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| Rule number one of On Tyranny! |
***content warnings: sexual assault, family violence,
the Bush Years, 1/6/2021***
Being admonished/censored on the family facebook page
is not at all like being frozen in a dream cul-de-sac by the evil incel version
of Harry Styles, but the horror it brings up in me is the same. It happened
over the summer, I realized it close to my birthday in September, and it
crushed any hope or illusion that my brother would ever be on my side, or on
the right side of history at all.
Like lots of queer folks and probably non-queer folks
too, I’ve struggled with the reality of right-wing relatives. I’ve wondered how
some aunts and uncles and cousins could profess to value me and my
then-wife-now-BFF, how they could invite us over and treat us with such
hospitality and also vote against our right to love who we want to, against our
right to own our own bodies.
The cognitive dissonance of hearing the aunt who
emotionally rescued me after my teenage sexual assault brought household abuses
to a head saying in recent years that the idea of consent was ruining
relationships, ruining men. The pain of hearing the mom who did her best to
stand by me in that time tell me in 2016 that I create more rape in the
world by thinking about it too much. Even after years of good trauma work
and wonderful therapists and lovely, LOVELY Prozac, it’s hard not to feel like
that lost and bruised teen, lost in a cyclone of random violence, practiced
abuse, and institutionalized hopelessness.
That rescuing aunt grew into the most right-wing of us
all, and at least one of my cousins followed suit. He worked in Bush’s NSA. At
his (the cousin’s, not Bush’s) wedding, which I attended with my then-wife, the
priest blamed both Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq on gay marriage having
recently become legal in some states. (I want to say he also blamed us for
9/11, but I think I’m conflating that priest with Pat Robertson.) (Jeez a lot
of things are supposed to be our fault!)
But! The same cousin had been at OUR wedding, cordial
as can be albeit in an American flag necktie! (American flags were strictly a
right wing thing in those early war years, it’s weird to remember now that we’ve
devolved to other, more upsetting flags.)
I stayed pretty close with the right wing-est aunt,
too, until a couple of things happened:
1. My
nice liberal cousin-in-law told me that Aunt Connie (the NSA cousin’s mom) and Aunt
Patti were planning to march with the Proud Boys et al on 1/6/21. (The hero
cousins of Aunt Patti’s fam talked her out of it! What a bunch of badasses!)
2. Cousin
Jimmy briefly left his wife and kids for another right wing lady and, OH YEAH,
TO WORK FOR GUILIANI.
NOTE: I got this info secondhand from Nice Liberal
Cousin-in-Law, who got some of it from Aunt Connie, a noted unreliable
narrator. BUT! The day did come where I heard his name on Maddow—he was part of
the scheme to invoke martial law and seize the voting machines.
HE WAS PART OF THE SCHEME TO INVOKE MARTIAL LAW AND
SEIZE THE VOTING MACHINES. And everyone in the family but me is like, oh, this
is totes normal.
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