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June 15 - June 24, 2020
The big idea, as I saw it, was this: You don’t exist for a long time. Before you arrive, there are ages, eons—an eternity—without you. (Can you imagine? How boring!) And suddenly there you are. Alive. How you doing? How’s it feel? Immaculate? What if it feels bad? Don’t worry; it gets better, right? But what if it doesn’t get better, it just gets. It just keeps getting. What then? You still interested? You still trying to be good, still moisturizing your T-zone, still working through your stack of New Yorkers, still fighting systemic oppression, still speaking truth to power, still attempting
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I’m sure I’ll be an anxious old man, and I’ll probably end up lying in my grave going, “Ugh, I feel like there’s something I should be doing right now. I wonder if everyone is angry at me. Oh my God, how long is this going to take? And what happens next?”
Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.”
as someone who has started many games of Monopoly and finished zero, I know that capitalism is not supposed to be fun.
a fervent love for this country and a soul-shaking desire for it to be less terrible.
If this was a parable, I guess the lesson would be that life isn’t fair but if you complain sometimes you get free things. Useful.
That’s the goal. You work hard so that your children are able to live a life somewhat free from the burdens that plagued you. That’s the gift my parents gave us, free of charge. Or, at least, I assume that’s a parent’s goal. I don’t have any kids but I want those things for my houseplants.
Basically, all of the selling points are a source of deep anxiety for me.
Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.
When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.
I was not quite sure how to locate my blackness, but I knew that my blackness was definitely not whiteness.
These were the moments when I was reminded that no matter how passively I engaged with my blackness, it was never not a force at work in my life. And, I found, the knowledge of my blackness could be used as a weapon against me at any moment.
The solution to all of my problems was to go inside. The issue with my solution was that all my problems were inside. And so I remained, shrouded in leaves, feet in the dirt.
(And this, dear reader, is a moment where you might quietly wish the hero of the story had another instinct. But he did not.)
Speaking, whether anyone wants me to or not, is one of my spiritual gifts.
Alone in the bookstore, I had read the sign that had hurt my feelings. And that hurt had acted as a flint, igniting an anger that had lurked beneath the surface for years, directionless and formless but now suddenly powerful. And aimed. I wanted someone, anyone, else to feel the way that I felt. And so I turned to the computer, and I started typing. I was the revolver.
Things were not going well. I didn’t yet know about the concept of a depression beard, so crisis hair seemed like the next best thing.
I also hate small talk. What am I supposed to do with it? Small talk is always shouted. “Nice weather we’re having!” Okay, well, the ice caps are melting, so lower your voice, honey. Small talk is purposefully avoiding every interesting thing there is to say.
it was about occupying a particular space in the world and the feeling that the world was suddenly, randomly, and ruthlessly hostile to that space.
The one word, a simple, meaningless word, dropped into context in her comment. I knew she could say it, she could use it, because she was it. And it was safe. And if she was it and I was it, then she and I were us. And I was on the inside. She was gay and I was gay and my swing was gay. And it was fine and dandy and didn’t have a thing to do with me hitting the ball.
When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one.
My mother stood in the middle of the street, on one leg, and took photos of a car that had crashed into her house and the women who were stumbling around beside it. For posterity. She’s a scrapbooker; she’d trained all year for something like this.
This disaster is your life. (Stitch that on a pillow.)
I would remind people in my classes that the storyteller gets to choose the beginning and the end, often despite what happens in life. And that you have to tell your listener what you, the protagonist, want. This connects directly to the “why” of it all. The impetus for raising your voice to speak.
to reconcile my truth as a gay person with my assurance that God not only loved me but had saved me. I didn’t know if it was possible, but I was holding out hope.
You’ve heard of spring cleaning? This was fall hoarding.
I knew that spirituality was something that I wanted in my life (Jesus! What a pal!), but as I came more into myself as a gay person, I became resolute in my desire to never sit in a pew and be told I was going to hell again. It’s the little things.
love Church. It’s theater, it’s high camp, it’s cabaret. What’s not to love? You get to dress up like you’re going to the Grammys. Literally every word that everyone says in Church is a very compelling story that frequently involves both scandal and magic. There is so much gossip. It’s Pay-What-You-Wish. There is a choir. And musical numbers. And choreography. And when things really get going, people yell, shout, jump up and down, and stop the show. HONEY. Church is very gay.
The conversations always centered around achievement rather than overcoming. In what I would later realize was a stunning bit of narrative alchemy, my parents taught us black history lessons that weren’t remarkable because of all the oppression they involved but because of the extraordinariness of the black people at their center. This would prove to be dramatically different from the rest of reality, which is, let’s be honest, an oppression-fest.
“Who has time to hide who they are? In this economy?!”
think it’s important to note that that takes work: family doesn’t just happen; welcome isn’t a neutral state. We have to tend to these things.
The stories of black life in this nation and prior to this nation have never been as well kept as the stories of white life. We inherit a narrative that is full of sand. There are so many on the outside who want our stories, our histories of achievement, erased, so we have to save the space for them—in ourselves and in our midst.
Every family’s story is a tale of becoming, sometimes through oppression, sometimes through achievement, and sometimes simply through the current of time. We were born grasping after freedom, in a house that could not hold us; every day we get closer and closer to our destination, until our features come into view. Soon, everyone further on down the family line can see us from their seats at the table; we’re coming home. Set a place for us. We’re hungry, we have so much to talk about, and we’re coming home.
To celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ, we hide treasure and then release children of varying developmental levels and abilities in a desperate, clamoring pursuit. Remarkable! It’s The Hunger Games in pastel. It’s a Black Friday sale at Walmart. The last biscuit at Golden Corral. We don’t expect other humans to act sanely or with any sort of grace when they perceive scarcity, so it’s foolish to expect kids to. Perhaps this is where they learn it.
Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?
I think it’s important to revel in the small things that make us joyful, to indulge when possible and not problematic, to steal laughter and hoard it. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d fight for a cheese grove’s right to exist. Because if there’s no cheese grove, what are we even fighting for? (I believe it was Winston Churchill who said that.)
What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all—it matters.
Going back in time isn’t worth the aggravation. The scent will never leave your nostrils. That’s also one of the issues with the present: a collective refusal to acknowledge the stink of the past. Rejection of time travel is one of my core beliefs for olfactory reasons and also as a form of social justice protest.
I do not understand the people in disaster movies who want to survive so that they can rebuild society. That sounds terrible. So boring, and yet so much work. Haven’t these people ever worked at a small nonprofit? It’s that. But with, like, zombies. No thanks.
I am mouthy, and I get easily annoyed, and I don’t know how to shoot a bow and arrow, so dystopias are a solid no from me. I’m basically Peeta from The Hunger Games, except gay. I am here for the baked goods and then basically I’m going to be dead weight. Cut your losses.
Governance is hard; why would I stick around after all of our infrastructure crumbles and they ban all the good TV and try to be a mayor or city council member or head of the jury duty commission or whatever? The only thing that appeals to me about that scenario is the possibility of a cape. I feel like in four out of every ten dystopian governments, once you reach a certain level of power, you get to wear a cape.
When it all goes south, I want to be remembered, not relied on.
But it’s what we’re given: flowers and sunshine and push alerts on our phones and midterm elections; pop-up restaurants and flawed history books and strangers in offices who become parts of our lives. There’s fighting for social justice and being brokenhearted about deaths that could have been avoided and being terrified about bringing a kid into this world and being even more terrified about leaving a kid in this world and trying to figure out how to wake up every day not thinking that the world is going to end. Even though it will. I’m here for that. That mid-topian life. How are we supposed
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But I understand that this place, for all its complexity, for all that it costs, for all that I fear it pulls out of me, is not a place I want to abandon. I feel this in a way, perhaps, that is far clearer than any feeling I’ve ever had about a physical city, or community, or even this nation. I’m a native now. Hi, I’m R. Eric Thomas; I’m from the internet.
I believe that you can mark the various phases and stages of your life by what kind of Pride experience you’re having.
I love Pride. I love a party, I love a family reunion, I love getting flyers and magnets from local vendors. I love Pride, too, because it began as a riot. That’s important to me; every step, every shimmy, every wave, is a gesture of triumph but also defiance. The first time I went to Pride, I wasn’t legally allowed to get married. I could be fired from my job because of my sexual orientation. My future husband couldn’t be ordained in the church. And yet we were living in markedly better times than we’d lived in before. There was so much to dance about.
The fact was, I was in church, on occasion, after years of being away. And this was, yes, where I wanted to be. And stepping through the door, remembering the times of welcome and the times of rebuke in my past, felt like triumph and defiance. It certainly didn’t feel as good as marching down the street on a Sunday in June, glitter-covered and abs (ab?) out. But it was a start.
An incantation, a wish, a prayer. I loved David and I loved God and I didn’t believe anymore that those things were in conflict. I felt something like love for myself. I also knew that the way forward wasn’t any less complicated, but no one ever promised me less complication. If anything, it’s always going to become more complicated. Better but more. Better and more. Pride is a party and a riot, after all. And I was here for all of it.
Can you imagine, “The Star-Spangled Banner” at an interracial gay wedding in the heart of a Sanctuary City with attendees ranging from a World War II vet to the mayor’s black LGBTQ liaison to Martin, my cousin who did multiple tours of Afghanistan, to our nephew Michael, a mixed-race boy, then three years old, growing up in South Carolina? Child, that place would have looked like a game of whack-a-mole, with some people standing up and some people taking a knee and some people looking around like “Honey, what is happening in this place on this day?” Now, that’s church.
Love is political. Church is political. Our friends and family—queer folks, trans folks, straight folks, white folks, black folks, Latinx folks, Asian folks, baby boomers, Gen Xers, millennials, Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, and at least a couple Libertarians, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics, questioners, and atheists—are political. This act—daring to say that we believe in each other—is political. Daring to say that we believe in something, anything, is political. Daring to believe that we’ll exist in the future in America is political.
