Storm: Stop being so oversensitive, get over it.
O.K. I WAS KIDDING! I do understand.
I thought you might.
BUT! I get it that my war is over, yours is not.
That's a huge part of it, yes, as is the unrelenting nature.
It's hard to take knowing there are places in the world where orientation will get you tortured and killed. That is sickening but it's reality.
One wonders tho, do people really make you feel as tho you are under the looking glass? I've felt that way when I was working "there" & it was real.
If that is going on with people oriented differently then that is downright criminal.
Yes, though the how of it varies with locale. In Lubbock, where I grew up, it's much more aggressive. The incident of my lover and me being followed home by a pack of no necks threatening to rape us all better was extreme, but there's always someone sneering, and there's not a queer in the city who's unaware of the risk every time you so much as hold hands in public. Not even my dear friend Drew/ Sinnaman, a black drag queen, veritable giant, and the kind of genuine ****** that doesn't need to act tough.
Drew stood 6'7, used to pick me up and perch me on his shoulder - shoulder, SINGULAR - and made a nice living as a body building coach, occasionally supplemented with prize fight purses. He was as loving and protective as he was physically intimidating, and appointed himself bodyguard whenever he saw fit. One night he was doling out safety tips when a much more effeminate guy asked what he'd know about being threatened. He got very still and said "enough jackals can take down any lion." It's the only time I ever heard him say anything with no laughter in his voice.
Portland is much different, acceptance is standard for everyone. Those who dislike weird tend to be a bit preoccupied in the land of the Unipiper, Where's Waldo Day and annual Naked Bike Rides, and don't really bother us much.
Pride is very much a community festival, which is how I like it. Instead of people waving sex toys, we have circus troupes, Brazilian heritage drummers and dancers in white and gold, and huge church contingents (my church was the biggest group last year!) distributing flowers and bangles to toddlers dressed as fairies to watch the parade.
People feel comfortable, part of the community. Which is why they feel so betrayed when suddenly that great Beaverton bakery cancels their wedding cake, or kissing a partner's cheek inspires an old man to start shrieking about sin, or the board member and beloved choir soloist in my church spends a week in ICU because he didn't notice he was being followed as he hurried home to help his husband-the-instant-it's-legal of 17 years soothe the newest of their five current foster children back to sleep. She'd had another nightmare and needed daddy Kevin's fairy dust to bring the good dreams back.
I visited him once the hospital cleared it. He could barely move for the broken ribs, and had very nearly lost an eye, but he was himself, smiling as best he could with the stitches, more concerned about seeing that his church duties were seen to than any possibile complications, and telling me that there's no point in hating them back... right up until he told me why he'd walked instead of waiting half an hour for a cab. He seemed more sad and disappointed than traumatized recounting the attack, but it started to crumble when he got to the fairy dust. She blamed herself, you see. He wouldn't have been walking if she hadn't needed daddy's fairy dust. 6 year olds will do that, find a way to make it their fault, because it's easier to hate themselves than cope with caprice. They nearly killed him, and he forgave that effortlessly. But they took the fairy dust away, it will never make her feel safe again. That? That was beyond what he could forgive.
We're UUs. We'd spent many wonderful evenings comparing his Christianity and my neopaganism, and he'd always gently counseled against the idea that the darkness is holy, too. That hatred, suffering, fury can bring strength and wisdom if we learn how to channel them properly. He finally got it, but he's still a wonderful Christian. He asked me to carry what I could, because it would only poison him. Sometimes even the best humanity has to offer needs help from the broken children of the darkness.
For me, that's the biggest, most devastating part: it's not
my war. Honestly, there's nothing left for the ******** to take, nothing they can do to me that hasn't already been done and overcome, and not by any heterosupremacist. I long ago lost the capacity to fear for my own well-being, to give a rat's infected hemorrhoid about mere survival, at least mine. What's the point of breathing if there's no beauty, no joy, no love?
It's the people who bring those things into my life that I fear for. The spirits still unbroken, whose sweet shining balances my darkness, the whose innocence even my demons will not see stolen.
In memory of fairy dust.
