Still In. Even Now.

Growing up in the 1970s, there was no one to look up to. No public figure who looked like what I was quietly becoming. No map, no OWLS*, no gay aunties or guncles to consult. Kids like myself learned, fast, to read the room – who was safe, who wasn’t, where we could exhale and where we had to hold it in. Even at a tender age, I got very good at that. I still am.

That skill – you might call it emotional intelligence, you might name it self defense – has served me more than it’s cost me. Most days.

But coming off of Pride weekend, and unenthusiastically facing down yet another fraudulent July 4th, celebrating a country I no longer admire, I am sitting with four things at once: pride, grief, anger, and fear. Not as a sequence. All at the same time, in a rush, the way they actually arrive.

I am proud – genuinely, overwhelmingly proud – of how far we have come. I have watched, across decades, as visibility grew. As language expanded. As people I love stepped into the light and were not destroyed by it. As so many of today’s youth embrace gender and sexual fluidity – rejecting tradition, binaries. Exploring who they themselves truly are, and want to be. That is not nothing. That is …almost… everything.

And I am grieving what is being taken. Not metaphorically. Legally. Structurally. Rights that were hard-won and felt, finally, settled – bodily autonomy, protection from discrimination, the basic right to be seen by the state as fully human – are being revoked. The people most affected, myself included, are not abstractions. They are in my life. They are young and trying to figure out which rooms are safe. They are elders who fought this fight before and cannot believe they are being asked to fight it again.

And I am angry. Because we were told that visibility was the finish line. It wasn’t. And nowhere is that lie more legible than in the annual spectacle of corporate Pride: the rainbow logos, the limited-edition packaging, the sponsored floats – a rainbow unicorn’s hood pulled over a snake’s head. Bright, celebratory, impossible to look away from. And underneath, the same companies quietly funding the legislators who are rolling back the rights they’re pretending to celebrate. Visibility without safety is not progress. It is exposure. You can be seen and still be hunted. You can be represented and still be unprotected. You now have a target on your back. Safety – physical, emotional, financial – is paramount, and precious few of us can afford what it costs to ensure it.

And I am afraid. Not in the abstract; in my body. Steeping in cortisol, in hypervigilance, in the way I – and so many I know and love – calculate the risk of every room before we enter it. That fear is not incidental, and I can read this room clearly: we are being asked to disappear quietly. The exhaustion is not a side effect. It is the strategy.

I know I carry real privilege – cis, white, financially stable, professionally established … that buffer does not make me immune. It makes me responsible. Because safety is not a feeling. It is a condition. And right now, the conditions are not safe – not for my community, not for people whose bodies are policed, not for anyone whose existence has been declared inconvenient by people with power. By those telling us to shut up and smile.

I am not going to perform resilience for a system designed to exhaust you into silence while expecting you to smile through it. Capitalism, founded in patriarchy, fueled by fascism. That is what the hood is for. That is what the snake is doing.

What I will say is this: I have a small family – human and canine, fierce and irreplaceable. The kind any of us’d step in front of traffic for without thinking. My family is small. My wife and I are trying to suss out whether a property trust and current advance directives and wills will be enough. Others stand to lose so much more – children, partners, the ability to travel safely, legal protections that make a family real and a human whole in the eyes of a state that is actively reconsidering whether it sees them at all. They are what I am fighting for when I fight for safety. Not an abstraction. Specific faces, specific heartbeats, who deserve to move through the world without calculating the risk of every room they enter. Somebody’s wife, mother, aunt, sister, friend. Valued. Regardless.

I don’t know how much fight I have left. Let me be blunt – brutally so – about that.

But I know they are counting on the fact that I don’t.

And, y’know, Pride started as a riot. I’m just saying…

*OWL: older, wiser lesbian

📸 credit: Upstream Podcast