Walk with Me

It’s Pride, and also the first anniversary of my uncle’s death, so I want to type up a story about him. (NB: my aunt, his wife, is equally cool, but she’d want this story to be about him too.) So here goes.

I skipped town when I was 16. Nothing interesting about that part; just standard queer kid in a conservative place in the 1990s stuff. I’d just gotten my driver’s license (this took a while; I’m good at other things), it was the beginning of summer break, and my parents had recently bought a new car and were planning to fix up their old one to sell. In the meantime, the old car (whom I’d named Harold Godwinson because one of his headlights kept exploding) was sitting all by himself in a corner of the driveway, and I thought he might be down for a little adventure. So, one night, I threw some stuff in my backpack (documents, journals, a few changes of clothes, my $235 in babysitting cash) and snuck out after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep.

Harold Godwinson and I hit the highway. The thing about him was that he started shaking violently at speeds over 57 mph, but in fairness so did I – I’d driven on the interstate in driver’s ed, but, like, twice, and for 5 minutes at a time instead of several consecutive hours – so we made a good pair. We were lucky enough (seriously: I cannot stress enough how lucky we were in this) to have a destination in mind, and we reached it just as the sun was coming up.

My uncle was in the kitchen making breakfast for my aunt, who’s not a morning person, and he did not look surprised at all to see me coming up the path with my luggage. He met me at the door and said, “Well, hey there babygirl, we were just thinking you might want to come and stay with us for a while, and I’m so glad you read our minds.” I ate my aunt’s breakfast and then faceplanted in the attic bedroom while he called my parents to tell them where I was and that I’d be staying. (I could hear the yelling even through the adrenaline crash; I think that’s the only time I ever heard my uncle yell and, believe me, I did a LOT of dumb shit in front of him over the years.)

The next week my uncle and I went out to run an errand. I’d thought we were just going to the hardware store – we were forever putting up shelves together – but instead we drove 45 minutes to the state’s only “alternative” (plausible-deniability term for “gay and lesbian”) bookstore. He walked me inside, poked his head into every room while I watched, confused, from the entrance hall, and then came back over. “Okay, babygirl. Here’s a twenty, you should, uhhhhhh, buy yourself some, uhhhhhh, alternative books. Back in one hour, I gotta go to the grocery.” At this point he looked around and realized that the cashier (who, I was about to learn, was permanently cosplaying Mo from Dykes to Watch Out For) and a nice middle-aged lesbian couple were trying very hard not to stare at him. He bowed slightly toward them, said “Ladies,” and then backed out the door in what might have been the most awkward little shuffle ever.

We were all hanging out at my aunt’s house earlier this month to celebrate my uncle. We drank a toast – cheap scotch, his favorite – and after a while of telling stories about him I asked something that should’ve occurred to me a lot sooner: how did he find out about the queer bookstore? It was so obviously not his natural habitat.

My big cousin swallowed his scotch the wrong way and my aunt said, “Oh, you’re going to love this. He asked around at church.”

Back up for a second: most of my side of the family is Catholic, but through various plot twists in her life my aunt became a member of one of the earlier groups of women to be ordained in the Episcopal church. Not one of the Philadelphia Eleven or anything, but pretty early on. Of course, not everybody – particularly in more conservative parts of the US (like, say, the south) – was cool with women priests right away, and things could get a little hostile at times. My uncle never had much truck with any form of religion or philosophy whatsoever, but he did believe in my aunt, so he would periodically show up at whatever church she was assigned to and stare down anyone who was looking at my aunt in a funny way.

Fast forward again to just before I showed up at their house: my aunt and uncle figured they might ask me to come stay with them, and my uncle, in preparation for this, decided to find some places I might like to hang out. He didn’t find anything in the immediate neighborhood, so one Sunday he tagged along with my aunt, who was then working in a church about 45 minutes from their house. During the coffee hour he approached a group of random church ladies and this happened. (Bear in mind that these ladies saw my uncle only once a month or so, when he showed up for his periodic glaring at the conservatives.)

My uncle: Morning, ladies! What a nice service that was. [Pause while they all stare blankly at him.] We hope that our niece will be coming to stay with us soon. [More blank stares from the ladies. Uncomfortable pause.] She has always been a tomboy, and –

One of the ladies, who was about to become my friend Amelia: OHH!!! Okay. [Turning toward the coffee urn.] HEY! POLLY! WE NEED YOUR EXPERTISE AND GUIDANCE!

Polly – imagine the woman from “Ring of Keys” and you’ll have it – came right over and said: Oh, a tomboy? Okay, I’ve got you. Let me just get some paper.

Chromatic Gesture II - 25 x 40 in - 63 x 102cm - 2025

they did not get to choose where they grew up and they are living under the harshest oppression

we cant punish them for where they live, we need to be working to help them as well

The experiences of queer people in conservative spaces are wildly misunderstood by people who have not lived in them. Little queer communities are often formed naturally, because queer people tend to gravitate towards each other almost instinctively, united by the shared sense of alienation and loneliness. That has been my experience, but I've been incredibly lucky to be surrounded by fellow queer people for almost my entire life.

I lucked out with my parents as well. My mom, step-dad and my father are all accepting and supportive. I feel like the assumed reality of most "queer people in conservative spaces" is that their families are the problem, or at least a huge part of it. That has not been the case for most of my friends. Sure, some of them have awful abusive parents, some are still in the closet, some had issues that have been sorted out by now, but A LOT of Russian parents are supportive of their queer kids. The bigger problem is the law never being on our side, the living in a state of neverending fear and stress, the constant looking over your shoulder.

I knew a girl in my year in high school who had two moms. I don't know what their situation was, but I know there are are a lot of same-sex parents in Russia, even though it is incredibly illegal and they are always at a huge risk of losing their child.

I know a few trans people as well, a couple of them have transitioned, although I genuinely have no idea how they even accomplished that. Their very existence is at a constant risk. They don't get talked about very often even by our own community.

And of course a lot of people, including myself, desperately want to move somewhere safer. Looking at photos of irl pride events genuinely makes me cry every single time. But of course it's not physically possible for everyone to move wherever they want to. You know how migration policies are like. The class inequality in this country is genuinely insane, the vast majority of people are somewhere between "dirt poor" and "struggling lower middle class". In a country where being queer is like this👌close to being fully illegal, of course queer folks specifically are at a huge risk of unemployment and homelessness. My parents knew a gay man who was fired explicitly because his employer found out about his sexuality. More recently my friend told me about a fight her gay coworker had with his boss, during which a friend of said boss shouted out "what were you thinking, hiring a f*g in the first place?!" He's a nail tech, by the way.

So what we're left with at the end of the day are a lot of queer folks, who don't have the opportunity to move, who are at a constant risk irl, who are prohibited to exist online by their own government. It makes me sick.

^ embroidered a net onto the front pocket of these overalls

one of my friends has CAIS. they were assigned female and have a prostate. they have been denied prostate exams multiple times on the basis of "being assigned female" despite insisting that they had valid concerns about symptoms that aligned with prostate cancer. guess what happened when they finally got an exam? they ended up having prostate cancer

it fortunately is now in complete remission, which is why they're comfortable with me talking about it, but you see the issue here? biology is never as simple as assigned sex, by judging the care someone needs by their proximity to maleness or femaleness any mixed or otherwise "abnormal" sex characteristics they have are completely ignored

...Welp, we've been married for a week now.

Holy crap.

But are there any aspecs who don't deal with that?

Like that shit is irritating and presumptuous, but does anyone else have family members that are fully aware and have made leace with it from how aspec coded you are even if you're not explicitly out?

I meant more to talk about how when you’re aro, there’s this whole side of relationships, those that are lauded as the « most powerful bonds » that you don’t have access to. You’re effectively barred from getting to close to people you know? How must it feel, to know yourself secondary in all relationships? If all you can have are friends, how do you cope with the expectation that all those friends could leave you to live with a partner?

And when you’re ace, especially when otherwise queer (like, being transfem), you have to reckon with the fact that no matter what, there’s a facet of socializing that you can’t access. This goes into relationships too, of course. What do you do with partners that expect some degree of sexual reciprocation? What do you do, when flirting, playing with desire, is so common in your community? Do you just accept you’ll be isolated from your peers in a tangible way? Is that even something you can accept?

I can’t claim these are the worst things the world does, nor to have solutions. But, when connecting with people, and doing so deeply and fully is predicated on relating with them, sexually or romantically, and you can’t do that. What do you do?