CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

My Confrontation with Rainbow Capitalism and the Pride Industrial Complex

Photograph Source: Syced – Public Domain

I grew up very Queer in a very small and very conservative town in Central Pennsylvania. I didn’t have the word ‘Queer’ or really any word to properly describe my feelings of visceral otherness, but I couldn’t seem to hide it either. Not from the Catholic priests who saw a child deeply disturbed by their own body as an opportunity for a good time or from their loyal parishioners who seemed to hold biennial conventions at my parochial school over the existential question of ‘what should be done with the Reid child?’

I have spent the better part of my life trying to come up with an answer to that question and even once I did, the answer didn’t exactly make things much easier. By the time I finally figured out that the ‘Reid child’ is a transfeminine genderqueer dyke molested into obedience by Vatican protected predators, she had developed five personalities just to deal with the weight of that post-traumatic reality and found herself bumped up to the top tier of the Fox News hierarchy of scapegoats, somewhere between undocumented communists and mouthy Black chicks in hijabs.

On the other hand, I also managed to uncover the fact that I wasn’t the only damnable pervert in the holler, forging a small found family of neurodivergent genderfuck hicks to smoke dope and shoot tin cans with. On top of that, it turned out that the college town about thirty minutes down the road from me had a fairly sizeable LGBTQ organization, one of the largest in the state, as fate would have it.

So, once the dust finally cleared from my shattered closet, I decided to pack up my five personalities and get a volunteer job in the big, wicked city with this non-profit in hopes that I might be able to convince someone over there to help my people over here.

The mission seemed to begin with promise. The people at this organization appeared to be very supportive on the surface and had even acquired a government grant to set up a program to provide services for Queer youth in rural areas like mine along with a paid employee to help run them. This was what I had wanted more than anything. The youngest member of my found family is the non-binary child of two of my best friends who calls me Auntie Anarchy and kind of restored my faith humanity after decades of people shielding their children from me like some kind of........

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