vog | Fucking Feelings

Fucking Feelings

I don’t usually post my feeeeeeelings here; that is a reserve plumbed better by more-experienced souls on the internet. Even the long “e” there in “feeeeeeelings” is a sentiment I’m copying, because I’m not entirely sure how one goes about expressing these things in such an odd, semi-public forum, and instead I am relying on precedent and attitude so that I can waffle here at the beginning.

But these feelings, they sometimes demand recognition. Otherwise, they evaporate and rain back down on you at a later date when you are trying to live your life, but instead you find yourself preoccupied by anxieties you cannot entirely place. What kind of recognition, I’m not sure. I’ll leave that up to you, anonymous internet weirdos and the occasional family member who stops by (Hi, Dad!)

So. Last night, I stayed in. I was tired, it was cold, and one can only go out to bars so many times in a week before one is broke/an alcoholic. Had I gone out, I would have gone to the queer night at a bar near my apartment. While I slept, some very good friends of mine got gaybashed at that bar. To reiterate: a queer night, intended as a safe space for people to express their gender/sexuality/personality however they damn well please, was invaded. Let me rephrase that out of the passive voice: three monstrous human beings invaded a safe space. As it was related to me, these men (of course) proceeded to call everyone “faggots,” and then took to attacking a stranger sitting at a bar stool. As the assembled queers took to defending themselves and their friends, these men punched someone in the face, threw several more people to the ground, threw someone onto a pool table, ran out, and, why-the-fuck-not, broke some of the bikes locked up outside.

Let me again point out that I was not at the bar for any of this. But the funny thing about how this shit works is, these three pigs succeeded in attacking me anyway. I don’t mean to make this about me (well, in a way I do, these are my feelings I guess); I was at home, safe and warm, while some people got hurt and lots of people got terrified. But the sting of hatred is that these loathsome fucks are still human goddamn beings, as much as I would it weren’t so, and their feelings reverberate just as much as mine, and their feelings would like it if safe spaces were annihilated. They would prefer Chicago be a cold and brutal place, where the mere fact of difference warrants expulsion.

I have been fortunate enough to never be physically assaulted, in part because my “difference” (sorry, I can’t think of words right now) is mostly “invisible.” I have, however, been called a faggot a handful of times, once by a 14 year old boy on a train, a train filled with people who were perfectly content staring concertedly out the window as the brown line swung around a corner of the loop. It is a chilly, lonely, awful feeling. When I got home that day, the first person I called was the same friend who was thrown onto the ground last night, and the only thing we could do at the time was feel awful together. Not much is different now, except this assault is many times worse.

I don’t write this to offer policy prescriptions (task force lol!) or even to note ironies (everyone asshole in Boystown is up in arms about a marginal increase in crime rates, which they are SO FUCKING HAPPY to lay at the feet of south side (read: black) kids coming to the only places in the city that will offer them humane social services; but the problem, of course, is just fucking dudes). I have no “objective.” I think I just need my feelings written somewhere, so that they don’t bury themselves out of fear, so that I can scream somehow and in some venue that this shit is so fucked America what the fuck, so that my feelings don’t get locked inside a bar after three assholes have run off, waiting for the police to arrive, probably to do nothing.