love wins, always

TRAUMA. 

Killing a black lesbian inmate was not simply killing off a character. Murdering a black lesbian inmate was trauma. Watching the life drain from her eyes was trauma. Watching her die didn’t make me feel any better, it wasn’t “topical” or groundbreaking. Something that quite literally happens to QTPOC every day, people like me every goddamn day, doesn’t make me feel any better. All I got from this plot line is that QTPOC bodies aren’t safe anywhere–not on the street, not in their homes, not in their safe spaces, not even in their fictional representations. All I got from this plot line is a mirror reflecting back to me an image of pain and anti-black violence in the form of a season “arc”. 

Writers will never learn, will they? Presenting black characters as victims (Poussey), or perpetually angry (Janae), or comedic fodder (Black Cindy and Taystee), or hopeless bodies in a system in which they’ll never get an honest chance (Suzanne) isn’t anything new. It’s the same mess we’ve been seeing since the days of Amos ‘n’ Andy. We’re only useful for white entertainment or white character growth. 

For once, let me see a character who looks like me be treated with the respect that they deserve…and live to bask and thrive in it. Poussey was violently crushed to death and left on the cafeteria floor like last night’s scraps. I don’t need to see myself dead and neglected on a TV show when black bodies are piling up in morgues and I could very well be the next body murdered in cold blood tomorrow. This plot line was not made with me in mind. Yet again, my body was used as an example for white people to “think” about treating black people like humans. 

Black characters aren’t props. Black characters aren’t statements for social change. Black characters aren’t vehicles for white guilt.

Black people shouldn’t have to die for a person to value their life–real or fictional. 

Never. Too many have died for the way they have loved. That needs stop now. 

Here’s the thing you need to understand about every LGBT person in your family, your work, and your circle of friends:

We’ve spent most of our lives being aware that we are at risk.

When you hear interviewers talking to LGBT folks and they say “It could have been here. It could have been me,” they aren’t exaggerating. I don’t care how long you’ve been out, how far down your road to self acceptance and love you’ve traveled, we are always aware that we are at some level of risk.

I’m about as “don’t give a shit what ANYONE thinks” as anyone you’ll ever meet… and when I reach to hold Matt’s hand in the car? I still do the mental calculation of “ok, that car is just slightly behind us so they can’t see, but that truck to my left can see right inside the car”. If I kiss Matt in public, like he leaned in for on the bike trail the other day, I’m never fully in the moment. I’m always parsing who is around us and paying attention to us. There’s a tension that comes with that… a literal tensing of the muscles as you brace for potential danger. For a lot of us, it’s become such an automatic reaction that we don’t even think about it directly any more. We just do it.

And then… over the last few years, it started to fade a little. It started to feel like maybe things were getting better. A string of Supreme Court decisions. Public opinion shifting to the side of LGBT rights. Life was getting better. You could breathe a little bit.

What happened with this event was one of two things that are pretty dramatically demonstrated by how Matt and I are reacting to this. Matt came out fairly late, during the golden glow of the changing tide. He’s never dealt with something like this. It’s literally turned him inside out emotionally because all that stuff he read about that was just “then” became very much “NOW”. For me, I’ve had some time to adjust to the idea that people hate us enough to kill us. Matthew Shepherd was my first real lesson in that. So this weekend was a sudden slap in the face, a reminder that I should never have let my guard down, should never have gotten complacent… because it could have been US.

Every LGBT person you know knows what I’m talking about. Those tiny little mental calculations we do over the course of our life add up… and we just got hit with a stark reminder that those simmering concerns, those fears… they probably won’t ever go away. We’ll never be free of them. Additionally, now we just got a lesson that expressing our love could result in the deaths of *others* completely unrelated to us. It’s easy to take risks when it’s just you and you’ve made that choice. Now there’s this subtext that you could set off someone who kills other people who weren’t even involved. And that’s just a lot.

That’s why I’m personally a bit off balance even though (or because, depending on how you look at it) I live in Texas and was not personally effected by this tragedy. Don’t get me wrong: nothing will change. I will still hold my husband’s hand in public. I will still kiss him in public. We’ll still go out and attend functions and hold our heads high.

But we will be doing those mental calculations for the rest of our lives. Those little PDAs you take for granted with your spouse. They come with huge baggage for us. Every single one is an act of defiance, with all that entails.

DUNKIRK LARRIES GROUP CHAT

Catch us in the theater on July 19, 2017 crying into our popcorn buckets as we watch Harry on the screen and wonder if Louis is hiding in the back row of our theater or someone else’s!

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