Image by Margaux Bellott.

If you’ve read more than a few of my rants, then you are probably already painfully aware that I am a Queer person and that I take this identity pretty seriously, some of you may even be forgiven for saying annoyingly so. However, you have to understand that I really didn’t choose this shit, at least not all of it. I didn’t choose to be born into a body that makes me physically Ill. I didn’t choose to have a gender identity so complicated that I need a goddamn Venn diagram just to explain it. And I sure as fuck didn’t choose to have to deal with all of this shit in a conservative Catholic diocese loaded to the gills with pedophile priests and fire-breathing conformist imbeciles.

What I did choose was to fight back, to maintain my mutant otherness and take pride in it. I chose to be an anti-puritanical individualist in league with other biologically bizarre people who would rather fight than fit in and this is what makes me Queer. I am a neurodiverse genderqueer lesbian, and Queer anarchism is the martial art that I practice to defend this existence. Queer is my culture, Queer is my tribe, Queer saved my life and it will probably save it a few more times before sundown. With all that being said, just because I am very proud of my people doesn’t mean that they don’t occasionally piss me off and it is this dichotomy that has long led me to have a very uneasy relationship with Pride Month.

What began as the revolutionary celebration of a riot waged by an irate mob of largely Black and brown gender outlaws against the police state has slowly transformed into a Disneyfied and heavily policed parade replete with soulless corporate sponsors and opportunistic Democrats. In fact, the entire month has become one big vanilla cash grab for monster machines like Blackrock and Raytheon who drape themselves in rainbows and get their pictures taken with weird people to throw us all off the scent of the latest war crime they manufactured in some dead-end corner of the third world. Crucify me twice for being presumptuous but something tells me that this was not what Marsha P. Johnson had in mind when she picked up that first brick.

On the other hand, I have found-family that includes actual Queer children, and I have long sucked up my bitter discontent just to see their faces light up like Molotov cocktails when it becomes theatrically undeniable that they are not the only ones. If I had even the slightest idea of that fact when I was their age it........

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