the last day of pride - return to the riot.
I’ve spent the past couple of weeks into Janelle Monae, working my way through her catalog chronologically from her first EP. It’s been a lift to my mood after I busted the plans I’d made for Pride - thwarted by life happening, scrounging for much needed hours at the day job that I love, a call that day that I felt I had to take, the anniversary of a loved one’s passing, wrapping myself in the safety of adulting at home at the very moment I should be out in the streets with everyone else. I saw a post on the Gram the next day, explaining very clearly what had occurred in my psychology, along with instructions on how to reregulate oneself. Helpful, yes. But it really would have been more so had I came upon it Friday, instead. The algorithm really did not come through for me there. I shouldn’t be surprised, it is an instrument of capitalism, after all.
It all just feels so profoundly bleak - anti-drag, anti-trans, SCOTUS anti all of us on the last day of Pride month, not to mention that squeeze you’re feeling these days when you’re just trying to go to the grocery store for some Ben & Jerry’s. It doesn’t matter who you are, red state or blue, we’re all just Charlie Chaplin getting fed through the gears out here. And we’ve been so successfully cleaved apart that I don’t know that we’ll ever find our way back to each other. Part of the tragedy, given we really do have more in common than we all would like to think. The French have the right idea, in my mind - change things up and everyone’s out in the street in a very real way. Riot real, but not, like, overthrow the government real. Maybe that sort of thing was possible here, at one time. A boi can still dream, right?
There are those little points that still give me hope, though - a thread on Twitter from the owner of an LGBTQ bookstore who takes time with the youth in their store, the paste-up I walked by on the stroll the other day, antifascist Queers posting self-defense how-to guides. We are the ones who keep us safe. The alternative’s just too dark.
There is no alternative.