The latest Queer Dispatch posting says "What if staying stops feeling safe?"
I'm having trouble making sense of "stops feeling safe." I have never in my 70+ years really felt "safe." The closest I come is when I'm completely alone and have some reason to believe nobody will come near me. I've been blindsided too often, including by people who said they would keep me safe. Being alive is risky; if you can't deal with it, there's always that one way to stop feeling scared (or anything else.) But I guess most of us would rather live with the fear.
So the current political situation is just another case where I have to keep my wits about me and to the little I can to reduce the dangers, and be prepared to run/hide/whatever when the you-know-what hits the you-know-what.
When I started showing myself, about 20 years ago, my matra was "if they kill me, they kill me." That hiding and pretending was worse than risking getting killed. And that's how I live now. There's no such thing as really safe. You just learn to live with it.
Comments
Safety doesn’t have to mean certainty
Asche, I hear you. After being blindsided so often, especially by people who promised to protect you, it makes sense that “feeling safe” might seem foreign. I respect what it took for you to decide that living openly was worth the risk.
For me, though, there are times when I do feel safe—especially around friends and family who accept me, or in spaces like Lezapalooza, which I wrote about in Fuck The Storm. That doesn’t mean nothing bad could happen. It means I can let my guard down, breathe, and be myself without constantly preparing for the next threat. Those moments matter.
The QD story isn’t about whether any country can promise absolute safety. Safety involves both the dangers we face and how safe we feel. The story is about whether those risks have become more than someone can reasonably live with. Leaving can be another way of doing exactly what you describe—reducing the danger and choosing how to keep living as yourself. Staying takes courage, and leaving can too. We each deserve room to make that choice.