The child stood up and pulled their shirt collar up to their face. "I identify as Timothy, actually," they said. The salon went silent.

And I laughed. At the moment, it was because I recognized, as an adult, the misplaced childish optimism inherent in coming out to a salon with a sign on the wall that says, "This Business Is Protected by the Blood of Christ." I laughed because I could hear this child, 10 years from now, telling this story to friends, finding the humor of it in hindsight. I've sat with friends countless times and told stories like this—when you revealed your true nature to the world, before you knew enough to keep it hidden. In the present, though, all I could hear was George Michael's "One More Try" coming from the salon's desktop computer. Then everyone else laughed too and I felt horrible; maybe this kid was embarrassed.

But then the stylist said, "Well, Timothy, get your ass in this chair because you're still getting your hair washed." And that made everyone in the salon laugh harder. Timothy sat down, lay back against the basin.

"How did you know to say that?" the stylist asked as she gently began to scrub Timothy's scalp. "How did you know those words?"

Timothy explained that their older brother was named Ezekiel. Ezekiel was always able to get out of taking a bath by announcing to his parents, "I identify as Fred." 

I am guessing that Fred and Timothy's parents became distracted enough by this announcement not to push the whole shower situation. 

The stylist nodded. "Well, Timothy," she said, "I guess that makes sense."

She was washing Timothy's hair so gently, with so much care, that the child was soon asleep, until another stylist came over and sang, "Tom, Tom, wake up! Wake up now!"

The whole salon burst to life again: "It's not Tom! It's Timothy! They told you they identify as Timothy!" 

I take so much comfort in knowing there is nothing new under the sun. That the identities and experiences pundits insist must have come from the internet or Wi-Fi radio waves or God leaving the schools have always been here, always been documented, if you care to look. In this week's main title, Mothership Connected, I got to see the great web of artistry and self-expression that connected the women of Parliament Funkadelic to four decades of American music and pop culture. 

This past week, I was reading The King of a Rainy Country, a McNally Editions rerelease of a British novel from 1956. Written by Brigid Brophy, The King of a Rainy Country is about a young woman, Susan, who has entangled herself with a mid-century version of a fuck boy named Neale. Susan and Neale meet by chance at a mutual friend's party, and Susan is immediately attracted to Neale's elusive and playful nature. She manages to move in with him in London, but Neale refuses to sleep with her. Instead, they alternate use of the one bed in their flat. It is 1956, so Susan is risking her reputation by living with Neale without marriage. Why does she do it? Neale makes romantic gestures that would appeal to a bookish, imaginative yearner like Susan, like making her a dessert of cornflakes and honey on a plate when he has no money. But he also invites a random Frenchman home from a bar, convinces the man he might sleep with him, and then loses his nerve and flees the apartment, leaving Susan to explain, in broken French, to the visitor that he is not, in fact, getting laid that night. 

In Neale, I recognized the elliptical behavior of the artistic-leaning young men I tried to date in my 20s. The kind of gestures that leave you wondering if you are dealing with a mad genius or merely an asshole. The kind of person you realize, in hindsight, is merely bluffing his way through eccentricity. 

Susan happens to see a photograph of a girl she was in love with in school in a book of softcore pornography. She becomes obsessed with finding her long-lost love, and the rest of the novel follows Susan and Neale as they conspire to track down Susan's girlhood crush in Venice—hustling their way into leading a tour group of truly ugly American tourists through the continent before coming to terms with their inability to understand each other in Venice. 

The novel is dreamy and meandering and very queer. It feels a little like the TV show Search Party: full of half-coincidences and doppelgangers that sometimes lead somewhere and sometimes do not. Mostly, when I read it, I felt a continuation of romantic yearning, of the feelings that I assumed when I was younger were particular to me—the desire to be known, to be seen, to love deeply—but that I realized with time, like everyone else does, that these are all universal. 

There's a moment in Mothership Connected that has me convinced I was born in the wrong time period. Mallia Franklin, known as the Queen of Funk, one of the key members of Parliament Funkadelic, Parlet, and the Brides of Funkenstein, is describing a pet snake she had in the early 1970s.

The snake came to her by way of drummer Robin Russell, who had just returned from a tour of China with Little Richard when he unpacked his drum kit and screamed: Inside was an albino articulated python that had stowed away in the belly of the bass. Mallia adopted the snake, named it Coco (after cocaine, naturally), and watched it dance—though it would only agree to do so to Jimi Hendrix. "We would all be high, sitting around the dining room table, watching Coco dance," she says. I've never wanted to be someplace more in my life.

Mothership Connected is one of my favorite kinds of books: a truly juicy and informative oral history. Written by Seth Neblett, Franklin's son, it consists of interviews with Franklin, Lynn Mabry, Dawn Silva, Debbie Wright, and Shirley Hayden—the women who were members of Parliament Funkadelic and were influential in the group's style, sound, and reach. Parliament Funkadelic was many things: a musical revolution, without which much of hip-hop wouldn't exist; a brand that created fantastical stage shows full of aerial aerobatics and a famous Mothership, a replica of which now sits on a platform on the very top floor at the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and a cult, as Neblett matter-of-factly states. Members of the band and their fans, known as the Maggots, pledged allegiance to the funk, and band members spent years, if not decades, dedicated to the cause—with mixed feelings. As the book delves deeper into the inner workings of the band, the women detail how George Clinton used emotional and financial manipulation to keep members in line.

The women at the center of this book are fascinating. Mallia Franklin, who died in 2010, was the daughter of a pioneering white woman labor organizer and a Black man who was one of the first foundry supervisors for Ford Motors. Franklin's mother was a high-ranking labor official, working with Jimmy Hoffa. She was best friends with Rosa Parks and would later run an influential advertising agency, working with Ford Motors and other corporations while simultaneously creating merchandise for the Free Angela Davis movement. Mothership Connected does an excellent job of tracing how deeply the funk, R&B, and rock scenes crossed over with Detroit's and Los Angeles's political scenes, the Black Power movement, and more traditional seats of influence in Black communities. "My parents felt [it was] my duty to fight for civil rights," Franklin says at a certain point. "Maybe it was, but I just wanted to sing a song, not change the world." It makes sense that the work of Parliament Funkadelic and its various offshoots is one of the foundations of Afrofuturism, Black horror, and Black speculative fiction.

Franklin's voice is joined by those of the other women of Parliament: Dawn Silva, a former Black Panther; Lynn Mabry, a Berkeley High School homecoming queen; and more. Neblett's deft writing never shies away from the misogynoir inherent to the funk scene. "[It] was clear the women's liberation movement had yet to reach the land of Funkadelica," he writes at one point. But the women here reveal themselves to be funny, sly creative forces with wide-ranging freedom of expression and influence across decades of pop culture. Toward the end of the book, when I saw Lynn Mabry in a still from the Talking Heads' concert film Stop Making Sense and immediately recognized her as one of the incredibly fresh backing singers in that movie, it all clicked into place. Of course there is a direct throughline from P-Funk, which I first heard on a mixtape passed to me one morning before class in high school, to the art funk I sheepishly devoured in my 20s, deeply aware of how silly it was to long for the dance parties of the 1980s. This book helped me reconcile the disparate things I love and that have influenced me deeply. 

For this newsletter, we will ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week's writer is Stephanie Wambugu. She is the author of Lonely Crowds, a novel published this past summer about two women, friends from childhood, navigating the identity-centric art world of 1990s New York.

Stephanie Wambugu: I used to write in bed on my days off just after waking up, but there came a time when I decided I had to put away childish things, like writing in my pajamas under a duvet. So I bought a cheap desk for my Harlem apartment on Facebook Marketplace and wrote most of my novel Lonely Crowds there. I also wrote in the Edward W. Said Reading Room at Columbia University, where I went to grad school. I had no idea how symbolic my time spent writing in that room would come to be, because of the protests against the conflict in Gaza that took over Columbia and the country just a few months later. These days, I mostly write on my couch in Bed-Stuy beneath a Purvis Young drawing that was given to me as a gift on my 25th birthday.