In Praise of Pride Merch, Part One

It seems like olden times—in 1993, the summer after I graduated high school, my that-summer best friend Brett gave me his set of Freedom Rings. Just the six rainbow colors back then, rings a little less than an inch big on a cheap hardware-store-like chain. They felt like the most beautiful thing in the world to me. They were like the key to some grownup gay world I couldn’t quite picture.

A few weeks before that, I’d gone to one rock show (King Missile at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park) with a pink triangle drawn on my hand in lipstick. I wanted people to know I was bi, I wanted to meet girls if I could, but I didn’t have any visual language for it. Although, I guess my goth-punk style maybe was a little bi in retrospect?

Nobody I talked to at the show knew what I meant with the lipstick triangle, it felt like a clumsy misstep. But with those Freedom Rings, I felt like an instant ROCK STAR wherever I went, whether they translated to anyone else or not. I felt like a goddess like I was dialed into something much bigger than myself, but also dialed INTO myself. They were a swaggery Dumbo-feather that helped me stomp/tiptoe my way into my adult queer life. (Even if that summer paired me up with a boyfriend who reminded me of Eddie Vedder. Shrug emoji? That’s bi, I guess!)

Anyway, one piece of jewelry helped me claim something important about my eighteen-year-old self.

Now, I have thirty years of pride tchotchkes and as many decades of rainbow art, queer poetry, and a jillion paragraphs examining all manner of multi-gender affections, and an ex-wife for a best friend.

Once, during the pandemic, I typed “bi socks” into the internet and had them in two days, delivered to the front-neighbor’s door, but still!

Last year, a friend of mine designed one of the pride Skittles bags, and Amy and I looked for them everywhere we went. In a grocery store in the middle of red rural Upstate New York, we found them! Then, out in the parking lot, a stranger noticed the rainbow sticker on Amy’s car and came over to do some gay bonding. She mentioned that she didn’t have much support around there. You could tell that running into us meant something to her.

On the way to my nephew's birthday, randomly stopping for snacks, and there we were: ORGANIZING.

Eek A New Poem! Where I'm From

A view from behind my childhood home when we visited a few years ago. Not pictured: fracking.

Disclaimer: My family is full of far-left-to-moderate wonderfuls. Supersorry they’re not in this poem very much!

Where I’m From

(After a prompt from George Ella Lyon)

I’m from tomato plants
and apple trees
and weeds I’m supposed to be pulling.

I’m from ten acres with horses
but the horses weren’t ours.
The house was harsh,
but not the fields: They smelled like
wildflowers and wild strawberries
and, alternately, cow manure or hay bales.

I’m from five cents for each fly swatted
during the manure times. I’m from hay bales, daylilies
mallow and daisies, from rows of raspberries
and brambles of blackberries—should have remembered to
wear long pants.

I’m from the perfect fall view
and the perfect place to fly a kite.

I’m from banging pots and pans at midnight,
visiting Great Grandmom’s South Philly
and marveling half-asleep
at the narrowness of streets.

I’m from waving little American flags with my cousins
in the big yard at Aunt Connie’s colonial one Fourth-of July afternoon.

I’m from visiting Aunt Patti’s house in Bradley Beach,
some summers even with my own badge
until my body made me promise not to go near Uncle Bud’s
“Deplorables for Trump” sticker anymore.

I’m from Walecki and Mellili and Keating and Wiedmann and McCormick and Penrose and Wojcik and Carter and Lawson.

I’m from meatballs in the crockpot
on Mom’s sideboard and from Grandpa
Wiedmann cooking bacon outside in state parks.
(With plenty of sliced tomatoes of course.)

I’m from undiagnosed depression and toxic positivity:

From Mom telling me I was creating Covid out of my own fear.
From Mom’s pretty Easter card telling me she was paying
Catholic priests to say masses for my soul.
(It should go without saying that I don’t think I need saving.)

I’m from Sicily and Ireland and Poland and Germany.

I’m from wondering what Emily Post’s grandchildren would have to say
about a PS. in Sharpie on the outsides of red Christmas card envelopes:
“Please don’t march with the Proud Boys” or about checking the FBI’s
pictures from January 6^th to look for Aunt Connie

I’m from the (MANY) podcasts about cults I listen to, to try and understand.

I’m from all the books I can’t assign them.

I’m from the both sides of teargas.

I’m from whatever version of family comes next.

To Heal, I Need the Victories

 

If you need science and not just feels (though science gives me ALL the feels!) go here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vaccinated.html

It’s been a long year. A long five years. As I move (I hope) out of survival mode and start to process the multifaceted trove of traumas these Trump/Bernie/Russia/Covid years have wrought, I think it’s important to pause here and be in awe at what we (And by WE I mean those of us who believe in justice, empathy, and science!) have just accomplished.

Thursday before last, I was having a generically shitty day. After all of the put-aside-in-order-to-live claustrophobia of quarantine, I was snappish with my neighbors and ready to drive one million miles away. I was having another round of seemingly insurmountable Zoom issues at work without the grace of my calm-down-we’re-in-an-emergency tend-and-befriend vibes.

After too-numerous calls to my BFF, I did what I often do when I’m trying to motivate myself enough to get ready for bed: I put on Nicole Wallace’s podcast. (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deadline-white-house/id1367201919)

(It used to be Joy Reid but she gets too Franken-y sometimes! Cry emoji!)

President Biden’s remarks on the newest CDC regulations lead the show: https://www.c-span.org/video/?511762-1/president-biden-speaks-rose-garden-cdc-eases-mask-wearing-guidelines He was speaking in the rose garden and a purple finch was singing its heart out in the background. A finch-size ray of sunshine-hope shined in and melted my crabby heart just a little bit.

The president said something like “You’ve earned the right to smile at each other” and that felt exactly, exactly right. I made going-to-the-movies plans. I bought (GASP!) concert tickets! (Wilco (ok) with Sleater Kinney (OMG!)

And then I felt completely overwhelmed.

But it’s a good idea to stop for a second and acknowledge what science (what humanity!) has accomplished. Miracle doesn’t seem like the right word, but that’s how this new whole-face life hits me. I’m in awe that I get to elbow-high-five my students! I get to feel the simple joy of handing a kid a book after more than a year of reading through screens.

Yes, the depression-machine that is facebook (and also the depression-machine that is my brain) will always remind us, there’s so far to go from here, so much work to do. We vaccinated lucky ducks may not be ready to let go of masks for any number of reasons. It’ll take stages and steps. It feels vulnerable for my face to be exposed, and maybe I’ll even be mistaken for predatory. But smiling at my neighbors and getting the HECK out of the neighborhood sometimes both feel like such momentous things!

Primaries Are a Good Time to Disagree (IRL)

First in a series inspired by On Tyranny:Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

A lot of the “obedience” triggers I’ve been experiencing lately have come from the pressure (both inner and outer) to “unify” with the (perceivedly) dominant Democrats, with the implication that if we don’t, Trump will be our fault. Sometimes, in my Bernie-ful neighborhood, my brain tells me I might be seen as at best a disharmony and at worst a threat. This isn’t the case, but it’s a tough feeling to wade through.

Urgent clumps of white men have become a mainstay at the Weaver’s Way Co-op corner (the very BEST corner if you need any kind of lefty signatures) and they feel like a threat to me, just as groups of white men can in any setting. When they first congealed there, I put on my quiet teacher voice and asked them to please talk with their teams about the bullying factor, (This NYT article had just come out: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/us/politics/bernie-sanders-internet-supporters-2020.html) but mostly I just cross the street to avoid them, running the risk of tangling with the grumpy dry cleaner across the street. Ladying is hard, even in our Stars-Hollow-like corner of Mt. Airy.

In addition to working on my own petitioning for Elizabeth, the main way I can push back is with art. Not having a yard, I’ve been filling the local telephone poles with even more watercolor sass than usual, plus some nice big Warren posters from headquarters, all decorated with ribbons and silk flowers.

Every year as a Valentine to the neighborhood, I take out all of the art I’ve accumulated throughout the year and staple them to the phone poles, expanding my like-I-own-the-place reach beyond my usual 3-4 blocks. This year, I got a melancholy windfall of flowers that the aunts cleaned out from Grandmom’s house. Washing them in the sink took days, the years and grief and not-having-a-family-headquarters-anymore evaporating into the air as the flowers dried, weighing heavy on my heart.

Armed with my bag of art, my bag of flowers, and my trusty staple gun, I set out to freeze my hands on my Valentine project last Saturday afternoon. One of my first stops was to decorate someone else’s art, a Postcards to Voters sign put up by a mother-daughter team I had the pleasure to meet one glorious day. Imagine, being in like second grade and helping design Postcards to Voters signs—amazing! ( https://postcardstovoters.org/)

I was happily stapling when a neighborhood lady I sort of knew approached me. She had just finished chatting with one of the aforementioned white man clumps.

“I have a new acronym!” She declared. “Do you want to hear it?”

“Of course!” I said, stapling silk flowers around the sign.

“AVAT! All votes against Trump! No matter what, we have to unify and get him out of office!”

I was wearing an Elizabeth button and I (somewhat paranoidly) thought this might be an obey-the-Bern lecture. (Or worse! Obey the Bloomberg!) But still! She was right!

“That’s a great idea! I said. “You should make a poster!”

“I don’t want to make a poster. I’m not a visual artist. I sing and write songs. Just like you might not like to sing and write songs, I don’t have to make visual art.”

Her voice had an edge to it that made me nervous, but we chatted away about her acronym. Another lady happened by and asked how she could write with Postcards to Voters, since she wasn’t from around here, and I told her it’s online.

“Yeah,” said Acronym Lady, “You can’t really see the “.org”—you should make that more prominent.”

“This isn’t my work to change, but you can totally do that!” This is my standard response to unsolicited critique, particularly unsolicited critique of free-labor activism—make your own!

“She keeps trying to force me to make art,” Acronym Lady said to the woman who was no doubt regretting that she’d stopped to chat, “But that’s not what I do.”

Something was awry here and I wasn’t sure what it was, but I wasn’t quite done stapling up this batch of flowers.

Acronym Lady kept on with her unity-talk until I finally pushed back, in (I swear) the mildest and calmest way. I told her my usual stuff about how this is primaries, now’s the time to disagree! With one guy bypassing the system by trying to buy the election and another candidate who was backed by Russia in 2015 and 2016, (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-russian-effort-to-target-sanders-supporters--and-help-elect-trump/2019/04/11/741d7308-5576-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html) there’s plenty to argue about! Plus, a lot of us were really traumatized by Bernie’s followers in 2016 etc, etc.

“So you DON’T think I should be telling people about this acronym?”

“Of course you can! Just maybe leave a little space for those of us who are in trauma.”

“Well, I was just having this conversation with a Bernie Bro who was actually capable of listening…”

The “unlike you” was implied, I think. But I’d BEEN listening for like ten minutes at this point!

I told her to stop gaslighting me and go away. Sometimes people get REALLY PISSED at me when I have a personal boundary, I can’t quite figure it out.

“No, YOU go away! This is MY corner!”

Still, I wasn’t done with what I was working on, so I kept telling her to go away and stop harassing me. I made the motion of getting out the phone to call the police, which was really dumb because there are almost no reasons to do that. What kind of street artist WOULD?!

She was shouting by the time she crossed the street. “You know what? You’re an ASSHOLE,” she hollered. “I thought you were a nice person, but you’re not.”

“Good job with the unity!” I childishly yelled. “It’s going really well!”

I’m not sure why I was the person she chose to resist, but I’m so glad she did. Her unhingedness and my own give me faith that we haven’t been swallowed up yet by tyranny, be it left or right.

But also, neither I nor Acronym Lady are okay right now. We on the left are all scared and weird from the acquittal, the missing Philadelphia snow, from the troll farms, from our own blind spots and entitlements. Amazingly, my fight or flight didn’t even activate during this exchange. Plenty of loving neighbor interactions followed—accidental canvassing, art bonding, general love. Still, Acronym Lady filled up my heart the most.

The Dueling Troll Farms of the left and right want us obedient, silent, scared, and complacent, so I hope we can hold to our IRL prickliness, our effrontery, and be downright difficult. This is a very good time for us to argue for what we believe in. It’s time to challenge each other and make each other uncomfortable and push for what’s right. This is Acronym Lady’s corner and mine and (though I wish it were very much less so) even the Bros. Fear can’t be allowed to simmer us down.

Tears and Miracles at Warren Headquarters

Last Tuesday, I put in a couple of hours at Elizabeth Warren’s Philly headquarters, calling New Hampshire to get out the vote for the primary. I was already having the blues a little for Bloomberg reasons and also because of come personal stuff, and the first round of calls really broke me. It was painful and scary hearing perfectly-nice-seeming people tell me they’d just voted for Trump and being compelled by the rules of phonebanking to disengage politely instead of screaming to the heavens.

About an hour in, I called a man who seemed delighted to tell me how much he hated Elizabeth Warren. I don’t know why, but I muddled through the call script instead of hanging up for self-preservation (darn persisting!) and he used every gaslighting trope since the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: She’s DISINGENOUS. She’s sneaky, she’s a liar, why would ANYONE trust her, etc, etc. As I finally got it together to end the call, he said “Say hello to Mata Hari for me.” I don’t know if it upset me more that he felt entitled to firehose contempt at me or that I’d chosen to listen to any part of his Women Are Liars: The Opera.

There’s a thing in my trauma brain that says: “BE GOOD. GET SMALL.” If you behave well enough, he won’t hurt you. Unfortunately, that inner voice intersects in time with the politeness, the performed equivocalness of canvassing and phonebanking.

Saying calmly “I respect your opinion” instead of screaming “WHY WOULD YOU VOTE FOR A MAN IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2020? OR EVER? AND WHY ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE WHITE? AND WHAT ABOUT THE MUELLER REPORT?” is a better way to be, but being diplomatic is triggering and it makes me feel surveilled and hunted.  It feels too much like obedience. That’s a PTSD problem, for sure, but it’s also an America problem.

I selected “Not Ready” on my dialer, took my headphones out, and went into the restroom and cried. I wondered if the organizers and other callers could hear me, if New Hampshire could hear me. It was a good cry, the first time in all these years that I’ve broken down in a campaign headquarters. It has been a long, painful four years. I felt dangerously close to the debilitating depression that I and so much of America, suffered in early 2017.

I’m proud that I cried. I’m proud that I came out of the restroom, wiped my eyes, and asked the organizers for hugs. They freely gave them, and I was so grateful. I got some chocolate from the snack table to ward off the (admittedly rare) dementors of New Hampshire. I wished I’d brought an extra thermos of coffee: Next time, for sure.

Those few minutes of campaign life were a beautiful miracle: the organizers and my fellow phonebankers got me talking about Gritty (“the true leader of the Democratic Party”), the time I met John Lewis, and how Elizabeth was probably proud of me.

For them, and for me, and in spite of the misogynists, I dialed back in. The first person to pick up was both heartbreaking and galvanizing: She told me she wanted to vote for Elizabeth, but it was too big of a risk—she was really, really afraid. I gave her my reasons (best choice for women’s rights and racial justice) and said I empathized but hoped she would make the brave choice, which Amy later pointed out was Gillibrand’s IP. That’s probably okay.

After that, the calls got better. Sorry Elizabeth, sorry organizers, but my heart overflowed with joy when voters told me somewhat apologetically that sorry, they’d just voted for Amy. My heart was somewhat less overflowy (but still overflowy) when they told me they’d voted for Pete. There’s so much progress, even in the middle of this troll farmy nightmare. So many reasons to feel hopeful.

I ended that day’s spate of calls talking to a man who told me that yes, he and his wife were both planning to vote for Elizabeth, they were leaving for the polls in about 25 minutes. I love them, and I love everyone who’s trying, and somehow, though it’s nuts, I love America.

Since that day, I’ve been having a depression flare-up because the Trump calls were truly harrowing. But I’m okay. I gave myself the whole weekend to do nothing but write and read and make art and take care of my apartment. I’m recommitting to caring for my mental health this election year, realizing I may not have the stamina I used to, but I still have so, so much to offer.

2016 Fucking Happened

The idea behind this quote was also super-racist:
 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/21/sanders-identity-politics/94221972/

"There is no question that Sanders was central to their strategy. He was clearly used as a mechanism to decrease voter turnout for Hillary Clinton," Darren Linvill, associate professor of communications and one of the researchers who worked on the study, told The Post. 

Linvill said the tweets analyzed as part of the study "give us a much clearer understanding of the tactics they were using. It was certainly a higher volume than people thought."

Sanders was "just a tool" to the Russians, Linvill added, and "a wedge to drive into the Democratic Party." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-russian-effort-to-target-sanders-supporters--and-help-elect-trump/2019/04/11/741d7308-5576-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html

Painting the painting above was meant to bring me relief, but it made my blood boil over and over again. It brought back all of the physical sensations of fear and abandonment and shame, tensing up as the notifications rolled in, as stranger friends-of-friends lined up to tell me how stupid I was, what a liar, how if we lost the election, it would be Hillary supporters’ fault for wanting representation—Oh, sure, a woman, just not THIS woman. The horror and sadness and moved-to-loudness I felt when my friends and then even Roxane Gay said they’d been afraid to speak up for Hillary. All this was before it had really sunk in that Trump could be our rapist-in-chief. Before the regrettable, inarticulate fury with which I ruined Thanksgiving and then rage-drove five hours, only able to find comfort in the new Gilmore Girls episodes.

Since then, I’ve learned to use my anger mostly-constructively. I’ve been so heartened and lucky to be in a city with progressive values and frequent marches, so glad that it’s only a day trip to yell directly at the White House or the Supreme Court. I’ve come to rely on visits to the Hope Diamond or long stretches of phone-games-in bed to calm down after protests. I have written every strongly worded letter that came to mind. I made a chart in case I can’t pick what to write to congress about on any given day:

And I’m very happy to be going as Rose Quartz for Halloween, because it means I’ll be ready with a DON’T MAKE ME GET MY PLANT ARMY sign come the Women’s March.

 Over the summer this year, my BFF and I listened to the Lawfare Blog’s Mueller Report podcast (https://www.lawfareblog.com/introducing-report-podcast-series-lawfare) on family trips and on dreamy drives home from the beach. The jazzy music that plays to indicate direct quotes was our song of the summer. It was a weird comfort to listen because so much of the time we’re gaslit into forgetting our election was stolen, but it was. As paranoid, panicked, as fight-flight-or-freeze as I’ve always been, even my anxious imagination could not have come up with THE SHIT THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

As outlined in the epigraph, a tyrannical enemy leader was able to exploit Bernie supporters’ misogyny to commit an act of warfare, to steal our election, and somehow this contingency still thinks they have the moral high ground. And it’s not just bigoted white men on his side—plenty of badass women who have NO ACTUAL NEED of obedience have joined the #BernieSquad rather than supporting any of the wildly qualified women who are running. AND YET I STILL FEEL BAD FOR NOT BEING NICE ABOUT THIS.

Sometimes Bernie/Russia rage comes out when I don’t necessarily want it to, especially when it comes to my better-behaved straight white lady friends. They do plenty of activism in their own ways, but I’m honestly sick of them guarding their social capital by outsourcing their anger to less-gender-conforming women like me. I found myself on a tear during a lovely Longwood Gardens brunch, during a beautiful walk in the autumn woods that is supposed to be abut other things.  I want to ask them to stop being so obedient, so diplomatic, to stop hiding in the shelter of their agreeableness and appeasing the men and the institutions they serve. I seriously hate it when people blame women for Trump, but I also seriously need these ladies to be braver, to close their empathy gaps, honestly to be just better friends to me and to America.

As these conversations progress/dissolve, I become conscious of the other lady’s “civil” moral high ground. Why does everybody have to argue, they ask. Why couldn’t you have been more diplomatic? Just be in community and everything will be okay. Perceiving their assurance of the innate superiority to my unhinged self, I feel more unhinged. I apologize a thousand times for being so mean. I don’t want to apologize any more.

Faith, Anger, and Heart: Part Three (Singing and Seething)

Not long after I started trying Restoration monthly, they welcomed a new minister. I’d been a fan of McKinley Sims (Okay, full disclosure: He’s super-dreamy. I had a crush. Sometimes the body leads the soul places, what can I say?) since about six years ago when he did some of his seminary work through the Unitarian Society of Germantown. He was always someone I felt like I could learn from, maybe because (as I later learned) he’s from Lubbock, Texas just like my ex-wife/BFF is. Something about that accent just makes explaining go down easy, I guess.

Still, I wondered why a congregation that had a stated goal of inclusivity and a Black Lives Matter banner out front would choose, in 2018, a white, cisgender straight man, albeit a presumably progressive one.

Encouragingly, McKinley’s first sermon as Restoration’s new minister gave me lots of hope. He said “siblings” instead of “brothers and sisters,” which suggested that he might be trained in the ways of the gender spectrum. He made it clear that he is committed to immigrants’ rights and his first month’s theme was “sanctuary.” He talked about how building sanctuary takes work, takes facing problems rather than sweeping them under the rug. He even acknowledged those harmed by church-enabled sexual abuse, which I have NEVER EVER heard a preaching minister of any denomination so. NEVER. I’ve been alive for 44 years. That’s a big deal.

One Sunday a few weeks ago, McKinley went out of town. The Substitute Minister, the layperson leading the service, was a slight, middle-aged white guy. He seemed nice enough, so I felt safe to settle in.

Ever in organizing/canvassing/yelling-at-Nazis mode, the Joy I wanted to share that week was a mini book review. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister had saved my life and fired up my soul in the trigger-laden weeks following the Kavanaugh hearings, and I admit I was feeling quite evangelistic about it. I’d brought the book for McKinley because I thought he’d like it, and even though he wasn’t there, I carried it up through the Joys and Sorrows line anyway.

“Joys and Sorrows,” announced the Substitute Minister, “Are for matters of the heart, not for political announcements.”

I was SHOCKED! I had never heard them mention politics during that admonition before—one of the reasons I felt safe at Restoration was because it felt like a break from the politics-shaming of my family and of the world at large. Everyone there seemed political, I hadn’t yet had to feel like I was badly-behaved or a freak.

I SEETHED when it was my turn to share. The Substitute Minister shrugged and rolled his eyes as I said:

“I deeply resent being told that politics are not a matter of the heart so…NO…to that.”

(If I had it to do over, I would 100% say “FUCK that.” Live it, learn it.)

I gave my teensy book review, and the women of the congregation smiled and nodded.

As I sat back down in my pew, nearly shaking with anger, a tall and warmly hippie-ish white man, one of the congregation’s regular musicians, that “Thank you for saying that.”

The next person in the Joys and Sorrows line, an African American man who looked to be in his early twenties, made (YAY!) an announcement about the vigil for immigrants’ rights that his committee was hosting the following Tuesday.

Stoplight Guy wasn’t there that week. I missed him.

I tried to listen to the rest of the Joys and Sorrows of the congregation, but I was seething so badly I felt like I was hovering off my pew. I did the bad-habit thing of planning what I was going to write on the minister’s facebook page after the service. I wanted to start typing then and there, but that seemed beyond the pale. I tried joining in the singing, but everything felt dissonant and out of whack.

SURELY once McKinley knew about this, he would fix it, right? SURELY he would understand what the problem was?

Spoilers:

1.      He SORT OF understood.

2.      The service was about to get even more egregiously fucked up.

Faith, Anger, and Heart: Part Two (Stoplight Guy Forever)

The week that the Unitarian Society of Germantown put “Welcome Pope Francis” on their sign, the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration’s sign said something that made way more sense to me: “Beloved Community.” I also noticed that their minister was a woman, so it seemed like it would be a safe place to be while the rest of the city (and my now-former church friends) fell in love with the pope. They put stones in water for their Joys and Sorrows just like USG did, but the congregation shared aloud if they chose to. One member shared his post-Catholic pain during that time, and that was the ONLY mention of the pope. The sermon, given by a layperson who was a woman of color, was explicitly in favor of LGBT rights (The Q hadn’t been widely added yet.) and ended with something like “Someday maybe I’ll be ready to sit down with Kim Davis and try to understand her. But not. Today.”

Still, for all of Restoration’s wokeness-before-that-was-a-mainstream-thing, it was hard to get past the architecture. Just like all of those cathedrals I’d studied in Art History, it was shaped like a cross. All of the characters on the stain glass were white people. Unitarianism, for an anti-racist post-Catholic, is like trying to break the cycle of abuse and then realizing you’re still abusing and being abused, but gently. It’s like one of those dreams where you know a place is your home, but you also know it isn’t.

But still, this spring when the voice in my Kirtan-blissed mind told me to sing in church, Restoration seemed like a good bet.

There’s a flaw in my personality wherein I’m still sort of looking for a perfectly welcoming, perfectly approving community/family. It probably comes from not having been particularly welcomed as a child, from inherited ancestor-grief in my XX chromosomes, or both. It’s a flaw that has caused me unending sorrow as an adult, to the point where if some group seems perfectly kind and safe, I should probably run for my life before I get too attached/expectant/hurt.

When I went back to try Restoration again, my child-brain started to spin its fantasy of perfect welcome. Here’s why my mistake was both understandable and irresistible:

When it was my turn in the Joys and Sorrows, I told the congregation I was feeling scared because the following weekend I would be headed to D.C. to counterprotest the (DELICIOUSLY FAILED! https://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2018/08/my-wonderful-magical-day-of-yelling-at.html) Unite the Right rally. I said I wanted to honor Heather Heyer’s name. And then, the most intoxicating thing happened: the congregation applauded.

As activists, we are trained not to expect rewards or thanks (derisively called “cookies”) for simply doing the right thing. This is in spite of the fact that doing the right thing takes hundreds of hours of unpaid labor and is often physically and emotionally dangerous. Women are especially policed for this (we especially police EACH OTHER for this) and I think the phrase “performative ally” was one of the phrases most successfully weaponized by Russian trolls in 2016. Though I wouldn’t criticize another activist for being praised, I live in (misogynist) fear of being deemed too proud of myself, of being too happy to be in the struggle.

So when the Restoration congregation applauded my efforts, I felt a deep sense of relief and belonging, of sanctuary. As I sat down, I felt briefly free from the family alienation, the Bernie Bro concern-trolling, the microaggressions, the weaponized phrases. I just felt appreciated for a second—a very wholesome drug.

EVEN BETTER: A few Joys and Sorrows behind me in line, there was Stoplight Guy. Stoplight Guy is everything that is right with democracy, with spirituality, with the world. He was a tall African American man with caring-dad energy. He explained that he lived across the street and was there to update the congregation about the very dangerous intersection the church shares with him. He told us about his efforts to get the city to understand the need for a light. There were SO many accidents, he said. It really needed to stop.

If this church had a place for Stoplight Guy, it had a place for me. We sand “When Your Heart Is in a Holy Place,” one of my favorite hymns. I felt refreshed and energized, ready to let my guard down.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Six)

It all happened so fast. It seemed like the people at the front, with the big “NOVEMBER IS COMING” and “WE BELIEVE SURVIVORS” banners in Women’s March font had been ready for centuries—I guess in many ways they have. Maybe it’s my Chilling Adventures of Sabrina binge, but I’ve been thinking a lot about inherited pain and struggle, of power passed down between generations of women (ALL kinds of women: trans, non-binary, femme, cis, etc.) all witchy, all trained. We had their power with us that day, and it made everything easier for a while.

On a more earthly note, the training and organizing that has proliferated since the founding of Black Lives Matter, since Tarana Burke first tweeted #metoo, since the 2017 global Women’s Marches, and since Emma González called bullshit on gun violence has us SO READY to fight, SO READY to stand up against evil. We will only get better, more grounded, more interwoven, more soundly knit. We have built and are building something beautiful, every day.

The people (mostly women, mostly women of color, trans, non-binary, butch and femme and cis and so on) crossed the police barricades and made it up the Capitol steps so fast. They unfurled their banners and chanted “Join us! Join us!” so we did. I grabbed Amy’s hand and led her through a break in the barricade, streamed onto the Capitol steps with so, so many others. There we were. On the steps. Facing the crowd. I faced the “E.R.A. NOW” side of my sign toward the crowd and felt very classic and Seventies.

The noise was dazzling, shattering, reverberating off the marble of all of those white supremacist heteropatriarchal buildings:

“We believe survivors!”

“We believe survivors!”

“We believe survivors.”

I looked out into the assembled crowd and misted over from the magnitude of the moment. After a few more minutes, Amy said “Okay, now it’s time to decide: Do you want to get arrested?”

I saw what she meant: dozens of black-clad police started lining up at the corner of the steps.

I had no question of what I wanted to do. My first student on Monday would be a little boy, a first grader who asks me WAY more questions than I should answer about why we don’t sing “I Believe I Can Fly” anymore and about every single other thing. At that moment, he was the highest priority in my heart, pulling me back down safely into the crowd.

There, we had the chance to witness our steps-occupying compatriots’ bravery. As we chanted to the police “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?” Layers of protesters left the steps, while many others stayed to get arrested.

The first two people to get arrested were a beautiful, middle-aged, full-figured goddess of an African American woman and the white clergyman she knelt beside, clasping hands at the front of the steps. Cheers erupted for them. As much as I wanted to side-eye the white dude, the symbolism was hard to resist.

Most of the arrested people wore brave, beatific expressions, some with a hint of “Are we really doing this?” in their eyes. There were people of all genders, many with a sort of wholesome, Unitarian-schoolteacher look about them, shiny-eyed and hopeful. A gorgeous femme trans women of color returned to the crowd, exasperated that they wouldn’t arrest her.

“Maybe it’s because I’m a candidate, I don’t know” she said.

Of COURSE she’s running for something. Magical fucking times!

One of the last people to get arrested was a blonde woman of about twenty. She had perfect red lipstick on and subtly punk rock eyeliner, and she was clearly having a panic attack. I saw the fear flicker into her eyes, so out of place and yet exactly right in this moment of plucky determination.

As the policeman put the zip-tie handcuffs onto the young woman, cuffing her at the front of her body, I could see her start to hyperventilate, could see her start to fight back perfectly reasonable tears. I could see her wishing she could just FREAK. THE FUCK. OUT. I started to freak out for her, sobbed from my safe place and wished I could run to help her. Her fellow arrested young women gathered around her to help, breathing with her and helping her to breathe. This young woman’s bravery, her vulnerability, her trapped fear, will stay with me forever, will help me fight.

So much of survivorship is about feeling trapped, immobile, voiceless. If you’ve never lived in a body that faces those conditions, it’s hard to understand the risk that that young woman, ALL those women, all those PEOPLE took. They faced the fears that I’m not always strong enough to face, and they did it for me. For you. For our fellow survivors. For America.

I promise that this sacrifice will never go unhonored or unnoticed. I promise to honor that panicking young woman and her brave compatriots every chance I get. I promise to always face my fears, to raise my voice, to stand as bravely as I can for women of every category. I hope you can make that promise too.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Five)

            After the conversation with the pro-Franken family, I needed to get away. On the way to finding a spot on the Capitol lawn, we ran into an art project. We were asked to write our thoughts on a popsicle stick (There was some kind of pun involved there, I forget.) to be glued onto a “believe” poster. I wrote “Fuck Al Franken too.” on mine and the young woman whose poster it was frowned at my contribution before placing it on a pile of also-not-fucking-cheerful-enough rape thoughts.

            Even protest art seemed to have betrayed me. It truly felt like there was nowhere to turn, like I would never be a part of anything ever again. This is a normal thing to feel during a panic attack but this was a NATIONAL panic attack, a GLOBAL one, fueled and pushed (I can only see this in retrospect) by all of my enslaved and exploited ancestors and precursors, by ALL of the women (especially the women of color) and girls and femmes and trans people and non-binary folks, all of the non-white non-men who had fought for freedom against colonialism before me. When I’m screaming, I’m screaming for all of us.

            I can see now there were generations, millennia, of pain and fear coming out of me in racked, animal sobs. I honestly didn’t are who saw. I hoped they saw. I hoped that the people around me could hear me but I ‘knew” in the way that a panicky rape survivor knows that no one could hear me, no one could ever hear me again. No matter how disruptive, how livid, how determined, no one in the world would ever be able to hear me.

            Amy’s policy, whenever scared at a protest, is to find a friendly tree, so we did. We sat on the grass and I tried to breathe. I was still starving so she gave me her sandwich. I wondered what she would have to eat and I nagged her about it for the rest of the day.

            I sat in the grass and scream-cried. I asked her if that women from China had really said “me too” to me and Amy said yes, she had. I shriek/bellowed “WHY?” Like a poorly written movie character. WHY does she have to go through this too? WHY do they hate us so much?

            I felt so dissociated and lost that it seemed like we were done with the protest. (Spoiler alert: We were not.) I wondered if we should start making our way to the Hope Diamond, my favorite post-protest reward. Instead, I kept crying, brokenhearted, feral, bereft.

            At a certain point, though, I realized that my crying might be disrupting the MAGA hat couple, who were engaging in performatively “reasonable” conversations with protester after protester. (I try not to hate those who take the Sarah Silverman, let’s-empathize-with-racists tact, but I kind of do hate them. Talk to somebody better!) When the spite started to re-emerge in my heart, I began to feel something like okay.

            Amy and I decided to go back to the protest for fifteen minutes and then call it mischief managed, but then we saw that the whole demonstration was on the move. It was magnificent to see: Mostly women (cis and trans), mostly people of color, mostly clad in black, fists held high. They were marching together for the Capitol steps.

            As Amy and I joined the march, I had an inkling that this was going to be one of the most powerful things I would ever see. I was not wrong.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Four)

            A really cool thing happened and then a really dreadful thing happened. Lots of protesters were sitting and having a rest along the planters that lined the sidewalk across the street from the Supreme Court. Amy and I went over there to relax for a minute and make sure our phones were charged. I opened the foil-wrapped PB& J from my purse and ate it with panic-hunger. We still joined the chants going on across the street. I wondered aloud why we weren’t BLOCKING the street. If this were Philly, we would definitely be blocking the street.

            Sometimes, tourists would come by and talk to us about what was going on. A group of Chinese women stopped to ask me what my “E.R.A. Now” sign meant. One woman in the group, tall and thin and brightly dressed, didn’t have much English at all, but she had two words:

“Me too.”

            Her face was shiny and happy, maybe just excited to have found the right words. A lightning bolt of connection, sadness, and heart from all across the world went through me. We smiled at each other. We had something beautiful and horrible and profound: Me too.

            Not too long after that life-altering exchange, a white, middle-aged, American man with a goatee, walking his bike and wearing yellow bicycle clothes, stopped to greet some friends who were sitting near me. In my freaked-out, hypervigilant state, I overheard what he was saying, and it FUCKING CONCERNED ME.

In an offhanded, chitchatty way, he said this:

“It’s just a shame because you know the ones voting yes today are the same ones who went nuts when Franken…”

“NO. NOT HERE.” I went from peaceful PB&J mode to spitting-nails mad in half a second. “YOU ARE NOT going to talk about that FRANKEN BULLSHIT HERE. NOT. TODAY.”

Like so many “liberal” men, he was super-ready with:

“You shut the fuck up, bitch. I’m just talking to my friends.” He shook his finger at me and said something physically threatening, I wish I could remember what.

“GO. AHEAD.” I said, holding my sign aloft and bracing for impact.

It seems so foolhardy now, but I WAS physically ready to fight him. I wanted him to come at me so I could rip him to FUCKING SHREDS and with him, all of the troll-farm- indoctrinated Bernie Bro rape-apologists I’d been tormented by for the past three years.

It felt like the crowd around him was treating me as a threat, but it’s likely that some of them were trying to protect me. NOT the white woman that the Bicycle Man had stopped to greet though--she stood between us, shielding the man from my attack. A black man with a very gentle manner tried to get between us on the other side. He was trying to help, I think, but I felt boxed-in and snarling. People were filming with their phones—I’m sure I’m on some feeds looking and sounding like a caged beast.

“You need to get some help.” The white lady acting as the patriarchy’s human shield kept telling me.

“You’re crazy,” the bicycle man kept saying.

1.      I am getting help! This protest IS me getting help.

2.      Nothing calms a girl down like some good old-fashioned gaslighting.

The worst part was that I ‘knew” in this moment that I was the threat here, not sleep-rape-joke making Franken (Who, in my fury, I kept calling Frankl. Sorry Viktor Frankl! Love youuuuu!”) not this man gaslighting me and telling me to shut up, not even Kavanaugh. To this little crowd, I was the scariest thing at the Capitol that day. Maybe I’m a little bit okay with that, except:

            “You’re making my daughter cry!” said the woman angrily.

            Her daughter, a curly-haired twelve-something, was indeed sobbing, in the same way my then-littlest nephew sobbed when I ruined the Thanksgiving before last screaming at the adults about Nazis and racism and the homophobic Catholic church and rape culture and Water Protectors and god knows what else. I recognized and empathized with both kids’ fear, but I tried to understand that neither I nor my anger was the problem.

            “YOU’RE making her cry! WHY DON’T YOU STAND UP FOR WOMEN?”

            “You need help,” the woman kept intoning, and I really can’t argue with her there.

            “What if it was HER in that fucking picture? What if it was YOU?” I screamed as I started to walk away.

            Although some people said words of encouragement (“Stay strong, you can do this.”) as I was led (by Amy, thank goodness) away from the scene in shock, I felt like the worst monster ever, like I’d ruined the movement, like I’d set back the Democrats by a million years. I was shattered, and ashamed of myself, but I can also see who did this.

            AL FRANKEN FUCKING DID THIS. He fucked women over in person and then he fucked us over as a party. Liberal men did this, by dismissing the concerns of all non-white non-men as “identity politics” and insisting that “real people” only cared about money.

            While I admit my anger was scary and I’m sad that that little girl cried, I hope she’ll remember my fury on her behalf. I hope, someday, it’ll spark some fury in her. That doesn’t make me not-ashamed, but it does make me a little hopeful.

Texting Voters: A Blue Wave Love Story

When Amy and I showed up a the Steelworkers’ Union Hall last Saturday for textbanking training, I started off crabby. We were a little late and missed part of the training. The coffee and donuts supply was already depleted and I couldn’t find a cup. I was super-aggravated not to get started right away, nostalgic for the feeling of being handed a good old-fashioned call sheet and getting to work. I waited grumpy-old-ladily for the lead volunteer to send me the link so that I could join the group on the Hustle app.

BUT THEN!!! I was in. Before I knew it, I’d texted FIFTY voters. Then another fifty! Whoa. They start you off with a pre-typed message, but I later figured out how to customize the canned messages, with all of the blue heart/rainbow/flag/Earth/blue wave emojis I wanted. AND!! It turns out that emoji-use DRAMATICALLY increases the odds that someone will text back—found a new superpower, who knew?!

There were still reasons to be grumpy, of course. As the women (As in 2016, the volunteers were mostly women, I’d say a 4:1 ratio of women to men, with room for the nonbinary, of course.) at our table mentioned the hostile messages they were getting, a middle-aged white guy was intrigued:

“Really?! I’m not getting that! I want to change mine to a woman’s name and see what happens!” He seemed curious and amused, rather than concerned LIKE A PERSON.

Maybe I should have just ignored him and let him try it. Maybe his texbank would have turned into an empathy machine. But he made my blood boil to the degree that this could’ve turned panic attack.

“I’m glad you can just OPT IN to my oppression. I’m glad it sounds fun.” I snapped, feeling like a party-ruiner.

“Well, I’m just a straight white guy, there’s not much I can do.”

            I said something like: “There’s a LOT you can do! You can listen and believe us, stand up for us instead of just being amused.”

            He backed down and I took lots of deep breaths to get to a good place and OH! The texts! The texts. I love them so much.

            This was the first time I was contacting ALL kinds of voters, not just active Democrats. When asked who they were voting for for governor and congress, many people responded with “TRUMP. MAGA.” Etc—we were supposed to just thank them for their time and mark them as Republican rather than arguing, and I MOSTLY followed that instruction. (It took me a little while to recognize the sweet gift that is the “Opt Out” option.) But I loved that I’d been a little ping in their day. Showing Up for Racial Justice (https://www.facebook.com/ShowingUpForRacialJusticesurj/) holds the idea that even when we can’t convince someone to fight white supremacy, we can still be an interruption in their worldview. I love when I have a chance to do that.

            (Of course, I don’t love being called c**t or stupid or crazy or hysterical, but those responses are few and far between.)

            But the BEST, of course, are the Democrats who write back, asking how to volunteer and sending all the blue heart emojis, asking about yard signs and organizing and telling me they’re already pledged to volunteer for Emily’s List. (A dude said this! Swoon!) We wish each other luck and the world feels warmer and more optimistic.

            I even, from time to time, step out of character and try polite disagreement. Then, okay, I step back into character and ask people when they’ll stand up for children who are already born.

            Now that I did the training, I can text voters anywhere, anytime between 9AM and 9PM. In my pajamas! Yesterday I wrote to 500 voters and only a handful were mean. With every try, I feel stronger and happier and more hopeful. Give it a try! <3 a="" href="https://act.padems.com/page/s/volunteer">https://act.padems.com/page/s/volunteer

            AND! When you’re on the receiving end of calls, some things to keep in mind: