Cover Artwork for Better Together: Queer Sultry Summer
Autostraddle & Everyone Is Gay
I wrote a Thing that meant a lot to me and has helped me heal a bit after this fucked up week and it got published on my favorite website in the world.
<3 <3 <3 alaina
“It is not good enough simply to show sympathy. You don’t see murder on this kind of scale with this kind of frequency in any other advanced nation on Earth. Every country has violent, hateful, or mentally unstable people. What’s different is not every country is awash with easily accessible guns. And so I refuse to act as if this is the new normal.” —President Obama on the need to take steps to reduce gun violence
Guys, there is so much in here about the cats. Just so much. This book’s tagline could, and should, be: THE STORY OF THE REAL ALEX VAUSE AND THE FELINES SHE LOVED AND LOST.
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Loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek are two of the most prevalent tenets of Christianity. The religion is literally founded on love and acceptance (despite what conservatives will have you think). Jesus hung out with prostitutes and prayed for his murderers as he hung to die. But I am so angry, that the idea of forgiveness feels impossible.
Then I remember the history of the Black Church. I remember how my great-great-great grandparents were forced to gather to worship in secret because they were slaves. I think about how racists would harass and terrorize patrons of Black churches in the ’60s. And then I think about how despite all of that we would still gather, still study, still pray, still worship.
Out of Orange is about someone so eerily similar to myself that it scared me. It’s about someone who smokes too many cigarettes when she gets stressed out, strives to be loved without being lost, gets stuck on matters of the heart, gets in over her head. Throughout the book, there’s a sense of responsibility from the narrator, who retells her story honestly at every cost to herself. There is no denial of guilt. There is just a sense of redemption, clarity, and remorse.
…when this man made this decision, it was deliberate. When police come into Black communities and harass and kill us, it is deliberate. These people make the decision to come into places where we feel safe, where we feel protected, where we feel like our lives do matter, and remind us that in their eyes they don’t. I think there’s something particularly awful about attacking a place of worship. I’ve been thinking about the fact that he didn’t just walk in there and start shooting. These members, who have a history of being denied the opportunity to worship freely didn’t want to do the same to this man — and so they let him in. I can almost imagine the scene: a deacon might’ve walked up to him and offered to shake his hand, a little girl maybe stared at him over her mother’s shoulder, a teen who had been dragged to church that night might’ve been sitting across from him in the back. This man experienced these people in community, saw them healing and uplifting each other, and still decided to commit an act of terrorism.
They’ve been kicked off fields; they’ve defied years of religious tradition to stand strong as proud Muslim women who play soccer, in spite of their families’ opposition, in spite of the threat of a partner’s separation, and in spite of actual divorce. Their celebration is a manifestation of victory over all of these hardships.
“In spite of the challenges,” Shutzer says, “these women continue to play and hope for bigger things.” And they deserve them.
