A couple of months ago I submitted a short story to The New Yorker but I think it is unlikely that they are going to publish it. So I have decided to publish it here. I'll make a note about it: this story began as a satire, a black comedy, but it may not be easy to tell when I am being satiric. A friend of mine who read it said that it lacked a story – this is a problem I have with some but not all of my stories. Nevertheless I think there is muh in this story that makes it something worth reading.
In my next post which I shall publish next week I'll get back to philosophy.
***
These Truths We Hold To Be Self Evident
The activists participating in the Queer rights march had begun assembling in the town square from mid-morning on, milling about and chatting with each other, catching up with friends they knew though college or Facebook and Instagram and striking up new friendships with allies they were meeting for the first time. Chai lattes and samosas bought from the food stalls set up by queer friendly entrepreneurs who, heeding the call of the profit motive, followed such demonstrations from city to city were, respectively, sipped and nibbled. Independent observers might have noted considerable diversity among the protestors in terms of race, ethnicity, and sexual and gender expression, although less so in terms of socio-economic status. There were not a few drag queens to be spotted among the campaigners, many of whom were perhaps simply indulging in transvestitism for the day and would go back to wearing suits and ties for their jobs as lawyers and bank managers the next. Butch dykes in Doc Martins and sporting rockabilly style quiffs wandered about in pairs. Male throwbacks to the ‘seventies and ‘eighties in mesh vests, leather pants and jackets, black PVC caps, and sporting Freddy Mercury moustaches, gathered in small clusters. Generally however the contingent, who were mostly generation Z, could have passed for any group of young adults you might find gathered together for a dorm party or college graduation ceremony. There was a buzz in the air, a palpable sense of anticipation, an almost gay atmosphere. The apposite word to describe their feelings was ‘solidarity’ – they were comrades united by a common cause, partisans striking a blow in favour of human rights against a reactionary establishment. It felt so good to be among friends, among allies. The march was due to start at noon.
The march was taking place in the small city of Jacksonville, population 50,000, one of several cities in the South with that name, in the Florida panhandle. Most of the participants, like most of the vendors, came from out of town. A typical resident of Jacksonville wouldn’t have known what a chai latte or samosa was if one had bitten him. The march was one of many planned across the state in opposition to Ron Desantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. This was of course a topic of considerable controversy throughout the nation and the demonstrators were almost outnumbered by members of the media. Journalists from all the major networks and local and national newspapers were present to cover the story which was being talked of as a barometer of the political mood of the nation. An enormous number of social media influencers were also in attendance. Of course the journalists, among them Alice Moretz, who worked for a local Florida news outlet, knew the real reason for the coverage, although it was not something she or other media workers would own up to publicly. Legacy media was dying. But a surefire way to attract readers and viewers was to report on stories related to gender and sexuality. Stories like these were catnip for the masses. Cynical, yes, but you needed to pay the bills somehow. The population of the whole country was evenly divided between those who ardently supported the LGBTQIA+ community and those who thought America was literally going to hell and that Christ was coming back any day soon to sort the saved from the sinners; either way, reporting on the march would pull in a sizeable audience.
Alice and her cameraman had located a couple of activists wiling to be interviewed and brought them to the edge of the square. The first of the two, Beatrice, was a certified therapist and psychologist specialising in issues of child and adolescent identity, and the second, Daniel, was a recent liberal arts graduate from Ohio. They had met earlier in the day and connected over their shared admiration for Bernie Sanders and AOC. Alice asked them if they wanted to share anything with “viewers here in the US or around the world”.
Beatrice immediately seized the opportunity, speaking up above the hubbub around her. “Yes, there is something important I want to say. The most important thing for people to understand about gender and sexuality is that they are inherent. What happens in classrooms can’t change them. You can’t make someone gay. A person’s sexuality and gender is something they’re born with. Every day more and more scientific evidence is coming to light, scientific evidence that shows that there are neurological differences between people that exist from birth, neurological differences that explain why people express their genders and sexualities the way they do later on in adulthood. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill is anti-science. It’s anti-compassion. It’s deeply ignorant and harmful. I actually think it is evil. It will hurt children and adolescents. Children need to grow up in environments in which they can safely express who they are. Children need to be affirmed in their identities.This is why it is vitally important that issues to do with identity be discussed openly and honestly with children at home and in schools. Not talking about these things with children can only be a recipe for serious mental illness later on in life. This is what we know now.”
“Do you identify as queer yourself?” asked Alice.
“Personally I identify as a cisgender heterosexual female,” said Beatrice, a little reluctantly. “But I am here in support of my clients. Sometimes it can take a person years to come to terms with who they are.”
“And what about you Daniel? How do you identify?”
“I identify as a non-binary pansexual,” enunciated Daniel carefully.
“That’s interesting,” said Alice, curiosity piqued. “When did you know you were pansexual?
“I think I always knew I was different from other people and didn’t know why,” Daniel said after considering for a moment. “Then I did a course at college about sexuality and gender and it got me thinking. And then I did some research on Youtube. I mean, I think now that the signs were always there. I had male friends as well as female friends when I was growing up. I liked Ryan Gosling and Liam Hemsworth. I also liked Taylor Swift. I was always more of a fan of Emo bands than f football. I mean, I think now that it was obvious.”
“What’s the difference between pansexuality and bisexuality?” asked the cameraman.
“Well, for me,” said Daniel, after considering for another moment, “pansexuality means that you like everything. I like animals. I mean, for instance, I like whales. I’m a member of Greenpeace. I’m very worried about climate change. I’m very concerned about the situation in the Middle East. For me, pansexuality aligns with my political commitments. And it’s not just animals, I also like inanimate objects. I have an XBox that I play quite a lot. I like that XBox. So I guess I would say that for me pansexuality is all about liking everything and not limiting yourself to just liking human members of the opposite sex.”
“The important thing to remember,” Beatrice interposed, perhaps sensing the Daniel was muddying the waters, “is that Daniel was born a non-binary pansexual. Most people are born with brains that have the same gender as their assigned biological sex but some biological men are born with female brains and some biological women are born with male brains. Daniel was born with a brain that is exactly fifty percent male and fifty percent female.”
“There’s another thing,” Daniel went on. “It’s not just gender stuff. I’m autistic. I have Autism Spectrum Disorder. I think its important to fight for the rights of autistic people.”
“Was it like when you realised you were pansexual? Was there a moment when you knew you were autistic?”
“It’s like I said before – I always knew I was different from other people. And then I found some people talking about autism on Youtube. And I realised I had all the signs. I have something called mono-tropism. Sometimes I play Legend of Zelda for hours on end on my XBox. And sometimes I miss social cues and sometimes I don’t always make eye contact. When I realised I had autism, everything fell into place. I felt massively better about myself.”
The cameraman, unable to help himself, interjected again. “I have a cousin who’s autistic. He goes to a special school, doesn’t talk at all, and throws tantrums because people can’t understand him.”
“There’s enormous ignorance out there about autism,” Beatrice explained, she hoped in a non-condescending fashion. “You have to draw a distinction between classical autism and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Only a few people have classical autism but many people have Autism Spectrum Disorder. It’s something else you’re born with. Some people have it and some people don’t. It’s on a spectrum. It’s just like with gender and sexuality – autistic people are born neurologically different to other people. This is the something I can’t emphasise enough, that neurodiversity is a real thing. Different kinds of people are born with different kinds of brain. For instance, did you know that Einstein was autistic? It can be very helpful to the self-esteem of autistic people to find out how many famous people in history were probably autistic.”
“I didn’t know Einstein was autistic,” said the cameraman.
“Of course he was autistic! Isn’t it obvious? For one thing, you can tell he was autistic because he was good at math.”
In the square, the demonstrators were experimentally raising and lowering a banner emblazoned with all the colours of the rainbow and the slogan “Unity in Diversity”. Mark, the cameraman, allowed his gaze to drift over to it. Sometimes he had considered quitting the whole news production game and pursuing his true passion, graphic design. It had been his major at college. Of course, with the advent of AI, graphic designers were probably going to become obsolete. Or maybe he could chuck in the whole television thing and see if there was any feasible way he could break into proper film work. Anything that would be a change from the endless parade of numbnuts he saw daily. But manning the camera for a TV network was a steady job, at least for now, and would help him pay off his Skoda and pay down his student debt at least a little.
“Mark! Concentrate!”
“Sorry. I was just checking the light conditions.”
“Just a followup question,” said Alice to Daniel again. “I’m interested to know. Daniel – do you currently have a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend?”
“At the moment I have a girlfriend,” Daniel said, slightly awkwardly. “She’s not here today. But that doesn’t mean,” he went on more animatedly, “that tomorrow I wont’t get into a relationship with my XBox. Or maybe with a whale.”
On a neighbouring street, the inevitable counterdemonstration was taking shape. A far larger proportion of the protestors in this group were locals, mostly made up of committed Baptists from surrounding congregations. Many of them had arrived at the town centre on hired coaches directly from church, organised by church leaders. Jeff Stevens, an associate of Alice working for the same TV station, had managed to coral a couple of Desantis supporters, Amos, who helped manage a peach farm, and Gloria, who had identified herself to Jeff as a homemaker. As Alice had, Jeff kickstarted the interview by asking them if they had anything to say to “viewers here in the US and around the world”.
“We’re here to send a message to all these gays and libs that the lifestyles they’re pushing on our kids is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord,” said Gloria enthusiastically, grabbing the chance. “God hates gays and Jesus hated gays. We’re here because in the Holy Book it quite clearly states that Jehova created man and woman, not thirty-seven different genders. We’re here because Jesus quite clearly said that marriage is between a man and a woman. We don’t want our kids being taught in schools that sodomy and bestiality and necrophilia are just lifestyle choices. We don’t want our children being sexualised and groomed by pedophile Democrat teachers. We’re here because people need to wake up,realise that the other side is ignorant and evil. We don’t want our kids being encouraged to choose to be gay. Righteous God-fearing folk need to take a stand before the world slides into total depravity and we need to to do it now, before Christ comes back to judge us all.”
“So you agree with Governor Desantis that there should be no talk of sex or gender in schools? No sex education at all?”
“I think that it is the responsibility of parents to talk about the birds and bees with their children when the children are old enough,” said Gloria, relaxing for a moment. Then she grew animated again. “We don’t want teachers grooming and sexualising our kids. We don’t want teachers encouraging our kids to turn gay. Righteous God-fearing folk like Governor Desantis and President Trump are fighting the good fight against all the queer Democrats and their liberal agenda. People like Bernie Sanders and AOC. All these lefty liberals. They use the word ‘gay’ all the time. Gay this and gay that. Gay, gay, gay. They never stop saying the word ‘gay’. I talk about this with my girlfriends all the time when we get together for canasta of an evening, all the secret pedophiles in Hollywood and New York, how they like to drink the blood of babies, how they’re trying to destroy this country. We don’t talk about this when the kids are up – we always try to make sure the kids are in bed first – but we talk about this a lot. And I see stuff about this on Truth Social all the time. If President Trump were still president, which he still is, he would never have allowed this to happen.”
“Do you identify as a Republican?”
“Damn straight, I do. The Democrat party is the party of godless liberal elitists. Like Bernie Sanders and AOC. The Republican party is the party of the working class.”
Amos, by temperament taciturn and undemonstrative, a solid man of few words, had been waiting his turn quietly. When Jeff turned to Amos to ask him the next question, Amos quite clearly noted the way Jeff looked at him. The journalist was quite clearly giving him the glad eye. Fucking faggot, Amos thought to himself.
“And what about you, Amos? If you could say anything to the world, what would it be?”
“I believe,” Amos began, deliberately, quietly but not so quietly that he couldn’t be heard over the noise of the crowd, “that the United States is a Christian country, that it was founded on Christian principles. I believe it has lost its way. I believe in family and family values. I believe in raising our kids right, in teaching them good from bad. I have a wife. I have three boys and I am afraid of the world they’re gonna live in after I’m dead. Supposing Jesus doesn’t come back to judge us first. If my daddy were still alive – my daddy was a preacher – if he were still alive and he knew about this here march he would spit blood. He’s probably spinning in his grave right now. This march is an attack on the rights of parents to bring up their children as they should, to walk in the light of God.”
“So you also support Donald Trump?”
“I do. President Trump is a a true Christian man. I truly believe that he was put on Earth by God to save the United States from ruin, from the Communists and the perverts who want to drag us all down into perdition. Pardon the language. I believe that when he gets back into office, President Tump will take action against them. I don’t know quite what he’s gonna do but he’s said he’s our retribution. Maybe he’ll do something we’ll never know about. There’s a war going on in this country and I believe President Trump is on the right side of it. Trump is an instrument of God’s justice, and of God’s mercy, and whatever he does and however he does it, it’ll be God’s will. I have faith in President Trump.”
When the interview had finished, the reporters moved on to find other subjects to talk to. Amos wandered for a while among the Desantis supporters, sick at heart, without speaking to anyone, and then decided to go home early. He didn’t have the stomach to stay. He could leave it to his wife and the boys to hold down the fort. Because he had left early, Amos wasn’t present when the mass shooting occurred and only heard about it in the late afternoon – we’ll come back to the mass shooting in a moment. At home, Amos strayed from room to room, from the kitchen to the dining room, and back again. A black mood had descended upon him. Amos had been plagued by black moods all his life. Partly, he knew, his depression was a reaction to having been around so many queers. You wouldn’t believe there were so many queers in the world. If you needed any proof that the country was falling apart, the gathering he had seen in the Jacksonville town square was it. Worries about the boys also came back to torment him. He was afraid that the eldest, Ezekiel, who was sixteen, might turn gay despite Amos’s best efforts to prevent it. In truth he sometimes worried that all three boys might go gay. These thoughts had plagued him for years. Still, Amos found some reassurance in the fact that the three were still back there in town taking a stand for true Christian values. After a while, even though it was still only early in the afternoon, Amos decided he’d be happiest in bed and went to lie down.
There was a memory from his childhood that would sometimes suddenly pierce Amos like a needle. He’d only been about four or five – this was the ‘seventies. He’d been messing around with a doll that belonged to his sister, a Cathy Quick Curl Doll, and his daddy had caught him playing with it. Amos hadn’t known there was anything wrong with playing with his sister’s toys but his daddy did. He had taken Amos out to the woodshed and thrashed Amos a dozen times with his belt, and then told Amos through gritted teeth never to play around with girls’ toys again. That was the only thing he had said. At the time, Amos hadn’t understood why his daddy was punishing him but now he knew. His daddy had been trying to thrash the queerness out of him. His daddy was a good man, was trying to raise his children to be decent God fearing men and women who loved virtue and hated vice, men who were men and women who were women; Amos knew this now. As he lay in bed and thought about this, a tear leaked from the corner of his eye. He thought about all the queers he had seen that day and what his daddy would have thought of them. He thought about the gay reporter who had looked at him the wrong way and asked him about President Trump. Feeling a stirring below, he decided to think about the reporter and do it to himself – this was something he’d felt an urge to do sometimes ever since he was a teenager. When he’d finished, as always after he’d thought about a man and done it to himself, Amos wept for real, hot tears of shame running from his eyes. Amos knew he wasn’t queer. But sometimes he wondered if maybe the libs were right when they said homosexuality wasn’t a choice, that some people were just born gay. Maybe Amos had got the gay gene from his mammy like he’d heard some people say sometimes happened. Maybe he was queer after all. It was a black thought he tried to push out of his head. He reassured himself that nobody knew about his sinfulness; this was the most important thing. God knew but nobody else did. Amos decided to get up and seek solace in the bible.
Every Sunday when he was little Amos had gone to church and seen his daddy deliver the sermon, and almost every Sunday his daddy had talked about homosexuality. He had talked about men wearing women’s clothes and women taking men’s jobs like being doctors and judges and police officers; he had talked about the wickedness of those who didn’t know their place. He had talked about the liberal atheists in Hollywood and New York, these modern Sodoms and Gomorrahs, doing drugs and having premarital intercourse and consorting with prostitutes. He had talked about women killing their unborn babies. Sometimes he talked about how the men in these places would sodomise and fellate each other. He had talked about how the faithful needed to stay strong, resist temptation, remain virtuous, avoid straying from the path of Christ; he talked about the tortures inflicted on sinners in hell, the burnings and the mutilations. Only if the faithful remained pure would God admit them into the Kingdom and he would only let in a few, the elect, like those few in the congregation who were worthy of his words; the rest would be hurled head first into the pit of flames. These were true fire-and-brimstone sermons and, although Amos hadn’t understood every word his daddy used, he had marked the way that members of the congregation would leap to their feet and yell Hallelujah! whenever his daddy described an especially brutal torment inflicted on sinners in hell. Today, on the day of the march, Amos thought again about those sermons. He reread, as he had so often over the years, Leviticus 20:13, a passage he had underlined, and earnestly beseeched Christ to believe him when he said that he truly repented, prayed to God for forgiveness. And as he had so many times since he was young, he prayed to Jesus for Jesus to take the gay feelings and desires away from him and to cure him, to make him a real man like his daddy and President Trump. He didn’t think Jesus would answer his prayer.
The march commenced on schedule, at noon. The demonstrators surged along the high street carrying rainbow flags and placards with slogans emblazoned on them, single words like “love” and “pride” or expressions like “equal rights for all”. Even though the pro-Desantis supporters lined the street on either side yelling imprecations and insults at them, the activists were ebullient, jubilant. They were buoyed particularly by a fact, a fact not all of them had known beforehand but which had been passed from person to person that day – a recent poll had found that more than one in five Generation Z adults now identified as LGBTQ. It had doubled over the course of a generation. They were winning the battle. Certainly they had always known that their cause was righteous but the fact that so many people were now free to be themselves proved just how decisively the political tide had turned in their favour, that the arc of history bent towards justice; it seemed that it would only take another couple of generations for them to achieve total victory. Men walked with their arms around their male partners and women walked hand in hand with other women. Daniel was marching with Beatrice and some other allies and carrying a placard that read “Gay lives matter”. As he walked, he noted the huge number of incredibly hot girls taking part in the protest. Some of them, he assumed, were probably exclusively homosexual but there might be quite a few bisexual or pansexual girls around and maybe even a few ordinary straight girls thrown into the mix. Possibly there would be some kind of big party or something that evening back at the campsite with beer and weed and maybe molly and one of them might end up hooking up with him. The idea of getting laid later on was something pleasant he could toy around with in his mind as he walked; even though it might not pan out in reality just turning it over in his imagination was enjoyable enough on its own. Of course, now that he had come out as pansexual live on state television, he supposed he should also consider hooking up with a cis man or trans man instead. This thought, when it occurred to him, was a little disconcerting – he didn’t think it had occurred to him earlier. But Daniel decided to set this somewhat unnerving prospect aside for now and worry about it later.
The shooting, as later phone records indicated, occurred at 12:37. The semi-automatic assault weapon that the gunman used was one he had bought legally from a gun fair earlier that day in a neighbouring town. It was unclear what message he was intending to convey with the shooting because he opened fire indiscriminately on both factions. Before he was subdued, twelve people had been injured and four people, including Daniel Easterbrook, had been killed. Independent observers might have noted the irony of Daniel being killed the same day that he had come out publicly as pansexual.
Mass shootings were hardly rare occurrences but it was unusual for one to take place with so many from the media in the near vicinity. It made for dramatic footage and excellent ratings. As usual, the national conversation turned immediately to the most significant issue raised by the tragedy: mental illness. It was obvious to everyone that mental illness must have been the cause of the shooting but unfortunately, as was often the case, there had been no red flags to indicate that the shooter was mentally ill apart from a few somewhat off-colour posts on Facebook and comments on Reddit, comments barely distinguishable in content and tone from all the other comments posted daily. An additional problem was that no-one was quite sure what the term ‘mental illness’ meant. Everyone agreed nevertheless that an epidemic of ‘mental illness’ was gripping the nation and some commentators began hinting at a final solution: some kind of national screening process should be set in place to identify the ‘mentally ill’ as early as possible, preferably when they were children. Although it might violate the Second Amendment rights of the ‘mentally ill’ to prevent them buying semi-automatic weapons when they grew up, it might be possible to neutralise the threat they posed to society by ensuring, first, that they were well medicated all their lives and, second, by somehow isolating the ‘mentally ill’ from the rest of the population who it could safely be assumed were not ‘mentally ill’. Certainly there were complexities that would need to be untangled before such a screening process could be implemented such as, for instance, whether ‘autism’ should or should not be considered a ‘mental illness’. But it could be left to the policy wonks at state and federal level to work out the details. The pundits repeatedly insisted that their role was not to tell the government what to do but simply make recommendations.
What everyone was sure about was that the fight for Queer rights would go on. Despite the sometimes vituperative and inflammatory language used, combatants on both sides repeatedly insisted that their primary concern was the welfare and protection of children. Of course the issue of LGBTQ rights was only one issue among many that divided the nation – where one stood on any particular issue depended entirely on which political party one supported. Either one side or the other was right and either one side or the other would win the next election, albeit an election to be decided by people who didn’t really know what the word ‘queer’ meant and who didn’t follow the news at all. Some commentators darkly predicted a third possibility: civil war, red states versus blue states. Some of the more historically minded even argued that the current culture war could be traced all the way back to the founding of the nation, that City on the Hill, a city that was either, depending on where you sourced your information, a city whose inhabitants had bared their souls, blemishes and all, for all the world to see, or a shining beacon of immaculate moral rectitude. Some independent observers felt they could even detect an adumbration of the impending civil war in the first civil war, a war won by progressives under the leadership of a president who, as everyone knows, was a queer Democrat who supported gay marriage. Whatever your view of history, you could be sure that, in the end, the right side would win.
The march was taking place in the small city of Jacksonville, population 50,000, one of several cities in the South with that name, in the Florida panhandle. Most of the participants, like most of the vendors, came from out of town. A typical resident of Jacksonville wouldn’t have known what a chai latte or samosa was if one had bitten him. The march was one of many planned across the state in opposition to Ron Desantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. This was of course a topic of considerable controversy throughout the nation and the demonstrators were almost outnumbered by members of the media. Journalists from all the major networks and local and national newspapers were present to cover the story which was being talked of as a barometer of the political mood of the nation. An enormous number of social media influencers were also in attendance. Of course the journalists, among them Alice Moretz, who worked for a local Florida news outlet, knew the real reason for the coverage, although it was not something she or other media workers would own up to publicly. Legacy media was dying. But a surefire way to attract readers and viewers was to report on stories related to gender and sexuality. Stories like these were catnip for the masses. Cynical, yes, but you needed to pay the bills somehow. The population of the whole country was evenly divided between those who ardently supported the LGBTQIA+ community and those who thought America was literally going to hell and that Christ was coming back any day soon to sort the saved from the sinners; either way, reporting on the march would pull in a sizeable audience.
Alice and her cameraman had located a couple of activists wiling to be interviewed and brought them to the edge of the square. The first of the two, Beatrice, was a certified therapist and psychologist specialising in issues of child and adolescent identity, and the second, Daniel, was a recent liberal arts graduate from Ohio. They had met earlier in the day and connected over their shared admiration for Bernie Sanders and AOC. Alice asked them if they wanted to share anything with “viewers here in the US or around the world”.
Beatrice immediately seized the opportunity, speaking up above the hubbub around her. “Yes, there is something important I want to say. The most important thing for people to understand about gender and sexuality is that they are inherent. What happens in classrooms can’t change them. You can’t make someone gay. A person’s sexuality and gender is something they’re born with. Every day more and more scientific evidence is coming to light, scientific evidence that shows that there are neurological differences between people that exist from birth, neurological differences that explain why people express their genders and sexualities the way they do later on in adulthood. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill is anti-science. It’s anti-compassion. It’s deeply ignorant and harmful. I actually think it is evil. It will hurt children and adolescents. Children need to grow up in environments in which they can safely express who they are. Children need to be affirmed in their identities.This is why it is vitally important that issues to do with identity be discussed openly and honestly with children at home and in schools. Not talking about these things with children can only be a recipe for serious mental illness later on in life. This is what we know now.”
“Do you identify as queer yourself?” asked Alice.
“Personally I identify as a cisgender heterosexual female,” said Beatrice, a little reluctantly. “But I am here in support of my clients. Sometimes it can take a person years to come to terms with who they are.”
“And what about you Daniel? How do you identify?”
“I identify as a non-binary pansexual,” enunciated Daniel carefully.
“That’s interesting,” said Alice, curiosity piqued. “When did you know you were pansexual?
“I think I always knew I was different from other people and didn’t know why,” Daniel said after considering for a moment. “Then I did a course at college about sexuality and gender and it got me thinking. And then I did some research on Youtube. I mean, I think now that the signs were always there. I had male friends as well as female friends when I was growing up. I liked Ryan Gosling and Liam Hemsworth. I also liked Taylor Swift. I was always more of a fan of Emo bands than f football. I mean, I think now that it was obvious.”
“What’s the difference between pansexuality and bisexuality?” asked the cameraman.
“Well, for me,” said Daniel, after considering for another moment, “pansexuality means that you like everything. I like animals. I mean, for instance, I like whales. I’m a member of Greenpeace. I’m very worried about climate change. I’m very concerned about the situation in the Middle East. For me, pansexuality aligns with my political commitments. And it’s not just animals, I also like inanimate objects. I have an XBox that I play quite a lot. I like that XBox. So I guess I would say that for me pansexuality is all about liking everything and not limiting yourself to just liking human members of the opposite sex.”
“The important thing to remember,” Beatrice interposed, perhaps sensing the Daniel was muddying the waters, “is that Daniel was born a non-binary pansexual. Most people are born with brains that have the same gender as their assigned biological sex but some biological men are born with female brains and some biological women are born with male brains. Daniel was born with a brain that is exactly fifty percent male and fifty percent female.”
“There’s another thing,” Daniel went on. “It’s not just gender stuff. I’m autistic. I have Autism Spectrum Disorder. I think its important to fight for the rights of autistic people.”
“Was it like when you realised you were pansexual? Was there a moment when you knew you were autistic?”
“It’s like I said before – I always knew I was different from other people. And then I found some people talking about autism on Youtube. And I realised I had all the signs. I have something called mono-tropism. Sometimes I play Legend of Zelda for hours on end on my XBox. And sometimes I miss social cues and sometimes I don’t always make eye contact. When I realised I had autism, everything fell into place. I felt massively better about myself.”
The cameraman, unable to help himself, interjected again. “I have a cousin who’s autistic. He goes to a special school, doesn’t talk at all, and throws tantrums because people can’t understand him.”
“There’s enormous ignorance out there about autism,” Beatrice explained, she hoped in a non-condescending fashion. “You have to draw a distinction between classical autism and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Only a few people have classical autism but many people have Autism Spectrum Disorder. It’s something else you’re born with. Some people have it and some people don’t. It’s on a spectrum. It’s just like with gender and sexuality – autistic people are born neurologically different to other people. This is the something I can’t emphasise enough, that neurodiversity is a real thing. Different kinds of people are born with different kinds of brain. For instance, did you know that Einstein was autistic? It can be very helpful to the self-esteem of autistic people to find out how many famous people in history were probably autistic.”
“I didn’t know Einstein was autistic,” said the cameraman.
“Of course he was autistic! Isn’t it obvious? For one thing, you can tell he was autistic because he was good at math.”
In the square, the demonstrators were experimentally raising and lowering a banner emblazoned with all the colours of the rainbow and the slogan “Unity in Diversity”. Mark, the cameraman, allowed his gaze to drift over to it. Sometimes he had considered quitting the whole news production game and pursuing his true passion, graphic design. It had been his major at college. Of course, with the advent of AI, graphic designers were probably going to become obsolete. Or maybe he could chuck in the whole television thing and see if there was any feasible way he could break into proper film work. Anything that would be a change from the endless parade of numbnuts he saw daily. But manning the camera for a TV network was a steady job, at least for now, and would help him pay off his Skoda and pay down his student debt at least a little.
“Mark! Concentrate!”
“Sorry. I was just checking the light conditions.”
“Just a followup question,” said Alice to Daniel again. “I’m interested to know. Daniel – do you currently have a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend?”
“At the moment I have a girlfriend,” Daniel said, slightly awkwardly. “She’s not here today. But that doesn’t mean,” he went on more animatedly, “that tomorrow I wont’t get into a relationship with my XBox. Or maybe with a whale.”
On a neighbouring street, the inevitable counterdemonstration was taking shape. A far larger proportion of the protestors in this group were locals, mostly made up of committed Baptists from surrounding congregations. Many of them had arrived at the town centre on hired coaches directly from church, organised by church leaders. Jeff Stevens, an associate of Alice working for the same TV station, had managed to coral a couple of Desantis supporters, Amos, who helped manage a peach farm, and Gloria, who had identified herself to Jeff as a homemaker. As Alice had, Jeff kickstarted the interview by asking them if they had anything to say to “viewers here in the US and around the world”.
“We’re here to send a message to all these gays and libs that the lifestyles they’re pushing on our kids is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord,” said Gloria enthusiastically, grabbing the chance. “God hates gays and Jesus hated gays. We’re here because in the Holy Book it quite clearly states that Jehova created man and woman, not thirty-seven different genders. We’re here because Jesus quite clearly said that marriage is between a man and a woman. We don’t want our kids being taught in schools that sodomy and bestiality and necrophilia are just lifestyle choices. We don’t want our children being sexualised and groomed by pedophile Democrat teachers. We’re here because people need to wake up,realise that the other side is ignorant and evil. We don’t want our kids being encouraged to choose to be gay. Righteous God-fearing folk need to take a stand before the world slides into total depravity and we need to to do it now, before Christ comes back to judge us all.”
“So you agree with Governor Desantis that there should be no talk of sex or gender in schools? No sex education at all?”
“I think that it is the responsibility of parents to talk about the birds and bees with their children when the children are old enough,” said Gloria, relaxing for a moment. Then she grew animated again. “We don’t want teachers grooming and sexualising our kids. We don’t want teachers encouraging our kids to turn gay. Righteous God-fearing folk like Governor Desantis and President Trump are fighting the good fight against all the queer Democrats and their liberal agenda. People like Bernie Sanders and AOC. All these lefty liberals. They use the word ‘gay’ all the time. Gay this and gay that. Gay, gay, gay. They never stop saying the word ‘gay’. I talk about this with my girlfriends all the time when we get together for canasta of an evening, all the secret pedophiles in Hollywood and New York, how they like to drink the blood of babies, how they’re trying to destroy this country. We don’t talk about this when the kids are up – we always try to make sure the kids are in bed first – but we talk about this a lot. And I see stuff about this on Truth Social all the time. If President Trump were still president, which he still is, he would never have allowed this to happen.”
“Do you identify as a Republican?”
“Damn straight, I do. The Democrat party is the party of godless liberal elitists. Like Bernie Sanders and AOC. The Republican party is the party of the working class.”
Amos, by temperament taciturn and undemonstrative, a solid man of few words, had been waiting his turn quietly. When Jeff turned to Amos to ask him the next question, Amos quite clearly noted the way Jeff looked at him. The journalist was quite clearly giving him the glad eye. Fucking faggot, Amos thought to himself.
“And what about you, Amos? If you could say anything to the world, what would it be?”
“I believe,” Amos began, deliberately, quietly but not so quietly that he couldn’t be heard over the noise of the crowd, “that the United States is a Christian country, that it was founded on Christian principles. I believe it has lost its way. I believe in family and family values. I believe in raising our kids right, in teaching them good from bad. I have a wife. I have three boys and I am afraid of the world they’re gonna live in after I’m dead. Supposing Jesus doesn’t come back to judge us first. If my daddy were still alive – my daddy was a preacher – if he were still alive and he knew about this here march he would spit blood. He’s probably spinning in his grave right now. This march is an attack on the rights of parents to bring up their children as they should, to walk in the light of God.”
“So you also support Donald Trump?”
“I do. President Trump is a a true Christian man. I truly believe that he was put on Earth by God to save the United States from ruin, from the Communists and the perverts who want to drag us all down into perdition. Pardon the language. I believe that when he gets back into office, President Tump will take action against them. I don’t know quite what he’s gonna do but he’s said he’s our retribution. Maybe he’ll do something we’ll never know about. There’s a war going on in this country and I believe President Trump is on the right side of it. Trump is an instrument of God’s justice, and of God’s mercy, and whatever he does and however he does it, it’ll be God’s will. I have faith in President Trump.”
When the interview had finished, the reporters moved on to find other subjects to talk to. Amos wandered for a while among the Desantis supporters, sick at heart, without speaking to anyone, and then decided to go home early. He didn’t have the stomach to stay. He could leave it to his wife and the boys to hold down the fort. Because he had left early, Amos wasn’t present when the mass shooting occurred and only heard about it in the late afternoon – we’ll come back to the mass shooting in a moment. At home, Amos strayed from room to room, from the kitchen to the dining room, and back again. A black mood had descended upon him. Amos had been plagued by black moods all his life. Partly, he knew, his depression was a reaction to having been around so many queers. You wouldn’t believe there were so many queers in the world. If you needed any proof that the country was falling apart, the gathering he had seen in the Jacksonville town square was it. Worries about the boys also came back to torment him. He was afraid that the eldest, Ezekiel, who was sixteen, might turn gay despite Amos’s best efforts to prevent it. In truth he sometimes worried that all three boys might go gay. These thoughts had plagued him for years. Still, Amos found some reassurance in the fact that the three were still back there in town taking a stand for true Christian values. After a while, even though it was still only early in the afternoon, Amos decided he’d be happiest in bed and went to lie down.
There was a memory from his childhood that would sometimes suddenly pierce Amos like a needle. He’d only been about four or five – this was the ‘seventies. He’d been messing around with a doll that belonged to his sister, a Cathy Quick Curl Doll, and his daddy had caught him playing with it. Amos hadn’t known there was anything wrong with playing with his sister’s toys but his daddy did. He had taken Amos out to the woodshed and thrashed Amos a dozen times with his belt, and then told Amos through gritted teeth never to play around with girls’ toys again. That was the only thing he had said. At the time, Amos hadn’t understood why his daddy was punishing him but now he knew. His daddy had been trying to thrash the queerness out of him. His daddy was a good man, was trying to raise his children to be decent God fearing men and women who loved virtue and hated vice, men who were men and women who were women; Amos knew this now. As he lay in bed and thought about this, a tear leaked from the corner of his eye. He thought about all the queers he had seen that day and what his daddy would have thought of them. He thought about the gay reporter who had looked at him the wrong way and asked him about President Trump. Feeling a stirring below, he decided to think about the reporter and do it to himself – this was something he’d felt an urge to do sometimes ever since he was a teenager. When he’d finished, as always after he’d thought about a man and done it to himself, Amos wept for real, hot tears of shame running from his eyes. Amos knew he wasn’t queer. But sometimes he wondered if maybe the libs were right when they said homosexuality wasn’t a choice, that some people were just born gay. Maybe Amos had got the gay gene from his mammy like he’d heard some people say sometimes happened. Maybe he was queer after all. It was a black thought he tried to push out of his head. He reassured himself that nobody knew about his sinfulness; this was the most important thing. God knew but nobody else did. Amos decided to get up and seek solace in the bible.
Every Sunday when he was little Amos had gone to church and seen his daddy deliver the sermon, and almost every Sunday his daddy had talked about homosexuality. He had talked about men wearing women’s clothes and women taking men’s jobs like being doctors and judges and police officers; he had talked about the wickedness of those who didn’t know their place. He had talked about the liberal atheists in Hollywood and New York, these modern Sodoms and Gomorrahs, doing drugs and having premarital intercourse and consorting with prostitutes. He had talked about women killing their unborn babies. Sometimes he talked about how the men in these places would sodomise and fellate each other. He had talked about how the faithful needed to stay strong, resist temptation, remain virtuous, avoid straying from the path of Christ; he talked about the tortures inflicted on sinners in hell, the burnings and the mutilations. Only if the faithful remained pure would God admit them into the Kingdom and he would only let in a few, the elect, like those few in the congregation who were worthy of his words; the rest would be hurled head first into the pit of flames. These were true fire-and-brimstone sermons and, although Amos hadn’t understood every word his daddy used, he had marked the way that members of the congregation would leap to their feet and yell Hallelujah! whenever his daddy described an especially brutal torment inflicted on sinners in hell. Today, on the day of the march, Amos thought again about those sermons. He reread, as he had so often over the years, Leviticus 20:13, a passage he had underlined, and earnestly beseeched Christ to believe him when he said that he truly repented, prayed to God for forgiveness. And as he had so many times since he was young, he prayed to Jesus for Jesus to take the gay feelings and desires away from him and to cure him, to make him a real man like his daddy and President Trump. He didn’t think Jesus would answer his prayer.
The march commenced on schedule, at noon. The demonstrators surged along the high street carrying rainbow flags and placards with slogans emblazoned on them, single words like “love” and “pride” or expressions like “equal rights for all”. Even though the pro-Desantis supporters lined the street on either side yelling imprecations and insults at them, the activists were ebullient, jubilant. They were buoyed particularly by a fact, a fact not all of them had known beforehand but which had been passed from person to person that day – a recent poll had found that more than one in five Generation Z adults now identified as LGBTQ. It had doubled over the course of a generation. They were winning the battle. Certainly they had always known that their cause was righteous but the fact that so many people were now free to be themselves proved just how decisively the political tide had turned in their favour, that the arc of history bent towards justice; it seemed that it would only take another couple of generations for them to achieve total victory. Men walked with their arms around their male partners and women walked hand in hand with other women. Daniel was marching with Beatrice and some other allies and carrying a placard that read “Gay lives matter”. As he walked, he noted the huge number of incredibly hot girls taking part in the protest. Some of them, he assumed, were probably exclusively homosexual but there might be quite a few bisexual or pansexual girls around and maybe even a few ordinary straight girls thrown into the mix. Possibly there would be some kind of big party or something that evening back at the campsite with beer and weed and maybe molly and one of them might end up hooking up with him. The idea of getting laid later on was something pleasant he could toy around with in his mind as he walked; even though it might not pan out in reality just turning it over in his imagination was enjoyable enough on its own. Of course, now that he had come out as pansexual live on state television, he supposed he should also consider hooking up with a cis man or trans man instead. This thought, when it occurred to him, was a little disconcerting – he didn’t think it had occurred to him earlier. But Daniel decided to set this somewhat unnerving prospect aside for now and worry about it later.
The shooting, as later phone records indicated, occurred at 12:37. The semi-automatic assault weapon that the gunman used was one he had bought legally from a gun fair earlier that day in a neighbouring town. It was unclear what message he was intending to convey with the shooting because he opened fire indiscriminately on both factions. Before he was subdued, twelve people had been injured and four people, including Daniel Easterbrook, had been killed. Independent observers might have noted the irony of Daniel being killed the same day that he had come out publicly as pansexual.
Mass shootings were hardly rare occurrences but it was unusual for one to take place with so many from the media in the near vicinity. It made for dramatic footage and excellent ratings. As usual, the national conversation turned immediately to the most significant issue raised by the tragedy: mental illness. It was obvious to everyone that mental illness must have been the cause of the shooting but unfortunately, as was often the case, there had been no red flags to indicate that the shooter was mentally ill apart from a few somewhat off-colour posts on Facebook and comments on Reddit, comments barely distinguishable in content and tone from all the other comments posted daily. An additional problem was that no-one was quite sure what the term ‘mental illness’ meant. Everyone agreed nevertheless that an epidemic of ‘mental illness’ was gripping the nation and some commentators began hinting at a final solution: some kind of national screening process should be set in place to identify the ‘mentally ill’ as early as possible, preferably when they were children. Although it might violate the Second Amendment rights of the ‘mentally ill’ to prevent them buying semi-automatic weapons when they grew up, it might be possible to neutralise the threat they posed to society by ensuring, first, that they were well medicated all their lives and, second, by somehow isolating the ‘mentally ill’ from the rest of the population who it could safely be assumed were not ‘mentally ill’. Certainly there were complexities that would need to be untangled before such a screening process could be implemented such as, for instance, whether ‘autism’ should or should not be considered a ‘mental illness’. But it could be left to the policy wonks at state and federal level to work out the details. The pundits repeatedly insisted that their role was not to tell the government what to do but simply make recommendations.
What everyone was sure about was that the fight for Queer rights would go on. Despite the sometimes vituperative and inflammatory language used, combatants on both sides repeatedly insisted that their primary concern was the welfare and protection of children. Of course the issue of LGBTQ rights was only one issue among many that divided the nation – where one stood on any particular issue depended entirely on which political party one supported. Either one side or the other was right and either one side or the other would win the next election, albeit an election to be decided by people who didn’t really know what the word ‘queer’ meant and who didn’t follow the news at all. Some commentators darkly predicted a third possibility: civil war, red states versus blue states. Some of the more historically minded even argued that the current culture war could be traced all the way back to the founding of the nation, that City on the Hill, a city that was either, depending on where you sourced your information, a city whose inhabitants had bared their souls, blemishes and all, for all the world to see, or a shining beacon of immaculate moral rectitude. Some independent observers felt they could even detect an adumbration of the impending civil war in the first civil war, a war won by progressives under the leadership of a president who, as everyone knows, was a queer Democrat who supported gay marriage. Whatever your view of history, you could be sure that, in the end, the right side would win.
No comments:
Post a Comment