Having spent eleven hours on a train in one weekend, I was lucky to have downloaded such a perfect light-read to keep me entertained on my journey criss-cross country. Hartnett’s Unlikely Animals is a contender for one of my top ten books of the year, for Hartnett does a pristine job at blending humor with sorrow, the absurd with the believable, and produces a cast of likeable and memorable characters. She speaks on the Opioid crisis in a human and non-preachy manner, as well as tells of the desperation that families feel when faced with illness in a country and healthcare system that does not support them. It is a book as charming as it is nostalgic. The sort of story that makes me homesick and I don’t get homesick often. It’s only when I read about autumnal New England, with its maple candy, apple orchards, stone walls, and covered bridges, that I think about returning home.
Even if said home is currently a shitshow of forced birth, anti-trans propaganda, mass shootings, and fascist incels.
It does tend to dim the leaf-peeping beauty of New England when I hear how terrible so many people’s lives are in the US and how very useless I feel across the ocean and removed from all that. Perhaps that’s why I was so determined to go all the way to Berlin last weekend. I wanted to go to some sort of LGBTQ+ event, though these parades are always shamelessly mass-marketed and are more about selling products/brands than caring about the actual people taking part in them. That’s capitalism for you, though. Corporations care about LGBTQ+ rights for as long as it means being trendy and turning a profit. As soon as things fall out of favour, they’re out. Still, they’re an expected annoyance at this point, for a lot of these companies do help to fund the parades and this was a giant parade, turning up hundreds of thousands of people a year.
That’s important.
People need to be loud and show up in droves and shame these hateful regressionists who are trying so hard to take away the rights of people. Who care so deeply that people outside of their ultra-specific world view might exist and dare to be happy. Who honestly believe that queerness showed up all of thirty-ish years ago with the invention of the internet and the McRib. And who pretend that queer history doesn’t exist, even though so much of it was targeted and destroyed or was censored by biased historians.
I met up with a friend in Berlin and we did a lot of walking with a lot of people. People who were kicked out for being themselves, who were young and searching for their identity, who were older and deep in a community, and those who were vibrant and alive and unapologetic. We waved flags, we danced, we avoided the handful of perverts who always attend these parades (seriously, the fetishist clubs have way more respect than these loner losers who walk with their dicks out), and we got blisters.
I remembered the pride parade I’d gone to in Boston, years ago. Where somebody had broken out from their group and had run up and asked to hug me, all the while complimenting my outfit and flag colors I’d chosen. Who’d seen me. I remembered how I had hugged them back and felt so accepted by them, so unconditionally loved even though I’d tried to blend into the back of crowd, that I think that started the acceptance I felt towards myself. How maybe I wasn’t cold-hearted for my lack of wanting to date or crush or marry, but instead that I just wanted to live a life without a romantic partner. That maybe I was actually very feeling and warm to the people I care for, even when society screamed and yelled that I was a loser because I didn’t want marriage. That maybe it was okay to like being on my own and to not be ashamed that I valued my independence above a husband or a child. Maybe I wasn’t selfish or broken or, God forbid, innocent (drives me fucking insane, that last label) for wanting to be single. Maybe it was okay to be a little off the norm, a little queer.
I was very lucky to have been born when I was, despite all the fuckers screaming that they want things back on the straight and narrow again, because if I’d been born just a hundred years ago, if I’d been forced to marry and have children, I think I would have killed myself. I really do. I think I would have been one of those women deemed insane who walked into a river with rocks in their pockets.
That’s what they don’t get, they say Pride is a sin.
They don’t know that there’s definitions of Pride outside of religion.
Pride is about having the dignity to live one’s own life.
I don’t even care if these religious fascists judge me and pray for my eternal damnation for my existence and tell themselves that I’m secretly unhappy, so long as they don’t take away my right to live the way I choose. Because nobody should have the right to control another. They have a right to sigh and be a bigot and say they don’t understand how people can lead such empty, childless and selfish lives, but they don’t have the right to stop me.
It should be said that, before the rise of the Nazis, Germany had been in one of their most progressive booms in their history. There were breakthroughs in trans-research and queer history, all of which was the first thing burned by the Nazis, all of those people killed or fled or sent to death camps. It’s something that I’m sure many people thought about at Pride in Berlin. How important it is to be loud and present. To be unapologetic. To walk over the same paths that the fascists marched and tread over their steps, person after person (in heels, in combat boots, in platform shoes), forever stamping down atop them that – no, you did not get rid of us. No, we are still here and we always will be.
We’ll march atop your steps.
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