#f vgk

[frawgspon]

dancing, together

—

And when the grainy photos of the two hockey players dancing, together, under the pulsing lights and silver disco ball of the gay club spread across the internet the press release said,

“We had hoped that here we wouldn’t be quite so recognizable, that fewer people would care about sports.”

Heteronormative society heard only a rejection, an excuse, a reason to laugh and set the whole thing aside, to not think about it, to stop looking.

But the rest of us, we looked. The rest of us thought about it. We looked inside the letters, into the holes of the o’s and p’s and b’s and e’s. We looked at the words they chose. We thought about their outsides, thin strips and oddly shaped outlines of white between the black letters on our screens. We saw a gap revealing, sparkling bright against the dark of the typeface, a shining void, dazzling,

We asked ourselves if, maybe, could possibly,

Society told us we would be wrong to assume anything but normal, average, common, typical, regular, normal, normal, normal. As if anything other than society’s restrictive ideas of what was expected were affronts, attacks. Most people fall into the majority they said, things are usual for a reason, there are fewer of you so what you think and how you feel doesn’t truly matter anyway.

But we looked, anyway. And we saw,

And what we saw were reasons to feel seen, reasons in little more than the absence of full-throated denial

We saw ourselves in the negative spaces,

And it was in those negative spaces that we also danced

together.