We survived. 💞
When I was 16, I couldn't wait to attend my first Pride parade. Back then, it wasn't even an official event. Folks just got together on the Fayetteville, AR square, marched up and down the street, and talked with one another like dear cousins who had been away at college for too long.
That was the year Westboro Baptist Church had picketed at my high school. Fred Phelps told me I was going to Hell, of course. A journalist was transported by ambulance after someone threw a full water bottle at him and missed. I was non-consensually outed by the local reporter on the 6 o'clock news that night. Boy howdy, what a day that was.
The counter-protesters at that protest were my very first time meeting other LGBTQ+ folks in my hometown. That's another story, perhaps for the book I've been writing, rather than an email.
Real Belonging didn't just pop into existence last year. It was born of long event volunteer shifts; hours spent transporting AIDS Project clients to doctors appointments; handing out condoms and PrEP info packets in parks; and yes -- many lovely, long nights at the clubs where I eased the pain of loneliness in clusters of people who, like me, learned that "family" means something different for us than we'd been promised as children it would.
This Pride month, I kept coming back to those memories of how we all got here. It was never easy. It wasn't even an optimistic road.
Being Queer was just the path we've had to walk, as majestically as we could figure out how.
It still is.
I don't create t-shirts and wall art and blankets and greeting cards just to make a buck -- although, since anti-trans laws have ended three careers for me in the past decade, it's not a negligible consideration.
I create them because I remember my 16th Christmas, when I had flooded my wishlist with EVERYTHING RAINBOW I could find on CafePress and insisted on being the most obnoxious, gayest gay who ever gayed, gaying gayfully in direct proportion to my mother's Evangelical dismay.
I remember how I felt opening the box with that rainbow belt I'd asked for. She actually bought it for me! I still have it, 22 years later.
Did my rainbow license plate holder offset all the harm happening in my home? I'm not sure it was supposed to. But it made me want to survive the bullying, the abuse, and the exhaustion to see another Christmas.
My rainbow-designed book bag made going back to school five days a week feel bearable.
My rainbow shoelaces made every step feel like a duty to keep moving forward for future generations.
These were gifts that mattered. They shaped me. They were my daily grounding rod. They gave me enough hope to survive on, in an era dominated by George W. Bush and Fred Phelps.
22 years later, I had to drag myself to Pride last weekend.
Finding out I'm autistic has been a game-changer. The burnout is the same, but the choice to push through it or honor my needs feels different now.
Still, I went. I spent every last ounce of embodied energy I had. It was worth it.
(If you're not yet following @CampCallout on socials, you prob'ly wanna catch what Mercedes Chandler -- recently relocated old-Southerner, new-Arkansan -- has going on.)
The queers I used to lie awake at night wondering if I'd ever meet turned out by the tens of thousands. In Northwest Arkansas.
So many of them are now my friends and chosen family. Wow.
This tiny little corner of the Ozark Mountains blossomed into a weekend of brilliance, filled with people just like me; people who love me; people who are glad I took those steps forward in my 16-year-old hard-headedness with my rainbow socks, my rainbow shirts, my rainbow book bag; inconveniencing school principals who had to deal with kids trying to kill me in gym class; stubbornly showing up to college before I'd finished high school and teaching myself languages because who was gonna stop me?
Day after day, I pressed onward through a U.S. Presidency I wasn't sure any of us would survive -- and I still lament how many of us didn't.
The hope that someday I would be part of this community right here was enough to keep me alive.
That very gay rainbow book bag was enough to keep that hope alive.
Now I'm creating these sources of hope for the next generation.
If I could give you a magically healthier society right now, I would. But this is the society we're in. So, this is the space in which I am committed to giving you and your loved ones dozens of adorable reasons to keep taking that next step each day.
I look forward to seeing you again next year at Pride, friend. Let's all take extra good care of one another between now and then.
In solidarity,
Brandyn