Flag

The first time I saw an upside down American flag it was on the back of a wheelchair. It made me uncomfortable, but Helen* frequently made me feel uncomfortable. She was a blunt, demanding, intimidating, old-school activist working class butch dyke with a voice that was simultaneously raspy and shattering. In short, she was a hero. If I need to call to mind the exact tone of her voice, I just need to think of her partner’s name. Helen’s utterance of it, like her voice, had layered notes of demand, vulnerability and impatience. Miiicheeellle.

 If a door was too heavy or inaccessible for a person encumbered with crutches, a walker or a wheelchair, Helen was the first to report it, and if she wasn’t the first, she’d definitely be the last. Lesbian rights, women’s rights, disability rights, civil rights – all of it sat front and center in any room she inhabited.

Where I favored email or a fond wave from across the room, Helen favored full on engagement. She’d steer her wheelchair like my grandma used to steer her car- choose a direction and hit the gas hard. Next thing you knew, her wheels would be inches from your toes, her belly hanging between her legs and her hands gesturing to the middle of your chest. That’s why, when I used to see her at the YMCA just after her pool exercise and my weight machine rounds, I ducked and weaved behind the pulleys and mirrors. Before we got to know each other, she wasn’t keen on trans rights, which is to say she was a lesbian separatist. Eventually, she questioned her stand there. I don’t think I, a very visible trans man, had any influence on her; I just appeared in her life as she was changing her mind about that. Still, I was early in my transition and didn’t have the confidence to defend myself yet, so just in case, I usually tried to steer clear and appreciate her from a distance.

I was on my way to my truck after a workout and had snuck out around her as she was holding forth with two YMCA employees about the contraption that was supposed to lower and lift her in and out of the pool. The flag was draped over the back of her wheelchair, sort of pinned there. It was a little grimy from the hours and miles driven on hot St. Louis sidewalks and being loaded and unloaded into a van. Dozens of bumper stickers competed for space on the armrests and a big plastic cup with a straw bumped along as she aimed herself my way and hit the gas hard. Now she was barreling down the sidewalk, gaining on me.

It’s perhaps these few minutes that made me love her a little, and I can’t even remember the conversation except that she was kind to me and she had a stuffed animal wedged between her thigh and the armrest.

Helen didn’t believe in new age therapy or touchy feely anything. I knew she’d grown up in an orphanage, and the only picture I’d ever seen of her before the wheelchair was of her smoking a pipe while straddling a motorcycle. Her helmet had giant stars and stripes like Easy Rider, and it rode on the handlebars.

I didn’t ask her what it meant to hang the flag upside down, but it looked like a giant fuck you, which would have been true to her nature. It made me sort of angry for reasons that I couldn’t quite understand at the time, and also inspired me to make a mental note. Sometime in your life, be bold enough to question every sacred thing.

The thing I do remember about our conversation was that she had named her stuffed animal. She was trying to bond with it, to connect with a smaller self, a child self. In other words, new age therapy. I silently bonded with her as I thought of Snoozy Bear, my doll from my fifth birthday, resting perfectly seated amongst my other teddy bears that I routinely comforted as I searched around them in my closet. I remember her being happy to see me, and I remember making another mental note to stop being such a dick.

When I got home I looked up what it means to hang the flag upside down and saw that it wasn’t a fuck you, but an S.O.S. A sign of a nation in serious trouble. I can’t help it. Every time I think of this, I think of summer, 1990. I was seventeen, and driving my sister home late at night. We only had about a mile’s drive through Effingham to get to our dad’s apartment, and to get there, I cut through downtown, where there were dozens of American flags flying. In the darkness, we saw a group of boys tearing down the flags. I still see the image in my mind of them running, cigarettes in hand, jumping and grabbing at the cloth, dragging it into the dirt. I stopped the car and we looked at each other for a beat before flinging the doors open and chasing them across the courthouse yard, across the street, past First National Bank to the post office where they scattered into the darkness. We stopped, crouched with our hands on our knees, and caught our breath, high on our righteousness, our certainty that we were defending the good. We were the brave ones. Two girls who had chased the boys away. Even though we had been drinking vodka and smoking menthols and weed (at least I had), we had defended something sacred. I was sure of it. So sure, in fact, that this memory stuck in my mind as evidence that I was one of the good guys.

The next time I saw an upside down flag it was taken down and burned on an interstate ramp. I was live streaming my participation in a Black Lives Matter march that led to blocking multiple lanes of traffic. I knew my relatives back home in Illinois were watching and I wanted to tell a certain story. I wanted them to empathize, and I knew I would lose them if they saw that. I turned my camera away from the flag burning and stood transfixed. It made me uncomfortable in a way that I still didn’t understand. I held my camera so that the marchers and sign wavers were in the frame and watched in the other direction as the smoke escape through the arms and legs of a circle of people. It was thick and dark the way something that is fire retardant smokes when it’s doused with gasoline. It didn’t want to catch. The result wasn’t the dramatic immolation the marchers wanted. It was awkward, and the logistics of lighting the flag sapped the spontaneity. Only a few stuck with the task, and the others retraced their steps back to the crowd, which was now headed onto the highway. I turned my camera toward the line of police officers wearing riot gear and answered, “No Justice” with “No Peace” along with everyone else. It’s that image that sticks with me – concentric circles of people trying to destroy something – protesters destroying a symbol of oppression, an armored police militia pressing in on a group that threatens the status quo, a group of observers and journalists who encircle the police threatening free speech.

But why was I, in some way, attached to a piece of apparently fire proof cloth?

The answer, I think, begins in Effingham, IL, specifically in a Southern Baptist Church in Effingham. Church was the white-hot center of my family. We went three times a week – twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday. It was where I learned about the power of language and fealty to a cause that is much, much bigger than one person. It was more than Sunday school, it was a thesis statement that followed me out of that church, into independent bookselling and then left me standing on a street corner pointing a camera one direction while looking another.

One Sunday when I was about ten years old, I sat in the baby room in the nursery while we listened to Brother Carl** shout into the microphone and into the radio airwaves and out of the speakers on the floor that ours was the only righteous faith.

“I will not apologize! I will not apologize!” he yelled. It was the first time it occurred to me that there was another group of people, possibly with more control, who would demand an apology for who I was. Other religions had their symbols and their tokens. “False idols,” Brother Carl called them. Ours was held together by certainty, an esprit de corps, a tribalism that became the air we breathed. This feeling of belonging to (and of possessing) the kingdom of the lord expanded to our town, our state, our country. We had the spirit of god, and it was up to everyone else to accept it into their hearts too. It was a big tent, but it was our tent.

Of course that’s a funhouse mirror view of the world. I started to understand that when I asked how to become a preacher and my Sunday school teacher said that was only for boys. I understood it further when I developed a crush on my third grade teacher, Mrs. Woods. I met people, fell in love with people, fought with people and listened to people. I embraced my queerness and my trans-ness. Slowly my worldview evolved in such a way that I was on the other side of the mirror looking in at this white evangelical entitlement knowing I was now the person Brother Carl was yelling at. He would not apologize, and neither would I.

Still, I didn’t have another thesis statement, so I applied the original one to bookselling and activism, trying to be a better person, trying to belong to something bigger, something righteous in an anti-racist, queer, secular way. I thought I had eradicated nearly all the trappings of my bible toting youth, but looking at that group torching the flag, it became evident that I still had it in me – that feeling of belonging to (and of possessing) the kingdom around me. That flag represented to me a nostalgic safety, where I knew the rules and the rules were there to protect me. But that’s a funhouse mirror view of the world. The American flag, to so many people, represents laws that make them outlaws, rules that rule them out, that protect others from them. From us. It is a symbol of the will of a group of people to extract and apology from us for being who we are, for believing what we do, for loving who we love. To some, the struggle is to defend what being an American means, to others, the struggle is to expand what America means. To challenge it. To question the sacred thing and require it to answer.

This year, in the wake of the reversal of Roe v Wade, the similarly catastrophic ruling favoring the coal mining industry over global climate change remediation, and other soul crushing defeats, it appears that more (white, cis, het) folks finding themselves outside of the shade of the big tent. They’re losing faith in the judicial system and really any elected official on either side of the aisle (and possibly the actual aisle). Lots of upside down flags. Lots of despair. Lots of crowing on the other side. Lots of solicitations for donations. Lots of silence.

What does this mean for the flag? What about the banners we wave signifying our identities and affiliations? Yellow and Blue flags briefly frame our profile pictures. Rainbow flags are everywhere in June (except for of course Chick-fil-A), and overnight they are replaced by red, white and blue banners and Fourth of July sales (except for Amazon who, even though I have opted out of all communication with them, still shows up in my phone scroll with ads telling me to wait for Prime Day). Is something sacred if it’s sanctioned, scheduled and short-term? It’s hard to be sure of anything. Enemies look like friends. Friends look like intruders with rude wheelchair politics. A flag can be false.

In Helen’s case, the upside down flag’s call of dire distress followed her everywhere she went. She wore it (metaphorically) like a cape. It dangled there amongst one liners stuck to the metal cage she found herself steering through a world she loved enough to provoke but that would have rather avoided her.

A couple of years before she died, I saw Helen steering her chair across a cracked parking lot and around the weeds on the sidewalk a couple of miles away from the YMCA. She held a full bag from Jack in the Box in her hand as she rode away. I waved and called out to her from my truck, but she kept going. I don’t know if she heard me or not. I like to think she did, but she was too damn busy changing her mind and changing the world to notice me. On the Fourth of July, I like to think about that.

*Helen and Michele were real people, and if you’re from St. Louis you probably knew them. I changed their names to respect their privacy anyway.

**Brother Carl is also a pseudonym. Also real.

Peace is not the same thing as non-violence

A few years ago Kris and I got into an argument.  It was one of the very few times we have outright screamed at each other.  I don’t remember what it was about.  It doesn’t really matter now, but I do remember where I was.  I was at the kitchen sink scrubbing pots and pans – good ones – that I had bought her for Christmas.  She stormed out of the room and I, in a rare fit of rage, smashed the pot against the counter.  It still has a dent.  I think about that moment every time that pot is on the stove – the moment when I had hit my limit of contained anger and broke something.

Later, after we made up about whatever it was we were fighting about, I admitted what I had done, showed her the pot and apologized.  There has never been and will never be a time when I would aim a violent gesture toward my wife, but there have been and will be plenty of times I am angry.  There will probably be very few where I reach the end of my tether and do the proverbial table flip.  In my case, Kris and I have equal power in our relationship.  She could very well throw my cell phone in the toilet or something and we would have to work it out.  Are either of these scenarios rational and calm?  Not really, and truth be told my little fit is embarrassing.  But they aren’t violent either.

I share this story to illustrate the difference between violence and property damage, specifically in light of the last few days of protests here in St. Louis and the multiple calls (from mostly white people) for peaceful protest citing Dr. King’s marches –  when what we really mean is non-violent protest.  I’ll admit I’ve used the term peaceful protest myself, equating peace with the absence of violence.  But I was wrong.

Anger is not peaceful.  Outrage is not peaceful.  Peace has no place in protest – it is the result of successful protest and other long-term work to achieve equality.  

Over the last couple of nights, thousands of angry people marched the streets of St. Louis.  As I type, another group is protesting again.  They are (and I am) outraged at the not-guilty verdict in the Jason Stockley case.

I’m angry, but I can tell you that the people around me – the black people around me – are pot smashing, cell phone in the toilet angry.  The difference is that there is no balance of power in this anger – this centuries old affront to human decency.  No miscommunication that gets resolved.  It’s injustice that just sits there with no place to go because the people with the power to change it don’t.

And also in the last couple of nights people broke windows and spray painted buildings.  Sometimes (and I’ve seen it personally) the breaking of windows is done at the very end of a protest by (many times white) people who just want to break stuff.  And sometimes the breaking of windows is end of tether, nowhere to go with your impotent rage property damage.  And while it is destructive and dangerous, it is different than hurting people.  The violence occurs after that, when the police use tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, clubs, shields and vehicles to inflict injury on people armed with rocks, spray paint and nothing to lose. (I’ll add here that even if the window smashing is being done by white boys with mommy issues, the police can easily contain that without gassing a neighborhood.)

I’m a white guy who co-owns a business, so I’ll try to stay in my lane.  I won’t pretend to speak on behalf of anyone but myself.  I won’t tell anyone how, why or when they should protest – and I won’t tell them to be peaceful.  I will hope for non-violence on the part of the police and protesters because violence – injuring or killing – diminishes humanity.  Violence is abhorrent.

I’ll be nervous about my bookstore, the staff who works there and the cat who lives there.  I’ll support the small businesses around me who have broken windows and I’ll help build a community that cares deeply for its citizens.  I’ll support the movement for equality and justice for all because lives are at stake.  I’ll march when I can and be a hermit when my mental health demands it.

But I won’t call for peace.  No justice, no peace.

Every Little Thing -In Search of the American Soul

I’m pretty sure my son voted for Trump.  I can’t bring myself to ask him directly, but I’m relatively sure his opinion hadn’t changed between the beer I had with him to celebrate his birthday in September and the election in November.  I don’t know what he thinks of things now either – whether he regrets his vote or not.  For an anti-racist, progressive transgender man such as myself, this is a gut check.

He looks at politicians with a raised eyebrow and barely contained eye-roll.  He doesn’t see much honor or honesty among any of our elected officials in any capacity, and I think I may have taught him that.

We’ve spent hours over the course of his life talking about things that matter -love, honor, truthfulness, dreams, the future, critical thinking.  Those are the conversations you get when you’re distilling a week’s worth of parenting into a weekend visit or dinner at Olga’s Kitchen in the mall.  There’s no time for idle chatter before the inevitable drop-off at the end of the visit. Then that’s followed by the drive home with grief and regret that you didn’t get to everything.  Every. Little. Thing.  Because every little thing is what I missed.

As he got older, his reality parted from mine.  He didn’t go to college even though he is smart enough.  He couldn’t justify the debt without the guarantee of a salary that would pay for the student loans.  What he did instead was follow his other parent into metal working (which is kind of bad ass anyway).  He’s had a few good jobs, but a few jobs isn’t what he really wanted.  It’s not what anybody really wants. But he’s a responsible, caring, funny and thoughtful man – a certain kind of happiness finds that kind of person no matter what they do for a living, and I am proud of him.

During our shared birthday beer we argued over policies and debated about candidates.  We talked about schools and banks and business.  We fundamentally agreed on mostly everything.  He is a smart, engaged voter.

And we still came to different conclusions.

Every time I hear my friends – many of whom I respect, many of whom I have stood beside during protests, parades, marches, educational talks and author events – say they’ve blocked out everyone who voted for Trump I am gut checked.

This is a time like no other.  The structure of our government is in peril.  I can barely keep up with the daily onslaught of regressive, destructive mandates from a racist sociopath who surrounds himself with other racist sociopaths.  I mourn because it’s evident that our country has elected a functionally illiterate celebrity to silence the press and mock and dismantle our government like it’s a reality tv show.

My social media feeds are electrified with outrage, fear and calls for resistance.  There are pleas to contact representatives, calls to action, marches unlike any other in history – a collective scream and chest clutch that reaches around the globe.

And I still love my son.  I think he mistook entertainment and manipulation for truth telling.  I think he was conned.  But I still love him, and I won’t give up the precious hours I have with him (that are now fewer and fewer) talking about things that don’t matter.  And I won’t give up any time with him that I can get.

Yesterday I posted on Facebook:

“Simultaneously
– Watching a screaming man being taken away to a psych ward in leg shackles for squatting in an apartment,
– getting news of DeVos’ confirmation on the phone i took out to film in case of a violent turn of events, and
-calming a dog terrified of loud sounds
is too much for me to process at the moment. Layers of processing there.

I will say this though –
When park rangers and teachers are dissidents, we have clear and indisputable evidence of a sick society.”

My good friend Alfred replied:

“Or a society that is beginning to know where to turn to find its healing …”

This stuck with me.  Another gut check. I’ll advocate.  I’ll call my senators. I’ll resist.  I’ll fight fascism like my life depends on it – it does.

But what it comes down to every time is the brave trust we have in each other, one on one, to take care of each other.  The heroes of this story won’t be our congress or lawyers.  They never have been.   We are.

We have to turn to each other once again, make and keep small promises, teach the truth even if it’s dangerous, speak even if it’s softly, listen even if it’s hard – even if it hurts – and argue about the things that still matter.

But above all, if we’re going to be the heroes of our own American story, we must take leadership from others who have fought oppression for generations and learn this lesson –

Our institutions won’t save us. We the people are the only ones capable of saving ourselves.  Each of us, one by one, two by two, must choose to be brave enough to keep the fabric of our common dream intact.  We must fight each other like hell and choose to love each other anyway.

I think I’ll call my kid now.

My Bernie-Hillary Struggle

Let’s talk about politics. Specifically this tedious primary race. I have to start in a church nursery circa 1983.  I know, it doesn’t seem to relate, but trust me with a few minutes of your time.

When I was about 9 or 10 years old I asked my mom if I could babysit with her during church.  The nursery at Gospel Baptist* was in a completely different building, a small converted house, that sat adjacent to the church. I didn’t care about watching the little kids, but I didn’t want to sit still on a pew with my dad, so I sat in the baby room with my mom listening to the transistor radio on the changing table. Brother Ray’s* sermon was being broadcast over a local station and we could hear him building momentum through the tinny speakers.  The toddlers in the room next to us had already built a fevered pitch so mom turned up the volume a little.  Just as she did, Brother Ray hit his stride. You could practically see him wiping his face with the handkerchief.  You could hear the calls of AMEN coming from the congregation.

“You can take this to the bank, my friends. This way is God’s way. God’s way is the only way. And all the other ways are the wrong ways!”

“AMEN”

“And I’ll tell you what,” he continued. “The Catholics and all the rest… the Pentecostals speaking in tongues, they’re all wrong.”

He got quieter. I was familiar with this rhythm.  The slowing and building, each swell outsizing the last.

“And brothers and sisters, I may get into trouble for saying so.  No, no I may!  There are those who won’t want to hear what I’m about to say, but I have to say it. God put the words in my mouth so they must be heard.”

I was riveted. There is no cadence quite like a Southern Baptist Preacher who has a belly full of righteous anger.  It is captivating.

“I’ll say it now and you’ll all be my witness, you here in the pews and you out there listening on the radio.” That was me.  He was talking to me.

“They are CULTS that’s what they are. The only way to heaven is through Jesus, through giving yourself to his will by repenting your sins and giving your life to Jesus, the son of God right here in this church! And I know I’ll get into trouble for saying this on the air and they might take me off the air but I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE.  I TELL YOU, I WILL NEVER APOLOGIZE!”

His voice boomed through the speakers.  I looked out the window to the church to see if armies of other religions had surrounded us.  I worried that the radio feed would be cut for his proclamation, that the heathens would try to silence him.  I was ready to defend.  Let them come.  We had the might of right on our side!

But the heathens never came.  We went to Wendy’s for burgers after the service like usual.  Still, that explosive bad boy/good boy fire stuck with me. I was intoxicated.

I didn’t stay with the church. Mom & dad got divorced and I’m queerer than they’d like, plus the higher power I serve now is bigger than a jealous god. Gospel Baptist probably wouldn’t have me back anyway. But good god, I love fiery passion.  I love the underdog. I love righteous anger. I love holding back the masses to preserve the sacred.  (I am a bookseller, you know.) But I also know about messiahs and how they almost always disappoint you.

And that brings me to this year’s primary race for the Presidency.  Specifically the Democratic primary.

It’s easy to point to a guy like Trump and recognize his self-proclaimed deification as ridiculous and dangerous. Cruz draws from the same pool as Brother Ray. That’s familiar and easy. But Clinton and Sanders?  They’re from the side of the aisle that fights over issues – not personalities.  Progressives are about secular politics, about civil rights, about rational thought and science. Right?

And here we are, supporters of both candidates,  loading our Facebook walls with 40 year old photos of arrests as evidence of civil rights involvement, un-vetted accusations of corruption, memes featuring the other candidate as false and untrustworthy-  bitter arguments among the faithful about which messiah is going to take us to the promised land.

The Clinton camp calls Sanders supporters Bernie Bros or Bernie Bots and condescend based on age and class. Sanders supporters practically paint flames and horns on Clinton, painting her as the embodiment of the establishment, the whole problem with the world.  The entirety of the Democratic base is in a competition to be the surrounded tribe whose underprivileged leader is righteous and holy and we are all convinced, CONVINCED that our choice is the only one. That all others are wrong.

And this brings me back to the church nursery in 1983.  When Brother Ray shouted into the microphone that he WOULD NOT APOLOGIZE for calling all other religions illegitimate cults he had the zealot’s rage of a David spitting in a Goliath’s eye.  It was Gospel Baptist Church of Effingham against literally everybody else in the world.  To quote from the  Tinker Tailor Solder Spy movie, “He’s a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.” To protect himself from that doubt, he had painted himself into a corner where his religion could not survive if others did and other religions could not survive if his did. There was no room for growth. No room to bring anyone in, just to call everyone out.  Incidentally, a few years later we discovered that Brother Ray had been cheating on his wife with the church secretary and he left in disgrace.

Sooner or later, one candidate will win enough delegates to be the Democratic nominee, and now I fear that each candidate’s supporters have painted themselves into the same corner.  I think that one or the other candidate could end all of it all at once if instead of vilifying anyone or naming their endorsements they just answered a question about a past bad vote or bad position on an issue like this, “I’m sorry.  I apologize for not being where I needed to be on that issue, but I am being the best I can be now and learning every day.  I am not a messiah, but a public servant.  I am a human being who learns from my mistakes and will do my best to represent you.”

The antidote to the overblown narcissism and bellicose rhetoric is humility.  Simple as that.  Real leaders listen. Revolutions succeed because the revolutionaries love each other as much as their cause.

I’ll vote for one or the other.  It’s none of your business who.  But I will say a Clinton-Sanders or Sanders-Clinton ticket would be unstoppable if the supporters of both candidates would stop burning the bridge between them.

*I changed the name of the church and preacher.  Exposing that church and his family would pretty much negate the growth and humility I ask for here.