21. Queer as in happy.

photo by Adrain Chesser

The wildfire haze returned to Philadelphia last week, and I learned that the number of times that the city has to fill with smoke from catastrophic forest fires burning in another country before I get used to it is exactly two. I realized it was happening again just as I realized that I didn’t find it remarkable at all. What’s one more new normal?

On Thursday after work, I grabbed my three-ring-binder protest sign and my big black sun hat, put on my mask, and took myself down into the smoke, into Old City, to join the protest forming outside the Museum of the American Revolution, organized by ACT UP Philly against Moms for Liberty, as I had been doing weekly all through the month of June, the month of Pride. What began at first as an outlet for my anger and my righteous indignation quickly became something so much more beautiful and more expansive: a ritual of sacred rage, sacred power, and sacred love.

The protest became a church, and then it became a homecoming.

The first time I made out with a girl (for real, not sleepover games) I was 16. She was new to town, cool and impish and ethereal, Doc Martens and black lipstick and pale skin and ragged Victorian lace. As spring melted into summer, I gave her rides home from school in the afternoon, and we parked my 1984 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight with the leaky sunroof under the scrubby pine and mimosa trees outside of her apartment complex next to the highway, and put the armrest up on the bench seats where the leather came apart at the seams, kissing and moaning and smoking and sweating and listening to mixtapes of Five Eight and Lemonheads and Jesus and Mary Chain in the Atlanta heat. We never talked about it at school, just flirted, and in the summer I went to camp and when I came back in the fall she was gone again, and I don’t remember her name.

I remember having no conflict or confusion about this whatsoever. Though I understood, intellectually, what it meant to be gay, I didn’t have an internal sense of making out with a girl as being “gay” or “bi” or different in any way, it only felt natural, something I did, something I wanted to do. While I enjoyed making out with boys too, making out with girls took place outside of what I knew to be “romance” or “dating,” which I understood to be contractual, a transaction, a negotiation made within the larger ongoing relations between girls and boys, something legible to others. I didn’t have conflict about making out with girls, but neither did I tell anyone: part of what made it beautiful was also what made it dangerous, and both of those things together made it completely invisible, even to myself.

By my sophomore year in college I was a fairly open and adventurous bisexual, at least among my friends, and I had flings with women at every summer camp I worked at (summer camp is peak bi culture). But, as the years went by dating—then married to—a man, I slowly boxed up and stowed away my bisexuality, sheepishly thinking that I had no right to take up queer space when I had so much straight privilege, as if there is a finite amount of queerness, as if there is any kind of scarcity or lack or dearth of queerness, as if there is not enough queerness to go around, as if there is only a small pie of queer joy that I’m not allowed to eat from lest there not be enough queer joy for everyone. Not only did I re-closet myself over those decades under the guise of respect and deference, I actually never really came out of the closet in the first place.

Because, if I’m honest, I was afraid, and it seemed easier not to.

Growing up, my brother—the middle one, the golden one—was full-throated in his ongoing disgust towards me, towards my body, my choices, my life, the whole fact and self of me: my period was disgusting, my breasts were disgusting, my breath was disgusting, my body hair was disgusting, my feet were disgusting, my opinions were disgusting, my vegetarian diet was disgusting, my friends were disgusting, I disgusted him.

He told me he would never talk to me again if “he ever found out” that I dated a woman. He also told me he would never talk to me again if I protested “the troops”—whatever that means—or if I got arrested again, or any other of a list of proscribed behaviors. He held our tenuous relationship to ransom, he tracked me and monitored me (from afar, with disgust), he beat up my drug dealer, he scolded me for moving in with Duncan before we were married: “why would Duncan buy the cow, when he can get the milk for free?” he would say. “What cow?” I would ask, bewildered. “What milk?”

It took me so long to understand that this behavior was not some kind of testosterone-warped, Southern-fried, ill-informed love that I needed to tolerate and correct, but rather a form of property management: as a member of his family, I was an extension of my parents, of him, of his image and social capital. I was his little sister, his cow, it was his milk to sell or do with what he damn well pleased. It was never about love or protection. It was only ever about control.

Even though I laughed at these threats of abandonment at the time, they had their intended, chilling effect: I hid myself from my family in order to be safe, performing ever more complex choreography to try to fit them into a world where I could also be myself. Not only did this effort fail, but I exhausted myself in the trying, and it didn’t matter anyway.

Seven years ago today, I sat on a blanket with Duncan and Jasper at City-County Plaza in Asheville, waiting for the 4th of July fireworks to start. I checked my phone, something I did frequently because I was hypervigilant about exactly this kind of situation: I had posted a photo of my friend Glo by Adrain Chesser, the one where she’s standing on a country road at twilight in an American flag dress, her son, about 8, on her left and another child on her right, both wearing American flags, middle fingers up. It’s beautiful and defiant and not even really anti-patriotic, but, to my mind, a classic American 4th of July sentiment. But my mother couldn’t contain her judgement, and she commented on the photo, essentially accusing my beautiful friend Glo, who was, at the time, very much alive and also on facebook, of child abuse for encouraging those innocent children to flip the bird. “So sad,” she tutted.

Of course it was absurd and of course I was furious, but what could I do? I deleted the comment and texted my mom, using the restrained language of healthy boundaries that I was learning from my therapist: “Mom, I deleted your comment. If you insult my friends on my facebook page again I will have to unfriend you,” I texted, feeling frantic but trying to sound calm, just another mom texting during the fireworks display on the 4th of July, my heart racing, my guts churning.

The reply came swiftly: “well, maybe you should just unfriend me, then.”

Not to be outdone, a little later in the evening my brother chimed in on the same photo, with his old tried and true: “you disgust me” (To GLO! The absolute audacity). I deleted the comment and blocked both my mom and my brother, folded my hands over my phone and sat by myself with my little family, alone in a vast swath of people, weeping silently as the sky exploded overhead to the sounds of country music over the loudspeakers, one more broken strand on the very frayed and threadbare string tethering me to the whole rest of my family of origin.

And yet, I tried to make it work with them for three more years, bless my broken heart. Such is the power of attachment in the mammalian nervous system: it feels like we will literally die before we allow ourselves to sever a bond, no matter how untenable, and many of us do exactly that.

On Thursday, the police guided and buffered the women of M4L as they disembarked from their charter buses and processed across the plaza into the museum for their opening reception, down a catwalk of barricades, surrounded by a whole city block of barricades, past rows of riot cops caging in the protesters with barricades. Some of the women pranced and flounced, mocking the people from behind police protection while we booed and howled and chanted, middle fingers up. When one particularly performative woman stopped to dance and shimmy, reveling in the attention, the emcee guided us to turn our backs to her, to turn towards each other in love, to say, “you’re doing beautifully!” to dance it out, to shake that ass.

Then, a slight teenager—let’s call them Ray—took the mike:

“When I first started to transition,” Ray shouted, head down, into the microphone, “my friend gave me a sticker that said ‘not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.’” The crowd cheered in recognition of the familiar slogan.

“BUT NO!” Ray yelled into the microphone, hands shaking.

“NO!” they yelled again.

“GAY! AS! IN! HAPPY!” they screamed, and the crowd roared back in affirmation.

“QUEER! AS! IN! HAPPY!” they rejoiced, head high, jumping up and down, the crowd going absolutely bonkers, jumping up and down with them.

“TRANS

AS

IN

HAPPY!”

Tears streaming down all of our faces, the spirit moving through us all, moving together. TRANS AS IN HAPPY! The power inside that child’s body, the power in their voice. The power that belonged to them and to them alone. They were incandescent with it, and it was beautiful, sacred, holy.

“You don’t know how much it means to me to see you all here,” Ray continued, “to see hundreds of people here to say no to hate, to know that you care that I exist, that you will stand up for me, and protect me. Thank you so much,” Ray was weeping, all of us weeping.

The protest wasn’t about Moms for Liberty, it was never about them. There isn’t even a “them” that they are, there is only us. They are us at our most repressed, self-disgusted, self-hating; we are them at their most liberated and joyful. The protest wasn’t for them, it was for Ray, and all the Rays inside of each of us, to know that they are loved, they are seen, they are holy, they are safe.

The next day at work, one of my clients brought in two huge plastic clamshells full of cut fruit from her favorite fruit salad cart to share with the other participants in grief group. “Ooh, is that from the one on 13th?” someone asked. “Yeah!” she responded. “EVERYBODY’S talking about that fruit stand!” someone else said. Everyone agreed, and I chuckled to myself that I definitely needed to try some of this very special fruit salad from this very special fruit stand but you know what, she was right. It was the best fruit salad I had ever had- the watermelon was so fresh, sweet and firm, the mangoes were just right, the orange slices, strawberry, cantaloupe, grapes, honeydew, each one the ideal ripeness, juiciness, firmness, piled high, generous, good and cheap.

The smoke came and the smoke went. Moms for Liberty came and Moms for Liberty went. And I’m still here, still working, still loving, still sitting in grief group with women, mothers, sex workers, drug users, pouring our hearts out over our giant plates of perfect fruit salad. Healing.

I’m still queer, and I would still be queer even if I had never kissed a girl, made out with a girl, or had sex with a woman, and being less visible or less vocal doesn’t make me less queer, because my queerness is an essential part of who I am, and it can never be erased, and neither can yours, your sacred, holy queerness, your pride. Pride as in riot. Pride as in protest. Pride as in church. Pride as in family, the real kind, unconditional. Queer as in healthy. Queer as in growing old. Queer as in safe. Queer as in flourishing. Queer as in beautiful. Queer as in belonging. Queer as in happy.

Home + The World features personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. Currently, all content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. Y’all have been so incredibly generous, and it’s truly amazing, humbling and astounding. Thank you. If you feel so moved, please share this newsletter and help me grow my readership! I thank you so deeply for being here and I thank you for being you.

⚔️❤️ Jodi