Loud Mouth Brown Girl

Every year for Pride, except the last few years, I’ve planned a great outfit, done my hair and makeup, and had a great time being proud of being myself.

Pride for me has always been an escape. When I go to Pride, I don’t – usually – have to worry about seeing my abusers, but two years ago that’s exactly what happened.

It took me two years to get over seeing M at Pride, because I thought I’d be able to handle it if I saw any of them in the wild, but the urge to get violent was so strong, that I had to run from the event.

Over the last few years, we’ve been dealing with COVID at home, as well as at mom’s work places, and then on top of that there’s Palestine, Yemin, Congo, the DRC, Haiti, all these places going through horrific events and realities that I don’t even know how to describe.

It’s been rough, all around, for the world. But especially for Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.

This year during Pride month, the Indigenous community in America lost one of their own when Jonathan Joss was murdered in what was obviously a hate crime. Not only was his house burned, his dogs head and collar were strategically placed where he would find them, when he returned to survey the damage with his husband. It was while grabbing the mail, that Joss was harassed verbally and then gunned down.

Pride started as a riot, and there hasn’t been a Pride in history that didn’t start with the blood of the innocent being stolen from them by people who want a darker way of life.

There are people I’ve learned who look at certain types of literature in one of two ways:

A warning

A way of life.

If you look at it as a warning, and when I say “it” I mean shows like Divergent, Hunger Games, The Handmaid’s Tale, then you are someone who doesn’t want a dystopian reality.

But there are people in this world who would kill for exactly that, I didn’t used to believe in Death Cults until I heard Netanyahu call his people “The Children of Light.”

That’s what they used to call us in Roman Catholic school, it was as creepy then as it is now.

This year for Pride I will be wearing black, for Tinu, Andrew, Meg, Jonathan, and all the others we’ve lost over the years. But I’ll also be wearing my keffiyeh, to represent Greta Thunburg who is as I write this, traveling across the world to take aid to the people of Gaza.

Thunberg is literally putting her life on the line, to protect the most innocent, and marginalized among us, and she’s not asking us to join her, or protect her, or stand up for her, instead she is saying “I am doing this. Period.”

And she’s doing the damned thing. I wasn’t sure about her when she first appeared on my CNN screen, but she’s been doing the fucking work and the rest of us have no right to do less.

Right now I am worried for my health, and I feel guilty for feeling sick when I know that I am capable of doing much more, but I also know that if I could I would.

I also know that the next three weeks are going to help me feel a lot better because I’ll be getting iron infusions, that will hopefully kickstart my system and help me get out of this shithole I’ve dug myself into.

I can’t tell you how amazing it feels to finally have a doctor who gives a fuck about my wellbeing, and is being proactive about making sure I get what I need to stay healthy. But it was a long journey to get here, and some people – specifically trans people, never get the medical care they need.

I don’t just mean mentally and emotionally, I mean physically. Trans people often don’t talk about this but many of them struggle with getting the physicians they need who can work with them without judgement.

Often when we “Come out of the closet,” so they say, it’s hard for people to accept that our reality is different than what they grew up with. That’s why Marsha started a riot, it wasn’t because she was an angry Black woman, it was because she was a tired Black woman who was sick of not being treated the way she deserved to be.

We are where we are today with mental health and medical treatment for Black women being (marginally) better than it was thirty years ago because of women who fought for our bodies to be protected and treated with respect.

We are here because of men like Harvey Milk who marched, ran, and led when everyone said “No one wants a gay man in office.”

We are here because of all the people who came before who built the path that we’re currently walking on now. We’re not building anything new by hosting Pride events, we are literally celebrating on the bones of everything that came before, and I don’t think that until this moment I understood what a powerful reminder of liberation that is.

There was a time when gay people were executed in the streets, burned at the stake, raped and tortured, without justice. While a lot of that stuff still happens, at least now we have some semblance of a system that occasionally works, but yes friends, it could work soooo much fucking better.

We the people have shown the world that we have collective power, and now is the time to start harnessing it.

Right now Americans across the USA are facing some of the most fascist like regime tactics in history. Americans – born, bred, and lived their whole life Americans – are being jailed, detained, and or deported, purely because Trump has a quota he has to fill to pay back all the crooked billionaires who put his sorry ass in office.

We can all see what’s happening, and we know where it’s going to end if we don’t stop it. I don’t know what to do over the next four years except continue to fight, and use my voice to remind people that we all deserve a place in this world, and if you don’t think so, you’re welcome to leave.

As we speak, Elon Musk is trying to build a space station that will host real live humans in space to live. Let em go. Bye Karen, see ya Bruce, have a nice life out there in space, do not come back.

Let the vampires take off, and let us rebuild a world that is fair and equitable for all, not just the few that can afford to live in this world.

Tinu died because she couldn’t afford cancer treatments. She caught a thing, and couldn’t break it, because her nurses wouldn’t mask up even though they knew how sick she was. She leaves behind a family of people who adored her and will miss her for the rest of time. May she rest with the ancestors now.

Andrew died having lived a full life, and the difference between him and Tinu was vast. She was a Black woman in America, he was a white man in Australia, they couldn’t have been more different if they tried.

Meg died of an overdose, I don’t know what to say here, other than she sang like a bird, she was beautiful, kind, and I loved her.

Terry died of a cold. A fucking cold, because her immune system couldn’t handle it. I will miss my friend very much, and regret that I didn’t make a stronger effort to keep her in my life.

I will wear black because I have regrets, I will wear my PALESTINIAN Keffiyeh, because it reminds me Nada, who sent it for my birthday, a woman I love more than I love breathing. A woman who reminds me every day that even when things are bad and terrible, the people of Palestine are the hope we’re looking for.

Pride was never about forgetting, it was always about remembering, about honoring, about pushing forward against the limits they set for us.

We can have a better world. I believe this, because I see the children – like Greta fighting for one, and I see her army standing there beside her, and I know, that in this century we are not alone.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall, The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl