Earlier today, a friend remarked: “I don’t understand. The way you are reacting, it’s almost like you knew someone in the club.”
Here’s the thing you need to understand about every LGBT person in your family, your work, and your circle of friends:
We’ve spent most of our lives being aware that we are at risk.
When you hear interviewers talking to LGBT folks and they say “It could have been here. It could have been me,” they aren’t exaggerating. I don’t care how long you’ve been out, how far down your road to self acceptance and love you’ve traveled, we are always aware that we are at some level of risk.
I’m about as “don’t give a shit what ANYONE thinks” as anyone you’ll ever meet… and when I reach to hold Matt’s hand in the car? I still do the mental calculation of “ok, that car is just slightly behind us so they can’t see, but that truck to my left can see right inside the car”. If I kiss Matt in public, like he leaned in for on the bike trail the other day, I’m never fully in the moment. I’m always parsing who is around us and paying attention to us. There’s a tension that comes with that… a literal tensing of the muscles as you brace for potential danger. For a lot of us, it’s become such an automatic reaction that we don’t even think about it directly any more. We just do it.
And then… over the last few years, it started to fade a little. It started to feel like maybe things were getting better. A string of Supreme Court decisions. Public opinion shifting to the side of LGBT rights. Life was getting better. You could breathe a little bit.
What happened with this event was one of two things that are pretty dramatically demonstrated by how Matt and I are reacting to this. Matt came out fairly late, during the golden glow of the changing tide. He’s never dealt with something like this. It’s literally turned him inside out emotionally because all that stuff he read about that was just “then” became very much “NOW”. For me, I’ve had some time to adjust to the idea that people hate us enough to kill us. Matthew Shepherd was my first real lesson in that. So this weekend was a sudden slap in the face, a reminder that I should never have let my guard down, should never have gotten complacent… because it could have been US.
Every LGBT person you know knows what I’m talking about. Those tiny little mental calculations we do over the course of our life add up… and we just got hit with a stark reminder that those simmering concerns, those fears… they probably won’t ever go away. We’ll never be free of them. Additionally, now we just got a lesson that expressing our love could result in the deaths of *others* completely unrelated to us. It’s easy to take risks when it’s just you and you’ve made that choice. Now there’s this subtext that you could set off someone who kills other people who weren’t even involved. And that’s just a lot.
That’s why I’m personally a bit off balance even though (or because, depending on how you look at it) I live in Texas and was not personally effected by this tragedy. Don’t get me wrong: nothing will change. I will still hold my husband’s hand in public. I will still kiss him in public. We’ll still go out and attend functions and hold our heads high.
But we will be doing those mental calculations for the rest of our lives. Those little PDAs you take for granted with your spouse. They come with huge baggage for us. Every single one is an act of defiance, with all that entails.
So do me a favor. Reach out to that LGBT person in your life. Friend, co-worker, or family. Just let them know you are thinking of them and you love them. That will mean the world to them right now. I promise you.
Because I can’t express myself like he does. Share with anyone who doesn’t understand.
This. Please don’t let this die. Cause we are going to.
When I started dating my wife, almost 18 years ago, I was scared SHITLESS of being a victim of violence or, gods forbid, HER being a victim of violence because of holding my hand or kissing in public.
I never allowed myself to NOT hold her hand, hug her or kiss her in public. Because I am still afraid (less, because now we’re women over 40 and thus, invisible), but I am a bitchy piece of work and I am NEVER going to allow fear to stop me doing what I want, especially as I KNOW that people are creatures of habit, and the more they see us LGBT having PDA, the less it’ll matter to them.
That asshole who murdered the people at Pulse will NEVER win, because to each of those crazy motherfuckers there are HUNDREDS of heteros who STOP being homophobic simply because they GOT USED TO SEEING LGBT PDA.
Those hundreds started seeing their neighbors, their colleagues, the people that took the bus with them, that crossed the same street with them, that went to the same places as them, holding hands, kissing, hugging while waiting in line at the supermarket. In my case, they been seeing that everywhere my wife and I go together every damn time since 1998.
And IT WORKS. We lived in the same neighborhood for 13 years together and we saw how other queer couples started holding hands in public and coming out of the closet IN SAFETY because they saw us do it every day - and nobody ever became violent or upright disrespectful. Were we lucky that nobody killed us?
OF COURSE WE WERE. Lucky as hell.
But our luck raised the chances of other queer couples to be as lucky as we are, to deal with less shit, and the more of us who DO show our affection in public, the more socially reproachful it’ll be for people to hurt us. In the long run, the only thing that will make things like what happened in Pulse possible will be ONLY the stupid-easy access to assault weapons that people have in America.
So FUCK the homophobe murderers, I am STILL going to flaunt my lesbian married PDA in everyone’s faces for as long as I live. I owe it to myself and to every other queer person that comes after me.
