CarnalNation

Nina is the most punk rock person I know, but I didn’t think so when I first met her. I thought she was musically and culturally naïve, with her Hot Topic skinny jeans and devotion to Green Day. She gravitated towards me in my heavy leather jacket like a moth to a match. Mild mannered, soft-spoken and kind of geeky, the most punk thing about her that I could see was her androgyny. I wasn’t overly impressed, but she seemed like she needed a friend.

So I talked to her more and found out just how shallow and judgmental I’d been.

Nina has Asperger’s syndrome. At 20, she was living at home. Her mother was a hateful Christian with a scary California New Age twist who believed that Nina needed to be institutionalized for nothing more than being gay and disabled—and, apparently, punk. Nina’s mom hated her clothes, labeling them Satanic, criminal, and a way of “acting out.” Now, there’s nothing criminal about Nina. She doesn’t smoke, hardly drinks, and has done little more with her girlfriends than hold hands and kiss. Yet her mall punk wardrobe and soundtrack of platinum hit “punk rock” constituted a more genuine and courageous rebellion than any I had seen from the most self-conscious of wasted youths, because she was truly persecuted and made to suffer for it.

What about Nina's punk presentation, common as it is in San Francisco, could have incited such rage in her mother? Maybe it was gender variance. Nina is frequently mistaken for a boy. I don't think she minds that much. Though she is basically comfortable being known as a female, she often says she feels more androgynous. Her style is also a manifesto for her sexuality; Nina is mainly interested in punk girls and finds conventional beauty boring. Did Nina's mother understand the complex relationship that her daughter's style had to her identity? Maybe not on a conscious level, but in her gut I think she found its connotations of lesbianism and androgyny disturbing.

A bitter ex-punk once screamed at me that real punk takes place only “In the gutter, man!” Nina does not aspire to the street punk life, but she’s usually barely a heartbeat from the gutter anyway. She lived in constant peril of losing her home. Her mother was always threatening to throw her out, and would often go so far as to pack Nina’s bags and toss them through the door onto the street. Alternately, she would lock Nina in her room for whole days. She constantly belittled Nina, saying she “looked disabled” and would never be able to make it on her own in the world. Thankfully, Nina was too smart to internalize any of that. Gutsy, strong-willed and tenacious, she knew her own worth.

I quickly gained respect for Nina. I stopped caring where she bought her clothes, or that she stood still at shows while the rest of us got down in the pit. It’s not that she wasn’t punk, she just wasn’t as good at posing as the rest of us.

But Nina didn’t need to cop an attitude to be tough. She was tough. She had things to deal with in her life that the rest of us could only imagine. Though calm, collected and reasonable, craziness seemed to buzz around her like mosquitoes over quiet water. Young, queer, female, and poised on the brink of homelessness, she was vulnerable. Somebody was always giving her crap.   

When I first met her, she was being stalked by a young man with a violent history and a bad drug habit (or several). We had to walk with her whenever she went to the neighborhoods he frequented, in case he showed up and tried to pull something. The cops said that they couldn’t get a restraining order against her stalker because he had no address. Despite the fact that multiple people had reported being harassed, followed, and attacked by this man, he continued to prey freely on the young women of the street. Having no other resources, we just kept walking with Nina wherever she went.

Her own mother hired stalkers of another sort for Nina, a group of “behavioralists” who followed her around, condemned every aspect of her actions and presentation, and spoke to her as if she was five. Their purpose was to pressure Nina to do what her mother wanted, and check herself into a mental hospital. But Nina wasn’t mentally ill, despite living with stressors that would’ve driven me quickly around the bend. In fact, Nina rarely even got angry, and never violently so. Nobody could pretend that she was crazy already, and apparently not even the most persistent torments could make her so.