Affect

Who do you love?

Last essay, Patty talked about the impact of the overturning of Roe on her personally, directly.

I think about this all the time. I lack the body for pregnancy, so I’ll never face an unwanted one. I’m gay so I don’t have the sort of sex that would create an unwanted pregnancy. Abortion is kind of far from my immediate concern.

As I think about the other previous court decisions that Clarence Thomas has formally threatened, I’ve never partnered up, so the overturning of Obergefell wouldn’t immediately affect me. Griswold would be a weird thing to overturn—I mean, really, are we going to take away contraceptives?—but for reasons stated above it’s not a big concern for me. Unless, of course, we’re talking condoms, because for nearly 40 years, we’ve been talking about condoms as a disease prevention device, so could we still use them for that? But then, though not named by Thomas, Surely Lawrence v. Texas is also on the table, making same-sex sex illegal again. But heck, I so seldom have sex, even that’s not a huge burden to me. (This time, I won’t go in how my whiteness adds layers to the ways these decisions might not affect me.)  

(Aside—this is the second time in a row that I’ve mentioned condoms. Are condoms the new Hitler?)

As Patty pointed out, everything is connected and all these lawsuits deeply affect people I care about and so I do care about the decisions. I’m just owning up to how little skin I have in these games. And then I think about all the people who have less at stake than I do. That’s when it starts to snowball.

I’ve noticed how few people in my work place have talked about this. I’ve had only one conversation with one coworker about the Roe decision. The Johnny Depp and Amber Heard courtroom drama got more discussion. I play my part. I haven’t brought it up, either. I work mostly with women, so maybe they’re having quieter conversations that don’t include me. The point is, most of my conversations about Roe have been online. I don’t know what this means.

As I sit in my mostly bureaucratic job, doing things that matter to students but not to the crumbling of the republic, I wonder if this is how it is in any other nation where fascism took over. Did everyone just keep going to work, doing their work things even as alarming decisions were made in places of power? Did everyone just keep doing their work things until it was too late to do otherwise and then it just became a situation of keeping your head down out of self-preservation? I figure this is how it must have been in all the fascist states of the Twentieth Century, the ones that led to world wars. (See how hard I’m working to not mention Nazis?)

Here Patty influences me. She says we start with what we can, where we are. Building relationships, connecting to community. I felt this the day after Roe was overturned. That was the day of the Houston Pride Parade, which I walked in with my church. It felt like a risky thing, and I will tell you that as we walked through downtown, waving at people, tossing out beads, and generally experiencing some collective queer joy, I also kept scanning the buildings around us, the parking garages in particular. That vigilance aside, it felt like we were nonetheless coming together, making a statement, being present to the world and to one another. It felt important.

Mind you, this is a “growing edge” for me (do we still say that?). If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that my hermit tendencies are real and I can pretty happily be alone and disconnected. It takes effort for me to build relationships and connect to community. I’m pretty terrible at it.

Then I think about the people for whom it matters. I have to decide that they matter enough for me to make the connections. It’s a decision to connect. It’s easy for some of us to disconnect.

So I’ve made some minor efforts in the last week. Not exactly organizing but working at maintaining connections I already have, asking friends the hard questions (like, “do you have a plan?”) before all of us in this moment in history, offering hope even as it sounds like I’m despairing. The hope is in the hard conversations.

Because if things go as badly as they could go, no one is going to care about my sex life and whether I used contraceptives. I’ve walked in Pride Parades, written for queer magazines, and made Roe-supportive comments in social media. As one tweet (that I reported for threatening content) said, they want to round up everyone who does these sorts of things. (They didn’t explain what happened once they rounded us up, but hey, I’ve read enough history to makes some guesses.) What I’ve done is enough to be rounded up.

We hope it doesn’t come to this. So far, we maintain our visibility in large enough numbers to make the “round up” difficult. Does it protect us individually? Not always. But the community? It might protect the community, for a little while longer. As I walked in the parade a week ago, I did think of Harvey Milk’s call for us to come out, that coming out, being visible, was our greatest strength. I thought about that and how Harvey Milk was shot.

Somewhere in here is a thought about how what affects individuals affects a community and how a community is affected by what happens to individuals and somewhere in there is a call to love in ways that are not romantic and are hard and requires courage. Maybe one definition of courage is loving people who are affected when we are not.

This has meandered around (like I do) and I feel like there was more I wanted to say. I wrote the first draft of this after checking on Chicagoland friends via Facebook, after another violent white man with a gun destroyed lives because he could. Some people label it hate, and maybe it’s anger, too. It’s definitely violence. It is holding violence as a value, as a means of addressing anger. Or hate. Most of these shootings just feel like bursts of anger backed up with violent values.

Not sure how that fits in with any of the above, but it’s also on my mind and the whole premise of this enterprise is digression, so . . . there you are.

Be careful. Love courageously. Grab dinner with some friends. Talk about the hard things. Make plans you never want to need.