Fairness in girls’ sports starts in kindergarten. Why argue about eligibility standards when we can simply examine every K-12 student athlete before every practice, game, meet, and match? It's time for a return to the fundamentals: teamwork, fair competition, orange slices, and a committee of adults establishing what is underneath every child’s uniform before every practice, game or match.
Something something first amendment rights, am I right?
Well, would you look at this, it's another willy-nilly social post hammering on about my hometown's ordinances again.
For just about the last month, I’ve been asking what Davis intends to do about conduct that has frightened people for years, and why city officials won't enforce an ordinance already on the books. It's a question for the city. The city has shown little appetite for answering it.
A Facebook group devoted to the same problem had rather more to say. Asking public officials for accountability was deemed unhelpful because I had not participated in its “solutions currently in process.” My address, possible future address and 8:30 PM zoom meeting attendance were also entered into evidence. It was the most vigorous inquiry my question had prompted, though none of the subjects were the municipal ordinance actually in question.
People coordinating a response when someone is targeted are doing valuable work. I want that work to succeed. I also want elected officials to explain what they are doing. These ambitions can coexist without anyone’s permission. Coalitions are built by gathering people with different skills and approaches, not by appointing a registrar to determine which of them has earned the right by geography to care.
If every new voice must first establish its standing with the existing opposition, the woman causing the trouble has acquired something rather useful: an opposition willing to spend its energy policing itself.
https://noraallen.substack.com/p/gatekeeping-davis-city-accountability-community-safety
Since the Mayor and the city council have declined to respond to repeated requests for explanation, I'm publishing the email exchange from Henry Todd, man with two first names and the Davis Chief of Police.
Perhaps city leaders got lost while looking for their spins. If anyone has seen them lately, please feel free to ask any and all of these questions until they answer.
Yesterday, I wrote directly to the Mayor and City Council asking what Davis intends to do for residents subjected to repeated targeted conduct. I included my original essay, the Reddit discussion now crowded with firsthand accounts and the recent Davis Enterprise letter, because apparently even civic despair benefits from supporting documentation.
The reply came not from an elected official or the City Manager, but from Police Chief Todd Henry, who informed me that he was responding on the council’s behalf. This produced the rather elegant bureaucratic arrangement in which questions about the responsiveness of an institution were referred to the head of that institution for an assessment of its responsiveness.
After some correspondence, Chief Henry confirmed that DPD can connect complaints involving repeated conduct by the same person, including reports that didn’t lead to arrest or prosecution. He also said residents should report incidents that don’t independently meet the threshold of a crime. These are useful admissions, and I don’t dismiss them merely because they arrived upholstered in generalities.
Still unanswered: How those reports are connected, who ensures they aren’t evaluated in isolation and what the City does before a pattern becomes prosecutable. The chief acknowledged knowing about an alleged up-the-skirt filming incident at Davis Pride this year but didn’t confirm whether anyone followed up with the person who reported it (the individual who reported it maintains no one has reached out since filing the complaint). The broader questions about City policy, public guidance, meetings with affected residents and support for targeted organizations remain untouched.
I’m allowing the council and City Manager a little more time to respond directly before sharing the Chief's correspondence in full. If no such response is had by Friday, which would everyone prefer: the original screen grabs, in all their six-mile vertical glory, or a clean, complete transcript with no edits beyond formatting?
Original open letter to the city is linked out here.
https://noraallen.substack.com/p/open-letter-davis-free-speech-public-safety?r=c61mx&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
[This Substack post is a little lengthy to fully copy/paste here, but it's worth the read.]
The City of Davis used to be a really nice family friendly town. And I want to believe that under the leadership of Mayor Donna Neville it still is. But an incident this past week involving the former artistic director of a local youth theater, her infant child and family, as well as the bright and wonderful teenage company members, has me wondering.
To live in a small town is to submit to a certain amount of mutual surveillance. People notice your haircut, your divorce and the regrettable duration for which your recycling bin remains at the curb. Davis, California, however, has permitted this ordinary provincial nosiness to metastasize into something considerably more baroque: a local Moms for Liberty president roaming about with a smartphone, discovering a queer emergency in pharmacies, libraries, volleyball games and youth theatre.
With her phone's camera she treats strangers’ bodies as public records, names fresh villains for her followers, drags children and families into the frame and then, when anyone objects, produces the wounded astonishment of a woman whose doorbell has been answered by the very house she set on fire.
For some of these teenagers, this is not their first experience of being placed in the path of an online anti-trans campaign. They remain deeply affected by the repeated bomb threats made against their schools and public library in 2023, threats that began after this same woman published similar posts about a local librarian and helped propel that dispute to a national audience. She was not accused of making the threats, and I am not suggesting that she did. But chronology need not establish causation before it becomes relevant.
The citizens of Davis aren’t afraid that she disagrees with them. They’re afraid of being selected, filmed, identified, anatomically interrogated and delivered to an online audience with their children’s faces and workplaces helpfully attached. The result is not debate but a culture of fear, the knowledge that attending a game, working a shift, raising a child or putting on a play may abruptly qualify you for a starring role in her next little pageant of persecution.
Meanwhile, the institutions of Davis appear to have mistaken constitutional restraint for complete muscular paralysis. We need to make it clear that the First Amendment is a constitutional safeguard, not a municipal permission slip to turn children, families and local institutions into material for an endlessly ravenous content machine.
Would she be allowed this much leeway if she were a man? If a man appeared at say, a high school campus, filmed a stranger and began asking whether that stranger produced sperm, which bathroom they used and where they changed clothes, would officials hear “political discourse,” or would more useful vocabulary suggest itself? What if he undressed at a school board meeting while talking about children in locker rooms? If he published an infant’s name, photographs and birth details beside an accusation of child abuse, would everyone remain so serenely persuaded that the absence of an explicit threat had disposed of the matter? Or would we recognize that menace need not arrive carrying a written itinerary of its intentions?
If the city waits until someone is hurt or worse before taking action, it is effectively deciding that harm is an acceptable price of inaction. And if that is the city’s position, residents deserve an explanation of who is expected to bear that risk. Which citizens is the city willing to sacrifice before it decides this behavior warrants a response?
Here's the what: Tonight at UC Davis's Wyatt Pavilion, Davis's own Acme Theatre Company is throwing an epic celebration of queerness and joy. Grab a friend and come out to Enemies of All Nations Night. Dykes on Bikes are rolling through, Davis Drag Club is kicking things off with a pre-show, and the cast will be sticking around after for a talkback with their special guests.
Want to join in on the fun? Tickets are 2-for-1 for anyone who attends in drag.
Pre-show fun starts at 6:00 PM.
Curtain's at 7:00 PM.
Come as you are.
Here's the why: I am not the queer person I was ten years ago. Almost none of us are. This sounds like it should be a complaint. It's closer to an observation, the kind you make about a coastline you have been visiting your whole life, the kind where you can't say exactly when the water moved, only that when you compare the old photographs to the new ones, it has.
I scan rooms now. Not consciously, not anymore, it's just become a reflex, the way some people check their phone or bite their nails. I look for exits. I look for anyone whose face has that particular quality of displaced rage that precedes trouble. I have done this at Pride parades, at drag brunches, sitting next to people I love, while trying very hard to look like a person who is simply enjoying herself.
I've gotten very good at looking like I'm not doing this.
I mention all of this because Davis is a town that has had bomb threats called into its middle schools, its high school, and its public library, numerous times each, across multiple years. Real ones. The kind that clear a building and put children on a lawn while a bomb squad checks for a device. The kind serious enough that the FBI eventually got involved. Every one of them came after the school or library did something to be visibly LGBTQ+ inclusive. A display. A policy. A $10 Pride flag. I didn’t expect that from a town I spent years in, and I imagine most of you wouldn't have expected it either.
(And not for nothing, but it is worth noting that the woman much of Davis holds most responsible for this climate of fear is now running for a seat on the school board that oversees those same schools. But I digress.)
I'm an Acme alumna. I spent my teenage years there, in the particular way that theater kids spend their teenage years somewhere, meaning almost entirely. I went into advertising after, which is its own kind of theater. This summer I have been mentoring the publicity and social media team, a handful of high schoolers who are, without exception, better at the job than most agencies I have worked for. I do this because I love the company.
There is also this: arts funding at the federal level has been slashed and burned by the current administration. What that means, on the ground, in a town like Davis, is that a company like this runs increasingly on the people it once raised. They come back. They help hold it up.
Acme’s summer show is The Pirate’s Wife. Two women, pirates, tried in 1720. The playwright, Briandaniel Oglesby (Acme ‘02) has taken language directly from Texas Senate Bill 12, the 2023 law restricting so-called sexually oriented performances, and put it in the mouths of the tribunal. Central to the story are themes of personhood, gender, love, and who’s allowed to be themselves in public.
This is not a theoretical issue for many of these teens. High school theatre and the arts in general have always provided community and refuge for generations of LGBTQ+ youth navigating their own questions of identity.
Tonight, nothing about this play changes. What changes is who they're telling the room this night belongs to. This one gesture, a company of teenagers deciding who a night is for, has taken more nerve than anything filmed by an adult woman who has never once had to face a room she couldn't leave.
A bunch of teenagers looked at a political climate that's made it harder and scarier to be visibly queer or trans, and made a night about welcoming exactly that community into their theater. Nobody made them do that. They could have just done the show and left it there. They didn't.
But here's what I can't get past. These are kids who have lived their entire adolescence in a town where threats were once serious enough to shut down their schools, and instead of quietly staying out of the blast radius of anyone's anger, they built a night that says come exactly as you are, in public, with your body, in the same county where someone once decided a library and a school full of children were acceptable collateral for their politics.
I have watched grown adults, entire corporations, retreat from a rainbow logo the second it became inconvenient. I have watched people I love calculate the social geometry of a room before they'll hold someone's hand in it. These teenagers looked at the actual, documented risk of being visibly queer in their own town and decided the answer was a bigger room, not a smaller one.
I don't have a tidy way to end this. I just think when 14, 15 and 16-year-olds are out-braving the adults around them, it's worth celebrating.
Wyatt Pavilion, UC Davis campus, tonight. Come as you are.
I ordered a grab bag of sorts of some 2” potted trailing succulents. None of them were labeled but most were varieties I was familiar with. That is, except this itty bitty adorable baby. I’m guessing it’s a member of the genus crassula? But I could be way off. I’d definitely appreciate help identifying it so I can help it thrive. Thanks in advance! 🌵🔥🤘🏼
Last week my newest succulent (2” pot) arrived via USPS. I had been tracking it after it shipped and it took about seven days to arrive in mail box. When I pulled it out it looked like this and the soil was completely dry so I immediately transferred it to a happy little planter gave it a a couple of tablespoons of water and placed it in a west facing window. I haven’t watered it but it continues to look sad and droopy.
How can I turn this little guy around?
I lived in midtown in my early 20’s and really enjoyed the walkable grid and recreation options in the area. Life took me away from California around 2010 and I’ve been in Chicago for the last 15+ years. Lately I’ve been missing the west coast and considering a move back. Curious about the midtown area now. Browsing this sub it sounds like meth heads and tweakers are still a thing but nothing I’m not used to, living in a major city currently. Would love to get folks thoughts on the area.
Watching this show, I keep coming back to something Joseph Campbell said: “mythology is something that never happened but is always happening.” As it relates to From, I think that’s not just a neat quote. It might be the actual mechanism.
The fae trap theory that a lot of people, myself included, have posited makes total sense, and the dark fairy lore is clearly there. Hello, bag o’ teeth. But I think the fairy lore might be the language, not the cause. What if the town is less a place and more a space where the collective unconscious has to express itself, and folklore is simply the vocabulary it reaches for, because that’s how the unspeakable has always been spoken? The town’s geography being non-Euclidean/impossible to leave maps quite neatly onto Campbell’s idea of the underworld or otherworld as a place outside ordinary space-time.
Yes, I was pretty stoned when I thought about this last night. I’m also not doing anything with my philosophy degree these days, so indulge me a moment.
Anyway, I think that’s where the Tarot symbolism comes in. If the Major Arcana threads running through the seasons are tracking something like the Fool’s Journey, the town might function less like a prison and more like an initiation. Everyone forced through Death, the Tower, the Hanged Man, whether they like it or not. Hell, Campbell even talks about how the “call to adventure” or the start of a hero’s journey often arrives disguised as something ordinary or accidental, a “chance” event that’s actually fate. Sounds a lot like a down tree blocking the road to me.
And then there’s Ethan’s books and Tabitha and Jade’s dreams/past life remembrances. A lake of tears, the same figures recurring across generations. That’s eternal recurrence, archetypes wearing different faces because the role matters more than the person filling it.
So maybe the monsters aren’t fae at all, not fundamentally. Maybe they’re something like Jungian shadow given shape, and the fairy tale is just the language it’s forced to speak in.
Anyway, happy Sunday. Hope everyone enjoyed episode eight!