“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

- The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

I’ve changed the name of my Substack publication.

The old one was fine, but it took a somewhat left-reactionary tone. As my outlook on life has changed, now a year and a half since this administration again ascended to power, I’ve found myself writing more and more about my… well, pursuit of happiness. My increasing hope, if even just because it’s a stubborn one, if even just because I must hold onto hope or I will have no reason not to give up.

But also, because hope is beautiful. Hope is power.

I’ve been reading, and thinking, a lot lately about the supposed rhetorical failures of the trans rights movement of the last decade to secure our civil rights, and how supposedly we made our situation worse by alienating the cis with our pronouns in bio and our refusal to participate in “just asking questions” debates (which often refuse to acknowledge they are debated in bad faith) about our existence, as though it’s our responsibility to avoid making cis society feel bad for how they treat our civil rights as a “nuanced”, “complicated” issue. I can concede that our priorities might be out of whack - it looks tone deaf to fixate on the sports issue in the face of Kansans getting their valid driver’s licenses revoked, and it now being a felony to use the “wrong” public restroom in Idaho. Most of us are not professional athletes and never aspire or would even qualify to be, but all of us need identification documents that don’t dangerously out us, and all of us need to occasionally pee somewhere other than the bathroom inside our house.

The rhetoric, I feel, is all wrong. It’s based in esoteric, niche queer theory that sounds like a Gender Studies lecture at UC Berkeley. It doesn’t speak the language of the average American - and there’s no reason it can’t. There’s no reason advocacy of our rights can’t sound accessible. While I’m no legal expert, I’m constantly pissed off at the ACLU for arguing all our cases on the 14th Amendment. It’s a weak argument that is based on the assumption that the state views us as a real class of people, and therefore equal to others - which SCOTUS has basically decided we aren’t, viewing us as little more than hobbyist cross-dressers who can just easily go back to living as our birth sex if we want those equal rights.

Ultimately, transgender/transsexual identity is a 1st Amendment, free-speech issue. Gender is speech. We express it through the clothes we wear, the haircuts we have, the gendered gestures and tones of voice we use, the ways we showcase - or don’t - our secondary sex characteristics. In some religious communities, such as Orthodox Judaism, men are required to grow out and wear their facial hair, as both an expression of their devotion to their faith and also an indicator to broader society what community they belong to. Many - though not all - Muslim women wear hijabs for similar reasons. The names we use, often recognized as exclusively belonging to one of the binary genders or the other, are speech - and every adult is free to legally change their name to almost anything they want, for any reason or even no reason at all. Pronouns are literally parts of speech, as we learned in middle school English (though MAGA seems to have conveniently forgotten their middle school educations - to no surprise, they don’t strike me as particularly literate, anyway).

I think back to Thomas Jefferson’s words above. Of course, he was a slave owner, and excluded Black Americans and women and Indigenous Americans from these words at the time (though some other founders, especially from the Northern colonies/states, were vocal slavery abolitionists, and it was a hotter debate at the time of the framing of the Constitution than most people know). Ultimately, these words, in their universalist vagueness, were aspirational, and the project of our country ever since has been to explicitly include as many people as possible in those words, with inconsistent and imperfect but generally cumulative success over time.

Looking back at the actual text - Trump and his regime today would consider these words radically leftist, subversive, and anti-American. Unalienable rights. Consent of the governed. Organizing the powers that […] seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Nowhere in it did Jefferson say the state had the right to decide for its citizens what that happiness could entail.

Conservatives have always been a contradiction. They want small government and limited intrusion on private citizens in some areas - and also, deeply invasive and humiliating intrusion into the literal genitalia of certain other citizens. At its core though, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not matters of state - other than to protect the rights of all citizens to have them.

The most airtight legal argument I can think of - and that the lawyers arguing our cases need to adopt if we’re ever going to survive - is that the state should not have the right to determine who its citizens are allowed to be. A component of free speech that is often not thought about is compelled speech. Not only can the government, for the most part, not restrict the things its citizens are allowed to say, with reasonable exceptions like inciting violence or panic, defaming someone else when the aggrieved party can prove the defamatory speech is false, or committing perjury. But it also cannot compel its citizens to say something it wants them to say but which they do not agree with, do not want to say, or sincerely believe is false. This is the core of the 5th Amendment - the state cannot force a defendant to incriminate themselves, nor plead guilty, even if is ultimately determined through other means that they are guilty. The state, under the 1st Amendment, cannot force me to say I am a woman - regardless of whether it thinks I am, because it can make no law restricting my ability to say that I’m a man or appear or express myself as one - the same as it cannot compel me to say I am a Christian when I am not, because it harms no one else for me to decide who I am and express myself accordingly in various methods of speech. It cannot compel a specific identity when one’s sincerely held identity is different from what the state claims it is or wants it to be.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t trying. Conservatives will always find some mental gymnastics loophole around this. But I choose to believe that there is still or will be an America - somewhere or sometime - where I can live freely, where I can assert that my rights are in fact unalienable, and the rest of society can feel some type of way about it all they want, but I don’t have to organize my life around their intolerance or discomfort. The storm clouds are still dark in the short term, but I believe the tide will turn. My anxiety is a third of what it was just a year ago. Arizona’s gubernatorial election is just two short months away, and of course that makes me proverbially bite my nails, but I just… choose my pursuit of happiness over the fear they want to crush it with. I’m not going to spend what have become the most beautiful years of my life living in that fear. That’s how they win. There’s nothing bullies hate more than someone who refuses to be their victim, who turns their head to their taunts, unbothered.

I’ll stake my stars and stripes in the ground, because that’s my right.

When he asks me if I’ve eaten, or if I’ve made it home, because he knows I forget to eat and knows I ride the train late at night.

When he let me put peaches in the fruit salad even though he hates them, just because I like them.

When he notices that I haven’t been on Substack as much, and says he misses my writing.

When he writes love poetry and sweet reflections about me - about us - on the bus ride home from visiting me, or after watching my bus pull away.

When he says that the universe is smiling on him, in part because he has me.

When he notices that I’m depressed even before I do, even over text message, even without me saying it - and his response is simply “I love you”.

When I express my insecurity about the kind of man I am, and he says, simply, “there are infinite kinds of men in infinite combinations.”

To be trans is to be inundated in messaging from society on a daily basis that tells you:

you’re insane,

a freak,

a predator,

you’re not actually who you are,

you should be locked up in a camp somewhere…

Even the gay community isn’t always a safe place. One must navigate a culture that worships cis male body ideals and performs disgust at trans men being in “their spaces”, even accuses us of trying to trick or coerce them into being sexually involved with us.

When I started this journey, at almost 35 - necessarily sacrificing a long-term relationship in the process - I accepted that I may never find love again. I would probably be able to find scraps, be someone’s fetish, curiosity, or experiment; be someone’s open-relationship-side-piece, as long as they maintained access to the cis men they “really” wanted.

But love? Not in the cards. Not anymore.

But the tradeoff between being myself, and love, was one I decided I was no longer willing to make.

It’s wild, then, when that love just happens along.

A love that accepts not only this fact about me, but all of them. Not merely acceptance, but fondness, or celebration even.

A love where I can brush off the burdens of society’s hatred, lay down my armor, not have to think about the ways in which I’m different, because in his eyes I’m not different from any other man at all.

A love in which my neurodivergent brain can find rest, healing, and a deeply visceral understanding.

A love in which my most mundane conversation is exciting.

I’d have accepted average, ordinary love. I didn’t have to. I got a thorough love.

A knowing love.

A love in which I see the best parts of myself reflected back to me.

A love in which I’m gently held.

A love that, despite coming from a man who spent almost three decades in the closet, now proudly speaks its name.

I speak sometimes of the “faith” I found in transition. Whatever shape that takes, whatever name it has, I don’t know, and I will probably never know. It’s not anything that can be confined within one human-derived religion, and furthermore religion is restrictive and limited, perhaps by design.

But some things just seem too uncanny, too good, to be coincidence. One of them is our mere happenstance of human existence at all. And furthermore, the ability of trans people to experience a process of collaborative co-Creation, of discovering deeper ways of being, of transmuting something that feels formless into a form one recognizes…

And queer love. A love often shamed to the shadows, lived in silence, but which possesses a power unlike that of any other. A love that heals the wounds inflicted by the world, shields us from more hurt, and gathers strength and meaning from the defiance required to live it.

My journey into manhood not only didn’t preclude me from this love, but just the opposite: it made it possible.

It is hard for me to believe that such beautiful, powerful, perhaps even divine experiences are simply accidental, are simply not meant to occur unless they randomly do.

But Who or What is It, that “means” for it to happen? Who knows? Maybe it doesn’t matter.

We were just in the living room, kissing on the couch,

waiting for the thunderstorm to pass before we could venture out for late night pancakes.

We had just walked the dog after the rain through the neighborhood with its perfectly tidy little shrubs and succulents.

We had just gone to the grocery store and cooked dinner together,

cheese burgers and fruit salad,

laughing about the ones we cooked last summer,

just as burnt.

I had just worked a regular day in the loft while you built your model in the kitchen and waited patiently for me to finish.

I had just watched you fall asleep next to me on a lazy afternoon, unaware that I was admiring your cute nose and your fluffy beard.

We had just spent an ordinary and yet not so ordinary weekend at home with (two of) our babies, their stuffed snakes and alligators strewn all over the house.

And once or twice,

we slipped and called it

“our house”.

And now I’m… here?

At… my house?

a hundred miles away?

Now I’ve returned to this life I had to build on my own

because so many years passed without someone to build one with.

So many false starts, missed chances,

futures that didn’t happen with people who wouldn’t have fit anyway.

But every time I come back, it feels more and more like leaving home, not returning.

I had just this morning woken up in your bed,

brushed my teeth in your bathroom,

looked at your smile from across the coffee shop table,

and tonight I’ll go to sleep in a bed and a house and a city that

make no sense.

Is it too late to have that simple life with someone

when everyone else started one decades ago?

That life that for so long seemed like it only happened to other, luckier people?

I hope there’s still time

for two middle aged men to dream like young men who still have their whole lives ahead of them,

and that we won’t feel foolish.

We won’t worry that it’s doomed to fail.

Maybe we can believe we’re some of the lucky ones, too.

The meteorologist said that the dust clouds in Phoenix this morning were the remnants of the storm in Tucson last night.

It’s a Broadway medley show, but it also features nine “storytellers”, fictionalized (to varying degrees) characters showing different slices of queer life and who introduce certain songs. There’s a neurotic guy freaking out because he’s been asked on a date and is wildly overthinking it. There’s a college guy strategizing how to ask out a cute classmate (who smells of “Old Spice, cappuccino, and sweat”) without coming off as creepy. There’s a man who is excited about his upcoming (gay) wedding. There is a man who reminisces on his uncle, who passed away from AIDS in the 1990s, and how he heartbreakingly wondered - as a queer child - if he’d “be next”. And a man who is coming to political consciousness and going to a protest for the first time.

And then there’s a trans character. The role depicts a person who is visiting home and seeing family for the first time since transition, and unsure of how the family - and they themselves - will react.

I’m one of about a half dozen openly trans or nonbinary members of this choir, and the ideal situation was to of course have a trans person play the trans character - so, it was pretty much assumed one of the handful of us would be the one cast. I was asked to try out (not necessarily for that role, but probably implied) and I was reluctant at first. Was this character sort of a token, in a way? Did I want to be that token? In a time when trans people are already exhausted from excess and usually negative visibility, did I want to have even more of it on stage, even if to a friendly audience?

The choir, despite in its very name being a “gay men’s chorus”, has been much more vocally gender-inclusive in the past couple years, and as a result, our trans membership has exploded. I am, to my knowledge, the first openly trans person elected to our leadership council, this season. Maybe this role was simply a reflection of that direction and commitment.

I auditioned, almost literally last minute, with one condition: that I essentially rewrote the script that was written for the character, and auditioned with my version. I was worried that I would insult our two librettists - one of whom is nonbinary themself, and the other, a published author, who is one of my closest friends and biggest cheerleaders in the choir. I didn’t want to seem like an entitled diva taking creative control, when in reality I hate nothing more than taking up too much space.

To my surprise, I was cast, and it was said that they loved the modifications I made.

I ended up revising it once more as we all workshopped our roles in rehearsals. Despite the approval, I still felt guilty that I was the only one of the group who had significantly altered their script. I interrogated myself on why I had insisted on it. After all, this was supposed to be a fictional character. And there was certainly nothing wrong with the role or the monologue as written.

Three years ago was my first concert with the chorus, entitled Born to Be Brave. Like this concert, it featured five characters who represented different slices of the queer community, each of whom were auditioning for our choir à la A Chorus Line. It also featured a trans character, played by a trans actor. I was roughly a year on testosterone, voice still cracking and squeaking like a teenage boy’s. I was still wearing a binder and thank god it got my chest flat enough that our golf polo shirts didn’t reveal much of anything. The stage lights totally washed out my already faint dirt stache. But I could not have been more brought alive by the experience of singing among other men, in the Baritone section, no less.

This concert feels like coming full circle from that time. Now 4 years on T, with a thick dark beard that no spotlight could be bright enough to vaporize, no longer being the wide-eyed newcomer but a confident veteran.

I realized this role, as originally written, was more appropriate for the man I barely was three years ago. I’d have been thrilled to read for it then. It depicted someone who seemed younger, less sure of themselves, and still on the beginning leg of their journey - as I was at the time.

The trans characters, and especially trans male characters, I most often see depicted in broader media are much like the character here. Young, early in transition, insecure at best and tragic at worst. They represent perhaps the most acute time of the transition experience. But as trans people progress further on hormones, gain confidence, pass more, maybe even go stealth, we sort of… stop hearing their stories. Why? Why do we cease to be compelling when we are fully actualized?

I also see that trans characters are often written with a deadly serious tone. So much of our cultural visibility centers around our pain, our fear, our discrimination. And for realistic reasons. While I intended to keep the serious core of the message - I’m also a fucking goofball. I laugh even in the darkest situations as some kind of crass comic relief, something which admittedly doesn’t always land well.

I realized I didn’t take the character in a different direction out of ego. I wanted to show the audience a trans character that they’re not used to seeing. One who is a bit older, more experienced, more confident, and while he’s still quietly nervous sometimes about what others will think - because that never truly goes away - the hard work of his self-acceptance, of his becoming, is largely in the past tense.

The word that the whole script hinges on is “recognize”. It’s not so much that the character is worried his family won’t accept him - he knows they pretty much already do - but moreso that he will appear so unfamiliar to them in the flesh that they won’t recognize him as the person they knew, and won’t as easily integrate him into the family as they once did. This is such a highly specific feeling that I don’t think is talked about enough, and yet which I have experienced so much in my later years of manhood.

A couple months ago, I saw a former boss and mentor that I had about a decade ago, in the audience at another choir’s concert, about five seats away from mine. I knew beyond a doubt it was him - he and I had bonded all those years ago on our shared love of choral singing. I was so excited and was ready to waltz over to him in the lobby after the show - but stopped dead in my tracks. The last time he saw me, I was a woman, and a fairly feminine one, at that. He would have literally no idea who I am. And while I usually have no problem in these sorts of situations sharing my deadname and reminding them how they knew me, even when they put it together there’s still this thick awkwardness in the air. Not of transphobia exactly, but of unrecognition. This person technically knows who I am, because I just told them, and yet physically I am a stranger to them. This has happened to me multiple times with people who don’t have me on social media and have no idea I transitioned - and even a few times with close friends who did know. Nothing quite prepares you for meeting up with an old friend and seeing the man who shows up - the extroverted man with the 100 megawatt smile standing in the place of the socially anxious, quiet woman you knew.

Ultimately, I let my former boss go without re-introducing myself. Sometimes, the fact that you have to re-introduce yourself to, start all over with, someone you were once close to, is a peculiar but sharp kind of pain. You want to start back up with someone right where you left off - as though nothing has changed - and instead, you’re forced to acknowledge that change on their terms, forced to create space for their emotional processing of it, when all you want to do is catch up. And sometimes you have to accept that your previous relationship won’t survive their awkwardness about your change in gender - even if, on paper, they’re “accepting.”

Speaking of smile, I knew if there was anything I wanted this audience to know about trans people, it was our joy. Joy is the defining aspect of my transition. It seeps out of my pores even on my worst days. The contrast in my delivery is intentionally stark. The lighthearted lines are channeling cringe amateur stand up comedian. The serious lines are small and quiet, like retreating into one’s scared child self.

Perhaps most importantly, the character never once uses the word “trans” at all. He didn’t in the original script, either. I feel sometimes like this word is a scarlet letter, a stereotype which precedes our actual humanity. I buried the lede even further by not revealing until the third paragraph that the character is nervous because his family would be meeting the “nephew who used to be their niece.”

The character’s very first line defines who they are - not a trans person - but a singer, a dancer, and now, a fourth-wall-breaking actor. It’s a rough biography of my various roles within the chorus over four seasons, and more importantly, it sets the tone for what I really want the audience to know about this person. He’s a performer, and his happenstance as a trans man is, or should be, an afterthought. I wanted the audience to see that gender is just one piece of identity. I transitioned, sure - but then I did more. I pursued these other identities, some of which were also new to me, some of which were only possible because of the confidence gained in this becoming. And those are what I want you to see in every trans person. To know us for our talents, our contributions, our absolutely atrocious jokes.

My monologue ends by introducing the song “This Is Me” from The Greatest Showman - which of course is a quintessential trans anthem. I always think of my queer ally late grandmother when I say the last line, “This is the me you’ve always known” - because I know, in some way, many of those who love us the loudest don’t have any trouble recognizing us at all. I’ve also been told by some people in my life that this version of me is the one they recognize - not necessarily the maleness, but the confidence, the exuberance, that real smile that I occasionally flashed then which now lives more or less constantly on my face. They saw the me underneath the mask I was wearing and are relieved that I finally took it off.

Suddenly I know I’m not sleeping

Hello?

I’m still here,

all that’s left of yesterday.

- “Hello,” Evanescence

My Grandmère recently passed away at the age of 95. She was my last remaining grandparent, and it was odd, in a way, to even have a grandparent still around so long after both of my parents had passed (Dad has now been gone for 17 years, Mom 9 years). My Grandpère, her husband, passed in 2014 at the age of 87.

We often mythologize our family members, perhaps especially our grandparents. Neither of mine were perfect humans. But they are among the things I am most grateful for in my life. Queer people don’t often have the luxury of biological family who love and cherish them fully, without trying to change them or quote Bible verses at them. Neurodivergent people often also face some form of family rejection through attempts to “fix” them or other types of ableist treatment. But my grandparents were always a place I could go to escape all the judgement in my home and in the world; a place I could always softly land. They were the role models I needed that I couldn’t find elsewhere. My Grandmère taught me that religious beliefs don’t have to (and shouldn’t) include bigotry. My Grandpère showed me a model of healthy, gentle masculinity that so few boys and men have the opportunity to see - even if I wouldn’t know I was a man until years after he was gone.

Grandmère was born in 1931 in a small, Québecois diaspora village in rural Rhode Island called Manville, not far from a larger town, Woonsocket, also dominated by Québecois immigrants. When I was 18, on one of my summer visits, she drove me up and down the Rhode Island countryside - which didn’t take long, Rhode Island is maybe an hour and a half drive from north border to the southern ocean - and this was one of our stops. What I remember of Manville was tiny, a few streets snaking through the lush green woods, with older two story houses scattered there.

We stopped at a roadside diner in Woonsocket for lunch and I was surprised to see, in probably one of very few places in the United States, that the menus and signs were in both French and English. Grandmère’s family spoke primarily French at home, and it was her native language - she didn’t learn much, if any, English until she was 7 years old and started elementary school, which was taught in English. When I took French in high school, to be closer to my heritage, she and I would write letters partially in French to each other.

My Grandpère was born in (I believe) Massachusetts in 1927, but moved to RI sometime in his youth - at least before his early 20s when he met Grandmère. He was also part of the Québecois immigrant community, though both were a few generations in.

They met at a dance. Grandpère, having turned 18 just a few weeks after Victory in Europe Day - was perhaps too young to be drafted into WW2. He instead joined the merchant marines, and deployed to Japan after the war there ended to help deliver humanitarian supplies, and help rebuild homes and buildings, which would lead to a lifelong career in carpentry.

He turned carpentry into an art form, learning advanced marquetry and various styles of furniture design, including the Victorian era furniture that my mother loved. He constantly churned out furniture pieces from his basement workshop, gifting them to his 6 children and 5 grandchildren - half of the furniture in my home are his original pieces.

Grandmère was an incredible cook, as well as sewer and quilter. She made her grandchildren stuffed animals and blankets, she made quilts for my mother. And her spaghetti sauce - a recipe she reportedly was gifted by an Italian friend - was the signature family meal, one my father often made for Christmas dinner.

My Grandpère was also a certified master gardener. The yards around their home in Cranston were full of flowers and bushes from all over the world, including a stately Japanese maple in the front yard. He and my mother traded seeds and bulbs through the mail between RI and Minnesota. He even had a greenhouse where he would grow cacti and succulents.

He, along with others, helped re-design the gardens at the Rhode Island veterans cemetery - where he would bury his son, my father, just a few years later.

Despite the distance, I was sent to Rhode Island to visit them every other summer as a kid. I used to think it was hard to grow up so far from grandparents and extended family, but now I realize I spent so much quality time with them that I have enough memories to write a whole book. I watched Jeopardy on the couch every day at 4:00 with Grandpère. Muppet Christmas Carol is my favorite Christmas movie because they had it on VHS, and I didn’t care that it was June, I watched it every summer I was there.

My grandparents took interest in every little thing I was interested in and took care to plan interesting outings every time I came to visit. I was obsessed with American and French revolutionary history in high school, which I gushed about in my letters to them, and New England being a hotspot of that history, my grandparents took me up to Boston and we walked along the “Freedom Trail” that led through all the landmarks of revolutionary Boston, and to Bunker Hill.

My Grandpère, himself an amateur photographer descended from professional photographers who owned a studio back when photography was relatively new, always nurtured my own interest in it and gave me tips. On the trip I took there just after graduating high school, not long after my photography hobby began in earnest, he noticed a particular photo I took of the gates of Brown University and said “you have the eye.”

I think it was always obvious to them that I was different. While they never got the chance to know me as their grandson, I did, at one point, come out to them as some flavor of queer - even if that queerness would take different shapes as I got older. Them being devout Catholics (albeit New England Catholics), I was a little nervous how they would react, though being in a queer-appearing relationship at the time, I knew they were going to find out somehow.

Grandmère was the spokeswoman for their response. She smiled the warm smile that was permanently on her face. “God made you who you are,” she said, “and God doesn’t make mistakes.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised, because judgement wasn’t in her vocabulary. I remember writing her letters in high school, being open about my struggles to get along with my parents, their separation, my failing grades - and the thread that ran through it all of just feeling so misunderstood. She just listened, never once telling me what to do, or that I should listen to my parents or do as I’m told, or that I need to pull my grades up. She was more interested in just validating what I felt. She saw me as a person, with struggles and confusion and pain, not a problem child to be fixed. Even over the distance, the pen and paper, she was a place I could feel safe, a place where I didn’t have to apologize for my existence in a world where I was under daily pressure to justify it.

Grandmère developed dementia in her later years, not long before I began transition. I never got the chance to reintroduce myself, mostly because I didn’t know if she would even understand who I was.

Coming out late in life means that some people will simply not be around to witness your truth. Both of my parents were dead for 5+ years before I officially became their son. A part of me will always mourn that.

But I thought about the nonchalance and unconditional acceptance that my Grandmère met my queerness, my neurodivergence, my less-than-ideal academic performance with. Had she known, she probably would have shrugged her shoulders and said “of course you’re my grandson.” Grandmère always had a special, intuitive way of knowing me, seeing me, perhaps even when I didn’t know myself. What she always saw was my good heart, my altruism, my resilience. After my father died, I think she latched onto me a little more, because I was all that was left of him.

As I look back at old photos to draw up memories of her, of them both, I naturally run into what most trans people dread - pre-transition photos of myself. In earlier years, these were painful reminders, of the childhood and young adulthood I didn’t get to have, of decades spent living as someone I was not. During the pandemic I purged a lot of childhood photos where I was presented as more feminine than I really was even in context.

But something changed after Grandmère passed. In many of these photos, I no longer see someone else, someone I don’t recognize. I don’t even necessarily see a girl. In some photos, I even see a kid who is unmistakably a boy, clearly performing an exaggerated idea of how he thought a girl was supposed to act or look - similar to how young gay boys exhibit effeminacy before they even realize it’s not what’s expected of them.

I see the person my Grandmère saw - someone who was trying their best in the circumstances handed to them. Who asserted their individuality in the ways that were actually available to them - through abstract/surrealist macro photography, through being a history geek, through reading fantasy novels, playing Pokémon, and listening to metal. I was never a kid who fit in - I was always proud of doing everything I could to NOT fit in. I wanted to be weird. I wanted to be different.

Somewhere in the pressures of adulthood, we lose that identitarian rebellion, because survival in a capitalist system often depends on our conformity. High school me was the second-most authentic version of me - and I didn’t need to be or appear as a boy to be authentic. I’m learning as I walk further along this journey that I don’t need to erase the past, or write off the person in old photos as a stranger, as not being me.

My grandparents loved my weird. They loved my different. They were proud of all the unique personalities of their grandchildren - I even distinctly remember Grandmère saying something to that effect. They stood back and appreciated us as we figured ourselves out and showed the world who we were, often clumsily. I think grandparents feel less stake in the identities of their grandchildren than parents do their children. Parents are too worried that their children’s identities will reflect poorly on them to appreciate who their children naturally become - and often exert high levels of control over who they are allowed to become.

My grandparents’ eyes were ones in which I was always enough, just the way I was. I’m trying to learn how to behold myself in that same way.

I’ve been pulling back from social media, Substack, and the internet in general more consistently in 2026. Not as a social media break or cleanse or reset. But as a longer term way of life. I’ve realized it was taking more from me than I was getting out of it, and I finally got so uncomfortable with the thought that wealthy Epstein Files assholes were getting wealthier off of manipulating my dopamine receptors that I just didn’t want to enable them anymore. We may be addicted to social media, but they’re addicted to our addiction.

Here’s what I’ve noticed over the last six weeks or so.

I had thoughts that I thought were “good” - small, bite sized thoughts that would normally become notes, but they weren’t enough to turn into a whole article. I noticed that I found it very difficult to grapple with the idea that I was not going to share these brilliant (read: contrived, derivative, snarky, not exactly groundbreaking) ideas with the rest of the world. That these thoughts would just go… nowhere. Eventually, that became okay.

So much of social media is not adding any new insight, but rather feeding our own egos, letting off steam, and repackaging sound bites we have read from other people in order to process them ourselves.

I have a voice, whether I share it on the internet or not, but more often than not I’m adding low effort noise to the environment rather than substance.

I found myself missing the adrenaline and cortisol. One day I was looking at AP thinking “wow this is a slow news day”, and realized I considered that a bad thing. In the Trump Era, a slow news day is a rare and merciful thing. This made me realize that some people don’t actually like Trump for his politics, but for the drama, and I hate to say it, but leftists are addicted to the drama too. It fuels Democrats’ fundraising campaigns. It fuels DSA’s membership drives. It fuels subscriptions to lefty Substackers building their brands as “journalists”. I have to admit that it’s a little bit exciting - in a sick, perverse way - to wake up every day seeking information about how technically illegal my existence is compared to yesterday. Life is simply more dramatic and interesting when stakes are high.

In reality, little if anything about my material life has changed, and any changes that may happen will be incremental, tied up in court battles, and, in the case of things like bathroom laws, may even pass over me entirely (a bathroom law is not going to make me suddenly use women’s restrooms, when I’ve used men’s for years with absolutely no incident). A former therapist’s “worst case scenario” matrix comes into play here - the worst case scenario being, of course, only one of the many scenario probabilities available, and one of the least likely to happen, but those of us with anxiety disorders and especially OCD live inside the worst case scenario as though it were already reality.

Leftist social media echo chambers function, then, as sort of a collective anxiety disorder, bordering at times on psyop. Who benefits from the fear, the spin, the speculation? Is my anxiety worth giving people clicks and padding someone’s subscriber count? Is yours?

I noticed that when I did get on social media, my mood would instantly plummet. Like within seconds.

The clickbait. The catastrophic and dystopian framing.

But even when it wasn’t super destabilizing content, I’d find myself getting agitated or activated. Feeling like I needed to comment my absolutely useless take on everything. Feeling like I needed to say something, anything, because everyone else was saying things. Even getting sucked into useless “feminist” Lindy West thinkpiece drama like I was reading some Kardashian hit piece in a celebrity gossip magazine. What does this have to do with anything I actually care about? I didn’t even know who this person was until every female writer on Substack was dunking on her, or dunking on the people dunking on her.

Social media pressures us to have an opinion on everything. Even things we don’t care about. For overly analytical and ruminating brains like mine, it’s a quicksand trap of constant hamster wheel spinning engagement that ultimately accomplishes nothing but waste time. So many people on Substack are writing just to hear themselves talk. It’s no better than any other social media platform for its performativity and personality curation. Add into the mix that fully half of writers on here are posting AI slop and the same cynical heterosexual gender war bullshit repeatedly, and this place starts to feel eerily artificial.

And yet, the analog, peace-maxxing life is missing something, too. At first, focusing on your daily routine and keeping your world small feels liberating. After awhile, it feels like a cage. People have published their writing and engaged in public discourse for centuries, long before social media or computers or even electricity. Our minds are too expansive to be satisfied with just what’s immediately around us. Our thoughts are meant to transcend into the public, political, meta-cultural sphere. It just happens that the internet is the easiest way to do that. Maybe I should join an in person book club or film discussion group, or something. But also - occasional social media participation isn’t unhealthy. Writing a post or a note when you actually have something substantive and fully baked to say - and aren’t just reacting with more two cents noise to the stupid discourse du jour - is good, actually. An analog life cannot be absolute in the digital era, and it needn’t be.

A surprising thing that went the opposite way I expected: I thought cutting social media time would make me more productive or focused, whether at work or in my personal goals. That didn’t happen. I get as little done as I always did. The time scrolling has just been replaced with not much of anything impressive. A little reading. A little writing. Yes, a bit more uninterrupted focus at work and less tangential political thoughts splicing up my emails. Probably more time spent being present in direct conversation with my friends and partner. Some hours logged in Stardew Valley.

(Of course I married Elliot 🥺)

But no dramatic explosion in productivity or material reorganization of my life. More like, my time at rest is a bit more restful, intentional, and not sucked up by stupid online drama or doomerist speculation about headlines that are already pretty doom-y by themselves.

Probably the best effect of all is that without constant exposure to negative messaging about trans people (whether direct from the transphobes, or secondhand by trans people reacting to them), I had emotional space to actually like myself again. To remember that I’m so normal in real life and everyone treats me as such and I’m almost universally loved and respected by the people I actually interact with. (Almost. We all have that one coworker…)

I don’t have to hold or carry all the hatred this world has for me, and the truth is it’s loudest online. I don’t experience any of it in real life.

I read some Substack articles from trans people the other day on Trans Day of Visibility, and I realized I had absolutely no desire to contribute. There’s this social pressure for trans people to be actively visible on that day, to post some kind of reflection, to perform inspo porn for cis people like little monkeys. Visibility has a cost. Not just to our physical safety, but to our sanity. Visibility demands we make a narrative out of our lives. Visibility demands that we fixate on our transness when most of us just want to be basic ass men and women (or neither). I want a Trans Day of Being a Basic Boring Bitch who’s just drinking a latte and writing a grant at a stupid hipster coffee shop.

When I read these reflection pieces, I noticed that many sounded the same. So branded. So built for a consumptive gaze. It feels to me like the trans community repeats the same subcultural scripts over and over, nauseatingly trite platitudes about resilience and persistence and self-acceptance, without saying anything bold, anything unorthodox, anything brave - or just the “brave” that’s palatable to our liberal cis allies. Or, it’s the opposite end - Marxist-feminist “revolutionary” edgelord stuff that ends up being its own tired archetypal script. I want to read something so excruciatingly mundane about trans life that it feels radical.

Overall, life with limited social media consumption has been peaceful. I don’t see my engagement going back to what it was ever again. Not out of willpower but out of a genuine lack of drive to participate.

There’s a saying about weddings that you’re supposed to have “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”.

Well, I didn’t get married this weekend, despite the tux. But it’s interesting how we incorporate the sentimental symbolism of objects into special events in our lives.

Like one this past weekend.

In my gay choir, our new-ish director is doing something we haven’t done in a long time - incorporating traditional choral works into our usual performance repertoire of pop and Broadway music.

So many of us were raised on this kind of music in churches and high school/college choirs. True choral nerds love that Ave Maria and Dirait-On shit. I’m not a Broadway or pop music gay, but I joined the gay men’s choir for the community and the chance to practice singing in my new voice - and I have come to appreciate the campiness of it all, and even joined the dance team.

But the director wants to elevate our musical caliber and give these other gay choirs at the quadrennial GALA festival a run for their money. Choral directors are nothing if not competitive. But he did it in an inclusive and accessible way. Despite the music being technically challenging, you didn’t have to audition for this smaller subset of the choir. Anyone who wanted to participate was welcome to come and learn this style of music whether they had experience in it or not. In the end, we ended up with about a third of our total group.

We sang in the beautiful and historic Trinity Episcopal Cathedral downtown. Despite that today the Episcopal Church is unapologetically LGBTQ affirming (and there are even a lot of queer priests), it wasn’t always that way. Here we were, a choir of mostly gay men and a few trans women and nonbinary people, singing a concert half-comprised of Christian liturgical music in a Christian church over a century old. My friend Michael put it best:

“Last night the Phoenix Gay Men's Chorus outdid themselves. What they brought to Trinity Church was nothing short of sublime. Traditional choral music performed with a clarity so pure it seemed to fill every inch of that sacred space, rising all the way to the rafters.

And sitting there, looking up, I couldn’t help but think about the hands that built that church [in] 1915. Those workers, whoever they were, laid every stone, raised every beam, shaped every arch of this place. They built a house of worship, and I wonder if any of them could have imagined what it would hold a century later: a chorus of gay men, and trans brothers and sisters. A community, gathered in beauty, lifting their voices in a space built by hands that never knew their names.

What would those builders think, if they could hear it? Would they be moved by the music first, that soaring, undeniable clarity that bypasses the mind and goes straight to something older and deeper in us? Or would they see who was singing before they could feel what was being offered? Would the vessel get in the way of the gift?

Because that has always been the struggle, hasn’t it? Beauty doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t check who’s carrying it or who’s receiving it. It simply arrives, and the only question is whether we’re open enough to let it in. History is full of people who weren’t. Who held their prejudice so tightly they never let the music reach them. Who looked at the singer and decided, before the first note landed, that the gift wasn’t theirs to receive.

But here’s what I keep remembering, the community kept singing anyway. In spaces not built for them. In a world that spent generations telling them they didn’t belong in it. They kept showing up, kept lifting their voices, kept offering the gift, even to those who might have refused it.”

We claimed that sacred space as our own. Because there is something sacred about us, too.

The tux.

I’ve certainly worn suits before. Experimenting with men’s formal wear was indeed one of the things, over a decade ago, that first touched the man who lived deeply, shamefully, in my heart, and which gave him a rare taste of joy.

But never a tux. I didn’t go to prom because I didn’t want to wear a dress. I did, ironically, later wear dresses to the few family weddings I’ve been to. (And looked damn good in them, might I say.) This was uncharted territory.

Men are made in community. They need role models, more experienced men to show them the way. Trans men are perhaps especially in need of this. We have to catch up so much later in life to all the basic experiences of manhood that others learn young. We feel behind, a little confused, and often embarrassed, like awkward teenage boys who don’t have a clue what they’re doing, except we’re almost 40.

And there have been many men who have guided Shawn along his new path. An ex-boyfriend who, despite knowing he was losing his girlfriend, painstakingly shaved my head so it would look even, stood watch while I used a men’s public restroom for the first time, and took care of me after top surgery. Friends in the choir who integrated me socially into the gay community. A former situationship who gave me a confidence in my new body I thought I’d never have.

And Stephen.

He put himself to work on my tux. Fitting the studs into the button holes. Adjusting the cummerbund around my waist. I stood watching us in my bedroom dresser mirror, laughing at our rather farcical height difference, but also breathless at how special this moment felt. There is an intimacy in letting someone help you walk a new step in that journey of becoming.

The old and borrowed. The cheap black bowtie I wore as a poor waiter in college, struggling to survive - now the finishing touch on a tux worth more than three days of that job’s wages. A sparkly earring from my late mother’s extensive jewelry collection, that I have taken to wearing as I become secure enough in my masculinity to wear such things.

And cuff links. Which I thought were over the top, but Stephen insisted I wear them, and he fastened them to my wrists.

They belonged to my father. After his suicide 17 years ago, I inherited a couple shoe boxes of the most random of his belongings. Marksmanship medals from his days in the Marine Corps. A bag of DnD dice and koosh balls. His wedding ring, which I’ve since lost. A couple of tie tacks, and these cuff links. Which are a bit bedazzled and well, gay, for my Dad, but, maybe rhinestones were normal for straight men back in the 90s when he would have last worn them.

I don’t know why I kept them, in a drawer, all these years, but as fate would have it, I would eventually end up having an occasion to wear them. A very strange fate for an atheist Republican’s trans, gay son to sing with a gay choir in a church.

Maybe Dad would have liked the show, actually. He was a big fan of classical music.

In long distance relationships, every moment spent in each other’s presence is special. Nothing feels mundane, not even the quiet moments on the couch, the errands to the pharmacy or the pet store or the tuxedo rental shop, the washing dishes after dinner. You wring the magic out of everything.

But this felt especially important. Having someone you love travel a great distance to witness the thing you put so much of your time and energy into, that you spend so many of your text messages talking about, that you chuckle at when he nags you to make sure you eat dinner before you go to rehearsal because it’s just so goddamn cute when he does that. It all makes you feel like what you are doing really means something, and you’re not just going through the motions of singing notes and words.

All the twists and turns our two lives had taken led, in some equally strange yet wonderful fate, to us both being here sharing this moment, me on stage, him in the audience. And I couldn’t help but feel that we both had made some right decisions in life, if they’d led to this.

And that’s the funny thing about life, and especially queer life. Being gay and/or trans is not a choice. Coming out is. Taking the hormones, telling our families, moving in the direction of our happiness is. Joining a gay choir is. Sending (or responding to) a message to a guy online is. Traveling 150 miles on a why-not, you-only-live-once whim to meet that guy, is. And continuing to wake up every day and send that message, to build that connection with each other even when the distance wears on you, is a choice.

As I introduced Stephen to my friends, I looked at the other couples in the room. Most of them don’t know what this is like. Most of them would go home after the concert to their shared home and their shared bed, and never have to think about spending a moment apart. As we left, we got that familiar pit in our stomachs. We knew we had less than 24 hours before he would have to get on the bus and go home. My bed and my home still functioned like little more than a hotel room, his suitcase on the floor, our relationship like a vacation from real life.

But these things are really built in the in-betweens. Every moment is special - not just those spent together in person. In some ways it’s quintessentially gay to have a long distance lover to pine for, like in the olden days when people would send each other love letters across the sea. As romantic as that is, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

But of all the choices I make, he is the easiest one.

“If music be the food of love,

sing on.

Sing on til I am filled with joy.

For then my listening soul you move to pleasures that can never cloy.

Your eyes, your mien,

your tongue declare that you are music everywhere.

Pleasures invade both eye and ear

So fierce the transports are, they wound.

And all my senses, feasted are.

Though yet, the treat is only sound,

I must perish by your charms

unless you save me in your arms. “

• “If Music Be The Food Of Love,” Henry Heveningham, David Dickau

• (A song we performed.)

I was at my usual coffee shop this morning, situated in the Melrose District, which is more or less Phoenix’s gay district.

It was unusually packed today. Behind me was a long table full of people. Unavoidable eavesdropping informed me that it was an Indivisible chapter meeting.

What was surprising about this (and it shouldn’t be), is that despite being a very small sample size, the demographics of the group ran counter to tbe narratives about “the resistance” I often see online. Out of this group of about 15 people, over half of them were white, ostensibly cis men. Of those men, only one was under the age of 50, and he was probably late 30s.

One was loudly complaining that Jasmine Crockett lost to James Talarico because Texas voters can’t handle voting for an outspoken Black woman, and that the criticism of her outspokenness is rooted in racism and sexism. Y’all, this man was easily over 65 and at first glance you’d assume he was the average Fox News-guzzling Grandpa. Nothing outwardly “liberal” looking about him.

After years of criticizing white (especially male) Boomers… I hate to say it but they are becoming woke AF and are an active part of the resistance. Of course, they are retired and have time and energy to spend organizing. But something is different this time around. Trump has gone off the rails enough that the white Grandpas have woken the fuck up.

About a year ago, I attempted to go to a Bernie Sanders & AOC rally at ASU. There were the usual under-35s and women in the crowd that you expect at such a rally, but I saw something else I’ve NEVER seen before, including in my time volunteering locally on Bernie’s campaign: old white (probably cishet) men. Thousands more people showed up than the capacity of the stadium (!) the event was held in, the line wrapped a full four times around the building, and most of us ended up watching it live on our phones on the sidewalk.

My biggest takeaway was this: I lost count of how many white men wearing “Vietnam veteran” hats I saw. These men are all 70+ years old, just by the math. At least 10-15. That’s not much in a line of maybe 7,000 people - and there were many more white male Boomers in that line - but that was the most visible marker of political change and hope I’ve seen since 2008 when America extremely improbably elected a Black man to be President.

I was humbled to see it. Of course, a lot of men who served in that war came out of it with strong anti-war politics. These weren’t that archetype. They weren’t the token aged veterans in your local DSA chapter with anarchist and marijuana leaf buttons on their backpacks. They were Fox-News-lookin’-ass Grandpas.

I’m not writing this post to rehabilitate the white male image. What I am reporting is that, while there are certainly white cishet male Boomers who were always liberal their whole lives (especially if born and raised in ultra blue cities/states and/or mainline churches) - there’s undoubtedly some who at one point weren’t. My point is: they’re reachable.

And I’ve been saying for years - they have to be. Clearly the Democratic coalition of women, queer people, and BIPOC voters isn’t enough to overcome the massive exodus of white male voters from the party, and the party was stupid af for putting all their eggs in those baskets. What these guys at the coffee shop proved today is that the traditional notion that social justice and equity politics are unappealing to white cishet male voters is NOT true, and we reduce them overall as a group to racist and misogynistic idiots who will always vote to uphold white supremacist patriarchy because it benefits them and they’re incapable of a single intellectual thought or empathetic feeling. When we do this, we reinforce to them that we have already written them off with the prejudice of low expectations. We don’t allow them any entry points: whether that’s an anti-war stance, a working class frustration about the unaffordability of their own bills, or just a basic outrage about wealthy elites and Trump being a vile asshole - we don’t allow them among us if they’re not perfectly aligned on trans women playing sports. Bernie & AOC’s rally was titled “Fighting Oligarchy”, and Bernie’s longtime political strategy of keeping most of the focus on class consciousness and de-emphasizing - but NOT abandoning - narrow identity politics is part of why he gained such crossover appeal. Nobody in the Bernie movement was forced to think too long or too hard about their own skin color or gender or sexual orientation; if Bernie’s central premise - that billionaires are screwing us all over but it doesn’t have to be that way if we work together to oppose them - resonated with you, you belonged. Period.

NOT to say we compromise our beliefs, or coddle ignorance - never - but we need to recognize when there’s an entry point. When there’s a glimmer of conscience, of independent thought, of “wait a minute” among white men. I cannot tell you how many cis people I have encountered who have admitted to just being uneducated or misinformed about trans people; who have asked me good faith questions that I was more than happy to answer; that maybe are still hesitant on trans sports inclusion or transition care for minors but still emphatically acknowledged that Republicans are focusing way too much on antagonizing us and believe that we’re people who deserve rights and deserve to be left alone to live our lives. That’s what we need. Entry points. Not perfection. We claim we want people to listen to us tell our stories and understand our experiences but then shut people down when they ask, upset that they didn’t already read 3 books on queer theory to educate themselves and that having good faith conversations with them is “emotional labor” (god, can we please leave that stale narcissistic BS in 2020 where it belongs?).

Idk I just think our country is on the fucking brink, if not already tumbled over the ledge, and we cannot afford to split hairs on this stuff or needlessly alienate people who are reachable by pushing them away because they haven’t already “done the work”. People learn in community - not from internet resource guides. People learn from exchanging experiences with each other, from hearing and being heard. Clearly hardcore MAGA are a lost cause. We simply have to defeat their ideology by organizing the majority who aren’t them. What we can’t afford to do is permanently lose the independent white men who flip between parties every election because they don’t feel heard by either side and don’t know where they belong - and are actively told by our side that they’re bad people who don’t and will never belong with us. When did we lose our capacity for communication?

Harvey Milk had it so prophetically right, and he’s a pinnacle of “queer theory” for this quote alone, that I wish more modern leftists would give credit to. We have to come out, because if they know they know one of us, they’re with us. Pew Research surveys have actually backed this up as fact - cis people who report personally knowing a trans person in real life are more likely to believe that we are who we say we are (ie not our assigned sex), place more importance on getting people’s pronouns correct, and believe that we should have equal rights, and that includes some Republicans. Milk is essentially also implying there that we can’t just come out like “surprise! I’m queer! Lol” - we have to tell our stories. We have to communicate, with people who have not had an opportunity to understand us. And while there is great trauma inherent to the experience of being a marginalized person and we get tired of explaining ourselves and feel we shouldn’t have to - everyday people don’t learn from textbooks and statistics and logical arguments. They learn from hearing that their trans coworker is having an extremely normal life experience like adopting a new puppy and omgggg the pictures are cute; that their fully-passing neighbor who they could swear was cis this entire time is actually trans and is struggling with getting their ID documents updated because of shitty new state or federal policies; that their college buddy of 20 years has struggled with gender dysphoria their entire lives and needs someone to come out to, and they were the person they trust to confide in.

I’m using transness as a proxy for this thesis because it’s perhaps the biggest stumbling block for a lot of Regular Folk that keeps so many of them out of our political camp - when it doesn’t need to. We just can’t speak in UC Berkley Gender Studies 302 language to them. We have to talk about the everyday experiences, joys, and fears we have in common with everyone else. We don’t think we are relatable to cis people because we are understandably so laser focused on what makes us different because of the trauma of our oppression - but we are relatable, because we’re normal as fuck and that’s the entire point.

Now more than ever we have to get over viewing every person who has white/male privilege as being automatically off limits for potential allyship, for stereotyping them as an unsalvageable enemy whose caveman brain can’t possibly comprehend people different than them. It’s extremely ineffective, condescending, and self-sabotaging politics, and it’s also a bitter poison that will destroy our souls from the inside. If I’d encountered “complaining about why Jasmine Crockett lost” guy in some other context, I’d have fully assumed he was the average cishet Boomer white man that I’d need to be cautious around - but in that environment, I knew he was a person I could be comfortable around, even though I didn’t actually interact with him. Human solidarity is the only way through this, not further entrenching ourselves into identity politics boxes. And seeing the humanity in each other is a mutual social contract that demands participation from both sides.

Paris is called the City of Love,

(and indeed I have loved there)

but isn’t that city wherever we find love?

In all those little momentary snapshots

in a dusty desert town

by a bubbling canyon creek

on a quaint little historic street

with a chocolate éclair and a queer bookstore

all the cuisines of the world in this red, white, and blue enclave

in a place filled with a quiet vibrancy,

even if many who come here are living too fast to notice it.

In our laughter in your living room

in bowls of ice cream in the kitchen

in folding your laundry when it’s done

in writing a gay romance novel at your desk,

and realizing we’ve already written one ourselves in blue text bubbles across the miles between us in over a year’s time

god, how has it already been that long?

In putting my lips on your neck,

feeling your beard brush against mine,

snoozing your alarm at least twice to let you have a few more morning dreams next to me.

Even on the bus to my own city

(because we have loved there, too,

and soon will again)

the songs on my playlist

aren’t so sad this time.

Maybe our city is always in the stars that you take me out to look at,

ones we can see no matter where we are.

On Monday, February 24th, 2025 at 8:09 AM Mountain Standard Time, I received an email that became the single most devastating moment of my professional career:

“Dear Partners, 

We regret to inform you that the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service has sent the [redacted] Foundation a Termination Notice for the project titled, “National Pass-through Partnership for Strategic Urban Forestry Investment in Disadvantaged Communities – Inflation Reduction Act”. The termination was effective immediately. 

As you were a future subrecipient under this program, we are notifying you that we are no longer able to offer you a Subaward under this grant.”

This was no small grant. It was $600,000 for an organization - mine - whose annual budget was $1.2 million.

It was just another callous casualty of the administration’s “war on woke” environmentalism.

(Because planting trees is so woke, you guys.)

I have worked at this organization for three years. We were riding high for a couple years with the deluge of Inflation Reduction Act funding raining down from the Biden admin for environmental and sustainability work. We quickly scored three six figure multi-year grants for our work out of this pot.

This represented the first time in my career as a professional grant writer that I ever felt truly successful. It helps immensely that I work for an organization with a really sellable mission, but my grantseeking batting average finally being decent injected a lot of confidence in my otherwise less-than-impressive career. Being successful in employment is already hard enough with ADHD; combine that with a profession where low margins are the norm and yet where payroll depends on it, and management can quickly get on your case about your metrics and why there are crickets in the bank account. It can be at times an extremely lonely and demoralizing profession - nonprofit fundraisers have an average tenure length of a year and a half. Burnout is high, mental health is low.

That was not the case here. The culture was healthy, everyone was supportive. I was just beginning to actually enjoy getting up and going to work every day…

And then 2025 hit.

And the entire nonprofit world panicked when grant termination notices started rolling in. Organizations started worrying about whether they’d have to close their doors. Corporate funders that had been reliable partners for years or even decades suddenly turned the faucets off when “DEI” became a target on our backs. Grant professionals discussion forum threads and LinkedIn posts were dedicated to putting together lists of banned words that we should not use in applications.

We were still getting over the PTSD from the COVID years when programming came to a screeching halt, and funding either dried up or was redirected to medical and human services organizations - leaving arts and civics and museum and environmental nonprofits to consider which of their employees they should dump overboard to keep the ship afloat.

The tension was high at my organization. We had two other federal grants that we were now worried about losing. I had to quickly figure out how I was going to keep myself and all 9 of my coworkers employed, when I thought I’d already done most of the work to make that happen. I predicted we probably had until about August before the layoff guillotine started falling.

In a weird moment of calm, I replied to the email with my appreciation for the longstanding partnership with this particular pass-through funder, and closed with this line:

“As our CEO said to our staff recently, "our commitment to our mission and our community remains unchanged."”

He had written that in our all staff Slack channel the morning after The Election.

We did not close our doors in August, or at all. But as always happens when funding is tight in a nonprofit, the longer this stress dragged on, the more the accusatory fingers were pointed at the grant writer as program staff saw their budget lines gradually zero out. It was brutal to not only suffer the injury of lost funding, but to endure the insult of accusations that I wasn’t hustling hard enough to make up for it. All the while, the administration is hunting my community for sport and I’m watching Charlie Kirk get shot on TV while blaming trans people for gun violence and I’m looking up Canada’s immigration policies while on the clock because that seemed more relevant to my survival than my actual employment.

I chalk it up to stress. We were all feeling the pressure and the trauma of this time and taking it out on each other instead of having grace and understanding. But it still damaged my already fragile confidence.

It was a year in which I can sum up my feelings in one word:

Unbelonging.

Tomorrow, I am heading into our annual board retreat and giving my take on the state of the organization.

In fiscal year 2025, I raised $985,000 and we had an operating deficit of $67,000.

Normally I would be ashamed to report a deficit - although we didn’t have one in 2023 or 24. Normally I’d be trying to put a positive spin on it, soften the news, be defensive, sweat all night about what answers I’m going to give to the questions the board might ask me.

But I’m not only calm. I’m proud.

We didn’t close our doors. No one was laid off. We were cut deep but I successfully bandaged the wound and stopped the bleeding. And I did it all without censoring the equity language out of my grants, without watering down our mission or pretending we weren’t serving people of color and poor people and Title I schools.

$985,000 are the numbers that represent my resilience. They represent the depression that made me not want to get out of bed but I did and went to my desk and logged in anyway. They represent my survival of the many targets that were put on me. They represent 1,100 trees and pollinator shrubs planted in low income redline neighborhoods and urban wildlife habitats. They represent that this little trans gay man has a place in this society that can’t be denied. I’m not some soulless capitalist that puts a price tag on my human worth - but if I were to, it’s pretty damn cool that it’s nearly a million dollars.

I don’t normally write about my professional life here for the obvious reasons, but to pretend that it isn’t part of my resistance to what is going on would be disingenuous. It’s easy to lose sight of that when you’re in the quagmire of emails and deadlines and spreadsheets. And it seems odd to think of planting trees and teaching kids about sustainable agriculture and clean energy careers as resistance. But I didn’t choose nonprofit grant writing because I wanted the early aging effects of budget stress or having no retirement savings. I chose it because it rules to be doing something small but tangible in the community. I knew that was my life’s calling.

And tomorrow I know I can be proud of what I have done.

“The world seems strangely benevolent today, in spite of everything going on. It’s 70 degrees and sunny.”

Cue the obvious “it’s always sunny in Arizona” joke, but… really. The most awful things can be going on in the world - sometimes awful things even happen here - but the sun will always shine cheerfully here in a disturbing false sense of security.

But is it false?

John Pavlovitz wrote a post about hope. In it was a line that crystallized some things for me:

“Hope, as best as I can tell, is a steadfast, stubborn refusal to believe that the present is permanent, that life is a perpetual spiral downward, that all is irretrievably lost, that something surprising or beautiful can’t still happen on the horizon of history.”

The other day I went hiking in the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, a popular urban hiking spot and little Saguro-dotted oasis of wild desert nestled right in the center of the city. I love the network of trails that allow you to create your own path, maybe even a different path each time, as long as you keep your cardinal directions straight - seems like a broader metaphor for life.

I came to a particular peak about half as tall as the towering nearby Piestewa Peak, which provided a spectacular view of nearly the entire western half of this sprawling metropolis. It was sunny. The hum of the city was low white noise underneath the quiet.

It was oddly peaceful. Knowing that the largest city in my home state, 1,200 miles away, is being torn apart by ICE. I know it’s only a matter of time before they come here in such numbers. They’re already operating here more covertly, without the media fanfare. But in this moment, from my high up perch, the city seemed peaceful, idyllic even.

I sat there and I set down the grief I’ve held for the past year, and thought about all the good things that have crossed my path. Life is full of cruelty, but it is also full of benevolence. It is full of violence and kindness at once. It is full of hatred and love. It is full of danger and safety.

We can never know which of these things will happen to us at any moment. We are touched by both the dark and the light throughout our lives, without much rhyme or reason. It is that uncertainty and that contradiction that distresses us perhaps even more than the darkness itself.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the most fundamental things we learn, is to live life one day at a time. That’s the only thing we can do. If we look too far into the future, it seems daunting. It can seem overwhelming to have to think about how we will get through the next month or the next three years or the next decade. We think we have control, but we don’t. All we can do is focus on today, then hopefully get up and do it again tomorrow. Breaking the task of living into smaller, manageable steps.

For today, I am safe. I am fed. I am employed. I am loved. I am on top of a mountain overlooking my city, and it was my own two determined feet that got me there. There were so many times of uncertainty and danger and suffering in my past, and here I am despite them. This country has been through many violent and dark and shameful moments in our past, and somehow through it all we managed to slowly, incrementally, build progress over time, even if that progress at times seems fragile. If there is no hope of more progress, no future benevolence, why keep living? Why get up tomorrow? Why not give up? I’ve certainly been tempted to give up on life before, but I have not listened to that voice in a long time.

Without hope, we have nothing to live for.

It is strange to think, when I am up in the mountains, that my existence is one of our nation’s most vitriolic political debates. Up here, I’m as uncomplicated as the rocks and the trees and cactus and sunshine. I just am. And I think I have to hold onto that through these next years. The laws coming down can say whatever they want about me, but I know who I am.

And while there will be very real material effects on the lives of people like me, the administration’s real goal is to break us. To get us to go willingly into the closet, into detransition, even into suicide. They are hoping we will make it easy for them and do their dirty work for them. Living in fear is what they really want, and every day that we don’t is another day that we’ve won. I know it sounds so trite and empty to say that, but I really want to keep saying it because it’s actually starting to click for me. They can take so many things away from me but they cannot take away my pride, my love, my joy, my courage - and indeed those are the things that are going to save us. There is nothing a bully can’t stand more than seeing that his fear tactics are not working.

I knew I was taking a risk when I decided to transition in 2022. I knew I was voluntarily giving up safety and privilege, and I would never as long as I live get that safety or privilege back. It was a necessary trade to stop hiding the truth inside me where it was beginning to make me sick. I knew that safety and privilege were a tiny price to pay for having a life worth living, for being a real person instead of an actor playing a role I didn’t choose. Even if that life were more stressful, less certain, maybe even shorter.

The current political climate notwithstanding, the universe has been surprisingly benevolent in the nearly 4 years since I took this leap. I knew I would be happier as a man, but I never expected the depths or the vibrance of the happiness that awaited me. Being Shawn has allowed me to show up in this world fully, with a genuine smile and an exuberant energy that has brought so many good things to me - a better job, a solid group of friends, a wonderful partner for whom I don’t have to hide any piece of myself out of shame or a fear of being unloveable. I’m able to give so much more of myself now that I don’t have a script of living a lie running in the back of my head at all times and losing the mental bandwidth that eats up.

I simply can’t go through the next three (or more) years being tossed around by every headline. This won’t last forever. The only certainty about life is that all things are temporary. I refuse to lose years of my life and peace to this orange blowhard. He’s not worth that. The more we show him we are anchored in peace and courage, the weaker he gets.

Stay anchored.

are we too good a people?

is that why they punish us?

is that why they send in their occupying forces

fill our air with smoke

fill our streets with blood

shove our knees onto the ground and

tear our neighbors away from us?

is that why the willows weep

why the loon cries

why our hearts are as frozen as the lake’s ice?

are we too quick to open our doors

for the people whose tired feet led them from the sharpest edges of the world

to the sky-blue refuge of our rivers’ shores?

is that why they would force us to lock our doors shut?

do they hate us

because we show them how easy it is to

Love

to welcome the stranger

to be the samaritans their god told them to be

and we remind them that they are not?

are they angry because we hear only the red-wing blackbirds singing from the reeds while their devils are talking?

are we too gentle

like the maple and oak leaves floating down on autumn’s wind?

are we too proud

like the daffodils that eagerly rise from under spring’s mud?

are we too happy

like the fireflies dancing on a summer night ?

are we too peaceful

like the full moon’s light on a fresh winter snow?

they hate us because our homeland is not a biology

a color

a language

but an offering

a hand to hold

a plate to share

a shoulder to lean on

a boat to carry you

a healing from the poetry of these waters

a heart that protects its blindness.

One of the least understood things about me, my whole life, has been my affinity for metal, alternative rock, and punk music.

People saw a sweet, charming girl dressed in bland, nondescript clothing, and later a small, effeminate, limp-wristed gay man with a glitter unicorn personality, and feel shocked when they hear the death growl vocals and loud, distorted guitars coming from my car’s stereo or the occasional Youtube video posted to my social media accounts. I have no tattoos, two basic piercings in one ear, I don’t dress goth or punk or paint my nails black. The most I display any kind of indicator is the occasional band shirt.

I have multiple reasons why I have been attracted to heavy genres since a young age, despite that I defy every stereotype there is about the “types” of people in their associated scenes (in reality, we’re usually just big nerds). The primary being, usually in its more progressive sub-genres, its complex compositional styles that often rival classical music that are candy to my former-music-theory-major ears. Another being the loud power of the sound, which has always uplifted and emboldened my otherwise anxious and fearful natural disposition. Most people view this music as either angry or depressing, and to that I say, are you never angry or depressed? I turn to this music at precisely those times because it tells me I’m not alone in my rage, my grief, and (thankfully rare) suicidal ideation. I find it cathartic, relieving, healing. There are some songs that have kept me on this earth when I didn’t want to be. The openness of male metal/rock singers about their depression in their lyrics is exactly the kind of emotional vulnerability people say they want to see in men - but then write this music off as being “depressing”.

The loudness and intensity of this music also in some way allowed me to access something that felt like masculinity, in the time of my youth when I was forbidden to express such things.  The vast majority of metal musicians and fans are men, and I felt a little subversive thrill in my enjoyment of a genre that girls/women aren’t supposed to like. Metal and punk sound the way testosterone feels in my blood. And common lyrical themes about non-conformity, rejection, and social alienation made me feel less alone as an isolated and confused queer youth. (Linkin Park certainly got heavy rotation in my portable CD player in high school).

And finally - metal and punk and the shades between have always spoken to my political consciousness. Most of the rage I’ve experienced in my lifetime has been of a political nature. 14 years old when the Patriot Act passed, 15 when America invaded Iraq, 17 when half the country outlawed gay marriage in their state constitutions - leftism of some degree has been my default politics since middle school. And the music I’m drawn to often illustrates these feelings in no uncertain terms.

These genres, then, highlight a particular irony in our current zeitgeist of white, heterosexual, “Christian” MAGA men being held up as the societal ideal of men - when my masculinity as a trans man has always been informed by this subversive music - especially when who should have been my primary role model, my father, was an ex-military neocon cheering on the Iraq War and voting for Bush Jr. Punk and metal, genres long dominated by white, heterosexual men and yet a contradiction of what white heterosexual men are “supposed” to be, present an opposite view of what it means to be a man.

MAGA’s “Masculinity” Shorthand - Aggression & Whiteness

MAGA is supposedly built upon “ideals” of what masculinity should be - what the rest of us would label toxic. Dominance, power, aggression, an oddly proud adherence to traditional heterosexual norms, guns and big trucks, idyllic fantasies about rural country life, and a warped version of “Christianity” that reinforces their narrow worldview in blatant contradiction to, y’know, everything Jesus actually said in the literal book, because they can’t read.

Contrast this with punk/metal masculinity: still aggressive, dominant, and confrontational - but for opposite purposes. For nonconformity; challenging authority (especially Republican politicians, sometimes directly referenced by name); calling out racism, homophobia, war, violence against women, police brutality, and Christian Nationalist hypocrisy, even toxic masculinity itself. Dead Kennedys are masterful at their use of satire, mockery, and sarcastic humor to expose and undercut the obvious farce of white conservative male masculinity.

“We run down bikes and hitch hikers

And we know we'll get off scot-free

We're the vigilante heroes of your tough-guy flicks

Bashing punks & bums and fags

With our baseball bats

No deer to blow away in the woods today

So we go to Oroville and shoot a black kid down

Or waste demonstrators in Greensboro instead

We are the Goons of Hazzard

Glorified on your TV

We leave you in a pool of blood

'Cause we know we'll get off scot-free”

• “Goons of Hazzard”, Dead Kennedys, 1985

“They Like To Push The Weak Around”

Police brutality is a special thematic focus in punk, consistent to the point you might even consider it a defining trait of the genre. Lyrical themes often center around police abusing protesters, Black people, and youth. Cops are repeatedly referred to as cowards, intentionally violent, sexually abusive, corrupt, racist, and rewarded with impunity for their crimes.

The ICE goons we’re seeing on the streets no doubt see themselves as the pinnacle of tough guy masculinity, enforcers of a social order that keeps them on top. That their primary rationale seems to be that they act violently only in self-defense against unarmed women and youth and people fleeing from them - basically admitting their cowardice - is laughable.

System of a Down has always been one of my favorite bands, who take these traditional punk lyrical themes against police violence and war, and transmute them into a varied musical style that defies categorization, combining elements of 2000s nu metal as well as influences from traditional Armenian music and their experiences as members of the diaspora that fled the Armenian genocide.

“Circumventing circuses, lamenting in protest

To visible police, presence-sponsored fear

Battalions of riot police with rubber bullet kisses

Baton courtesy, service with a smile

Beyond the Staples Center you can see America

With its tired poor avenging disgrace

Peaceful, loving youth against the brutality

Of plastic existence

[ … ]

A deer dance,

Invitation to peace.

War staring you in the face,

dressed in black,

with a helmet,

fierce,

trained and appropriate for the malcontents,

for the disproportioned malcontents

[ … ]

Pushing little children with their fully-automatics

They like to push the weak around.”

• “Deer Dance”, System of a Down, 2001 (probably my favorite song of theirs)

“Now You’ve Got Something To Die For”

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” - Stephen Miller, January 5, 2026

Not even two days into the new year, the US military invaded Venezuela, abducting President Maduro and his wife, after numerous rogue killings of Venezuelan ships they claimed were involved in drug trafficking. The next day, Trump threatened to take over Greenland, “either the easy way, or the hard way,” using military force if “necessary”. Pete Kegseth (not a typo) has reverted his department to its original name, The Department of War, and displays a weird kink for what he calls “warrior ethos” - code for white male aggression and violence, and enforcing strongman, tough guy “diplomacy” to the world with military intimidation. All of this aligns with MAGA’s obsession with guns, violence, the military, and domination. And all of contains the same fear, insecurity, and cowardice that characterizes the violent culture of police forces.

Anti-war stances are an obvious and prevalent theme in punk and metal music - with many early examples of these genres born in protest of the Vietnam War. Rhetorical devices eschew earlier hippie-folk music styles about love, peace, and harmony - favoring more aggressive and direct commentary calling out hypocrisy, imperialism, and ulterior motives of greed, profit, and oil; and the use of grim imagery such as politicians’ “bloodlust”, describing the human toll in terms of childrens’ bodies on the ground, and cities being bombed and on fire.

Several American metal and punk bands responded to the Iraq War with music. Lamb of God is one such band that dedicated nearly a whole album to Iraq War commentary in 2004’s Ashes of the Wake, which was certified Gold and remains their best-selling album. Randy Blythe uses this aggressive lyrical approch that emphasizes graphic imagery to demonstrate the brutal impacts of war:

“Bombs to set the people free

Blood to feed the dollar tree

Flags for coffins on the screen

Oil for the machine

Army of liberation

Gunpoint indoctrination

The fires of sedition

Fulfill the prophecy

Now you've got something to die for

Send the children to the fire

Sons and daughters stack the pyre

Stoke the flame of the empire

Live to lie another day

Face of hypocrisy

Raping democracy

Apocalyptic

We count the days

We'll never get out of this hole

Until we've dug our own grave

And drug the rest down with us

The burning home of the brave.”

• “Now You’ve Got Something To Die For”, Lamb of God, 2004.

Jinjer is a female-fronted band and therefore not entirely contributing to my thesis of masculinity - although Tatiana Shmayluk certainly defies feminine gender norms with her harsh death growl vocals that are better than many men in the genre - but I’d be remiss in not mentioning them on this topic. They also demonstrate this hard-hitting rhetorical style combined with music alternately brutal and melodic, in one of the most powerful anti-war songs I’ve ever heard. A Ukrainian band, they repeatedly write about Russian aggression and war waged on their country, even before the 2022 war began.

“My darling, did we wake up like this?

Isolated bodies in a boudoir of helplessness.

A bullet is an early bird, a midnight owl.

Morning greetings of a rooster are replaced

With fire in a hole.

My dear, do we have to go to sleep like that?

With a soothing cocktail and the hundredth cigarette.

[ … ]

Our beds are cold,

As cold as basement floor.

This house is not our shelter anymore.

Home is not a building,

Home is liberty.

A place where memories live

In prosperity and peace.

I came back home, so I want my home back.”

• “Home Back”, Jinjer, 2019.

“I’m Born Free, But Still They Hate”

Heterosexuality expressed with (often violent) misogyny and homophobia isn’t limited to white MAGA. It’s a feature of toxic masculinity in general, and several other genres of music - country, rap/hip-hop, etc - center around lyrical themes that are hyper fixated on the genital and pronoun signifiers of proving one’s manhood through attraction to, and domination of, cisgender women.

Straight men expose their insecurity about their own attractions not only through try-hard, overcompensating speech about their sexual prowess with women, but through denigrating gay men to signal to others that they’re not one of them.

Obviously this insecurity is exposed every time a Republican politician or megachurch pastor is caught having a Grindr account or cruising for other men in an airport bathroom, but MAGA’s obsession with queer lives is perhaps especially most tragic when they target LGBTQ kids, both through legislation and through (directly or indirectly) teaching their own children to bully their LGBTQ peers.

LGBTQ solidarity features less often in metal and punk music than one might expect or hope, and unfortunately these genres have historically not been friendly to LGBTQ people. But it’s there. Dead Kennedys specifically call out “racist, queer-bashing bands” - and the record labels who sign them - in “Chickenshit Conformist” (1986).

One band who has been a leader on this is Rise Against. In partnership with the It Gets Better Project, they dedicated a song to gay youth who had died by suicide, and yet wrote it from a more personal perspective of attempting to put themselves in the shoes of those youth:

“Bang, bang from the closet walls

The schoolhouse halls

The shotgun's loaded

Push me and I'll push back

I'm done asking, I demand

From a nation under God

I feel its love like a cattle prod

I'm born free, but still they hate

I'm born me, no I can't change

[ … ]

And too much blood has flown from the wrists

Of the children shamed for those they chose to kiss

Who will rise to stop the blood?

We're calling for,

insisting on,

a different beat, yeah

A brand new song.”

• “Make It Stop (September’s Children)” - Rise Against, 2011

In this song, Tim McIlrath expertly blends words about things we’re told are “soft”: compassion, kindness, empathy, justice, hope - with his usual punk vocalist style of urgency and indignation over crunchy guitars and uptempo drums. This mix is powerful, shattering the idea that these concepts are somehow “feminine”, “weak” - all the things that MAGA wants us to believe about basic kindness and equality - as well as the idea that punk always has to sound super hard or aggressive.

“Sallow In Their Sickening”

This segues into the next area of MAGA masculinity, and how so many of these men defend their positions - by hiding behind the Bible. It’s cognitive dissonance to hear these hardened macho warrior men like Kegseth talk about loving and worshipping Jesus - indeed it’s often the only time they use the word “love” at all. I believe that Christianity for some of these men is their only socially acceptable outlet for publicly expressing any kind of “soft” or “submissive” emotion. But it’s also just another way to compete with other men, over who is more devoted to, ironically, a brown-skinned Jewish socialist who spoke truth to the power of the Roman Empire. Scripture quotes become status symbols the same as Rolex watches. “Prosperity gospel” preached by charlatans like Joel Osteen tells you it’s okay that you have more money than everyone else, because you’re God’s special chosen white people and he’s blessing you for it. It’s all a cult mentality - crosses and bibles are in-group signifiers in an empty performance of superiority.

One of the core mechanisms of MAGA is something that most of its devotees have been conditioned into since childhood by Evangelical churches - absolute blind and inerrant allegiance to authority figures, including (their idea of) God, church leaders, parents, husbands (if women), and government officials (well, the ones who look and worship like them, ie Republicans - the Democrats are obviously working for the Devil). This allegiance covers every aspect of your life, from church attendance to marriage to children to gender expression and sexuality to political values and behaviors and even things like restrictions on consumption of secular media. Straying from this not only means eternal condemnation of your soul, but excommunication from your community - y’know, like a cult. As such, this psychologically abusive relationship with religion has groomed them into being useful sheep for Trump, the DSM poster child of a psychological abuser, and they’ve even deified him.

I’ll touch on this more in my next point, but this obsessive loyalty to authority - or what someone else tells you is authority, and tells you what loyalty looks like - is pretty antithetical to American founding principles like freedom of thought and questioning authority. MAGA tends to focus on “religious liberty” as though that’s the only liberty they need - and they view it as the right to be protected from the free thoughts and speech of others who don’t conform to their religion, to not be inconvenienced by those heathens sharing public space with them. And ultimately, a right to remake America in their twisted image of Christianity - using violence if needed.

But it’s sad, that they give up the liberty of their own minds to their abusive concept of God. Most mainline or progressive Christian churches don’t ask for - or they even discourage - blind loyalty, literalist interpretations of the Bible, and fear of asking questions. They don’t tell you what you must think or believe or what kind of person you’re “supposed” to be - other than kind and loving - and there aren’t any tests later to make sure you’re in compliance.

Machine Head is, in my opinion, a criminally underrated band, not only musically but for its boldly political lyrics that sometimes comment on this cult mentality of Christianity. Singer Robb Flynn has repeatedly taken heat for his political lyrics; for when he denounced Trump in 2020 as being “the embodiment of everything that I cannot stand in a human being" and "the epitome of WHITE privilege”; when he wrote a poem denouncing the Capitol Rioters on January 6, 2021; and for calling out racism among other metal musicians. His response to fans upset about his political stances: “I don't know what they think I've been singing about for the last 27 years.”

“This is a right to life

Not religious right's act

This is abortion's knife

Aiming at the womb of

the Christian conspiracy

So, open thine eyes and see

the Halo over our demise

Following a god so blind

Sallow in their sickening

Swallow not the shit they feed!”

• “Halo” - Machine Head, 2007 (IMO one of the greatest metal songs of all time, that dual guitar solo 😮‍💨 )

Mind Control

MAGA masculinity fetishizes the cowboy image. The idea of freedom, self-reliance, bearing arms to defend oneself, and a “maverick” independent-thinking mentality, are all supposedly what these men value. Revolutionary War imagery like the Gadsden flag is also popular among them as a symbol of this independence, as seen in the proto-MAGA “Tea Party” movement that twisted the nation’s founding ideals into standing for independence from a government that would “force” them to live in a society that afforded its citizens enough equal rights that a Black man could become President. (God, those were the days.)

Their actions prove the exact opposite. Freedom scares them, because then it means freedom for everyone, and they can’t have that. Information that might contradict the worldviews they’ve been force fed must be avoided or suppressed, lest it reveal they’ve been lied to, and how that shame would rip apart their entire story of self. They’ve been taught that thinking for themselves is the influence of the Devil, so they look to male authority figures to comfort them by controlling the thoughts, speech, and values they’re allowed to have, by removing their freedom, by demanding praise and worship and loyalty - because then they don’t have any confusion about where they fit in the social hierarchy or how to correctly be who they’re supposed to be. They quote Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate at people instead of having even a single original thought. It’s all very sad and ironically, very unmasculine. To put it in their own words, it’s “cuck” behavior.

It’s no wonder we have a “masculinity crisis” that white men - and especially young white men & boys - supposedly suffer from. Because - they genuinely do, but not in the way conservatives complain about. They suffer from the insecurity that comes from a lifetime of cult gaslighting, the hollow sense of self that comes from the psychological abuse of forced conformity, the emptiness that comes from being beaten - sometimes literally, by their fathers and brothers and school bullies when they’re children - into submission to this ideal of masculinity that is toxic to themselves as well as to us. These systems of ideological indoctrination rob them of their human empathy, which is a tragedy in itself.

In this masculinity crisis, much has been said on the left for advocating for a healthier masculinity, which in the minds of many equates to a soft one, a quiet one, a gentle one. And many men are soft and gentle, and they are not lesser men for it. But many men are going to have a hard time identifying with “soft and gentle”, something they’ve been told their whole lives is “weak”. So, how do we channel male tendencies toward outrage into something constructive?

What music has taught me is that a healthy masculinity need not be quiet or soft. In fact, this moment of succumbing to authoritarianism demands that Americans of all genders NOT be quiet or gentle or soft in challenging it. There was nothing quiet, gentle, or soft about Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis yelling “get the FUCK out of our city” to ICE, during a live press conference. Despite the familiar image of white male rage, it was the values behind his words that made this an ultimately healthy expression. It was rage at the senseless murder of a woman, at high school students being maced, at his city’s residents, whether citizen or not, being ambushed and disappeared, at the armed paramilitary troops occupying the city against their will.

That is what we need men, especially white men, to be. Angry in favor of justice, strong in protecting the vulnerable, resilient in never backing down from these values.

I’m thankful that my “white male rage” found a voice in the music that it did, music that channeled it through the lens of challenging injustice. This is how we model masculinity for the next generations of white men. That justice is loud, it is angry, it is defiant, and it doesn’t ask nicely.

“I’m done asking, I demand.”

It’s raining and hailing in Arizona, of all places.

A day after a mother, a queer woman, a poet, a self-described Coloradan “experiencing Minnesota”, was murdered, her blood staining the deployed airbag of the vehicle she attempted to flee her killers in.

Killers from a supposed “immigration and customs enforcement” agency, who have inexplicably killed an American citizen while her stunned neighbors, and wife, watched and captured on video.

And the administration which deployed 2,000 masked agents of this “agency” is now lying through their teeth to us, telling thousands of Americans they didn’t see what they saw, didn’t hear what her wife screamed on camera, or the doctor trying to get through to help her.

Or if it happened, she deserved it. She was an agitator. She was a radical. She had pronouns in her bio.

She had stuffed animals for her 6 year old child in the glovebox.

Investigations into daycare center “fraud” based on rumors online, and the cutting off of welfare programs for children as punishment. Targeting of long-established refugee communities and the social aid organizations that serve them.  The assassination of the legislature’s Speaker of the House, her husband, and her dog in the dead of night. The Department of “Justice”’s investigation into the state’s anti-discrimination laws protecting gender diverse children. The targeting of a popular governor and mayor for their grief, their defense, their rage in speaking out about it all.

For their compassion and empathy, now cardinal sins.

A word, a place, a culture, a people, is the thread that weaves together all these headlines.

Minnesota.

A place, a culture, a people to which I belong, and though I have not resided in it for nearly 20 years, no matter where I find myself, I will always be of this culture, this people. I couldn’t imagine being from anywhere else, being cut from any other cloth, holding any other values than the ones I found there. I am Minnesotan first, and American second. And that has never been more true than now.

If anything, Minnesota is more American than America itself.

Neighbors. That’s the word Governor Tim Walz often repeats. My people are not one people, but we are one neighborhood. We are not perfect. We are not exempt from the grim colonial history and ideological ills that are an unfortunate part of this nation’s heritage, and we don’t pretend we are. But our culture is centered around this concept - neighbors - one we find natural and easy to understand while the rest of the world struggles with it. We are a place where our neighbors are Somalian, Hmong, Russian, Chinese, Indigenous, gay, transgender.

Coloradan.

And the notion that we should treat them differently, exclude them, ignore them, doesn’t occur to most of us. I was born in a Minnesotan October blizzard, my body and soul are of those lakes and rivers and woods, I lived exactly half of my life there. And yet a woman who lived there only a short time before she died there, was every bit as Minnesotan as I am. All who enter our borders are, for however long or short they stay.

It is no surprise that a place, a culture, a people who hold dear every value that is antithetical to this administration would become its target. They don’t want us to be empathic, compassionate, united, truthful. They want division, fear, marginalization, intolerance, violence, lies. And an American state who refuses to comply - because we can’t, because it is not in us - becomes an obstacle to their “project”. A reminder that they will not be successful. A sign that Minnesotans will not give up our place in these United States, our conviction that our neighborly values are the moral North Star of this nation.

We have a reputation for being “nice”. But we are not nice in that we will give in to threats, that we will be pushed over when attacked, that we will accept injustice without a fight. We protect our people, because that is what neighbors do. We don’t have to think twice about it.

She shared my name. René(e). In French, it literally means reborn. This has held many meanings for me, as I have pursued identit(ies) that differ from the ones I was born with or told to be. Identities that Minnesota itself has confirmed in legal documentation, without a second thought, as though it’s always recognized me as its son.

We can’t get her back. We can’t undo what they did to her. We can’t undo the atrocity that occured on our soil by these outside invaders, the only word that describes what they are.

But we can look to this Northern Star to show us the way in rebirthing the values this nation is supposed to have, once the rest of the country has finally decided it’s had enough.

And all the people holding candles for her tells me that day of having had enough will come. For as long as L’étoile du Nord stands tall against those who would destroy what we stand for, there is hope for us all.

Don’t ever wonder where I am

I’m always with you and you’re always with me

We climb the same mountains

We’re enchanted by the same sunsets

We are rooted in the same soil

Like two saguaros that stand tall together

Nourished by the same rains

And like the hummingbirds find their way to the spring flowers

We’ll always find our way back to each other.

in a year when we were told that the best we could hope for was clinging desperately to survival

how surprised i was to have found joy.

how surprised i was to receive digital letters from another traveler in this life, from a desert far (and not so far) away,

and to watch as the pages we wrote

slowly blended together into the same book,

writing the kind of story they now ban from schoolchildren’s libraries,

one of laughter and longing and love between two men.

we marked off the calendar’s days with photos of the cats who had wandered into our lives;

texts inquiring whether we’d each eaten enough and taken our medications and made it home safe;

trading stories of stars and of trees, somehow finding common threads to weave together.

enough of the threads made sense that,

one summer day,

i got on a bus and counted the saguaros until i got to your city;

i stood in your kitchen while you took your pills and you laughed when i gave silly names to your fish;

i admired your smile as you showed celestial objects to kids so short they needed a step stool to reach the telescope;

in pine forest mountains and over cups of coffee we discovered how our broken edges fit together,

how all the things the world misunderstood about us were easily understood by each other.

one winter day,

you rode the train in my garishly unsustainable city and wrote a detailed analysis on the irony of its sustainable infrastructure;

you wandered through all the heavily trodded paths of my life - the muddy secret garden at the university,

the cafés where i write my book,

all the places with memories i’d made with other people and was now adding you on a fresh page,

all the history of me -

and you looked upon it all with fresh, excited, youthful eyes;

you stood in a museum talking about linguistically isolated pre-indo european languages and i could swear i was listening to the other half of myself-

… not every lonely traveler in the desert finds his companion,

but maybe we did.

we ended the year with a kiss shared at midnight in my kitchen,

in this house you make feel like a home again.

a simple gesture that symbolized the not-so-simple ways we’d held on to each other through all the dark storm clouds,

us two targets of a fascist “Project” named for this year,

as though they can colonize time itself

but we made 2025 our own.

writing the kind of story they don’t want the world to hear,

creating the kind of joy they don’t want us to feel,

surviving in a way that doesn’t feel desperate,

every morning choosing the beautiful loudness of our truths over the quiet closets they want us to hide in.

a toast to “this time next year”, and the power that dwells in fully intending to live that future.

new year’s day brought rain.

my feet splashed through the puddles as i ran after the bus that took you away from me

(something that looks romantic in films but is very embarrassing in real life)

the bus taking you home

but maybe neither of us are really so certain about where “home” is anymore

or whether it is a place at all.

the rain, for a moment, cleansed the smoke from the air

and cleared a path for all of us to build something new.

One of the complicated things about being an elder Millennial trans guy is that my perspective of trans youth is so different from what youth are actually experiencing today.

And one of the limitations it has caused me is a complicated feeling about medical transition care for people under 18.

Before someone comes in to flame me for being anti-youth care, I’m not. But for awhile I had struggled to see what was so wrong with the position of “well why can’t youth just wait until they’re 18 to make decisions like that?”

It took a video creator pointing something out that I’d never really considered before.

• Why should young people not be able to choose which puberty they should go through if they’re going to have one or the other anyway?

• In adulthood we spend so much time undoing all the damage our “natural” puberty did to our bodies, some of which can’t be fully undone.

• Why should trans youth not get the chance to be happy earlier in life?

My blind spot is this: growing up in the 90s/early 2000s, none of what is available today was a remote possibility for me. The knowledge that being trans was a thing wasn’t available to me. Even when I discovered that trans men were a thing in my late 20s, I didn’t know anything about how HRT worked. It wasn’t until I followed a bunch of trans guys on instagram during the pandemic and saw their before and after photos that I learned, oh wow, trans men can actually grow beards and look as male as any cis guy. If I took T I wouldn’t have to be a non-passing androgynous person forever as the best possible “compromise” with my body. Only then did I transition.

And so it’s very hard for me to put myself in the shoes of trans youth today because not only was transitioning even socially not possible when I was their age, it wasn’t even known.

And if you don’t know what you’re missing, it can’t be that painful.

Even so, there were signs. “Shawn” was a name I gave myself when I was in 3rd grade. Given it was the first syllable of my deadname (although I’ve anglicized the spelling in my adulthood), I successfully passed it off as a nickname. Even for me it didn’t necessarily have any relation to gender, as I didn’t have any context to understand that anyway. I asked my parents and teachers (I didn’t have any friends) to call me that, and they did. It lasted about 3 days. The boys bullied me into gender compliance with “but that’s a boy’s name. You can’t have it because you’re not a boy.”

Something that has deeply and unexpectedly affected me has been the FDA’s recent targeting of companies that manufacture chest binders. Despite that none of them specifically market towards children, they are being harassed for such, and forced to either register their products as medical devices which can then be regulated, or essentially remove any references to gender dysphoria or trans people in their descriptions. It already hits hard when legal documents or medical care is targeted, but this is clothing. Binders are little more than somewhat stronger and fuller coverage compression sports bras that flatten chests and help guys pass before they have top surgery. Even cis men wear them for gynecomastia. They’re shapewear, not medical products. It harkens back to the anti-crossdressing laws of the 1960s and prior, where you couldn’t wear more than a handful of articles of clothing designated for “the opposite sex” in public.

I was always ashamed of my post puberty chest, even though it thankfully wasn’t very big. I wore big baggy hoodies and t shirts much of the time hoping it wouldn’t really be seen. Telling a child they can’t hide or diminish their breasts with shape wear, that the government can police what kind of under garments they wear, telling them their secondary sex characteristics must be on display, is just fucking sickening - especially a government run by pedophiles. Again, I didn’t have many choices, as most kids don’t, but this is still something that I can relate to in some way. And some of the companies targeted, all of which have a primarily trans customer base, are companies that I have purchased from as an adult. Most of them are small businesses run by trans or queer people. The FDA went out of its way to do targeted research to find trans-serving businesses and threaten them with asset seizure or disbanding.

To have been happy earlier in life. A phrase that reminds me how much of my life was stolen from me. How my youth was spent living as someone else, someone lost and confused and never being able to name it, and I’ll never get that youth back. And maybe the trans youth of today demanding access to transition is just a reminder of that pain and that loss that I don’t want to acknowledge. Maybe I’m jealous of them, and that jealousy and pain is blocking my understanding.

But was it less painful to not know? The youth today know what they are missing. I was numb and unaware.

September 5th, 2023, 9:00 AM. I sat on the exam chair at my top surgeon’s office for my 48 hour post op appointment. The nurse removed my surgical bandages and the feeling I had is something that human language will never be able to truly capture. The flatness of my chest was an animal instinct. A feeling of: this is the way my body should have always been. I suddenly felt like a child, remembering what it felt like to be 8 years old - the last time I’d had a chest this flat, 27 years prior. I felt like a little boy and the innocence of that feeling was devastating. I had been an early bloomer and my body would betray me very quickly. I didn’t realize the weight of the psychological pain that hung from my chest until it had been removed. Corrected.

While top surgeries today are extremely rarely performed on minors, usually ages 16 or 17, and certainly not at all when I was that age, it was still something I could have accessed much earlier, had I known. Had I known what that feeling would be. Instead, I was six weeks away from my 36th birthday before my body felt like it belonged to me.

Denying access to medical transition at a young age is one thing. Denying them underwear is absurd cruelty on top of it. And while I hesitate to ascribe misogyny to discrimination against trans boys/men, it’s the underlying factor. Girls are not permitted to own their bodies, even as minors. They must look and dress and present the way adults tell them to. Teens must display their budding sexual attractiveness. Transphobic parents always put the fertility of their “daughters” before any need for bodily autonomy, comfort, or self expression - what if my “daughter” removes her breasts and regrets it one day that she can’t feed her babies? Or, as my mother more or less directly expressed to me when I was 16, if she doesn’t look and present feminine or conventionally attractive, how is she going to get a boyfriend and eventually husband? If girls/women can “escape” misogyny by becoming boys/men, then how will misogyny be effective? What about all the cis girls/women who don’t get that same “privilege”? No, we must force our girls to remain girls, so that they can be good compliant little breeders for the patriarchal state. Just like their mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers before them.

As worried as I am about attacks on adult trans rights, attacks on trans youth affect me too. Because I was once a trans youth. And little 9 year old Shawn carries even more pain now that 30-something Shawn is able to tell him the words that name that pain. I wish I could tell him, as I did during the Biden years, that he’d be safe one day. Fact is, 38 year old Shawn isn’t so sure of that himself.

I’ve been seeing this series in my feed called The Love Notes Project: a curation of messages people have sent in support of the trans community. They’re beautiful. I suppose I haven’t been in an emotional place where I could engage with what sometimes seem like hollow affirmations of positivity.

But I finally did crack one open. And this particular quote broke me.

A future. That’s all any trans person wants. A boring ass ordinary future. We want to be able to plan ahead our 30-60-90 day plans at our jobs. We want to not feel a sense of dread if we scroll too far ahead in the 2026 calendar. We want to not have to think about uprooting ourselves and moving across state lines to chase our equal rights or safety in whatever places where those things remain, leaving behind communities we have built - although having geographic contingency plans has long been a part of LGBTQ culture. We want to be able to envision the next year and what it will look like, whether we’ll be able to stay in our jobs and homes and relationships and whether we’ll have to sacrifice our medications and our legal documents and ability to use public restrooms in order to do so.

Thousands of trans Americans (and parents of trans kids) have already moved across state or country borders, most with no illusions that they will ever be able to go back. I was resigned to hopping the border to New Mexico in 2022 if the gubernatorial election here went to MAGA darling Kari Lake. Miraculously, that didn’t happen, and Arizona elected its first Democratic governor and staunch LGBTQ ally in almost 20 years.

While Arizona has trended more purple since the Trump era, it’s still as fickle as ever, due in part to our large population of “independent” voters, most of whom are politically illiterate, disengaged, and only show up at the polls every four years to express their misdirected exhaustion at late stage capitalism as rage towards whomever the current White House occupant happens to be or whatever the current price of gasoline and eggs happen to be. Many are middle class surburban cishet white people whose sociopolitical moral compasses don’t point in any particular direction, as they’re largely unaffected by the ideological winds regardless of where they’re blowing. They’re the demographic of legalizing weed but also opposing trans rights; thinking corporations are greedy and wanting billionaires to pay higher taxes but also thinking that driving an electric vehicle would make them look gay. Unfortunately, they are the deciding factor in whether minorities in our state have rights.

The governor is up for re-election this coming year, and knowing how the pendulum swings here and how narrowly Arizona went blue in 2020 and 2022 while returning to its big white lifted pickup truck roots in 2024, I’m not optimistic. Andy Biggs, the Republican candidate, speaks all the right red meat language about opposing “wokeism” and protecting kids from being trans’ed, rhetoric which has had a decade-long chokehold on the white cishet male psyche.

I’m a little apprehensive about the first year of this nightmare having had no material impact on me, yet. The vast majority of the persecution of trans people is still happening on the state level. And I have only ever been a man under the Hobbs administration. I have that pit of dread in my stomach knowing that 2027 could be even more traumatic than 2025 was, because a potential Republican governor of my state will have much more power to go after me directly than an orange buffoon 2,000 miles away. The legislature will be even more emboldened to go full Texas-Florida on us with Biggs as a willing rubber stamp, frothing at the mouth to win his culture war brownie points.

I look to my “future”. What a simple thing to want. Nobody’s future is certain, but most Americans are able to reliably depend on having choice over it. They build careers and friendships and relationships and families without wondering if they’re foolish for doing so because it could all be taken away. They don’t face the same gun to their head tradeoffs; forced to choose between their safety and the communities they have built, forced to consider whether conformity and resignation is worth keeping their home. As a Minnesotan, this culture of “not everyone belongs here or deserves to call themselves an Arizonan” baffles me. That is not the culture I grew up in or understand. Minnesotans aren’t perfect, but they are better at understanding how to welcome and care for neighbors different than them as though they weren’t different, how to practice collective responsibility, knowing that we don’t all have to be best friends but being enemies would poison our cultural soul.

And yet it’s Arizona that actually forced me to have neighbors different than me. Phoenix is a microcosmic melting pot of the entire world; you could probably find at least one person from 85% of countries on earth in this city. A place so politically obsessed with cultural conformity and repression of diversity is ironically one of the most diverse places in the country. And while we made unfortunate headlines with SB1070 and Sheriff Arpaio’s tent city, long before Trump sicced ICE on the nation, I’ve watched countless extreme right bills die in committee or even get vetoed by Republican governors.

But the environment is… different, now. This is Stephen Miller’s Nazi wet dream America. Anything goes next year. And the rhetoric of trans dehumanization has so thoroughly infected 40% of the country that they will not view anything they do to us as an atrocity or a broach of human rights. They will view it as “common sense” and “saving their children”.

I suppose I will be extremely lucky if being forced to flee to New Mexico or Minnesota is the worst thing that happens to me.

For cisgender heterosexuals - y’know, “normal” people - it’s a time of celebration of their most cherished things - religion, nuclear family, tradition.

And for many of us, we have been excluded from all of those things, as well as these holidays. Some of us face being around family who won’t acknowledge our names or pronouns, won’t acknowledge our relationships, either silence our identities or confront us about them in hostility. Some of us have traded family contact for peace, and must make alternative holidays with friends, or just stay at home by ourselves. A lucky few spend holidays with families who accept their whole selves.

In addition, the timing of the season presents its jarring contrasts between our subculture and the dominant hegemony. Thanksgiving, in all its cozy pumpkin-spiced positivity (and convenient amnesia about indigenous genocide), is oddly sandwiched between Transgender Day of Remembrance, where the trans community remembers those lost to anti-transgender violence or suicide, and World AIDS Day, which is often used to mark those lost in the peak years of the epidemic, especially gay men. The quilts are already hanging on the walls in our choir rehearsal room at the LGBTQ center downtown, and it’s startling sometimes how the fabric affects the acoustics, sucking up the sound waves of our singing.

And in a year like 2025, we wonder if we all in the next three years will have our names written onto that 11-20 list, if there will soon be candles illuminating the tears of the people who will mourn us, if there will be more names sewn onto quilts as funding for HIV medications and PREP is cut off.

In a year like 2025, where our enemies even named their fascist project after this year, how do find the audacity to be grateful?

I have a peculiar and even annoying stubbornness to find light in darkness, to find hope in despair, to find gratitude in tragedy. Not that I don’t have my moments of wanting to give up - it’s because of them. The more of them I survive, the more I realize they are but moments. And this resilience is the tactic of survival, not its result.

I can choose to blacken out this year on the calendar with a big fat sharpie, I can choose to assign it only pain and fear in my memory. I can choose to focus on the targets that were put on my back, I can choose to mourn the safety and peace I have lost, all but for what seems like a cruelly arbitrary schedule of we are supposed to have elections every certain number of years, so this year you have rights and next year you don’t.

Or - I can choose to stake my pink, white and blue flag in this year, and claim it as another chapter in a story I am writing. I can refuse to give the pen over to those who would write me as the villain or the victim.

I always look back at the most difficult years as being the most beautiful. Because they forced me to make choices. They forced me to take action, whether to confront challenges of my own making, or survive the consequences of other people’s bad decisions that were unfairly put onto me. And each time, I proved I was up for the challenge. Each time I found something beautiful in the process.

This is more or less what I expressed to a friend last night over the Thanksgiving table. 2025 was challenging for both of us, like it was for just about every queer American, but we both had this weird sense of peace. Here we are at another Thanksgiving dinner. We are fed, employed, safe, and loved. How fucking weird is that? This year was supposed to end us. There’s this strange cognitive dissonance between the storm clouds in the news and social media, and the sunshine in our smaller lives.

I have taken long breaks from Substack and from the news, because it’s just The 🍊 Show all the time. I opened this app the other day to an article entitled “The Global Trans Genocide”, and immediately closed it. As much as I have to stay informed, I can’t live in a prison of my own fear. They want me to be afraid to be myself. They want to tell me that survival is impossible unless I conform, unless I live the way they want me to. Their tactic is 90% fear and 10% action.

Giving in to the fear is a choice.

It’s a choice I no longer want to make.

I will create the beautiful life they do not want me to have. In fact, I’m already living it.

(All photos my own.)

The world sometimes can feel like too much to bear, in our current moment.

We wonder how we can get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes, we aren’t able to do that.

We mourn the dreams we had for ourselves just a year ago, dreams that now seem imperiled or dashed altogether.

We wonder if we will survive this time, if we will have the privilege of growing old that we once rightfully took for granted.

We move through this world with targets pinned to our backs, and every day it seems like there are more targets, from every direction.

We wonder if it’s all hopeless. If the evil in this world will win out. Those of us with any kind of spirituality or faith question those things now. We wait and hope for a higher power to step in, to save us, and day after day it seems that will not happen.

But we all have to ask ourselves, what is it that will keep us holding on? Holding on to hope? Holding on to faith that justice will prevail, that love is stronger than all this hate? Where are our happy and safe places to weather the storm?

When I think it’s all hopeless, I close my eyes and imagine myself on the bus to Tucson, one I’ve taken three times this summer, and the man waiting for me at the station on the other end of the route with a big smile on his face. And my blood pressure stabilizes. My heart stops racing. My mind quiets down. My animalistic fight or flight instincts subside. I lay down my armor and finally have permission to be soft, to be safe, to be free.

And we retreat into the desert to look at stars I don’t get to see at home. We retreat to the mountain forests with cool air I don’t get at home. We cook dinner and watch TV and enjoy the kind of company that neither of us often have at home. For a moment, we are safe.

And each time, we discover that underneath the ugliness and cruelty of this world, there is beauty and love to still be found.

It’s the same on Tuesday nights in my choir. Throughout my years there, I have strived to reach out, to acknowledge, to notice the newcomers who maybe don’t feel seen, who stay on the sidelines unsure of how or whether they fit in - because I spent most of my life being the invisible one, and I don’t want anyone else to feel that way, and I have the power to change that. I shake their hand and give them a smile, ask them their name and to tell me their story. Over these years, I have heard so many of my choir brothers say that the choir saved their lives. That it gave them a purpose and a direction and a reason to keep going. That it gave them a place to be their authentic selves, sometimes for the first time. That it is their safe haven. I’ve said all of these things myself.

And in my broader network - all of my college friends, mentors, family members, fellow organizers from campaigns I’ve worked on - there’s a sense that we’re all in this together. And as long as we have each other, we are powerful.

Maybe that is all that really matters in this world - those right in front of us. Our friends and family and partners and pets. Maybe that is the most powerful resistance of all. They can take so many things away from us. But they cannot take away the love we create with others. And we must continue to create it, to defend it, to speak it out into the open without shame. We can’t let those who threaten to destroy us to stop us from building, from creating, from dreaming, from hoping, from believing, from embodying all that is truly good about humanity. After all, that is why we are here, and what is worth being here for.

That the universe so improbably exists, that our planet so improbably supports life, that we so improbably evolved from that life, that this existence affords us this very sacred and rare gift of creating love, is worth it all.

Don't think I need to say this

'Cause you know what's in my head

"Fucked up" is an understatement

Can't wait for this year to end

It all fell apart, don't know where to start

Everything moves so slow

I can't get a break, it's too much to take

But closing my eyes I know

When the world's on fire, all I need is you

I don't always think to say it, but it's true

When I just wanna disappear

You're the one(s) who keep me here

The world's on fire, but all I need is you.

“World’s On Fire”, Mike Shinoda