I need to say something people don’t seem to want to hear.
Things are worse now than they were 25 years ago.
I was sixteen years old, freshly out of the closet, walking around holding hands with my girlfriend proudly, happily, utterly in love and at no point did I ever feel scared.
This was twelve years or so before same sex marriage was legalised and an apology was given by the queen for the criminalisation, harm and stigma brought upon our community. Equal rights seemed unthinkable to me at sixteen years old, and yet I never once felt a need to hide who I was or who I loved.
The Pride flag I hang every June has been stolen and found burned in a nearby field. My neighbours don’t put my bin out when they take out everyone else’s, a deliberate choice of exclusion. A woman braked to a stop outside my house and asked me what I was doing there (I was very obviously cleaning my windows), and she looked shocked when I said I was the person who lived there, glared at me and drove away without explanation. I am the only female-shaped person who visits my local barbers, and although the staff there are friendly and welcoming, I see the coldness in the eyes of some of the other customers in the mirror, and I feel the need to explain my hair fell out due to cancer rather than that I actually quite like having short, masculine hair. Because I don’t feel safe.
Everywhere I look, I see Pride posts flooded with hateful comments, and it’s more than the ignorant basement dwellers I’ve dealt with all my life, these are deranged, radicalised individuals who believe their hatred is allowed because it is being given a platform. They are organised. They are finding each other. They are so full of rage and desperate to point it somewhere. At someone.
And I hate that I’ve been pushed into a state of fear and shame that I’ve never, in my twenty five years of being openly me, experienced.
It is bad out there. And I’m afraid it’s going to get worse.
I know my page, my whole thing, is mama bear hopecore, but I’m genuinely all out of hope. It’s so fucking hard to be hopeful in this charged political climate. So if you’re out there, and a part of you is afraid, I’m telling you that you are 100% right to be, that in twenty five years the most dangerous it has ever been is right now, and just staying alive and being yourself is all you need to focus on right now.
Take care of yourselves, and each other. And remember that you are loved, you are valid, you are worthy, you are enough, and if you needed to hear it today, I’m so fucking happy you’re here.
2087
turnnoffyourmind
izzy806
yousharknotpass
jacobvanloon
