God Bless America, Hold the Sprinkles
Independence is supposed to belong to everyone. Most of us are still waiting.
Chase, our energetic and opinionated rat terrier, woke me up an hour early Saturday morning. As much as I would have loved to sleep in, Chase makes sure that almost never happens.
He doesn’t ask what kind of night I had. He just needs the walk. I get up anyway, because I love him. No explanation needed.
I pulled on some shorts and a shirt. Since Portland mornings can be cool, even in July, I added a “light wrap”. That’s what my husband and I call anything that isn’t heavy enough to be considered a coat. In this case, it was the sweater I hijacked from his side of the closet before he left for his rotation several weeks ago.
Chase and I walked the neighborhood as we do every morning. On our way back, as we rounded the corner, I saw the donut shop across the street from our apartment building. To be clear it’s right directly across the street. A literal hop, skip and a jump.
Here’s where I admit that I have a sugar addiction. And as far as food goes, guess what I love more than most anything else? Yeah, donuts. I’m also aware of what sugar does to my ADHD symptoms. As hard as I try, my attempts to avoid them fail at least once per week.
This morning was one of the aforementioned failures.
Hey, it was early, which meant the donuts were extra fresh. I may not work as a chef anymore, but my sense of smell hasn’t changed. I can tell the minute something starts to burn. I can also tell when donuts are too fresh to ignore. Simply walking past the shop wasn’t an option. It was out of my hands.
They always have the chocolate covered raised donuts, but this time they’d added red, white, and blue star shaped sprinkles on some of them. Oh right, it was “independence” day.
I said to the woman, “I’ll take a chocolate covered, but not one with God bless America sprinkled all over it.”
She said, “I don’t blame you,” and added it to the bag with another one I’d already picked out. Okay, there were two others already in there. Three in total. Don’t judge me.
That’s Portland for you, though. She probably had a directive from the corporate office to add them. We understood each other immediately.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t celebrate or feel proud of where I come from these days. There was a time that I did, but it’s been awhile.
Even last year, we were camping with our daughter Emily and her wife over the fourth of July. We were all in agreement that we didn’t feel much like celebrating then either.
Luckily, it’s our daughter-in-law Sara’s birthday on July 3rd. She’s a pastor and gives a hell of a sermon. That was a much better reason to celebrate, and so we did.
Nothing has changed since then. If anything my feelings are even stronger about it. Celebrating independence just doesn’t feel right.
Last week, a writer I follow, Clint Collide, posted something short and furious about a New York Times op-ed that ran on the last day of Pride Month.
Mission accomplished, he wrote. He wasn’t interested in another religious argument for why someone hates the way the rest of us describe ourselves. The Bible is a book, not a shield. Don’t like the word queer? Fine, don’t use it. But don’t police the words other people choose.
So I went and read it myself. Matthew Vines, a former Evangelical, married and gay, writing for the Times, claims the word queer is undermining public support for marriage equality. Married gay men. Men like him.
He thinks he’s one of us.
He is not one of us. And he’s delusional if he thinks the conservatives he’s trying to appease hate him any less than they hate the rest of us.
Queer is a word. Words matter. But words change meaning over time. And guess what? It’s OUR word, and it has nothing to do with what’s happening.
John Pavlovitz, a straight pastor and ally, answered him a day later, pointing out what should have been obvious: the people coming for our rights don’t pause to check which letter you are first.
Then, later on Saturday after the donut shop and post sugar crash, I read one more piece, by a man named Joe Guay, about a moment at Trader Joe’s, watching a stranger in a wheelchair navigate what looked like his first time out in a new normal, and how it undid him.
What he felt in that parking lot is close to what I’ve been feeling lately. Emotionally overwhelmed, both when something beautiful happens and when I’m feeling incredibly worn down. His point was that it’s a small number of very rich old men doing this to us.
I think about how they do it. Pitting us against each other. Making us think we hate each other, so we’re too busy fighting to notice who’s actually pulling the strings.
That’s why Vines hit so hard. He’s trying to separate us at the exact moment we need to be coming together, using a word our community has started taking back in a positive way.
I’m a married gay man in my fifties, once married to a woman, and a father of two beautiful grown daughters. I identify as gay, and I absolutely identify as queer. He says if you’re gay, you were born that way. He never says what that makes the rest of us. He doesn’t have to.
Because that’s what it means. If you look and act enough like the people who’ve always run things, you were born that way, and you’re safe. Everyone else, bisexual, trans, anyone who doesn’t fit that shape, that’s a decision. And decisions can be taken back.
That’s what makes my skin crawl.
The woman behind the donut counter never asked me what I was born as. She just bagged up the one without the sprinkles and told me she didn’t blame me.
—R. Michael
R. Michael is a former yacht chef, a married gay father, and a late-diagnosed neurodivergent writer. He tells his own stories, but he writes them for you, hoping you found something here to connect with. This is Ungarnished.
❤️