity, like passing, is incredibly context dependent. It has been a truly wild experience to have a few years under my belt now of being greeted by strangers as “sir”, lol. There are times one might prefer to be read as male for safety reasons…but at the end of the day, I’m not NOT a lesbian. Y’know? I’m interested in how people get caught up on the word “lesbian” and the evolving terms we use for gender and sexuality. I’m married to a woman. The word “lesbian” doesn’t trouble me; I’m happy for it to apply to me. I feel welcome at Lesbian Culture Club events. Lesbianism connects me to our history. There are many transmasculine people who do not feel this way. Across the LGBTQ2SIA+ community, I am hearing many conflicting, swirling feelings about labels. I know trans men who feel they cannot return to lesbian spaces, trans women who want to come but are scared of getting rejected at lesbian gatherings, and lesbians who feel like the word “lesbian” has been stretched too far and no longer means anything. None of this is simple to parse, but Portland’s queer community, in my experience, is at least willing to try. I’d love for us to host a conversation that brings together different generations and includes African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Native people. Young queer people are navigating a completely different reality than I did; their ideas and culture are massively shaped by the internet and by political/economic chaos. Often, they’re acting out of suspicion rather than assuming positive intent. Let’s hear more about how these terms have shifted. People deserve the right to self-determination. Devotion is one way of naming the long term commitments that hold queer subcultures together. I want us to slow down and think out loud together offline. This is something I see you are hoping to create with Lesbian Culture Club. 

How has your identity informed your activism?

I hope being a gender non-conforming person will inform the creativity of my activism. Especially, going back to identity labels, when it comes to staying focused on long-term goals. I care less about perfect activism and more about pragmatic activism. Portland’s queer community keeps trying to stabilize reality by naming it, renaming it, and defending those terms. A term only has value if it helps us think, communicate, and organize. It’s reasonable to inherit language from earlier movements; it’s reasonable to stretch that language to meet the complexity of our lives. Lately, especially online, when someone says “I feel differently about this word,” the other person reacts like they're being murdered. Disagreement has become a bit unsafe, at least socially unsafe. But ideas don't disappear when someone disagrees with the language attached to them. Social realities only get stable when we agree to co-create them in a stable way. We could always choose to make new, different agreements. We could build a new social and linguistic reality together if we wanted to, but it would require releasing the idea that there is only one correct way to describe our lives. I hope we shift our attention back toward the real un-safeties, which affect those who are least protected. Trans women are not safe. Black women are not safe. They face physical danger. Fixation on phrasing has not produced safety, stability, or shared power for them. I can’t maintain a long-term friendship with someone who cares more about policing language than building systems that help people survive and thrive. I am a transmasculine person with transfeminine friends. I see how far apart our conversations are sometimes. T-boys are talking about our most nuanced inner fashion feelings and hoping our height might increase an inch or two. T-girls are navigating a nearly constant stream of death threats. Our attention is often misplaced. Our efforts should be re-focused on preventing violence and harm.

Was there a turning point that shaped the identity path you’re on today?

Having gender-affirming “top” (mastectomy) surgery was a turning point. People had so many feelings about it. I was shocked by the coercion, threats, and meanness people directed at me about MY breasts. For most of my life, my chest wasn’t an issue. I had very small breasts that I liked and rarely thought of. Then I had a hysterectomy. Hormonal shifts caused everything to grow. Suddenly, breasts felt unbearable, interfering with all my patterns in dance, sex, surfing, yoga. I couldn’t ignore how much they were weirding me out…very awkward. After years of bother, I went for it. Not an easy or exciting decision. I didn’t always feel transsexual. I don’t relate to “born in the wrong body”. Perhaps nobody is completely comfortable in a body. Recovery was easy, much easier than hysterectomy. Physical transition has been fun and happy, but the parts situated in a broader social context are excruciating. My family has been cruel. Their vitriol and ostracism hit hard. Still, my choice was worth it. Only you can decide what body situation is going to work for your lifestyle and make your days bearable. One consistent response about my choice was, “How could you do this to me?” That says a lot about the agency we grant women. I'm pleased with my results, proud of my big desires, not significantly more mentally ill than the average bear, and not a vulnerable woman who was tricked into mutilating her body. Rhetoric around this procedure is degrading. I do not believe mastectomy magically turned me into a man. Rather, it compressed distributed suffering into a dense period of weeks. It infused pleasure into my daily activities (especially trail running and putting on a soft clean t-shirt). Mostly a sensory thing. It improved my quality of life. What I hope to design, especially in groups like Lesbian Culture Club, is a practice space for collective devotion, for improving quality of life for each other. The life I would have had in most other places and times, such as with my ancestors in Northern Ireland, would have involved extremely hard labor, subsistence farming, probably having had at least a couple babies by now, endless chores, being cold a lot of the time, and a lot of encounters that didn’t require my "enthusiastic yes". Instead, I get to live with no boobs on and go trail running. It’s a dream come true. It’s powerful (and privileged) to get to make so many of my own choices. That’s what I wish more transphobic people would acknowledge or understand: if you really loved someone, you’d want them to be free enough to make their own choices. I love growing up. I love rest and ambition and breaking from history. I hope these are some of the freedoms my ancestors imagined for me.  

What’s one surprising thing about gender transition that most people don’t know?

Gender transition has been much harder (emotionally) and much easier (physically) than I expected. It’s interacted with neurodivergence in surprising, spiritual ways. I’ve heard that from many other transsexual people. I've met some autistic people who are transsexual, but almost every transsexual person I've met has had at least some symptoms of autism: alternative communication preferences, a not-normal life path, a-typically social, obsession, spiritual intrigue, repetitive behaviors. I believe these things are connected in ways we do not yet understand. The physical world is malleable. If we know what we want and move towards it with energy and conviction, reality can reconfigure itself more quickly and easily than we might expect. 

What’s a challenge you’ve faced around gender transition that taught you something about yourself?

When I was deciding whether or not to transition, I asked cis and trans men about masculinity. One of my favorite quotes was from my mentor, Anselm Hook. He said that for him, being a man means asking, “Can I carry any more weight?” I loved that framing: masculinity as the option to step up to the plate and take on more responsibility. To be in service of others. Not that lesbians aren’t famous for taking on labor! But I’ve enjoyed the challenge of exploring the idea from a transmasculine perspective. This is another way devotion can feel like an orientation. It is part of how I decide who I am accountable to and how I can help.

If you could go back and give advice to your younger self — or to someone walking a similar path — what would you say?

Be open to having conversations with lots of different types of people. “Ask me anything. I won’t cancel you if you use the wrong word. If I have time, I will answer.” Open conversations are how we build trust and shared language. Finding devotion to shared goals will help us rebuild. These days, I try to center my time and attention around north stars. I want to raise awareness, for myself and others, about how to improve conditions. I hope the people who form new bonds at Lesbian Culture Club will be interested in collaborating on how to reduce the impacts of classism, racism, and genocide. My mantra is: keep dreamin and schemin.  

Are there local causes, movements, or organizations that are close to your heart?

I have really enjoyed my gigs with the Oregon Community Foundation. They are one of the largest community foundations in the United States and operate statewide in Oregon. Basically they pool funds to support programs that improve quality of life in extremely tangible ways. I don’t think the non-profit model is going to save us, by any means, but their impact is undeniable. I think of their leaders as very devoted.

What brings you joy outside of work?

My wife is very playful. Just an incredibly bright person. Going on walks with her brings me joy. 

What are you manifesting or calling in for the new year?

More time with pets and animals. 

Morning person, night owl, or neither?

I like to work hard. Both are great.

Favorite place in Portland right now?

My business partner Emmanuel “Onry” Henreid is creating a space for queer singers. He is a professional opera singer and loves to help people find, and re-find, their voice.   

Song you have on repeat?

“Mama's Gonna Give You Love” by Emily Wells

Who inspires you right now — in life, in love, in art, in work?

Carol Maso.

What has been your favorite LCC event or moment so far?

I have really enjoyed the dinners. Lesbians having dinner is just romantic. Sacred conversation. I love being cooked for.

What do you appreciate most about the LCC community?

There’s a good mix of spiritual seekers, kind people, partnered people, hardworking professionals, and horny people. I don’t want to hang in a space that’s not at least a little bit sex-positive. 

*I use “transsexual” here in an affirmative way to emphasize bodily modification, transformation, risk, vulnerability, social peril, re-presentation, scars, and eroticized, rebellious embodiment. It was the old-school term for those seeking hormones and surgery. Physical transition is currently not safe and includes taking steps against fascism and normativity. Some people reclaim "transsexual" to resist assimilation and allude to this risk. Reclaiming this word names the underground, criminalized, orgasmic, terrifying courage, hunger, danger, and joy of changing your own form. It drips with the thrill of becoming. The word “transsexual” honors the anti-respectability of choosing a form that can get you fired, beaten, or killed. The word “transgender” is a more inclusive umbrella term used in broader cultural or political contexts (e.g., referencing "transgender care"); it covers many kinds of gender variance, including crossdressers, non-binary folks, non-transitioning gender-variant folks, and other genderqueer identities. 

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGB_Alliance

https://www.curvemag.com/tag/lipstick-and-dipstick/

https://wams.nyhistory.org/end-of-the-twentieth-century/the-information-age/miss-major-griffin-gracy/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/k-b-brookins

https://lidiayuknavitch.net/bio-1

https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/marsha-p-johnson

https://anselm.substack.com/

https://deepwaters.union.site/teachers/onry-h

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