In the same year that Matthew Shepard was murdered, I was fired for being gay. It was 1998 and I was working as a grant writer for an engineering school within Cleveland State University. I hadn’t worked there long, had written only one grant application. That one had resulted in a large monetary award for the school. Despite this success, after putting a framed photo of my girlfriend and me on my desk, I lost my job.
My boss was a woman about 20 years my senior. She came to my desk on the edge of a warehouse floor to congratulate me for winning my first grant when her eyes settled on the photo. The smile on her face hardened into a disapproving line. She struggled to neutralize her expression when she looked at me and asked who that was in the photograph with me. I stared into the photo and felt hot shame redden my face when I noticed how intimate and close we looked. I was seated with my legs draped across her lap and our arms were wrapped around each other, faces pressed together. Our dog was stretched across us — the proverbial fur baby — completing our lesbian nuclear family.
“Oh, that’s my girlfriend and my dog,” I said, summoning more confidence in my voice than I felt. Some naïve part of me believed that nobody would be disapproving of love, regardless of what form it takes.
“That’s not appropriate to have out on your desk,” she said, forgetting her reason for visiting me in the first place. A rebellious anger came over me, displacing my embarrassment. I stood up from my chair. “Everyone here has a photo of their spouse or significant other out on their desk. Why are you telling me that mine is not appropriate to have out?”
She took a step back and her face hardened even more. “I think you know,” she said and walked away. It was the end of the day, and I left shortly after, taking the framed photo with me. But the damage was done. When I arrived to work the next day, I was greeted with a letter of termination, which cited my homosexuality as the reason for being fired. Walking away from my job that day with that letter in hand, I swallowed hard over the familiar taste of fear in my mouth. The reality of my situation sank in. As an out and proud lesbian, my livelihood was not the only thing at stake.
A year or two before, I had been visiting a different girlfriend at her college, Ohio University. While walking down the street in Ada, Ohio, feeling safe and protected in the progressive bubble of the campus, we openly held hands. We were headed to our car about a block away when a pick-up truck filled with guys rolled slowly by. We heard a snorting sound before a ball of mucus-filled spit landed in front of us on the sidewalk and a male voice yelled “Dykes!” There was a round of laughter as the truck rolled past. I held up my middle finger at them as they drove away, then my girlfriend squeezed my hand as we saw the break lights. They were turning around to come back our way.
We dropped each other’s hand and ran for our car, jumping in and tearing out like we were escaping a crime scene. The truck followed us as we drove toward her house, which was outside of the campus in a rural part of the surrounding Bible-belt town. Night was falling and we debated what to do. Should we drive directly to the police station? Would they even protect us here? I opted to accelerate and attempt to lose them. There were two bends in the road just before her house and I made them faster than was safe then swung into the driveway and cut the engine and lights. Moments later, the truck sped by and disappeared into the night. We exhaled. We sat there, crouched in the car, silently holding hands, filled with fear, waiting for the terrifying prospect of the truck filled with men to come back and find us.
Margaret Vandenburg in her book, Craze, writes about the experiences of Henrietta, or Henri, an androgynous lesbian journalist in 1930s New York, and the double life she leads. Tuxedo and top hat by night, sensible skirt and blouse by day, Henri isn’t very successful masking her true self while interacting with her male boss. He senses something off about her and she works hard to put him at ease with deference bordering on cloying. The imminence of danger hangs in the air all around her in this scene and many others; I can feel it in my body as I read. It was the same set of feelings I experienced in my early twenties some sixty years later.
And now, another couple of decades has passed, and though some things have changed for the better, queer rights are under attack like never before. A record number of anti-queer laws — at least 510 bills — were proposed in state legislatures across the United States last year. That’s about triple the number introduced in 2022. Queer people across this country exist in fear and uncertainty about where these laws will lead not only for our own futures, but for the next generation.
I’ve noticed a few people on social media (friends and acquaintances who are not openly hostile toward queer people but who are decidedly not queer, themselves) post about the upcoming election and claim that we all just need to get along, and no matter who you vote for, we will find a way forward together. The people who post variations on this theme have something important in common. They have never been fired from a job for loving who they love. They never felt the visceral fear in their bodies of imminent violence while being pursued by a truckload of angry men.
They have agency and a clear right to choose what happens with their bodies. Naturally, they don’t then worry too much about the outcome of this election. And they want us all to just calm down and get along. If only it was that easy.
This eternal round of oppression and injustice, this colossal history encoded into my tiny DNA, this impossible barrier to a beloved community that human animals insist upon perpetuating — it looms. And yet, sometimes, the unexpected happens. I feel a forward momentum I hadn’t dared to plan for, a sense of sharp beauty as well as desolation. There is something beneath the surface, beneath the appearances of things, that endures to choreograph our moves. This seems certain, yet I don’t know how it can be.
Still, its presence lends a quality of relentless, small hope.