I grew up very Queer in a very small and very conservative town in Central Pennsylvania. I didn't have the word 'Queer' or really any word to properly describe my feelings of visceral otherness, but I couldn't seem to hide it either. Not from the Catholic priests who saw a child deeply disturbed by their own body as an opportunity for a good time or from their loyal parishioners who seemed to hold biennial conventions at my parochial school over the existential question of 'what should be done with the Reid child?'
I have spent the better part of my life trying to come up with an answer to that question and even once I did, the answer didn't exactly make things much easier. By the time I finally figured out that the 'Reid child' is a transfeminine genderqueer dyke molested into obedience by Vatican protected predators, she had developed five personalities just to deal with the weight of that post-traumatic reality and found herself bumped up to the top tier of the Fox News hierarchy of scapegoats, somewhere between undocumented communists and mouthy Black chicks in hijabs.
On the other hand, I also managed to uncover the fact that I wasn't the only damnable pervert in the holler, forging a small found family of neurodivergent genderfuck hicks to smoke dope and shoot tin cans with. On top of that, it turned out that the college town about thirty minutes down the road from me had a fairly sizeable LGBTQ+ organization, one of the largest in the state, as fate would have it.
So, once the dust finally cleared from my shattered closet, I decided to pack up my five personalities and get a volunteer job in the big, wicked city with this non-profit in hopes that I might be able to convince someone over there to help my people over here.
The mission seemed to begin with promise. The people at this organization appeared to be very supportive on the surface and had even acquired a government grant to set up a program to provide services for Queer youth in rural areas like mine along with a paid employee to help run them. This was what I had wanted more than anything. The youngest member of my found family is the non-binary child of two of my best friends who calls me Auntie Anarchy and kind of restored my faith humanity after decades of people shielding their children from me like some kind of ghoul.
This child would become my beloved nibbling (a non-binary term for niece/nephew) and trying to provide them and others like them with the modicum of community and safety that could have shielded me from mountains of trauma when I was their age became a kind of jihad.
Sadly, it didn't take long for me to recognize that the big college town LGBTQ+ center didn't quite share my passion. In fact, they seemed to spend most of their time organizing one of Pennsylvania's largest Pride parades every June. I would take my nibbling to some of these decidedly family friendly events just to show them that they weren't alone, but I was never quite comfortable with the level of police presence at these crowded spectacles or the level of performative gladhanding from the state's Democratic Party for that matter.
Still, I held my nose for what I believed to be the greater good and I largely did the same thing with my new volunteer job at what I came to call the Center; coming in week after week and harassing the awkwardly placed straight woman who ran their physical location downtown about the progress of what they had promised to what I came to call 'my kids.'
But it was just one excuse after another from that woman. Just week after week of "soon, be patient" even though these people supposedly already had all the resources they needed. Somehow, those resources just never seemed to find their way to my broken neck of the woods.
Then Trump got reelected and I lost patience. Within days of that vile child molester's inauguration, he was passing executive orders targeting Queer kids and my nibbling's school life went from bad to unbearable; receiving death threats that their teachers couldn't seem to be bothered to even address while their friends filtered in and out of various institutions after failed suicide pacts.
To make matters even more maddening, my straight supervisor at the Center seemed to vanish into her office around this time, spending every waking minute on the phone with the door barricaded from the inside. I hoped that maybe at least some of that attention was being spent on the kids on the frontlines, but it never reached mine, so I took actions into my own fragile hands.
I found a safe location at a volunteer bookstore for the rural youth group to operate from and even offered to provide transportation, but the Center's employed operator never seemed to show when anyone was actually watching. Tensions finally came to a head when my incessant bitching finally got me a meeting with the chairwoman of the whole damn organization.
I did my best. I told her about the small town I grew up in and the nibbling that I loved, about the pain of seeing someone you care about reliving the worst moments of your childhood for the first time in slow motion. I begged her to give us just a fraction of the time and money she splurged on cop-infested parades and bougie gaylas, and even told her that I was a Queer person on disability who would gladly run the program myself if she'd just give me a hand. That's when things got ugly.
The moment this woman learned that I had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, she began to lay into me with ableist microaggressions and straight-up insults. When I finally cut the shit and asked her if she was actually telling me that my neurodiversity should preclude me from being around kids like my nibbling, that elderly white lesbian gently told me, "Well, we need to think about the children."
It was the Catholic Church all over again, only this time the bigots had dressed themselves in rainbow camouflage.
A series of increasingly infuriating events unfurled very rapidly after that dreadful heart-to-heart that made the true colors of this supposedly inclusive organization grotesquely clear.
I overheard my straight supervisor talking trash about me with half a dozen of the organization's board members in her office, so I stopped coming into the Center and began working at the bookstore instead where I discovered that the person being paid to run the rural outreach programs was a literal fraud who was simply pocketing the checks without even showing up to what they were supposedly paying for. Upon informing them of this discovery, the Center replaced this charlatan with another straight white woman and then moved the bitch and her virtually non-existent group to a closed location when I continued asking questions.
But perhaps the most despicable development of them all was my discovery that the first thing my supervisor had done after Trump's reelection, what she was too busy with doing in her locked office to even speak to me, was getting on the phone with straight corporate sponsors to make sure that they didn't pull their floats from the Pride parade after Trump's crackdown on trans-everything. This was what took precedence over suicidal children and executive child abuse.
I was infuriated but not even a fraction as infuriated as I became upon learning that one of those blessed sponsors was none other than Raytheon, a company using its support for Pride parades to cover up its ongoing involvement in profiting off of the slaughter of other poor people's children.
This! Dearest motherfuckers! Is the Pride Industrial Complex! A network of once-benevolent LGBTQ+ organizations, operated by rich old white lesbians, spending most of their time and millions of your donation dollars on throwing parades just so they can raise enough money to throw more goddamn parades, all of which serve little other purpose than to offer diabolical corporations and two-timing politicians' platforms to celebrate themselves celebrating diversity while they murder entire populations behind the rainbow flag.
What more can I say without literally smashing things? Big money does hideous things to beautiful people and beautiful things for hideous operations. Just please do me one big goddamn favor, keep it all the fuck away from my children and don't make me tell you twice.
As for me, I ended up running the youth group myself out of the bookstore because no one else could be bothered to give a fuck about rural Queer kids when the cameras weren't rolling. I was too busy organizing to even think about indulging in another parade this year. I helped organize a block party in that very small and very conservative town with Food Not Bombs instead. My kids were there and I'm proud to say that not one red cent was exchanged for anything during the entire affair.
The only Pride parade I'm still interested in marching in is the one that leads to the White House and ends with that temple of Raytheon being burned to the ground once and for all. That would be one fabulous spectacle that I'd like to think we could all take pride in. Until then, the pink jihad rides on.
Peace, Rage & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Atmosphere by Joy Division
* Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers
* Walking in My Shoes by Depeche Mode
* What's Wrong with Me by Olivia Rodrigo
* Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails
* In Bloom by Nirvana
* Head Over Heels by Tears for Fears
* Bruised Violet by Babes in Toyland
* Man-Size by PJ Harvey
* How Does It Feel by Bob Dyland
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