[image description: a black screen displays a circle distorting to word “anointed” written in white all-caps text white smoke bookends the screen, rising about the silhouette of people standing at the Beyoncé concert on August 1st, 2023. photo by author]
i don't write and publish very much publicly anymore. but my spirit heavy was heavy on august 1st, 2023.
years ago, i would keep up with the seemingly never ending string of murders in the U.S. and beyond of Black people. all Black people. cis, trans, queer, straight, disabled, non-disabled, etc. and not just police killings, but the murder of cis and trans Black women that often included sexual violence. i also read about the murders of trans women of all races and ethnicities, cases of murdered and missing Indigenous women, and police killings of disabled people.
in the case of the Black victims: i knew their names, how they died/were killed, their stories. i wrote about some, i protested after the murders of some, i tweeted about as many i could, and i mourned them all as if i personally knew them. i experienced so many intense emotions so heavily and frequently that my mom, in an effort to protect me, asked why i cared so much if i didn't know them. she wondered why i did it to myself. while i could not just turn off my empathy, i can now see that i had become fixated on these deaths in ways that i can only describe as unconscious self-harm. it is possible to care without obsessing, but i couldn't do that at the time. it was all or nothing.
after involuntarily seeing one too many of their deaths on video, i decided that i would not intentionally watch footage, listen to recordings of their dying moments, or read graphic descriptions of their deaths. the videos i saw prior to that stuck with my psyche in ways that felt torturous. i couldn't keep doing that to myself and i knew it wasn't good for any of us to do so.
over time, i consciously and unconsciously slowed my obsessive reading about the routine murder of folks with whom i shared an identity or to whom i related in some way. a friend would send a link or a tweet and i would read the headline but not the article. i would see the hashtags but i wouldn't scroll to find out more information. but august 1 was different. the murder of O'Shae Sibley, a Black gay man murdered for voguing in public and defending his friends, really got to me. i, again, was in mourning for someone i didn't know, for someone i don't even think most of my friends directly knew. he was a part of my extended Black queer kin network, but not my inner or even outer network.
in the past, murders similar to O'Shae's hurt my heart and fueled a certain sense of "that could have been me." with O'Shae's murder, my heart dropped but different thoughts populated my head. my thoughts swirled around the idea of the banality of evil. around how much protection each of us are afforded from violence based upon how we look, stand, gesticulate. how ugly, fat, dark, visibly disabled we are or aren't. as queer and trans people, how femme, clockable, and socially desirable others determine us to be.
the thing about being queer and/or trans in such a hateful world is that violence stalks us no matter how much we pass, no matter how heteronormative we make ourselves. we don't have to vogue in public to Beyoncé to be murdered. and we can hide all we want. but our queerness, our transness, our perceived difference announces itself before we even have a chance to grow up. too often our lives are cut short due to violence—structural, systemic, and/or interpersonal—beyond our control.
i typically hold a lot of protection as someone typically labeled or perceived to be a masculine man, even as one with detectable sugar in the tank. walking on 14th and broadway ave—a main thoroughfare in downtown Oakland, CA—around 3pm on a wednesday afternoon in July, a man clocked my friend and i as queer.
"don't fuck each other too hard, you fucking faggots."
we immediately started laughing at the absurdity. he followed up with another equally absurd line: "you're laughing, you faggots can die together," prompting us to laugh even more.
after we got our giggles and chuckles and tee-hees out about getting verbally hatecrimed on a sunny weekday afternoon, we talked about how our perceived maleness and masculinity allowed us to laugh rather than fear for our lives. we talked about those we know and those we don't, those who have been killed or seriously physically harmed in broad daylight. we then parted ways, him on BART back to the city and me in my car back to my apartment a few miles away.
and here's the thing, i don't have a neat conclusion or takeaway. this is the mundanity, the absurdity, the joy, the sorrow, the trauma, the celebration, the fear of living while queer and especially while non-white. i initially started writing this on the train to the Beyoncé concert in Boston, stopping after i ate my pre-concert meal to find my seat. i was greeted by so much visible joy, so much beautiful Blackness, so much splendid queerness. i got my life on that night, sure. but the sadness did not magically disappear. lifetimes of queer and trans sadness won't dissipate at any point in the near future as we, especially youth in the U.S. and queer and trans people of all ages worldwide, are actively being attacked physically, legally, socially, and interpersonally.
rest in power, O'Shae. and may each day we live bring us more joy and much closer to healing the pain we daily endure.
I first read your post 8 days ago. Since then I have been haunted by your post.
There is a phrase you used, and too a word, that I have been thinking of, over and over.
The phrase “the banality of evil” haunts me, I think, because it makes me think of my complicity. Because even if I am not complicit in creating evil, for evil to become banal it requires an audience. I am part of the audience.
The word you used in your post that also still haunts me is “heteronormative”. I had not known the word, and my very lack of not knowing it bothers me: my ignorance of the word “heteronormative”, I believe perpetuates the need for the word to exist.
Thank you for your writing. It is so much more than “just writing”.