I haven’t written a blog post since the election. I feel like it’s pertinent.
These elections are inextricably tied to our sex lives. The people we elect do and will impact the ways we have sex and the repercussions from the sex that we have. Take, for example, Ronald Reagan. I consider him one of the most dangerous presidents in our nation’s history. His maniacal death grip extends far beyond the genocide he funded and helped execute in Central America and enters into the domestic sphere. By domestic sphere, I mean our bedrooms. He wasn’t just a war criminal, funding the ruthless slaughter of entire populations in an attempt to “thwart communism,” but he initiated the entire “family values” rhetoric we hear today – a rhetoric that implies that reproductive freedom and a well-informed sex life are incompatible with families.
He refused to fund AIDS research because he didn’t really like gays that much and despite logic and science proving the fact that AIDS was an epidemic that impacted everybody, he still wanted to prove a point. And prove a point he did. He was president for over seven years before he even acknowledged a health crisis that killed over 650,000 Americans.
We’ve had a lot of terrible presidents. I think Reagan was one of the worst because he tricked an entire population into thinking he was benefiting them, and that racial minorities, queer people, and single moms were entirely responsible for any sort of economic repercussion that the country might face. I think Trump’s rise is a product of a number of really terrifying realities our country needs to own up to, but I also think the “family value” rhetoric is largely responsible. A massive number of otherwise decent people can somehow find compatibility between grabbing women by the pussy and retaining family values. And that’s because family values have come to be associated with hetero-normative nuclear families who buy massive cars and intentionally dull their senses with ads for large electronics and some new frozen food shit like sugar coated beefsteak or cheeto chicken fingers (I’m looking at you Burger King).
On election night I attended a bizarre underground warehouse costume/dance/pole dancing party in which people listened to music while the results poured in. Initially, the mood was relatively celebratory. Even the most skeptical in the crowd were willing to drink and dance at the beginning. By the end of the night though, as the results grew bleaker and bleaker, people stopped. One young gay man who oscillated between putting on the most incredible acrobatic pole dancing routine I’d ever seen and sitting on his partner’s lap, just stopped and stared silently at the screen. He grabbed a piece of tape and put it across his mouth. He was followed by the DJ, and then other party-goers, as the room began to grow somber. The music still played but sounds that once emanated the rhythm of a night out now felt daunting. The room pulsated with a specific type of fear. The man who had been pole dancing was especially reminiscent of that. He was Hispanic and gay. What would happen to him?
A few neighborhoods over another group of friends of mine were in a seedy little gay bar when they heard the news. One friend reached for the man closest to him and started simultaneously kissing him and crying. As he told me, he just didn’t know if that would be legal anymore. He didn’t know what else to do. The friend he was with fell asleep on the couch, a form of physical denial. A way of coping. He was then disturbed by a particularly aggressive bouncer who felt that his sleeping on a couch was a way of disturbing the space. He shone a flashlight on his face and aggressively shook him awake. An otherwise irritating action was suddenly cloaked in a particularly dark type of foreshadowing. As a gay man of color, my friend sleeping on the couch will soon be considered a threat simply for existing.
Women are terrified too. We fought to get basic access to reproductive health and still live in a world in which some women have to drive entire states to get an abortion, where some women simply cannot afford the means that would prevent the pregnancy and therefore prevent the abortion, and where some women still have to simply hope that the lump on their breast is benign because going to the doctor is out of the question. One of Trump’s primary goals is to defund Planned Parenthood and that is genuinely terrifying. Cancer will skyrocket. Unplanned pregnancy will skyrocket. STD’s will skyrocket. And people will not get the support they need.
Luckily, people are organizing. Even in Casper there is a well organized and relatively large group of feminists ready to support one another and their community. This is hard. I wasn’t in Casper for the election, I was at a liberal minded underground warehouse party and even that was terrifying. I visited Casper and saw way too many oversized pick-up trucks sporting Trump-Pence bumper stickers and I wanted to throw up. The struggle here is real. There are protests happening all over the city, but the struggles happening in small communities are especially commendable because they’re uphill all the way. But that makes it all the more important.
I went to a conference once in which one of the speakers said “we need to win the revolution so that we can all make love.” He didn’t mean this in a particularly hippie type of way, not in a free love trumps all kind of statement. He meant that until there is economic, racial, sexual, and gender equality – some people’s sex lives will not be legitimized or enjoyable. So on that note, keep fighting the good fight. Our lives and our sex lives count on it.
rallyshoplocal 