By Senior Copywriter, D’Anne Witkowski
It’s Pride Month! And you know what that means…
First and foremost, it means that LGBTQ+ people will be purposefully visible and unapologetic about who they are and who they love. This is a time to celebrate queer joy. And there’s a lot of it! Seeing this joy on display at Pride parades and events across the country – indeed, the world – is a beautiful thing.
But I have to admit, queer joy is something that some of us – especially me – can lose track of in the face of the unending wave of news about attacks on our rights. Especially troubling is the micro-targeting of transgender kids by people in positions of power. I am a grown-ass woman who came of age in the 90s. I cannot even imagine how teenage me would have coped with the kind of pressure these kids are facing.
Not that I was out. This is also a huge change from back when I was furtively buying a cassingle of Melissa Etheridge’s “I’m the Only One” from Musicland at the Summit Place Mall. So many kids are out now! Not all of them, of course, as the threat of violence looms and for many staying closeted is an act of self-preservation. I can relate! I was afraid that if anyone found out I was a lesbian my life would be over. I was convinced that I would lose all of my friends and my parents would kick me out of the house.
Did this happen? Not exactly. But the fear kept me in the closet for many years. And that is not good for one’s health.
I commend and celebrate the young people who are out and proud today. I also feel a responsibility to protect them. How do I do that? By living out and proud myself and by voting.
Yeah, I said it. Voting. And while there are a lot of reasons to be disappointed and angry with the Democratic Party as a whole, the difference between how Republicans treat LGBTQ+ people and how Democrats treat LGBTQ+ people is night and day. Who is in the White House appointing those judges on The Supreme Court and lower courts really does matter. I mean, here’s looking at you, Supreme Court. The overturning of Roe v Wade was monumentally terrible and is causing real harm across the country. Harm that Republicans are celebrating and wanting to see more of. You don’t have to look far to find stories of women forced to carry fetuses with fatal anomalies to term. Or women turned away from hospitals while hemorrhaging during a miscarriage because they’re not close enough to death yet for doctors to legally provide abortion care.
If you think this Supreme Court isn’t going to trash every pro-LGBTQ+ civil rights ruling, then you aren’t paying attention.
Then again, if you’re not paying attention, maybe you’re happier than me! But when an avalanche comes, it doesn’t matter if you’re the one pointing at it and warning everyone around you or if you’re the one blissfully ignorant, watching a Tik Tok video of a dancing cat on your phone. You get trapped under ice and snow all the same.
Oh man, there I go again with the negativity. And an avalanche metaphor in summer, no less.
But I can’t apologize. I refuse to accept that an avalanche, or a Trump reelection or the Supreme Court overturning the marriage equality decision that allowed me to both get on my wife’s health insurance and legally adopt the son we share while I was battling cancer, is inevitable.
I’ve heard it said that the reason LGBTQ+ people are under increasing attack is because of the increased visibility over the past few decades. That if we weren’t so “in your face” about it people would leave us alone.
And yet when I was younger, anti-LGBTQ+ attacks were fueled by the fact that so many of us weren’t visible. After all, there wasn’t going to be any pushback against laws against LGBTQ+ people if no one knew anyone who identified as such.
Bottom line: the attacks and the hatred aren’t our fault. We aren’t doing this to ourselves. We scared conservatives when we were invisible – call it boogeyman chic, if you will – and we scare them when we’re visible.
So let’s spend June scaring the hell out of conservatives by being ourselves! And let’s spend the rest of the year scaring conservatives by voting them out of office and voting in people who don’t hate us.
Love,
The Guerrilla Politic