Hello cult members! Sorry for the delay in posting this; I’ve been off sailing and pillaging. The life of a pirate doesn’t make discipline easy.

I think that my hometown is a good place to start with this blog. Discussing its quirks and issues will hopefully provide an appropriate context for my writing, since I believe that hometowns usually shape people in unique ways. While some of you may be relatively familiar with it, I’m still going to give some background information on the town itself as well. Hopefully this blog eventually reaches an audience beyond the Oklahoma social sphere. What I most look forward to talking about is the Tulsa’s city culture that I’ve become more aware of in the past few years.

Let’s start with some facts. Tulsa is a mid-size city in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma, about an hour from the borders with Kansas and Arkansas. It’s definitely an urban area, but given it’s locality many of the suburbs are appropriately country-adjacent. There’s actually plenty to do in Tulsa proper, with most of it centered around Midtown and Downtown. There’s a lively music scene and a thriving community of small businesses and local restaurants. Regardless, you don’t have to drive far out of town to get to rural communities and a feeling of distance. This plays into the already rural identity of the state as a whole. Many Tulsans might attest to being ‘rednecks’ or country-folk in keeping with this identity, despite living in an 800 sq. ft. condo in Midtown. Identity can be an elusive concept.

The music and small business communities in Tulsa have made it a place full of activities for both tourists and locals. Without the oppressive crowds and prohibitive costs of living in larger cities, there’s still plenty to do and lots of people to engage with. A lot of this growth of community has happened in the last decade. However, aspects have been around for a long time. An example of the latter is the music scene, which has always been one of the most active parts of Tulsa culture. Several smaller venues downtown have been around for decades and consistently attract both big names (some before they make it big) and local acts building steam. The Tulsa Theatre and Cain’s Ballroom are the two I have frequented the most, particularly Cain’s. I appreciate it in particular because of the intimate, standing room only space as well as their approach to alcohol monitoring. While other places in town ban folks under 21 from all shows where alcohol is served, Cain’s uses a wristband system that’s implemented at the door. This means that I’ve been able to attend countless shows with my Mom or alone all before my 21st birthday. It might not seem like a big deal, particularly in states where alcohol laws are less archaic, but to me it’s something I’ll always be grateful for. This rule allowed me to participate in the music community in Tulsa in a way I’d have been unable to otherwise. Without it, I would have missed out on a large and formative part of my childhood, and probably the experience of Cain’s in general, as I’ve moved away now. While the casinos and bars may have their reasons for the restrictions on underage people coming to shows, which I fully respect, I will forever love Cain’s for finding an appropriate system that still includes younger music fans.

This kind of attention to creating local community is also prevalent in the many small businesses and restaurants scattered throughout Midtown. Many of my favorite Tulsa shops are either marketed specifically as unique stores or stores specific to the Tulsa identity. Ida Red, for example is located on Cherry Street and sells a mishmash of Tulsa-themed memorabilia, foreign candy, gifts, and nostalgic toys. There’s a regularly switched out inventory of items that would be hard to find elsewhere and many that are specific to Tulsa, like the sticker with the local weatherman’s face on it that I put on this laptop. Shoutout to Travis Meyer. A smaller place with similar fare is Buck Atom’s Cosmic Curios on 66. In terms of unique items, Love Me Two Times Vintage Mall and Black Moth are especially fantastic suppliers. Love Me Two Times hosts small-time antique vendors from all over town as well as the leftover merchandise from the now-closed occult store Good Mischief that was run by the same owner. Black Moth is a natural history store selling everything from bones and taxidermy to crystals and preserved specimens.

All of these places make concentrated efforts to engage with their clientele and procure connections with locals. This is part of what makes frequenting them so special and appealing. And this might sound like one big sponsored post, but I promise no one is giving me money to write anything. I genuinely love these places for their offerings of items and community.

That same sense of community has been achieved with the many organizations that have sprung up around town in an effort to acknowledge our dark history and support minorities and at-risk individuals in Tulsa as well. There are initiatives each winter from the local news stations that aim to provide shelter and food to the many unhoused individuals that live downtown. There are local organizations dedicated to uncovering the unspoken parts of our history, like the Center for Public Secrets. Activists and historians have pushed for the public acknowledgment of things like the Tulsa Race Massacre and the role of Tulsa historical figures in slavery. These efforts have led to changes in street names and business names, as well as larger projects like the search for a mass grave related to the Massacre and the educational and sobering Reconciliation Park. There are also groups downtown that provide services specifically to the LGBT community, including a local theatre.

Despite the painful origin of some of these initiatives, they represent a desire of locals to invest in the town and its people. I think it can be difficult to find such a thriving sense of togetherness in other areas, as I have yet to locate it in Connecticut. No offense, Constitution State.

Now, to negate everything I’ve said. Not really, but there are two sides to every story, and I can’t gush about Tulsa without acknowledging that it is still a deeply flawed place.

An obvious place to start: it’s in Oklahoma. Oklahoma has a piss-poor public education system and the state of its politics is lamentable. Despite the notable presence of a wealthy elite created mostly by the oil and gas industry, there is an equally notable lack of funding for vital aspects of the state’s infrastructure, like education, public transport, and roads. Education is the main issue, because it tends to be the most noticeably harmful. Teachers are paid next to nothing, and students end up with no materials or qualified instructors, because surprise! No one wants to be an unappreciated teacher.

It’s also probably pretty clear that I lean left politically, so the right-wing tendencies of nearly all of Oklahoma’s elected officials is a source of great chagrin to me personally. But to explain this a little further, I’d like to point out that I am not a political person. I care about the well-being of under-served and at-risk people. The policies often enacted by Oklahoma officials to not seem to share this concern, as they frequently put these people in danger. The recent abortion laws come to mind, as well as the positive treatment of oil and gas companies at the expense of things like education, whose neglect always means a maintenance of poverty. The state of policing in Oklahoma is an entire blog post in itself. Here’s Human Rights Watch’s take: https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2019/09/11/policing-poverty-and-racial-inequality-tulsa-oklahoma.

This is a state-wide condition. Tulsa specifically struggles with some unique burdens. First of all, the treatment of minorities. There’s not a whole lot I can say about this a privileged white woman, but it must be addressed. There’s the very obvious and continued dismissal and subjugation of indigenous groups who were forced into Oklahoma and those that were originally here. This is a long history that is another entire blog post (for some limited information, visit: https://tulsapreservationcommission.org/tulsa-history/native-american/). However, The Tulsa Race Massacre is probably the one event most widely remembered in Tulsa history. That’s a shitty legacy. For those of you outside the town or those failed by the education system (as many Okies are), I’ll give the basic story. There was once a thriving black community in downtown Tulsa, centered around Greenwood Avenue. Culture and wealth were abundant there, which prompted tension and outrage in the larger local white community. When a young black man entered an elevator with a white woman, she accused him of rape and initiated a surge of white hatred. After armed men on both sides met at the courthouse and shots were fired, the Greenwood community was largely burned to the ground. The community did not die, but suffered greatly in this tragedy. The official report at the time indicated 36 dead, with only 10 being white, but historians believe the death toll might have approached 300. For more information, visit https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/.

That’s a heavy story that was covered up for years. As I mentioned before, the education system for a long time kept information about this event about as detailed as the crude picture I’ve drawn here. It was referred to as the Tulsa Race Riot as well, until the name was recently changed in order to more accurately reflect the horror of the event.

These things in addition to the positives make Tulsa a complicated community. However, there’s one final negative aspect of Tulsa culture I’d like to share that is a little more difficult to explain: the cult mentality. This one is a little lighter to discuss.

While a sense of community is a great and beautiful thing, it can also give rise to some bizarre ideas and a homogeneity that isn’t so productive, and this is the case specifically with the rich, mostly white, midtown Tulsa community. It’s a cult, and not the fun, tiny pirate kind.

The most impressive and obvious example of this that comes to mind was the Rustic Cuff trend that rattled the town several years back. It was a local business started by a woman making bracelets in a particular style. They took off in a ridiculous way. The bracelets became a status symbol throughout the town and even the suburbs, and the more cuffs you wore at a time, the cooler you were. Bejeweled wrist weights of five to ten cuffs adorned the arms of everyone from the news anchor to your loud neighbor Lacy. Every young girl with a Vineyard Vines-sponsored closet wanted at least six for Christmas to wear to seventh grade. People would get matching sleeves. Daughters stole from mothers and families were torn apart.

Obviously I’m exaggerating, but it was a craze of staggering proportions, and it was just Tulsa. Although there was some reach into other cities out of state and she even opened a location in New York, nowhere else was there the obsession that she created in her hometown.

In addition to fashion, the cult behavior is very prevalent in parenting circles. Note here that I’m getting some of this information secondhand from my mom, as I have no intention of having children, but having been one myself I did see some of the effects of this mentality play out in my social circles. First of all, private school is the way to go in Tulsa. Public schools are looked down upon aggressively by the social elite. This might be relatively justified, since Oklahoma education is so bad, but the catch is that most of the private schools are filled with children so deeply and effectively indoctrinated into the Rustic Cuff, Sunday School, perfectly coiffed hair cult that anyone straying from the norm would be immediately ostracized and bullied to the brink of hospitalization. Despite my struggles through middle and high school, I do not regret turning down a private school education.

Finally, no cult would be complete without trapping it members. Everyone stays in Tulsa. You go to school at OSU or OU. You root for their teams. You can talk about going to New York City if you want to. You can buy a vacation home in the two approved Tulsa elite out of state towns (one in Breckenridge, Colorado and Destin, Florida). Eventually, you will come back. You wouldn’t want to make your poor mother sad, now would you? If you move away, we won’t see you anymore! Also, stop liking bones and anime. The Lord does not approve of these hobbies for his chosen people, the Tulsa elite. What’s that? That’s not what it says in the Bible? It does in my 2021 Tulsa translation that I got from my friend Karen for Christmas. I think you need to start doing your own research.

Maybe these things happen in every hometown. I have no point of reference for what a normal town’s culture is. I know that elitism and racism are everywhere in the US. However, I wanted to write about it, and you read this far. For that I thank you. I hope you have a good week, and I hope that I’ll post again soon.