What It Means to Come Home

The concept of home has never come easy to me.

I carry nostalgia for the places I once fled to as a child—the scattered woods and musky bogs outside of Boston—where I wandered aimlessly just to avoid being in the house. Those places offered escape, not sanctuary. They weren’t home.

For a long time, home felt like resistance. It lived in the cracks of underpasses, in the weeds breaking through pavement, in the squat East Coast houses that whispered defiance. It was gritty and raw. It was me yelling into the void: “Fuck you, I LIVE.”

That deeper feeling of home—the comfort, the safety, the radical act of being loved just for existing—that’s something I’ve only known in fleeting moments. It’s an ephemeral warmth that reshapes me every time I stumble into it.

But even that definition falls short. Because home isn’t just a feeling—it’s political. It’s collective. It’s power.

Home is about shared culture, shared struggle, shared land. But most importantly, it’s about liberation from the daily weight of oppression. Home is what happens when we can embody our full selves without shrinking, without apology.

At the end of my title weekend, I collapsed onto the porch of my cabin and cried—gut-wrenching, body-shaking sobs. That feeling of home overwhelmed me. I hadn’t known I was signing up to come home when I registered for Women of Drummer, but that’s exactly what happened.

Now that I’m halfway through my title year, I’ve had time to reflect. What makes Women of Drummer feel so different? I’ve been to countless leather events over the years—many of them queer-centered—and yet none of them offered what I found here.

What does Women of Drummer have that others don’t?

That question led me to a journaling prompt from Lou, who challenged me to consider: What does it mean for Women of Drummer to exist in an era of growing gender diversity? What truly binds us together? Should we keep the name, or is it time to change?

Here’s the thing: I’m not here to define what a woman is. I don’t know. No one does. And maybe that’s the point.

We were all born into the political construct of Gender and Patriarchy. From the moment we take our first breath, we’re assigned roles based on nothing but biology—and then expected to build our lives around them. We’re forced to navigate our internal truth, often our gender, within a system that was never built for us. A system that exists to serve the colonizer, the patriarch, and the white supremacist.

There is no home in that system—for any of us. But the damage it inflicts is not equal.

The wound from pulling the trigger is not the same as the wound from the bullet.

Whether we claim womanhood or had it assigned to us, we’re all targeted by a violent web of social and political expectations. Even something as joyful and natural as feeling the sun on our bare chests becomes a dangerous choice.

I know butch elders who call themselves women, and their lived experience is no less complex or radical than that of trans leatherfolk. It’s a contradiction and a truth: we are not all women—but we are all forced into the same box. And that box restricts us all.

That’s where Women of Drummer stands apart.

It’s not a label. It’s a rebellion.

It’s a coalition of defiance—for those of us who have had to fight for space in leather because of our bodies, our identities, or both. It’s not about who fits a category—it’s about who’s been pushed out of one.

Women of Drummer doesn’t just name the box. It takes a sledgehammer to it.

It refuses to bow to patriarchal fear or division. It builds community where other spaces breed hierarchy. It creates joy where others breed scarcity.

Here, we play. We love. We sweat and dance and feel the sun on our skin without fear or explanation.

Here, we come home.

Nicole, Woman of Drummer 2024