The language of violence smells like aerosol hairspray, burning cigars, cheap rum, colognes handcrafted in Paris and sold in Bloomingdales or mass produced and lined on Wal-Mart shelves. It feels like 119 stab wounds in a blood soaked hotel room in Mississippi or the tread marks across the rib cage and skull in Kansas City or any one of the thousands of ligature gashes across the necks of trans women found in ditches and dumpsters and corn fields. Americans are taught this cruel alphabet early on with history lessons on the divine rights of genocide and enslavement. We write this language on the bodies of the poor and disenfranchised like chalk on bloody sidewalks where death waits hand in hand with the prison state to deliver the day’s pre-written report and police union’s masturbatory praise of law & order. Violence is almost always sounded out in silence.
Jazz Alford’s murder now marks the 21st reported homicide of a transgender or gender nonconforming person in America. I found myself this summer sitting in a purple lit bar watching black trans women dance and lip-synch on stage in homage for a sister lost a week earlier. The benefit show raised money for her funeral and when I asked my friend who knew her what happened his response was short: HIV. The room lifted her name in praise and power but it was the silence that echoed off the walls like the ball beats the crowd vogued to after the show. When our trans sisters go missing or unheard from for a few days the silence speaks loud and clear.
He assaulted me early on a Friday morning after a night of drinking at the local drag bar we went to every Thursday night in college to drink $8 Redbull vodkas and make out with strangers on the dance floor. He was dating one of my best friends for a few months and when we found ourselves alone he would aggressively hit on me, always with a wink, or a nudge, whispering that my friend would never find out, that a little head isn’t considered cheating, that my friend is asleep in his room so let’s just have some fun. I let him know in no uncertain terms that I won’t suck his cock, I won’t fuck him, that I won’t do my girl like that. The night I let him get in my car we drive to an after party when the bar closes. I just want to drink more vodka and snort coke. He knows the guy who owns the house, an older gay white man notorious for hosting college twinks for coke fueled parties by his pool. We arrive and I continue to binge until I pass out on a leather sofa in the lech’s library. I wake up a few hours later faded and dazed and in pain. He is on top of me, his cock inside me, silent. I scream and push him out of me. We fight on the couch, his body stronger, heavier than mine, pinning me down. I kick him until he lets me go and yells at me: DON’T ACT LIKE YOU HAVEN’T WANTED IT! I cuss him out, tell him to leave me alone, and knowing that I’m too wasted to drive anywhere lay back down and let the drugs and liquor pull me back to sleep. I wake a few hours later, still drunk, the sun rising in haze blue sky. He is asleep on the same couch I’m on. I drive alone back to my apartment. I won’t tell anyone about this for another 5 years.
I’m sexually assaulted a second time during Atlanta Pride. A nameless white man at the bar buys me drink after drink until I’m too drunk to walk. I pass out in his car as he drives me back to his apartment. I fade in and out of consciousness until I’m in his bed, naked, penetrated. I tell him I can’t, I’m too drunk, I just want to sleep. He doesn’t listen, keeps fucking me. I gather enough energy to kick him off me, tell him to stop. He becomes furious. Demands I get out of his home. Throws my clothes at me. Sends me into his apartment hallway, blacked out and alone.
I read the transcript of Donald Tump’s conversation with Billy Bush on my phone. Begin to notice the first trickle of social media posts and memes about his conventional brand of violent misogyny. The headlines detailing his VULGAR and LEWD comments mask the invisible codes that tell us that rape and sexual assault is something to be tolerated. His non-apology is a grammar school example of how we worship violence by giving it the name LOCKER ROOM BANTER or god or CAPITALISM. It was the same non-apology given time after time to those whose pain is calculated as an inconvenience to the order of the world. While Trump represents an incredibly dangerous threat to democracy and political stability, his cock massaging banter sadly reminds me that most white men have never been taught that their obnoxious behavior is threatening, uncomfortable, insulting, and banal.
The unspoken, violent syllables ring in my ears:
THE BODIES WE ENVY ARE THE BODIES WE FEAR ARE THE BODIES WE DESTROY.
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