This Hat Belonged To The Man Who Abused Me. Here's Why I Decided To Put It On.

A few years ago, on my birthday, I went to see the author Jerry Stahl do a reading at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. In conversation with the writer Joshua Mohr, Stahl said something that has stuck with me ever since: “If you write a sentence that makes you squirm, keep going. Because if it’s not dangerous, it’s not worth doing.” Perhaps I am putting that to the test now, both as a writer and as an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

This year over my birthday weekend, I was invited to Mosswood Meltdown, an annual, two-day music event hosted by John Waters in Oakland, California — as a press representative for a small indie website. Mosswood Meltdown showcases predominantly punk musicians and artists who have pushed the boundaries, both in their art and society.

I was thrilled to go, especially with a press pass that would allow me backstage access, but I was less thrilled that the festivities this year happened to coincide with an exhaustive heat wave. Temperatures in the Bay Area reached triple digits, easily shattering previous records. After sweating through the first day of Mosswood in all black, I succumbed to the heat and for Day 2 of the event opted to wear light denim Levi cutoffs, a white vintage concert T-shirt, and a hat — the latter of which was a deliberate and boundary-pushing statement of my own.

The hat in question is a white-and-mustard-yellow, trucker-style cap with a mesh snapback. The front of the hat has black, capital letters and a heart and reads: “I [heart] Intercourse PA.” It is no doubt a double entendre ; I would guess it was bought during the late 1970s or 1980s in Intercourse, Pennsylvania. The hat once belonged to a man who sexually abused me.

My abuser was an older male