In Praise of Pride Merch, Part Two

Loss is, but so is LOVE.

This year, for the first time since burning-things-down summer, Amy and I joined the Philly Pride March. People of all ages were wrapped in every color of Pride flags, every sequined or tulle (or both!) permutation of every flavor of rainbow. So many young people with cute pansexual flags painted on their cheeks. Everyone there (aside from the requisite small group of surly religious folks) seemed so happy, so free, and SO STINKIN’ CUTE!

And there, at the end of the march, were the booths. My favorites were the independent artists. They were selling in-joke t-shirts, pronoun pins, big, bright PLUS SIZE! dresses. One booth had a flag pin selection so thorough that they had both the old and new versions of the polyamory flag.

And of course, there were organizations: for reproductive justice, for gender-affirming care, for getting out the vote. The National Parks Service was there making a flag out of rainbow “what inclusion means to me” postcards.

As I’m describing this day I kind of took for granted, it’s really hitting home how much history and effort and sacrifice had to happen to get us there. Just like those Freedom Rings were a key to a bigger life, Pride is a rebirth, reaffirmation, and continuous organizing of that bigger life. It feeds us and connect us and fills our field of vision with bright adorableness so we can be fortified to keep building a loving world.

There were corporations at Philly Pride too, banished to something called “corporate alley.” I love that for us.

But about those corporations: I am so, SO happy that my niece came of age in a time where her bisexuality was so ordinary that she could shop about it in the Target. I love that she could be like “Oh there’s a Star Trek themed Pride shirt this year and now I have a Star Trek themed Pride shirt.”

I love that I could super casually pick up a bi bandana to use as an in-case-there’s-teargas-and-also-because-Covid mask in the summer of 2020! Plus glittery rainbow socks.

When I see the Pride sections in regular stores, I always wonder what it would have felt like to see them as a kid. I was raised rurally and then sheltered-suburbanly in the Eighties and Nineties. For queerness, I pretty much had Madonna (whose records my mom let me get) and Culture Club (whose records she did not.) When I grew into hair bands, I had pretty, pretty Sebastian Bach on my wall making me feel gender things I didn’t have words for.

Would a beautiful activist Skittles package or a rack of multi-flagged tees have given me a language for what I was feeling? Maybe! Who knows! I didn’t even have a language for talking about “regular” sexuality, let alone for discussing queerness.

Which is why it really, really hurts my heart that violent, cruel monsters bullied Target into taking their Pride displays down. It feels like an end (hopefully just a temporary end) of a golden age. It’s not that I think corporations genuinely cared about us this past decade or so—it doesn’t make a difference to me how they feel, only that they’re adding more rainbows (And therefore, I think, more queer visibility) to the world. We really, really need all the rainbows we can get.

I value Corporate Pride not so much as a part of activism as a bellweather, as a symbol that we were powerful enough to be a mainstream thing, marketed to like everybody else. Selling us stuff is not an act of altruism, but it lets us see our progress nonetheless. It lets us see ourselves.

I know the tyranny of disinformation, violence, and fucked up “anti-woke” initiatives won’t prevail in the long run, but for now I just want to stop and feel the pain of losing a little ground. Pride is much bigger than cruelty, stupidity, white supremacy, much bigger and more powerful than brute force. It’s love, y’all, and there’s absolutely nothing they can do to overcome love.

Birthday Heart Inventory and Grandmom’s Still Lives

Despite the grief, despite my predictable frustration with summer for being over, despite even the errant landscapers who tore out my blue morning glories just as they were starting to bloom, I would call this one of my happiest years. My work is getting closer and closer to being exactly what I want it to be—my commute is nearly gone! I feel the most at home I’ve ever felt and I have so much hope for the future—my own and, even a little bit, for the world.

I’ve learned, sometimes, in a still-flawed way, to dole out anger constructively. I’ve lost, most of the time, the conviction that the world is actively trying to push me out of it.

This summer, I had to get good at grief. Grandmom died in June and just last week a favorite mentor succumbed to a second onslaught of cancer. It’s a dubious thing to be proud of, but I think I’ve done my best job ever with grief. Rather than lash out (or lash inwards) I was able to simplify, to focus on the lives well lived, to just go ahead and sleep as often as possible. Grief feels a little like the task of learning bifocals: hurt a little or a lot, feel dizzy, sleep, let the connections grow in my brain and let my vision reset. If post-traumatic growth can be a thing, so can post-grief growth. I’m proud of that growth. I’m proud of the sad strength it took to photograph Grandmom’s house without her in it. The light and colors were new, so may angles I had never seen before.

This year, at the tender age of 44 (oh, to stay Obama-age forever) I learned something like attachment. I was swimming in the ocean with my family a few weeks ago, surrounded by baby jellyfish or some other kind of gelatinous not-stinging aliveness, and I had this thought: “I’ll probably see these people again.” I knew I was loved. I knew I was part of the family—I’d never known it quite so deeply before. I can maybe attribute this shift to a higher Prozac dosage, but the less scientific part of me sees something supernatural—something like Grandmom’s grace reprogramming and refocusing my brain.

Right now I'm having trouble saying anything else about the year, so I'll let Grandmom's Still lives take over:

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Anger, Faith, and Heart: Part One

It seems very tricky to be writing about how pissed I am at my local Unitarians at a time when every faith community that isn’t white, mainstream, and Christian (Arguably, Unitarianism IS a white, mainstream, Christian religion, but they certainly don’t like to see themselves that way!) must be feeling protective of their congregations and their faith homes. But at the same time, I see ways in which the fear can contract us into something evil, a witchhuntlike distrust of strangers that provides an excuse to prey upon (or at least silence) the marginalized. In religion, nearly everyone who isn’t a pro-colonialist Christian straight white male looks marginalized to me.

Additionally tricky, I’m writing from the position of an outsider. I was raised Catholic and I’m ALWAYS angry about it, I’ve been an on-again off-again (now probably permanently off-again) Unitarian for about ten years, and I’m too frustrated now with forced/performed feminine niceness to even attend yoga classes very often. Religion and organized spirituality are clearly not a fit for me, and I know I should probably just let them go like a would a bad match on OK Cupid. Similar to my need to be self-employed, I guess my spiritual life needs to be self-determined. Whatever is divine within me needs to be expressed freely, in its own way, without millennia of patriarchy, rape, and colonialism to weigh it down.  I may wonder forever if that’s even possible. I probably will keep trying.

I am still deeply, fundamentally angry at the Unitarian Society of Germantown for the abandonment and betrayal what was their welcome and celebration during Pope Francis’s visit to Philadelphia in 2015.https://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2015/09/pope-week-is-all-of-panics-parkway-is.html  It still feels like a FUCK YOU to raped children, to LGBTQ folks, and especially especially ESPECIALLY to those of us who identify as women. I think sometimes of returning just once to have my name taken out of the USG membership book, where it remains like a bad spell.

The loss of the Unitarian Society of Germantown and the brunches, music nights, and other friend fun that went with it (I still ache when I remember that my closest church friend called me a narcissist. My blood still boils when I remember the lady who condescendingly told me she hopes I find peace. WHAT KIND OF MONSTER FINDS PEACE WITH CHILD RAPE!?)  still makes me so sad and angry. I probably should have steered clear of future attempts to join a faith community, but I missed the singing. I drive by the Unitarian Church of the Restoration on the way home from work most nights, and they seemed like they might be less patriarchal than USG.

Then, one night in the spring, in a yoga studio running a Kirtan sing with a friend of mine, a voice came to me: “Go back to church. Go back to singing.”

Remembering And Thanking MJ Harris

Yesterday would have been my friend MJ’s birthday. When he passed away last fall, I didn’t properly grieve. I was using all of my emotional strength to prop myself up for my third graders, but that’s no excuse. I should have honored him, thanked him, properly grieved the way such a dazzling soul deserved. I’m, sorry, MJ, and thank you.

When I first met him, we were working for AmeriCorps, both bringing poetry into schools where people kept telling us “these kids” don’t want to write. We bonded over a shared faith that poetry and art could make the world a better, safer, happier place.

We became closer friends when MJ joined one of my poetry classes at Big Blue Marble. He was open and wholehearted in every writing game, and it was a privilege to stand back and watch his poetry deepen and grow, to watch his already strong voice get stronger and more sure of itself.

What I admire most about my gone-angel-friend is how he put his art first. He had faith in the goodness of his talents and never compromised, didn’t let anything hold him back. He was a true artist and a loving, generous, and deeply kind friend. I don’t tend to believe that my dead loved ones can look out for me, except when I do. His spirit might have been part of what took me through these past few weeks, remembering sitting on the 23 bus talking and believing in poetry, in kids, and most importantly in our real selves.

Thank you, MJ, I will try to honor you by being more like you, by putting friendship, love, and creativity first. I miss you and love you very much, and I hope you knew how much you meant to me, how grateful I am for your enormous heart, your enormous contribution to the lives of children, your friends, and the world.