Dykes on bikes with mikes

Lynn Breedlove takes us to her manic world of speed freaks, strippers and queer-core punk rock.

By Amy Benfer

Aug 1, 2002 | Lynn Breedlove, just-published novelist, former bike messenger and frontwoman for Tribe 8, the all-dyke hardcore band, walks into Jack's Bar and heads for the bathroom, a place where she once could be found shooting speed.

She stares at the toilet and a cracked mirror. "Looks like someone else got here first," she says and takes a running swing at the mirror. "Pow!"

Back in the bar she drinks ice water with lemon. "I'm an ex-asshole," she says. "I'm a new guy. I still have moments of assholedom, but now I win best boyfriend awards. I used to win worst boyfriend awards. "

Her boyfriend skills are so finally tuned, says Breedlove, that she is toying with the idea of opening Uncle Lynn's School for Boys, an etiquette school for butches. Relationship rules will include: "Talk about your feelings. Don't go off. Don't cheat. Don't lie. Don't start more than 50 percent of your sentences with the word 'I.'"

Though less mean and very sober, Lynn Breedlove still looks more or less like the kid on the cover of her novel, "Godspeed," with maybe a decade or two of seniority. That kid has a blue mohawk, a neck tattoo, the word "F-U-C-K" tattooed on his knuckles, and he's sitting on a Dumpster with a paper-bagged 40 oz. brew in his hand and a bike at his feet. Breedlove still has the bike and the blue hair, along with a few tattoos, but she no longer snacks on malt liquor. The kid, who appears in photographs throughout the book, is actually a former roadie for Breedlove's band, a perfectly apt alter ego for Jim, Breedlove's speed-freak, stripper-dating punk-rock dyke heroine, who is something of an alter ego for Breedlove herself.

"Godspeed" is not an autobiography, though Breedlove does call it a roman à clef. Jim, a punk dyke bike messenger, is addicted in equal parts to her stripper girlfriend, Ally Cat, her bike and speed, though the three competing habits have a tendency to cancel one another out. Breedlove also was once a speed freak, a dater of strippers and a bike messenger. (She founded Lickety Split Couriers, an all-girl bike messenging service, in 1991.) And she went on the road with Tribe 8 throughout the United States and Europe, as well as touring with Sister Spit, a lesbian spoken-word performance-art collective.

The fictional Jim navigates real San Francisco landmarks -- shoots speed at Jack's, goes to gigs down the street at the Firehouse (now the Kilowatt), agrees to watch her lesbian friend turn a trick as a "boy" on Polk Street for 20 bucks. Jim also is a member of Hags SF, along with her friends Smash, Pez, Frankie and Fuckalot, whose credo Breedlove describes early on: "Hags are us, crazy rocker pervert hellions outside even dyke society, banished by lesbians to the pit where we mosh after ingesting copious amounts of stimulants on the bathroom counter in front of regular dykes applying lipstick and otherwise grooming themselves. Hags have special anti-grooming rituals, like streaking hair with blue paint. We don't de-escalate. We're not afraid of blood."

There is plenty of blood throughout the novel, mostly dispensed through a chaotic campaign of vigilante justice: A homophobe who tries to pick up Jim's girl outside the strip joint ends up with Ally's spike heel to his groin; a man beating his girlfriend on the street gets a Kryptonite bike lock to the head; another guy who is abusing his girlfriend and molesting her daughter ends up drunk, beaten and possibly raped by a team of angry dykes.

Ally loves Jim's badass self, but is not so cool with the speed thing, especially because Jim chronically hits her up for cash. Jim, who calls herself "the President of the He-Man Woman-Haters Club," reacts with very typical boy bravado: "She don't love me no more," laments Jim. "If she did, it would be forever and no matter what, but it's always if I don't steal her money and if I don't go out and get high, and if she doesn't catch me runnin' with no other hoes. That's ... what is it ... conditional love, isn't it."

And though speed and a general indifference to pain are good qualities in a bike messenger, Jim's employers are less impressed with her tendency to disappear for days at a time. Girlless and bikeless, Jim decides to roadie for Hostile Mucous, an all-dyke hardcore band. After several months on the road, she lands in New York, works as a cabbie, falls half in love with a drag queen and finally gets clean.

Next Page: She works as a "gayby sitter," caring for the infants and toddlers of gay parents

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