Bed-Stuy Vs. Felicia The Degenerate
Laurie Miller, 58, a black woman from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, was just minding her business, living alone in the same row house she moved into as a child in 1974, when she got a new next-door neighbor: Charlotte Taillor, a white queer feminist who works as a dominatrix and BDSM instructor. When she saw all the weird men coming and going from the house, Miller raised hell. Taillor doesn’t live there, but runs her dominatrix training academy out of it. The New York Times went to a recent community meeting about the controversy. Excerpt:
One of Ms. Taillor’s supporters said critics just objected to the nature of her work and wouldn’t care if she were teaching knitting.
Ms. Miller said afterward that neighbors were able to hear “things like whips and chains and moans and stuff like that.”
“These brownstones are old and hollow,” she said.
Another block neighbor, Mary Patrick, said at one point about Ms. Taillor: “She should leave. She should take that to 42nd Street.”
Ms. Taillor told her critics in the room: “You don’t have to kink-shame or say that people are creepy because of what they enjoy doing.”
She added that her hope when she moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant was “to have a nice relationship with a nice community of woke people.”
“Oh, ‘woke’!” Ms. Miller fired back. “Bye, Felicia!”
Ha! (If you don’t get the joke, look here for the explanation.)
Read the whole thing. Even though Taillor finally agreed to clear out, you’ve got to read the story to find out what Laurie Miller is doing now. She is not letting up! I’m guessing that’s her yelling on the street in this recent local TV news report about the controversy, in which the dominatrix complains that her angry neighbors are hurting her feelings. Shouldn’t she be thanking them for that? I’m so confused.
Here’s what I’m not confused about: Laurie Miller is the hero America needs! It might be Weimar America elsewhere, but not on her block of Bed-Stuy.