Care about people other than yourselves, I beg this of you

When I was about eighteen, I left my abusive parents in New Orleans and moved to New York City on my own. I'd been writing for a magazine based in San Francisco that was planning to move its offices to NYC, and I'd been promised a full-time staff role once that happened. I moved a month ahead of time to get settled, but then things at the magazine went tits up (it was a weird situation — they even made a movie about it) and it fell through. Suddenly I was in NYC without the job I'd been promised, right as Bush kicked off the Iraq War and tipped the US into recession. I'd spent what little I had to my name getting to NYC and getting a place; I'd naively paid a deposit and first month's rent up front on what I thought was a studio apartment, only to find out once I arrived that I was renting a room in a sharehouse owned by a creepy geriatric who "normally only lets Chinese college students move in" and who sexually harassed me on multiple occasions. When the job fell through and I had no way to pay rent, he offered to let it slide another month if he got to watch me jerk off to his collection of gay Asian porn. I declined, and moved out.

What followed was nearly a year of homelessness — mostly couch surfing wherever I could find a place to crash, with some bouts of sleeping rough. I quickly made friends with a group of other homeless queer teenagers who hung out around Christopher Street Pier, its significance to queer history something I'd only learn about much, much later. Many of them were people of colour, many of them were trans, many of them were sex workers. I never accepted anything outright transactionally, but across that year I definitely went on dates with men significantly older than me — men I never would have talked to if I hadn't needed a place to stay and a shower, or if they weren't shouting dinner. I didn't know the term "survival sex" at the time, but that's absolutely what it was. Still, at one particularly low point, I remember calling my mother from a payphone in the middle of the night and screaming into the receiver that, despite everything I was dealing with at the time, it was still better than living with them. So, there's that.

After about a year, I finally landed a job and a stable place and started putting my life together. I stayed friends with the people I'd met, many of whom I absolutely credit with the fact that I'm still alive two decades on, but the one I cared about the most was a gorgeous six-foot-five Puerto Rican trans girl a couple years older than me named Roxi. Roxi was the first trans person I ever (knowingly) met, and she could shift from the most glamorous human being god ever put on this earth to absolutely the sort of soldier you'd want in the trenches with you. In the stretch between getting said job and said apartment, while I was saving money up, I got jumped by a couple of guys who were going to rob me or bash me or worse — I don't know which. I still have a scar on my upper thigh where one of them slashed me with a knife. Then, out of nowhere like deus ex machina, Roxi showed up with a hammer, cracked one of them in the leg, and sent them all running. Afterwards, she helped me limp back to the pier, and I got drunk for the first time with the other queer kids while she stitched the slash up. I don't think I asked her how she knew how to sew stitches but then that was the sort of thing she would have known how to do.

Roxi was making money the way many trans women of colour who "hung out" around the Christopher Street pier did, and one day she disappeared.

This wasn't unusual for some of the other kids, but it was for her. She was a few years older than the rest of us and had adopted a matriarchal persona; she was also one of the few I never, ever saw doing drugs, even though I couldn't begrudge most of the kids there whatever form of escapism they needed. It was out of character, and we were all concerned. My experience with the police during her disappearance — whose interest in doing anything about it was not merely absent but negative — is certainly one of the things that's coloured my opinion of the job as a whole. By the time I was twenty I had founded a non-profit in her memory, and one of its chief objectives was advocating for cops actually giving a shit about crime against queer people.

I have been in the room with queer folks — predominantly cis, white and white-passing men like myself — much older than me, who stood there with smarmy, patronising expressions, lecturing me on the right and wrong way to do advocacy. I have sat in on arguments where those with the most power and privilege talked down on those with the least, dismissed their experiences and worries as unimportant next to their own, and triaged whose struggles got to matter. I was present when groups like the Human Rights Campaign threw trans people under the bus because they didn't want to rock the boat and risk their access to Democrats — which in practice meant Democratic events and the donors who funded them. I have said fuck them and fuck their money, and had people roll their eyes at me like they were playing six-dimensional chess and I was too young and too naive to "get it" — only to sit here two decades later as the smug little Cassandra I always end up being, going "I told you so" while everything plays out exactly the way I said it would back in the 2000s.

Mainstream queer — though I should be specific: "queer" generally meant the issues that affect white gay men first and foremost, with everyone else a trickle-down afterthought, if anything — organisations refused to stand up for trans people because their struggles were politically unpalatable to their own, and rather than show some selflessness and solidarity, they let conservatives and bigots carve us up. That didn't make things better, it just showed conservatives and bigots where the movement's weak points were.

And, having identified those weak points, they've spent decades exploiting them.

Oh, but we can get married (for now) and serve in the military (for now), so mission accomplished for us, I guess.

Anyway — this isn't a post about US politics. It's a post about Australia, and how, having watched this shit happen over there, I now get to watch the same types of people shoot themselves and the rest of us in the foot, with absolutely no lessons learned.

This weekend there will be a vote on several motions around the Sydney Mardi Gras parade and its governance. Several were brought up by a faction called Pride in Protest — predominantly organised by younger, gender-diverse people of colour — and several have been added to the docket by "Protect Mardi Gras," a faction of generally older, cis, white gay men who are exactly the sort who lectured me two decades ago about how there's a right and a wrong way to do politics and that I "just didn't get it". It might be a different cover artist, but they're singing the same song.

"Protect Mardi Gras" came into existence solely because Pride in Protest was making enough noise to be noticed. And the privileged cadre of people who don't want the boat rocked, who don't want their access revoked, who don't want to worry about things they're lucky enough never to have to, have come out well-financed and swinging. While we're watching trans folks erased from public life in front of our very eyes, "Protect Mardi Gras" is sitting on high tone-policing and telling others what the right way to be angry and demand their rights is.

I'm nearly half as old as many of the '78ers, and I know that there were plenty of people at the first Mardi Gras parade — just as there were at the Stonewall Riots and during ACT UP's protests demanding that politicians pay attention to the gay men dying of AIDS — saying "this isn't the right way to do this". Having secured a pyrrhic victory for themselves, they're pulling the ladder up behind them.

As I write this, Pride in Protest's main social media presence has been banned from Instagram, and people affiliated with "Protect Mardi Gras" are claiming credit for it via a mass reporting campaign. Look at the comments on anything on social media shared by either camp and you'll find people saying some of the most virulently heinous crap about Pride in Protest's organisers — up to and including calls to review the visa status of asylum seekers.

I shouldn't have to spell out how dark and outright evil it is to use the same weapons the bigots use against us — a few weeks ago The Laird was banned from social media; Midsumma has complained about shadow banning; other queer artists, non-profits, and venues in Australia and abroad have been swept up in mass banning campaigns potentially initiated by bigots and religious extremists.

And let me underscore, once again, that for most of the people involved in "Protect Mardi Gras," who count failed Labor political candidates and current Liberal political operatives amongst their strange bedfellows, trans people being disappeared and a genocide on the other side of the planet is an annoying thought-exercise — but it's an existential crisis for the people on whose behalf Pride in Protest are asking for recognition, affordances, and safety who are facing this stuff right now and being retaliated against by our own community for speaking up about it.

Well, it's an existential crisis for the cis white gays, too — they just don't realise it yet. Because for every cis gay man who thinks the discrimination stops with trans people: you're in for a rude awakening, the same as every cis gay man in the US now staring down a reality where the bigots are already reaching for more. For every cis gay man who takes up the weapons and language of our oppressors and uses them against the least protected of us, you're in for a rude awakening when they start doing it against you too. South Australia didn't abolish the "gay panic" legal defence until the end of 2020 — within my own lifetime, queerness and "think of the children" were still treated as inseparable, and now we've got Mardi Gras board members doing the same thing with trans identities.

If I cannot appeal to your general sense of empathy and "hey, maybe I shouldn't be a fucking asshole", then perhaps, strategically, you guys can look at the state of queer — and gay — civil rights in the US and realise there's safety in numbers. Rather than worrying about your party getting ruined, you can think about the bigger picture: what happens when a conservative government comes along and rips up the marriages you care so much about, or stops you visiting your spouse in hospital, or won't let them inherit your assets after you've passed, or denies them medical care — or decides to bring back lobotomies, electroshock, and conversion therapy. This stuff is not distant history, and I'm not that fucking old.

"Protect Mardi Gras" do get half of it — they keep complaining that Pride in Protest are showing our enemies where they can divide us; but they stop there, and in stopping there, they make it obvious they think they should be the ones deciding where our resources go and whose struggles actually matter. "Protect Mardi Gras" say that participating in the parade shouldn't be a reward for good behaviour (a bizarre stance to have) and act as if kicking police and bad politicians out will hurt us — but not a year goes by where people aren't harmed by police during the parade itself, and the NSW police watchdog had to order an investigation into over-policing at queer venues in Sydney just days ago. How did letting them march alongside the community they regularly terrorise prevent that bad behaviour, again?

I'm reminded of the story of Sammy Davis Jr, who — despite being one of the most successful performers of his era, a Rat Pack member alongside Frank Sinatra, and a tireless campaigner for JFK — was disinvited at the last minute from performing at JFK's inauguration because he was in an interracial marriage. And this was after he'd agreed to move his own wedding up a month so it wouldn't create controversy in the final days of the election. He did what he was asked — not for himself, but because he thought JFK would be more receptive to the issues affecting Black Americans and would actually do something about them — and he was still kicked out of the room once he gave them what they'd expected.

When you throw the more vulnerable under the bus, you don't get to insist you're still on the same side. And when you're not on the same side, you don't get to dictate the terms on which the people actually under threat get to be angry and fight back.