Commentary: Dykes Who Watch Out For…

Kara Olson (photo by Sally Volar)

I write this one week after Renee Nicole Good and her wife dropped off their son at school. On their way home, they stopped to observe and document ICE brutalizing and kidnapping their neighbors. While trying to drive away from the area, Good was shot in the face by a federal agent. Her wife, Becca, who was sitting alongside in her the car, wailed on the street afterwards. A nearby doctor offered to help. ICE turned them away. Becca said, later, in a statement, “We had whistles. They had guns.”

I’m at my desk, several blocks from where Good was murdered, and five blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered, a whistle around my neck should I hear the dogs bark upstairs, alerting me and my partner of nearby ICE activity. I’m still shaking from the account of the ex-marine two days ago who was legally observing agents from a safe distance before they rammed her car, broke her window, yanked her by the neck, stomped on her, pushed her face to the ground, called her “it,” tried to break her ankle, while saying, “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch!”

Here it is again. That old banal evil Toni Morrison saw so clearly in slave patrols, and in Primo Levi’s descriptions of Nazi officers. Demonization that will dissolve in the face of manifest human dignities. How illiterate these agents are, their uninteresting language that, as Morrison might say, has “an alien stench to repel us.”

I was twenty-two years old when I moved to Bloomington Ave. in Powderhorn Park in 2006. Like many queer women, I fled a rural background to find safety and a life in the city. Like Alison Bechdel, I learned what it meant to be a dyke and a good neighbor in south Minneapolis. I loved sitting down with lesbian elders who knew the history of this place called “Dyke Heights.”

I learned how to show up for my community from other queers, but also from Powderhorn activism that was deeply informed by its multiracial identity — neighbors from Somalia, Ecuador, White Earth, Eritrea, Liberia, Vietnam, Laos, and Mexico. My young adult years were shaped by rich, thriving community.

We helped neighbors move after a divorce, sang songs and read poems at funerals and fundraisers, protested police brutality at the 4^th precinct long before Lake Street burned, walked through blizzards across the park when a friend was going into labor, helped immigrants find pro bono lawyers and file paperwork, cared for the elderly and sang with them when they were losing their memory, taught free sexual health class at clinics, taught creative writing in prisons, helped women access birth control, helped trans youth access gender-affirming healthcare, facilitated racial healing circles in schools, and adopted elders with no children as our own parents.

All of this came rushing back to me like a warm light the night of Good’s vigil. I kept thinking:  how starved are most American neighborhoods for this kind of love?

Bechdel credits the rich dyke subculture in Powderhorn, and her place on 32^nd Street and Columbus Avenue, in the 1980’s for her famous “Dykes to Watch Out For” strip that appeared in gay and lesbian newspapers. Her strip made lesbians visible as ordinary human beings while also documenting lesbian culture as a kind of life that is at the forefront of political movements. The strip’s title alone intrigued me the first time my partner showed me her cherished “Dykes to Watch Out For” archive — the ones her mom’s lesbian friend had purchased in the 1980’s in Kansas City.

I was drawn to Bechdel’s playing with both the need for lesbian visibility and the defiance of the dominant culture’s vilification of lesbians throughout history. We are dangerous. We are dangerous because we have not spent our lives looking to men for validation, power, or security.

Jonathan Ross did not kill Renee Nicole Good because he was afraid of her. He killed her because she was not afraid of him. We are dangerous because we care about our neighbors.

In honor of Renee Nicole Good, and in gratitude to Bechdel, and to my neighbors who are currently under a violent occupation, I want to celebrate dykes who watch out for their neighbors:

• Bless you dykes, writing poems at IHOP, volunteering at your children’s schools, putting your bodies on the line, blowing your whistles, your bird songs, in the face of military rifles and monetized fascism.
• Bless you dykes at the local sex shop and the local lesbian bar using your businesses as sites for mutual aid, collecting and delivering funds, diapers, and groceries for immigrant and BIPOC neighbors who are too terrified to leave their houses.
• Bless you dykes for fighting for reproductive freedom, carrying the blood of another woman out to the trash after a safe abortion, providing security to patients at clinics.
• Bless you dykes who are nurses and organizers, serving as civil servants, fighting for low-income communities, authoring legislation for shelters for Asian, Latina, and American Indian survivors of domestic abuse.
• Bless you dykes advocating for affordable housing, offering up your couches, connecting homeless youth to resources and mentors.
• Bless you dykes who created The Combahee River Collective and fought, and currently fight, racism and transphobia in white feminist movements.
• Bless you Minneapolis dykes for organizing collaboratively to protect trans people since 1975.
• Bless you dykes who were part of Chicken Soup Brigades, providing emotional support and companionship to gay men with HIV, for organizing blood drives when gay men were banned from donating blood during the crisis.
• Bless you dykes for fighting repression of erotic expression, for educating straights about how to have an erotic life, better sex.
• Bless you dykes who fought for parental rights after having your children taken from you.
• Bless you dykes for organizing and marching for trans and non-binary rights after having been institutionalized and experiencing shock treatments yourself.
• Bless you dykes serving as clergy, holding vigil for those who die alone.
• Bless you Minneapolis dykes who followed the lead of the American Indian Movement Patrol and created Queer Street Patrol as protection from police brutality.
• Bless you who are not dykes but are Somali neighbors delivering sambusas and warm food at the site of a murdered dyke’s vigil even when vicious agents are coming after you.
• Bless you dykes giving rides to Latino families and opening your house to hide and protect your neighbors from ICE who are perp-walking teenagers and lining up children to haul away.
• Bless you dykes for educating everyone at the faculty meeting on how to not let violence, threats or lack of funding stop crucial racial equity work.
• Bless you dykes for marrying undocumented men so they can stay here legally.
• Bless you dykes fighting for the visibility of missing Indigenous women.
• Bless you dykes who taught other dykes how to love themselves after being called psychopaths in 1950, who created social clubs and opened lesbian bars which were subject to raids and police harassment.
• Bless you dykes holding down the community hotline for suicidal youth.
• Bless you dykes loving on yourselves right now after being called a “lesbian bitch” in 2026 by a federal officer, a “deranged radical” by the U.S. President.
• Bless you dykes who lost their jobs for being out, for speaking out, for scrutinizing manipulative language and finding the most articulate ways to fight for justice.
• Bless you dykes who created queer publications and wrote stories and poems, letters to editors, and those who are holding up the archive.
• Bless you dykes for raising nieces and nephews, children who have needed homes, as your own.
• Bless you dykes who have been kicked out of your own families.
• Bless you powerful femmes, you sensitive butches.
• Bless you for laughing so hard.
• And for marching, always for marching.

Please support our unique storytelling platform: