Chase woke me up an hour early Saturday morning in his usual way. He slowly crawls up, puts his paws on my chest (or my face) and uses me like a piece of pilates equipment.
He doesn’t ask what kind of night I had. He needs to go out. So he stretches as big as he can while yawning directly into my face. There’s no sleeping through morning dog breath, and he knows it.
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.
P.S. I have a second publication called BEARINGS. It's where I go back through my past essays, find the ADHD that was showing up, and figure out what was actually happening in my head after the fact. If ADHD is part of your story too, it might be worth a look.
Love the social commentary with the embedded moral within the donut/story. Great piece and mutual sentiment
Ohhh, yes - that Vines article was vile.
As someone who came out just as the first reports of a 'mystery disease' had, in a sudden outbreak, killed over 100 gay men in New York; and as someone who then went on to learn to navigate the gay world and community through the early-to-mid 1980s as the horror of what came to be called HIV/AIDS ravaged its population; I saw what damage division (shunning those who were ill; saying nothing as officials advocated isolating people with AIDS - or even putting them in 'camps') could do - as well as what miracles could happen when the lesbians, gays, and transfolk, rather than forming the occasional coalition for a brief, specific political effort, at last united together as one, and the LGBT (other letters added as people began to express their own sexual/gender identities, and find/create their own subcultures-within-the-subculture) community was born. No one else was helping us in this hour of dire need? OK, we'll do it ourselves. And we did - *together*.
From within that new and necessary unity, the word 'queer' came to be used more and more - especially among the (then-)young turks in the more activist wings - as an umbrella term for everyone who wasn't (or couldn't 'pass' for) heterosexual white folk who accepted 'traditional' gender roles - one word for *all* of us, all in the same storm-pummelled boat - and boy, did the assimilationists and old guard get pist off.
Me, I was among the first to happily adopt the term for myself. As an AuDHDer myself (not yet then diagnosed, but in retrospect it was textbook behaviour), the zeptosecond I came out, I was OUT - and obsessively, voraciously read everything I could on LGBTQI+ culture - its history, its art, music, literature. So having already read respected and admired authors such as Christopher Isherwood and Jean Genet, and knowing they too preferred the term 'queer', I figured heck, that was good enough for me.
I especially always got a larf out of the 'b-b-but "queer" is a slur!' argument. Yeah, bud, like fellow students sneeringly calling you 'gay' in the hallways of high school before shoving you into a locker was meant as a bloody compliment.
And now we're watching the assimilationists do *exactly* what I predicted when marriage equality became prevalent (in the West at least): declare victory; walk away from the fight; and lunge happily into mainstream society, thinking they're totally accepted and 'normalised' - forgetting the lessons of the Weimar republic, and what happened with whiplash-celerity to the 'acceptance' and great legal strides forward that Germany's homophile movement had made when a certain failed Austrian artist with a silly moustache rose to power upon waves of hatred thought left in the past, but were only lurking and waiting for their moment to rise again.
Transfolk? Varied gender identities? Others too different in appearance and behaviour (either by unconscious expression or by direct decision) to fit in - the 'queer' ones? Under the bus with 'em. At gay men's hour of need, in the worst of the AIDS crisis, they may have rusht to our side and been of incalculable help - but now, when transfolk, especially, are under brutal socio-political attack, what do the 'normal-acting' gays do? Run in the other direction and claim that's a totally different thing; not their problem ('the "T" doesn't belong in "LGB"!'). Their behaviour is disgusting and nauseating - and by 'their', I mean the assimilationists like Vines, not my trans friends and allies.
As the hard right lurches from success to success in seizing power and dismantling society (let alone democracy) and uses those of us too different - too 'queer' - as distraction and lightning rod for resurgent hate, we need a community united as determinedly as during the worst of the AIDS pandemic if we are to (quite literally) survive. Instead, we're seeing vipers like Vines pull up the ladder they climbed behind them and throwing the unassimilated (voluntarily or not) to the wolves - those subcultural quislings have no idea how eagerly they themselves will be shoved from the heights and rights they've reached the moment they're no longer useful to those now consolidating power, and hunted down with the rest of their kind.
If, this time, we're driven to defeat and destruction, the blame will be directly upon the Vines of the world, twining desperately around the pillars of 'respectability', so eager for to feel acceptable that they split away, sowed division among their own tribe and simply watcht each splintered portion was pickt off one by one - til their own doom arrived.