On Keeping Ourselves Safe

It's not going to be okay. | Dec 23, 2022

It already isn't okay.
I don't know what to tell my girlfriend when she breaks down in tears because the threat of violence is all too real. Club Q is the closest to home, as far as mass shootings go. I've been talking about community and personal defense with my other partners; firearms scare her because of previous associations with family members, and she feels that it invites violence unto us. I haven't the heart to tell her about when I had to fight off a homophobic assailant with my knife. Violence is already being forced upon us whether we are perceived to invite it or not.
It seems that there are a lot of queer people that I know that haven't directly been the subject of horrible violence. That is a wonderful, fantastic thing. What I and many other people have gone through doesn't make us better or give us claim to superiority, that we know more than anyone else about homophobia. Terror doesn't build character, it just traumatizes us.
What experiencing harm does, is it gives us another perspective. Queer people that have never been physically assaulted aren't stupid or wrong for not having been attacked, their perspectives just reflect a life of relative safety. The strides that we've made insofar as being accepted by the public is not to be understated, and is reflected in the reduction of of homophobic hate crimes. Violence is a thing that they see happening to others far away, violence is an abstract concept.
Until it isn't.
What Pulse and Club Q show is that the fascists aren't content to just keep us sequestered to our bars and our drag shows. What the slandering of Pete Buttigeg and Jared Polis and /normal/ gays show us is that there is no point of respectability that one can adhere to, that one can pander to our oppressors for, to be seen as anything other than an abomination. All of us painted perverts and pedophiles with the same brush of condemnation, no matter how much the respectable gays try to seperate themselves from the faggots and the freaks and the dykes and the trannies and the weirdos and the gender-nonconformists and and and... and it doesn't matter. We all are freaks and faggots and dykes and weirdos and trannies and WRONG, WHOLLY AND COMPLETELY BY NATURE OF WHO WE ARE to the people that hate us and want us dead.
Don't you get it yet? Don't you understand that mass violence is coming for us all sooner rather than later? A bill has been introduced by a senator in Utah that would outlaw all pornography. This is the first step to outlawing any depictions of queer people, and eventually making being queer at all illegal. Gay people are already hypersexualized. Being transgender is already seen as a kink that we are subjecting other people to without their consent. To have any depictions of us labeled as inherently pornographic is not a far stretch, and something that has already happened before. Anti-sodomy laws have been penned in this country in the past, and some still exist today. An introduction of a ban on all things queer wouldn't be an unprecedented new radical idea, but instead a return to tradition as the fascists see fit.
Gay and Trans panic laws still exist in a number of states. The defense of killing someone because they were gay and coming onto you without your consent or because they were trans and "tricked you" still legally holds weight. An active attempt to remove queer people from public spaces is already underway. By litigating who can use public bathrooms, who people are able to play school sports with, what they are able to wear in public, what they can be called, what people are able to do with their bodies, what love is, what sex is, what being a human person is, there leaves no room for us in their world.
How do you plan on keeping yourself and our communities safe? I am not telling you to go out and grab an AR platform and start running drills like the chuds that want to kill us, I am simply asking you to put some thought into how you plan to stay safe. The horror is coming for all of us, it already has been, whether we're ready for it or not. I do not think that we are ready.
So Let's Get Ready.