Mother Jones illustration; Courtesy photo
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.
For those of us who would be described in HR packets at progressive workplaces as “gender nonconforming” or “of non-normative gender presentation,” it can sometimes be really hard to get a haircut.
The places where one might get one are usually gender-segregated zones, where cisgender people go for what one might call gender-affirming care—that is, cosmetic care toward redeclaring their man- or womanhood. Still, enough gender studies papers have been written about the barbershop as a masculine space and the hair salon as the center of an all-women’s social world. I, frankly, don’t want to get into all of that.
But my point here is, in the expensive coastal cities where broke queer and trans people congregate for safety and community, it can be difficult to find an affordable haircut. When I moved to New York City, I was inundated with ads for queer-affirming barbershops. But these were all promoting places where haircuts cost $120—not, for me, a particularly affirming price tag. For a while, I resorted to making my friends cut my hair with drugstore scissors.
Then I met Ruth Boirie. Ruthie’s been cutting hair for 44 years, and she charges a flat rate of $30 cash for haircuts in her small barber-slash-woodshop (yes, woodshop). In late December, she’ll be 77 years old.
Ruthie has seen it all. Once upon a time, she cut hair for $3.50, in a room she rented for $15 a month. Now, she pays just over a thousand dollars per month for her studio, with “RUTHIE’S NEIGHBORHOOD BARBER SHOP—EVERYONE WELCOME” lovingly hand-painted in gold on the window.
I found out about Ruthie through a friend of a friend: She’s been handing out her business cards, adorned with clip art of a palm tree on a beach, at the lesbian bar down the street from her home for decades. She scouts the bar for people who might be in need of her services: “I get my cards every day over there, and…when I see the short haircuts, I say, Do you live in the neighborhood? Well, here’s my card, if you’d ever like to try me out.”
“I want them to feel my heart, you know, when I come in and the way I greet them, and that right away, I open their hearts up from the warmness I give them when I shake their hand, because a lot of barbers don’t do that with them,” Ruthie said in a New York LGBT oral history interview back in 2022. “Every person that comes into my shop, I ask them, ‘What’s your name? How are you doing?’ and I shake their hand.”
“Every person that comes into my shop, I ask them, ‘What’s your name? How are you doing?’ and I shake their hand.”
When I walked into Ruthie’s barbershop on a freezing December night, she was cutting the hair of someone she described as an “old lady,” a client she’s been seeing since she opened the store in 1996. She finished up her work—a simple short style, like most of us get there—and ushered me into her chair. I settled in for more or less the same haircut.
Ruthie’s Neighborhood Barber Shop is cluttered with 20 years of knickknacks. Little dolls and vintage action figures in the window entertain the neighborhood children, a few of whom came in out of the cold in their puffer coats for a piece of candy from Ruthie’s bowl as I sat. Even the physical structure of the shop is Ruthie’s own. After each cut, she sweeps hair off the floorboards she laid herself.
“I made the benches,” Ruthie told me. “Something to make it look neat enough for people to want to walk in and feel comfortable.”
Her haircuts take a long time: She’s obsessively precise, and she’s also certain to take a break anytime someone from the neighborhood stops in. And that’s the thing: Everybody stops in. A man with a bulldog grabs a treat for the dog and says hi to Ruthie; a young dad with a wiggly baby in his arms struggles to wave at Ruthie and keep ahold of the baby at the same time.
Ruthie keeps posters of the neighborhood as it was when she was young, streetcars and all. And she keeps sepia-toned pictures of her mother—elbow-length gloves and a wedding gown, age 23—which she eagerly shows customers. “Hey, Mama,” she asks the portrait sometimes, “how you doing?”
When Ruthie was left with unexpected bills after her mother’s death, the neighborhood banded together to raise enough to get her back on her feet. But now, almost a decade later, that love might not be enough to save the shop. Lately, Ruthie said, the clientele at the bar has changed. Not as many customers have been coming through her door.
As she cut my hair, Ruthie told me that, at 77, she’s applying for jobs—using the computer is hard for her, but she’ll fold laundry and keep things neat at a laundromat if they’ll have her. She has a social worker but isn’t sure whether that social worker can help her with much beyond getting EBT.
A younger friend stopped in as Ruthie was adjusting and readjusting her clippers at the back of my head. They asked if they could help Ruthie fill out a job application on Indeed. They struggled to then explain to her what Indeed is—people who are 77 should not need to know that kind of thing.
Maybe the laundromat job will call back. Or maybe, as the weather gets warmer, customers will begin lining up at Ruthie’s door again.
