How to Be an #LGBTQAlly After #Orlando
by Elizabeth Drescher
June 14, 2016 | Auntie Norma called us on Sunday. I was out of town. Kelly was romping around the neighborhood park with our dog. So, Norma left a message.
She was worried. She’d heard the news out of Orlando about the murder of 49 people and the (physical) wounding of as many more at the Pulse nightclub as LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations began elsewhere around the country, including where I was visiting in Philadelphia. Norma wanted to make sure we were safe. She wanted us to know that she was alarmed by the news and that she loves us.
Norma, Kelly’s mom’s 88-year-old sister, was the only person in either of our families to reach out to us after Orlando. None of our straight friends contacted us either. This isn’t an indictment. The truth is, until Kelly called me to tell me about the message from Norma, I hadn’t given a thought to whether anyone might make a point of connecting with us.
With the remarkable exception of one of my nieces, my family is pretty don’t-ask-and-for-the-love-of-Christ-and-everything-holy-don’t-tell about the fact that I am a lesbian. Kelly’s family is resoundingly liberal-libertarian Californian in their how-is-this-even-a-thing? response to Kelly being gay. And, we’re all as naïve as the next San Francisco Bay Area Californian in our belief that it would take importing an angry white dude in from the Midwest to put LGBTQ+ people at risk in our utopia. That couldn’t happen, could it?
So, maybe it took the long memory of our 88-year old auntie to plug into the real risk that the killings in Orlando posed for people exactly like us in terms romantic and sexual orientation. Of course Norma would remember a time when anti-gay hate was enacted regularly, albeit not massacre style, on the bodies of lesbian and gay people. Her memory is longer and deeper than ours.
Oh sure, I’ve felt socially and professionally unsafe as a lesbian in a more or less constant, low grade way since I came out in my teens. Yes, I’ve experienced all manner of mostly thoughtless, mostly uninformed, and probably unintentional micro-aggressions from family, friends, colleagues, and strangers over the years. More than a few times, I’ve received poor service or been wholly ignored by servers or store clerks who apparently guessed I am gay. I’ve had cause to worry about the security of my employment on occasion. I still fret about whether, when, and how to note in various settings that my partner is a woman.
But, especially since moving to Northern California fifteen years ago, I’ve never felt physically unsafe.
When I realized on Friday evening that I happened to be in Philly during Pride, and that I was in easy walking distance from the “gayborhood” where most of the festivities would take place, I was excited by the good luck of having had a speaking engagement the same weekend. Those of us who live in the Bay Area can often take for granted the privilege of having actual, legally reinforced, freedom and civil rights. We often avoid Pride because it seems like a such a tourist thing. We’re so over it. I mean, OMG, people come in from Stockton, from Ohio…
Last summer I had a similarly unanticipated stroke of travel luck. I was teaching in Seattle during Pride, just as marriage equality was affirmed as an essential human right by the Supreme Court (the anniversary of which is later this month). It was wonderful to be in the LGBTQ+ node of my networked life when one more assurance of the dignity and freedom we all value as Americans rang through the nation. It was especially meaningful to be among so many people who’d come into the city from far flung locales where pride was rarely asserted, let alone assumed. They needed the celebration on the streets of Seattle, and I needed to be reminded that I had been in very similar circumstances for a very long time myself. I thought I’d been given another such gift on this trip to the city of brotherly (and sisterly) love — a cosmic affirmation of the humanity and worth of all queer people everywhere and the importance of our own affirmation of that reality.
When I heard the news out of Orlando in the wee hours of Sunday morning, I was genuinely frightened about going to the Philly Pride Parade. I worried about walking around the gayborhood, about congregating with a mass of my strategically essentialized LGBTQ+ sisters and brothers. I was aware that, as a person who is otherwise of considerable privilege — white, squarely middle class, well educated, cis gender — the feeling of existential insecurity that I know trans people, non-cis men and women, African Americans, Latina/os, women in hijab, men in turbans, and far too many “others” can experience every single day could be its own morally, politically, and spiritually instructive gift. But, Sunday morning, I mostly felt anxious and uncertain.
So I did the thing that I tend to do under such circumstances: I dragged myself to church — a church right around the corner from where the Pride Parade would launch. I assumed such a church would be particularly sensitive to the fears and worries of the many, many LGBTQ+ people in whose midst it stood. I wanted to walk into the risk the parade presented to me with a sense of acknowledgement and blessing. Yet, aside for a passing note that Christians might advocate for tougher gun regulations, such assurances weren’t offered from the pulpit. I know every church was not as disconnected from the events of the morning, but in this case: #Churchfail. #Again.
I left after the passing of the peace for a truer liturgy, a richer sacrament: A queer marching band and a flag corps warming up for their parade performances; families with same gender parents cueing up with kids in strollers and wagons, waving flags and dancing to the band; thick dykes and burly bears grooming their motorcycles; and dozens of Philadelphia police clustered on corners and milling through the crowd, both vigilant and reassuring with Pride participants.
I relaxed a little. They got it. I didn’t feel entirely safe, but I felt okay. I walked alongside the band and flag corps all the way to Penn’s Landing. It was glorious.
This is how you’re an #LGBTQAlly. You’re right there, in the moment, acknowledging the particularity of grief, pain, anger, and very real fear. This bad thing happened, the ally knows. It happened to you in a very specific way that cannot be generalized to other forms of terror and hate, however parallel or otherwise related they might seem.
When I got back to my hotel, Kelly called to share Norma’s message with me. We both wept at the beauty of it — at how this wise woman knew that the thing the moment called for was a simple expression of concern and compassion. Nothing more. Nothing less.
This, too, was, to my overwhelming surprise, what the Philly police seemed also to get, their concern peppered with a large measure of we’ve-got-your-backs vigilance. And just to make clear that this wasn’t any sort of “politically correct” pandering, a group of queer cops rode and marched in the parade and the force had set up a recruiting booth at Penn’s Landing.
This is how you’re an #LGBTQAlly. You’re right there, in the moment, acknowledging the particularity of grief, pain, anger, and very real fear. This bad thing happened, the ally knows. It happened to you in a very specific way that cannot be generalized to other forms of terror and hate, however parallel or otherwise related they might be.
This is apparently a tough thing to get, I know. I have to wonder how many times I have failed — after Trayvon Martin, after Ferguson, after Charleston, for instance — to get that these horrible experiences are not meta, that they are not object lessons in oppression and violence. At least not in the immediate aftermath. They are particular, focused, specific. They’re raw and personal. They harm a narrowly defined “you” however much they might also, eventually, speak to broader, institutionalized structures of violent repression and unfreedom.
Sunday afternoon and throughout the day Monday, when my Facebook and Twitter feeds erupted with discussions arguing with the characterization of the Orlando shootings as “the worst mass shooting in American history” on the basis of the Oklahoma City bombings and the massacre of Native Americans in the nineteenth century, my heart broke, my stomach turned, my blood boiled. Here were so many of my well-meaning, progressive, mostly straight friends and colleagues reminding me that more people had been killed at Wounded Knee (true, but, alas, that was hardly the most egregious killing of Native peoples); that Palestinians and/or Israelis feel this kind of threat every day (they do, but American LGBTQ+ people felt it this weekend); that the news reporting is fuels Islamophobia (it does, even as it ignores homophobia).
I couldn’t help but hear the echo of what an otherwise remarkably supportive straight friend said to me many years ago as I was going through the rancorous end of a 16-year relationship: “Oh, wow,” she said, “this is almost as bad as a bad divorce.”
Almost. But not quite.
But I also thought about how many times I have turned away from the raw pain of African American and trans people in the face of such violence. I’m sure I thought raising questions about gun regulations, political exploitation and corruption, systemic injustice, and so on was part of being “in solidarity,” of being an ally.
Let me say clearly now: it isn’t. You are not being an ally when you are comparing the suffering of one violently oppressed group of people with that of another.
Being an ally in circumstances like Orlando is about acknowledging pain, grief, anxiety, and anguish in its most personal forms. It is about expressing very specific love and support. It is about naming a real you and a real felt risk to that you. It is first and foremost being humanly — not politically, not ethically, not religiously, not academically — present to the felt experience of terror by particular human beings right now.
Later — much later — we can weave the particularity of this experience into the wider canvas of justice work we all must do together. But today, this week — right now — if you want to be an ally, do this: call, text, or email an LGTBQ+ person you know. Leave a message. Post on Facebook. Share compassion and solidarity on Twitter. Leave it at that. That is all that is needed right now. If you are a ministry leader or part of a worshiping community, being an ally looks something like this.
As for me, the next time something like this happens — and we all know there will be a next time — I’m planning to start by asking a simple but profound question: #WhatWouldNormaDo?
