It's funny. I was thinking about writing a similar article just yesterday when your draft popped up in the P&P queue. By similar, I mean I was thinking about writing that I feel a great deal of fear these days, a kind of fear that is new to me.
My teenage years were bad. As a closeted gay kid in a conservative religious family in the Bible Belt, I didn't have a lot of hope for my personal future.
I had a few bright lights in my life, though, including a young, liberal guidance counselor (hi, Kai!) who helped me understand that progress was happening and was probably inevitable, that our generation would help usher in a kinder, much more inclusive society.
For pretty much my entire life, I held onto her "arc of progress" thinking. Progress did indeed look like an unstoppable wave. Setbacks happened, life could be painful, but "it gets better" was part of the unquestionable fabric of my personal universe.
Even in the worst days of the HIV/AIDS crisis, I knew (with a certainty of knowledge I had no way to explain to myself) that the treatment would come, the dying would stop, and we would overcome.
Indeed, we did. We lost far too many loved ones, but after effective treatment became real in 1996, the struggle for LGBTQ acceptance and equity roared into what felt like unstoppable overdrive.
My faith in the arc of progress grew just as much.
My faith did not waiver during the Trump years, despite his relentless attacks on equality, despite a raw homo/transphobia he made acceptable again on the public stage.
We would defeat Trump on the merits, I told myself, and progress would resume.
I was right on the first part, wrong on the second.
The most overwhelming, effective anti-LGBTQ backlash I've ever experienced happened after Trump left office, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
My ideas about inevitable progress have changed. I've never seen attacks like I'm seeing today, not even during the Anita Bryant years so many decades ago.
How am I doing?
The best I can, I guess. That scared teenager I used to be reminds me pretty often that he's still part of me, still remembers all the hopelessness we felt before we chose to believe in progress.
I haven't stopped believing, but keeping the faith is harder. Nightmares about my teenage years and about the AIDS era come much more frequently.
Even so, my determination to work — to fight back—remains as strong as ever.
In part, I think I'm afraid that if I stop fighting, I will give in to despair and admit that progress isn't a sure thing. I can't imagine who I would be in a universe like that.
So, I am very, very tired, but I am still me. I'll take that. What else can I do?
