Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

About 48 hours after stepping down from my previous volunteer position, I've as-formally-as-I'm-going-to taken up a new one.

The queer club I've written about a bunch, where I've made friends and felt part of a community again in a way that was so desperately needed and so good for me after The Other Events of March 2020, had been run by two people out of the goodness of their heart and very little else about two and a half years ago. It was only this summer that they started saying it'd be nice to have a little group of people to help do things like arrive early, set up the room we rent in the community center and stuff like that, and in the last few months a dozen or so of us have done various things (someone procures tea and biscuits, someone knows the code to get in, I am good at setting out tables and chairs and stacking them away again neatly at the end of the evening...)

It's reached the point where our two original organizers want to step back entirely from running things and just be regular attendees of the club, and a handful of us have offered to do that. So tonight those two and four of us had a video meeting for them to share the details of how to book the room, what the password is for the e-mail account, one of us taking over looking after the money, all that kind of stuff. Also when is the Christmas party going to be.

Of course I took notes and of course I tidied them up and circulated them immediately after the meeting.

For all I adore the two founders, I don't begrudge them their break before they can come back and make use of their projects and ideas because they don't have to run up every month and look after all the admin and stuff.

I love the vibe of this, everyone's happy to pitch in. At the Christmas party someone's going to teach us BSL "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" and we're going to wear cozy cardigans and have home-baked treats and maybe mulled apple cider [USian meaning of the word, it's a sober space too which is also great]. Onward and upward, queer club!

I never got around to talking about the other two things that D and I saw that week, Breaking the Code or Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

Breaking the Code is a play that D had seen a TV movie version of (starring Derek Jacobi, that sounds amazing) of a book he's also read and considers the best biography of Alan Turing. D knows quite a lot more about Turing than I do, so I consider this high praise. My knowledge is more on the did-the-walking-tour that that guy (Ed something?) does around "Turing's Manchester," I've seen his mug chained to the radiator at Bletchley Park and for the afternoon I was there I did understand how the bombe worked but I've forgotten again now...and of course I know the tragic ending to his story that queers absorb: prosecution, chemical castration, suicide. I was really enjoying the walking tour until I remembered that bit was coming up at the end...

Anyway, I really enjoyed the play. I liked the epilogue that has been added to it, where a modern-day pupil at the school Turing went to is doing a presentation or something about him for LGBT History Month, which adds his pardon and a little more context to what's otherwise an utterly pointless loss of life. This life also happened to be really important to the second world war, but I am always mindful of how many ordinary lives were diminished in similar ways. I do think that having to be secretive about what he did during the war, even afterward, does offer a sad parallel to his isolation.

The play is set during his time in Manchester, with flashbacks to school and Bletchley and everything and I've no idea how true to life this is but in the play anyway he's wistful about his time at Bletchley, seeing it as a period of freedom, getting to be himself -- he's played with a very autistic affect and a stammer that can be severe, he could be weird and queer and chain his mug to the radiator and he could get away with whatever he wanted because his brain was so important to the war effort.

"Breaking the code" at first seemed an odd name for the play because breaking the code is exactly what -- D taught me -- Turing did not do; three Polish cryptologists did. (Turing developed optimizations to their methods, and created an electromechanical computer which allowed Enigma to be brute-forced much faster. He was a genius and deserves to be recognised as such. But he was part of a team at Bletchley who were building on Polish work, and Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski deserve recognition along with the French spy Hans-Thilo Schmidt and many others.) But of course the phrase can also of course to social codes, which included compulsory heterosexuality. When Turing reports a burglary to the police and in the process tells them he has broken the law -- "gross indecency" -- they have to act on that; he has broken a part of the legal code.

The other metric that D judges a biography of Alan Turing on is whether it says he invented the computer -- he didn't, or if he did it depends on what you mean by "computer" and for that matter "invent" -- and the play could probably have done better at that but it didn't feel egregiously inaccurate either. Turing does at one point say something like "we won the war because of me," but of course saying it doesn't make it so, and he says it to his "bit of rough picked up from the Oxford Road" as the police officer describes the young man, so the possibility of exaggeration to impress (or dismiss?) seems plausible.

Finally in a thing that probably only I noticed, near the end of the play when Turing has met up with an old Bletchley friend, who's now a wife and mother, and he's now infamous for his gay crime. So they have a lot to catch up on. At one point Turing is explaining about his "chemical castration," which was the option he took to avoid prison. I'd known about this, but I'd somehow never until this moment considered that what he'd been given was of course estrogen. They gave him dysphoria, I thought. What an awful thing to do to anybody. Anyway, the thing I noticed is that when Turing tells his friend in his matter-of-fact tone "I'm growing breasts!" all around the auditorium there was a chuckle from the white, older audience who like D and I were spending our Halloween at t the theater. I didn't laugh. Turing cheerfully went on to say something like "No one knows what'll happen to them when I stop getting the injections, if they'll go away or what!" Sitting there, seventy-one years later and a short walk from the stop where we'd gotten off the bus, which I just learned is where he met his "bit of rough from the Oxford Road" as the police officer in the play describes his lover, and a chest flattened with modern compression fabric, I winced. No. If only they just went away again... I was disappointed but not surprised at the room full of respectable theatergoers laughing at this. (The idea that taking estrogen would make someone less horny seemed much more amusing to me, but that's based on knowing so many trans women, and they are of course women and not men who are being punished.)

Oh wait, one other me-specific thing: in the play, Turing's mother did not accept that her son had died by suicide. It reminded me of my own mom, who was outraged when asked by police if my brother might have crashed his car intentionally. I understood that they have to ask but she was livid at the question. Maybe some mothers are just always going to be. You think you know your son so well, maybe better than anyone else, and then it turns out that no one gets to know him any more. I saw this play the day when I'd had that dream about being called my brother's brother so maybe that's why I thought of this.

Had a fun afternoon celebrating (belatedly) the birthdays of a couple who are both among my favorite people. One asked for sourdough pizza and a wander around the market at Manchester Leather Weekend.

I bought a trans-pride earring at the market and was delighted to see, but didn't manage to determine if available in appropriate size, a t-shirt with a lot of Care-Bear-looking colorful cartoon bears with symbols on their tummies, including a rainbow which is canon in one of the bears I remember from my childhood, but this time the other bears have trans/leather/bear/pup symbols or flags. It seems the absolutely perfect thing for someone like me or A who had to live through being a girl in the 80s but are now cautiously leaning into our bear-y selves. (Like I told the other birthday boy, I, this week when he lamented Fat Bear Week coming to an end: hey, some of us are here all year!)

D bought himself a leather waistcoat too which he looks amazing in, so that's fun. I tried on one like it was that technically my size but made me feel unusually dysphoric. I'm glad the market included vendors with explicitly trans stuff but it also had a lot of very normative bodies. Or, diversity of some kinds but not others. I guess it's why I've always steered clear of such things, despite my long-term yearnings...which I used to think were (just) yearning to be with rather than (also) to be -- lots of queers have this problem.

It was great to hang out with our friends and be silly together for an afternoon/evening.

Tomorrow will be busy in a really different way so I'm going to try to get some sleep.

Yesterday was a delight. I got tipsy around some friends of friends, one of those being the person who always remembers to introduce herself and where she saw me last. She tells me when things are happening to the side of me where I can't see.

It turns out she works in a special education needs school, specifically in a class for kids with multiple sensory impairments, so she's like "oh this is nothing."

Access intimacy plus alcohol might be a hell of a drug, but then I don't feel I overstepped when she's the one who told me I must have a really good binder because she did not believe I have the cup size I told her I do, heh. The kind of conversation that'd be wildly unlikely and inappropriate in most contexts can be so fun when it finds the right one.

I see so much of myself in this person's life! I knew they were my age before they said, just from their description of junior high.

And of course so much is different too. I wish I could write anything as good as this.

I read about this NatGeo documentary about Sally Ride last week and D and I watched the first half or so tonight (before I got too sleepy).

I remember being floored by a photo of Sally Ride in space, in the shuttle, that I saw in my social studies textbook in I wanna say third or fourth grade. American women could go to space. I think I was probably just about grown out of my desire to be an astronaut by this point (I'd seriously considered it until I decided my mom would worry too much about me so it wasn't a good idea...seeing how much she still worries about me, this seems very astute (the fact that I can't see did not occur to me as a dealbreaker until I was much older, by the way)) but I was fantastically interested in astronauts and the space shuttle (I had a toy version, complete with the truck to slot it on to for the drive across the country), the Voyagers still encountering planets at the time, and all that.

Reading about and especially watching the documentary now, I'm struck by how familiar parts of her story are. Never showed her emotions? Had parents who never modeled how to? (In a way that's referred to as "Norwegian"?!) This shit could literally be taken from my counseling sessions, heh.

This person as remote as the space she traveled to still feels as close as I was to that social studies textbook in elementary school.

I talked to my parents last night (a Friday instead of a Sunday since they've got plans this weekend).

My dad mentioned the new pope. My parents both said approvingly that he's "pretty progressive, pretty similar to Francis." Which was a big change after the previous 24 hours of social media being all shitposts and "uh guys did you know this guy sucks and actually the catholic church is problematic, can't believe no one has mentioned this yet."

My dad mentioned something the new guy has said, I just got a garbled version from my dad but I think it was something about him saying it's not his place to judge humans that God has created to be gay. Regardless of the accuracy or veracity of that, it was something my parents were repeating approvingly, which feels like a very big deal to me.

On the topic of same-sex marriages, my dad said "I see these pictures of people and...they just look so happy. If they want to get a piece of paper, fine!"

"And it isn't hurting anyone else!" my mom chimed in. It's true! (In a few weeks my parents' mixed-sex marriage will have existed for fifty-three years. Unbothered by the existence of gay marriage for like the last 15 or whatever of those years.)

Then my mom said "And those homosexual..." but she kinda swallowed the word like she was thinking wait, that's not the right one, then she said "lesbian" in a way I thought might be about disgust but I later realized was more "trying to carefully say a new foreign word" but then she still struggled to get her sentence out and then my dad had sufficient context clues to say "Do you mean trans gender?" And again it was definitely a new word, with a big space between the two parts like it was foreign (reminded me of those people who hyphenated "bi-sexual" for such a long time) and I had time for just a moment of oh, here we go... dread before they went on to say something I can't remember word-for-word but basically, they're being told trans women are too manly to play sports but also not manly enough to serve in the military, and they're not having it.

Even my parents can see that transphobia doesn't have any internal logic.

It was a stressful call for other reasons, and I had a huge headache by the time it was done, but I hung on to my dad saying "They just look so happy" about queer couples getting married. It warmed my heart. As did the fact that, even not knowing the words for trans people, they know that you can't decide they're whatever gender allows them to be punished the most.

Telling the others about this afterward, I mentioned that I remembered, by chance, being at my parents' when the Obergefell ruling came down legalizing marriage across the U.S. and watching TV news with my dad, with some of those photos of beaming newly-married couples. I remember my dad saying something similar then (I know I wrote about it here, but search doesn't seem to be working for me right now sadly), about how happy the people looked.

D sent me a link to a song, "City Hall" by Vienna Tang saying it's his "favorite 'queer people being happy about getting married' song." I wasn't familiar with it, but just reading the lyrics gave me goosebumps.

Ten years waiting for this moment of fate
When we say the words and sign our names
If they take it away again someday
This beautiful thing won't change

The annotation on that Genius link for those last two lines says

Those who were married at the City Hall in 2004 knew that their right to do so remained in jeopardy– and unfortunately, it was in fact taken away; in August of the same year, the state courts ruled against the city and voided all licenses it had issued to same-sex couples.

I remember those times, I remember people driving sometimes across the country, people who'd been together for decades sometimes. People lining up at night to be ready when a city or state or federal law was about to come into force. The eagerness and the desperation. And all the businesses and volunteers that gave them food, drinks, treats, people wanting to do whatever they could to support this, to celebrate, to whatever limited extent felt possible.

It feels so long ago now and it really wasn't. And I remember the first time Trump was elected hearing Lib Dem friends, who treated U.S. politics like a series they were binging, blithely talk about Obergefell being overturned. Nothing can be taken for granted.

But it's still there. And my mom is saying it isn't taking anything away from anyone else. The world really has moved on. I have hope.

Definitely the best thing about lift club this morning was turning up accidentally early, too early to get inside. I put my hood up against the cold.

The next person who approached the door said "Are you here for lift club?" I nodded.

It was their first time, so I'm glad I could be recognizable! I thought I looked pretty normal today, with a hoodie and jeans over my gym clothes.

When I said this, they pointed out that I was wearing a green corduroy hoodie.

Ah yeah, fair enough.

I'm proud of my dad, who didn't exactly express an emotion tonight but admitted to previously having had an uncomfortable one.

He was telling me about some event at my mom's church that featured music from Gavin and Ellen and Eva and maybe someone else, I can't remember...anyway, these are all people I remember from school because they're only a couple years younger than me. They are, as my dad pointed out, all from my brother's grade. "Why couldn't he be there to watch it too?" Dad said. I muttered rueful agreement and we all sat in the silence with that feeling for a little bit.

I'm proud of my mom too, who said "I never knew back then that Adam was gay." I didn't even know where to start with that. She reminded me that Adam is the same age as the kid she was a support worker for; she followed that kid all through from preschool to high school so she got to know all the students in that year pretty well; they were basically her coworkers every day for like 15 years. And one of them is this Adam.

I am dying to know how she's so sure now that Adam is gay but she didn't explain, just saying "It was so obvious." (Did he just say "my husband" or "my boyfriend"? Did he have a lisp and a limp wrist? What would be obvious as gay to my mom??) But she didn't report his gayness in a complainy way, much less like it's a tragedy, like she's telling me someone has inoperable cancer, so this is a vast improvement on the past. And she added "He was really nice, though," and reported on a nice ordinary conversation they'd had about his job. It's such a big deal for my mom to say a person can be gay yet also nice. And to have a normal conversation with them and report it as such.

I've made it to queer club three months in a row now! D was able to come along this time and I'm so glad he found it as enjoyable and friendly as I do and as I hoped he would.

This time we did a pub-style quiz (USians call this "trivia"). There was a page of lesser-known pride flags we had to identify (demisexual, polysexual, bear...it was my first time seeing a pup flag but I guessed right away what it was!) which also included the flag of the Netherlands as a joke at the end (I think it's way funnier that three separate people asked if that was the flag of France -- I said I know that's the Netherlands but I only know this because of Eurovision, which may be the gayest way to learn flags).

Our table came in joint second, despite being so abominable at the music round. Even when most of the artists and song titles were named at the end they didn't mean anything to me. Except one: I guessed Indigo Girls after ten seconds of what turned out to be "Constant Craving" by kd lang! Just shows how bad I was at being a lesbian I was in the 90s!