Lesbians of Palm Springs - Sapphic Traffic in the Desert

15/10/2026

14/10/2026

In honor of yesterday's , we would like to recognize Mary Riddle this , who was the second Native American woman to earn an airplane pilot’s license after Bessie Coleman.

Riddle was a member of the Quinault Indian Nation in Washington and the Clatsop Tribe in Oregon. She was named Kus-de-cha by her mother which means “Kingfisher” in the Quinault language. She spoke often about being named after a bird, especially because of her dream of flying aircrafts. When Riddle was seventeen, she saw a woman fatally crash an airplane and became even more determined to prove that women can fly.

Riddle received nationwide media attention after announcing her plans for a transcontinental flight to deliver gifts from Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest to President Herbert Hoover in Washington, D.C. Multiple newspapers, featuring a photograph of Riddle in standard pilot attire and next to a plane (bottom left photo), highlighted her plan. Whether Riddle made that trip is unclear, but the coverage her plans received demonstrate her fame and respected reputation.

By 1937, Riddle began parachuting, making more than 40 parachute jumps at airshows during her tour across the country to promote aviation. She was also featured on the cover of the June 1934 issue of The 99er, the magazine of the International Organization of Women Pilots, now known as The Ninety-Nines Inc.

During World War II, Riddle served as both a civilian aircraft inspector and aircraft maintenance advisor. She died in Portland in 1981 at the age of 79. Today, we admire her lasting legacy as a woman aviator and her contributions as a female aircraft inspector.

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Women in Aviation International Women At War Elevate Aviation United States Air Force National WASP WWII Museum The Ninety-Nines, Inc, International Organization of Women Pilots National Women's History Alliance Women Rock Wings

12/10/2026

11/10/2026

Built for Questions We Cannot Answer

What mystifies me most is consciousness.

Not intelligence. Not memory. Not even love, though love is a magnificent puzzle.

It is the astonishing fact that there is an inside to being alive.

Light hits the retina, neurons fire, chemicals move, electrical signals race through wet tissue, and somehow there is blue. There is the smell of rain. There is embarrassment. There is longing. There is the private sensation of being you, looking out through one particular pair of eyes at a universe that existed for billions of years before you arrived.

We can describe a great deal about what the brain does. But why any of it should feel like something remains deeply strange.

And then there is a second mystery tucked inside the first: why we care so much.

We are temporary creatures in a universe of absurd scale, yet someone failing to call can ruin an afternoon. Losing a pet can break our hearts. We will cross continents to sit beside someone we love. We save photographs. We plant trees we may never sit beneath. We worry about people who haven't been born yet.

From one angle, this is ridiculous.
From another, it may be the most important thing about us.

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09/10/2026

09/10/2026

09/10/2026

Katharine Bushnell trained as a doctor in the nineteenth century, but medicine was only one part of her work.

After returning to the United States from China, she began working with women in prostitution and women vulnerable to exploitation.

Then she travelled through British-ruled India with Elizabeth Andrew to investigate what was happening around military cantonments.

Women suspected of prostitution could be registered, subjected to compulsory examinations for s*xually transmitted infections and confined in lock hospitals.

The system was presented as a way of protecting the health of British soldiers.

But it was women whose bodies were being inspected and controlled.

The men buying s*x were not subjected to the same machinery.

Bushnell and Andrew documented what they found in The Queen’s Daughters in India, exposing a system in which s*xual exploitation, colonial power and the policing of women’s bodies were deeply entangled.

Bushnell was also a committed Christian.

And rather than treating religion as something beyond criticism, she began questioning the biblical interpretations used to justify women’s submission.

She studied the original languages and argued that some translations and interpretations had reinforced ideas of female inferiority that were not actually demanded by the texts themselves.

Her response was not to abandon her faith.

It was to challenge the men claiming inequality was God’s intention.

That became the work later collected in God’s Word to Women.

Katharine Bushnell spent decades looking at institutions that claimed moral authority and asking what happened when women were the ones paying the price.

Empire.

Law.

Medicine.

Religion.

None of them, in her view, should be exempt from scrutiny.

Her name was Dr Katharine Bushnell.