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Photo credit: Allyson Mitchell, Lesbian Rule, 2013. Courtesy of the Artist.
On a warm fall evening in 2015 a lesbian feminist entity known as KillJoy opened her fang bearing mouth in the center of Los Angeles’s Plummer Park. Inviting audiences into her inner sanctum, the maligned matriarch elicited delight, horror, fear, sentimentality, laughter, and reverence for lesbian feminist herstories1 Viewers grouped together in line with friends, or perhaps friendly strangers, awaiting their turn to experience the novelty of a Lesbian Feminist Haunted House. Reaching the front of the line, visitors’ introduction to KillJoy’s Kastle was brusque as Valerie Solanas was back from the dead and working the door!2 Brandishing her infamous S.C.U.M. Manifesto, a ghoulish Solanas instructed groups that what they were about to experience would not be “part of the ordinary.” As a group was being informed about nudity and instructed not to take flash photography, I joined in time to be advised that the “KillJoy’s Kastle is best viewed by the light of your pussy—if you have one.” I quickly explained, as I was in costume as a Riot Ghoul, that I had left my post as a performer in the Kastle to do the tour as a participant.3 Solanas instructed us to select a group name. After deciding on a suitably gory yet gay name my group was ushered through the large fangs that adorned KillJoy’s Kastle’s entrance by a series of handsome undead security personnel. We were seated inside a courtyard on camping chairs arranged on a green plastic lawn facing a stage; large pink letters above the stage unapologetically proclaimed that we were now in the realm of “LESBIAN RULE.” On stage, a zombie-lesbian folk band performed. The two zombies openly bickered about their past relationship as lovers and proclaimed they had been resurrected together to perform as a form of purgatory after murdering each other when their personal and professional relationships turned sour. Playing their own repertoire, as well as covers of lesbian folk classics, the zombies performed their anachronism self reflexively, making snide comments about current political affairs and comparing their experiences of the 1990s lesbian heyday “when it was possible to have a lesbian band” with current culture, which they...