Years ago I wrote a short story called Lobbyist’s Nightmare, a satirical story about a corporate lobbyist who has a nightmare about congress.

In his tortured dream he finds that there are no longer two dominant political parties in the two branches of Congress anymore. The Democrats only have a combined eight representatives and senators and the Republicans only five. The rest of the House and Senate are made up of many small political parties. For this epic tale I made up a bunch of political parties: The Green Party, the Labor Party, the Farm Workers Party, the La Raza Party…

I then started making slightly more obscure political parties such as the Beer Party, the Construction Workers Party, and the Sex Workers Party. From then on it got silly: The Nudists Party, the Pabst Blue Ribbon Party, the It’s-Okay-to-Skateboard-on-the-Sidewalk Party…

In this list of facetious political party names I also included the Neanderthal Dyke Party. Neanderthal Dyke is a song by the lesbian punk band Tribe 8. It’s a very silly song about horny lesbians who want to get laid and who eschew PC behavior.

The chorus:

“Neanderthal dyke, neanderthal dyke,
Never read Dworkin, I ride a big bike,
Feminist gets me uptight,
Get in some heels and lipstick and I’ll spend the night!”

I wrote this story when I was a regular attendee at a writers groups in Berkeley California. This group had plenty of different writers from different backgrounds, and most of them tended towards literary fiction. After I had passed around copies of this tale of lobbyist angst, I was confronted by one of the women there, an older Bay Area native.

“What is this?” she blurted quite aggressively.
“What?” I wasn’t sure what she was on about.
“This! Oh my God, this!”

She was so incensed by the term “Neanderthal Dyke” that she couldn’t even bring herself to say it out loud. She held up her copy of my story to my face and pointed at it. By now she had also included another older woman in on the controversy, who was also equally incensed.

“That’s horrible!” she continued, quite angry. “That’s like saying the N word!”
“It’s a reference,” I defended.
“A reference to what?”
“It’s a song by a dy… a lesbian band.”
The other angry woman chimed in. “A lesbian would never write a song like that!”
“No, not regular lesbians. It’s a song by a bunch of silly punk lesbians.”
“You’re making that up!”

I tried to tell them about Tribe 8, and even offered to bring evidence of the band and the song to the next meeting, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They were so unwound by my horrible expression that they were trying to convince the group leader to kick me out of the group on the spot.

Which speaks to cultures within cultures. There’s lesbian culture for sure, but it also has a myriad of sub cultures with that culture as well. I was a crazy clubber back in the eighties and nineties, and my gay friends were not of the well groomed and presentable gay people normally seen in the mainstream. For example, when the Basic Instinct controversy bubbled up, about the derogatory nature of an ice-picking lesbian, most of my dyke friends were all “What’s wrong with that? I think it’s cool!” “Yeah, but you’re kinda kooky.” I would reply.