Maybe I'll go to a gay bar

I don’t like leaving Austin. It feels like living in West Berlin. Surrounded. Under siege. But as long as you stay in town, your little neighborhood, the north side or the south side of the river, the parks where people spread blankets and let their dogs run, the pickleball courts and the vape clouds around Tuesday band practice, the dry weedy lawns and the weird hippie lawns of cacti and scrap metal and pretty colored bottles catching the sunlight, nod at the guy who walks his cat on a leash, get a taco from Maria who remembers your order now, sit in a corner and talk shit about the college students who think they invented grunge but they probably don’t call it that. Long as I stay in town, I’m safe here.

It’s why I moved here. It’s why we’ve always come here. It’s why kids from Amarillo or Midland or Abilene talk about moving to Austin someday. There’s always the crazy one who thinks they’ll make it all the way to New York City or San Francisco. But even back then, I knew those were made up places. Austin was a place I could reach. Then I joined the Air Force, and a couple times, I made it all the way to New York City or San Francisco and they were too loud and I felt too small, like if I didn’t watch out, they’d walk right over me, squash me like a bug, and no one would ever know.

But I never liked the suburbs. Not many of us do. We know the look in their eyes. The look they’re real proud of out there, where they pat themselves on the back for being tolerant, for tolerating us. I hate being tolerated. I know it only lasts so long as I keep quiet. I know how fast they’ll turn. How quickly they remove the mask. And I know how much it’ll hurt.

Probably not something everyone thinks about. But I know some do. I’ve convinced Black friends to go tubing and heard the stats. Two Black people, Lauren. Three, including me. I asked if they do the nod. The nod that says I see you and it helps that you’re here but let’s not make a big deal of it or stand too close. They don’t like it when they think we’re organizing. You’d have to ask them what they think we’re organizing for, or maybe you already know. Or maybe you’ve never noticed because it’s not something you think about.

I know people don’t think about it. I know because they’ll tell you batshit things like housing prices in rural areas or the best chicken fried steak thirty miles outside of Austin, and you don’t tell them what it feels like to have your ribs broken or another tooth knocked loose. You don’t tell them there’s not always a trucker to save you or a six foot four drag queen to throw a shoe. If you do, they’ll tell you that was a long time ago. Things have changed. And you don’t tell them a guy walked into a gay club and shot people again.

I wrote about that the last time, the gay bars. How they were open on holidays because we needed a place to go, because our families, at best, tolerated us. And how when we couldn’t clench our jaws any harder, hearing all about how they tolerated us, how they loved the sinner and hated the sin, if we could go home at all, we’d find a gay bar and for a few hours, we’d feel safe again.

I didn’t write about how you keep a count of the family you have left. One brother. One sister, sort of. She’s started leaning more to tolerating than loving you but you’re trying to tell yourself she’s just parroting shit she’s heard. She doesn’t really believe it. You lie to yourself a lot, so you don’t lose another one. I had my brother. Then a sister. And another. I’d hear my friends’ stories and thank fuck I had my brother, two sisters now. The next generation showed up and they were the next generation. I didn’t have to worry about losing them. They grew up knowing me and thinking it was weird anyone cared at all. My mom tolerates me sometimes and loves me wholly most of the time and it’s enough. Then I got my dad and I had everything. I was rich.

I always thought it was helpful, that MAGA’s so good at branding. We can see them a mile off. That’s a man who’ll kill you for sport. That’s a man who thinks it’s funny to wear his MAGA hat to a gay bar. Not in a funny, well structured joke sort of way. But in an I could push every one of these faggots into a locker and laugh while they cry sort of way. It’s the humor they know. Empathy is hilarious. Kindness is a joke.

Part of why I don’t like leaving Austin. I can see them a mile off, but I don’t have to look that far. There’s a sign next to a larger sign. The signs that say they love rape and rapists and watching women die. The signs that say they’ll bring snacks to the hangings and post memes of my tears in front of the firing squad, because I wrote that thing up there, in the New York Times. I’m the enemy within.

Strange that’s not hyperbole. You get accused of hyperbole a lot if you’re someone like me, which is to say, a lesbian and a woman. But their guy is talking about firing squads and hangings and they’re laughing now, and they’ll keep laughing, because that’s how it works. They don’t understand that part. They haven’t read the books let alone lived them. They don’t know how easily it happens, how close we are. That these things he says are meant to harden them to the idea.

They had a problem after a couple wars. They knew soldiers came home without ever pulling the trigger. So they changed the training and they changed the songs. Kill, kill, kill, and blood makes the grass grow and napalm sticks to kids. It worked. And it’ll work again, if god forbid. It’s funny now, in a she just needs a good dicking corrective rape sort of way. And it’ll be funny then because they laughed about it now. How it works.

I have to leave the city sometimes. I’ve got family out there. And it’s more jarring every time. More signs. More hats. More stares that say I wandered too far away from the People’s Democratic Republic of Austin, as they like to call us. Because a town of artists and musicians and writers and queers is hilarious. And they talk on their message boards of how we’ll be overrun in a week. How yeah, it’d be proper to do the hangings on the statehouse lawn but it’d be funnier if they drowned us in the lake.

I’m not sure why it’d be funnier. I don’t really get the drowning humor. You’d have to ask them.

They’ll tell you it’s no different than planting a Harris sign on your lawn. But they’re full of shit and they know it. Their problem with a Harris sign is everyone is welcome and kids shouldn’t go hungry and immigrants shouldn’t be rounded up and put into camps. Real radical shit there. Dangerous, I guess.

I don’t mind it so much, leaving the city that is, if I’m only going from A to B. My house to my dad’s house. I can listen to the radio and try to not look at the signs and try to not think about how there are more of them now and they’re not even pretending anymore. I keep my car in between the lines and I try to not think of how it’s all out in the open now and people still refuse to see. How they hate us. How they wish us dead. How easily the rhetoric turns into action, because that is the purpose after all.

It’ll be okay. We won’t slide into fascism. He’ll be defeated and the spell will break and we’ll try to forgive, but we’ll never forget. Or that’s what I try to tell myself. Just don’t look at the signs. Don’t think about what they mean. Ignore the pictures of the ovens they send. Forget about the flyers they dropped around the neighborhood. Ignore that burning you still feel in your ribs. You’ll see your family soon and there’ll be nieces and nephews and pudgy arms and snotty noses. You’ll breathe again and you won’t be afraid.

Until you see the sign. The kid you loved with his chubby little hands and goofy laugh. The kid you held and the kid who loved football so you pretended to love it too. The kid put a sign in his yard. And he thinks it’s funny. In a fuck you sort of way. And you want to tell him what it meant. But you know he’ll never hear you again. You’re the enemy within afterall. And he fucking hates you. Because that’s what tolerance means.

Goddamn.