The Trip to SC, Pt. 4

Now to the people I met who came to the conference: the woman who wanted to know how Betty and I had sex (and not for prurient reasons, but to ask me how I felt about missing cock). The woman who’d been married three times before she realized she had rotten taste in men and much better taste in women. Her partner, butch identified, who said she can only think of herself as a woman if she says “lesbian woman” but not without the clarifying adjective. The mom whose lesbian daughter told her about a young gay man who had been kicked out of his home and who she, in turn, took in, and in the process left off being a homophobe to become an LGBT ally. And a woman who volunteers at the local PFLAG, whose daughter or son isn’t gay, and who isn’t LGBT herself, but who was invited to a wedding years ago where the younger daughter of two was getting married, and the older daughter was coming to the wedding with her girlfriend. The mother of these young women sent out a note to “warn” friends and family coming to the wedding about the older daughter coming… and something struck this friend of their family as just wrong. We talked about what it means to be an ally, especially when LGBT people are “born that way” but we who are not choose to ally with them, & how hard that is for other people to understand sometimes, and how much it makes you queer – that long fall off the short cliff of heterosexual privilege.

As I said before, I met and talked to most of the students.

The last people I met were the couple whose own life was the reason for the conference: they lost their son last year when he was gay-bashed. They gave me a t-shirt, and we exchanged information, and they have become powerhouses for PFLAG much like Judy Shepard did after the murder of Matthew. They were beautiful, mourning, and determined to get justice for their son.

I was once again impressed with how intense the sense of community is in smaller places; here we have enough LGBT people that there are splinters of gay men who wear leather vs. gay men who don’t. But in this community, there was a much greater sense of everyone hanging together or ending up hanging separately which has been, in my experience, typical of smaller places where there are fewer LGBT people. The murder of that beautiful kid, Sean Kennedy, was the reason for the conference, and the conference had a remarkable energy to it: sad but tenacious, tired but optimistic. There was no room for cynicism, and I found that incredibly refreshing and inspiring.