This is supposed to be a spotlight week or something but I don’t have the stomach for that. If you’re over “reaction essays,” feel free to jump to the end (after the second “Share” button) where I summarize the call to action. But I’m gonna talk a bit about my feelings and hopefully that will make y’all feel a little less alone. Chime in in the comments as you need to.
The worst part for me isn’t the disillusionment or the anger. I compared the feeling Wednesday morning to sitting in a doctor’s office and being told that the cancer was back, and I haven’t come up with a better analogy since then. It is exactly the feeling that my body is betraying me somehow, that even though I feel perfectly healthy, there’s something malignant growing in there. It’s the feeling that we can’t trust our feelings and perceptions, that the healthy culture we’ve immersed ourselves in isn’t the reality. It’s the feeling of not knowing what little ache or pain is natural and what’s the sickness, what people we might pass in the grocery store or the airport might have voted to make our lives harder, less safe, more violent; who might have voted to strip-mine this world and leave nothing for us, let alone the next generations. It’s the feeling that the years ahead are going to be exhausting, that a lot of fighting will be necessary and a lot of sacrifices. Maybe we’ll beat it. Maybe we won’t.
The anger is fine; it feels cleansing. The disillusionment is hard, but I realized that it means I can still hope, and that’s something. I don’t know yet whether that’s broken.
I’m old enough to remember 2004’s election, when a demonstrably incompetent president who had presided over the worst terror attack in America’s history was re-elected on the back of a wave of homophobia (over a decorated military veteran! a white man!), and it wasn’t close. I felt a good amount of despair then, too. But you know what? Six years later I married my fiancé, legally. Four years after that, we all got gay married, or at least we were all allowed to.
This feels more dire than that for all the reasons you all already know. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. What I know, what we all know, is that the next four years (please, please, only that long, but at least that) are going to be dangerous for a lot of our family and friends, especially for us in the furry community. It’s already starting, as many of the worst people you know (and don’t know) gloat about the election and what they want to do to the queer community, to women, to anyone who isn’t a white Christian.
So what we need to do is hold on. Hold on to each other, because we all have friends who are vulnerable and are going to be in danger. Reach out if you need help, reach out if you know someone who might need help. Despair and isolation is what the Republicans want, to erase the ones they dislike either by making them conform behaviorally or by making their lives physically difficult. Hold on to our friends and don’t let go. We will be asked to compromise, to stay silent when we aren’t the direct targets; we will be threatened for standing up for our friends and family and our beliefs.
Hold on to the communities we’ve built, hold on to our values. We have made these spaces for ourselves and they are in danger now. There will be pressure to abandon them or change them to make them something different, less threatening to the minority in charge. Fight for the things we’ve created.
Hold on to ourselves, too. We’re furries. Not everyone understands that, and that’s okay. I’m going to keep writing queer furry books and I’m going to be a fox and I’m going to love both my partners because that is who I am, and fuck anyone who tries to tell me to be something different because it would make them feel better. And I want all of you to be dragons and wolves and bears and otters and pangolins and cats and rats and arctic foxes and grey foxes and kit foxes and cross foxes and silver foxes and fennec foxes and whatever else you want to be, whatever makes you feel the most you. Be boys or girls or either or neither; love whoever you love. Hold on to yourself and don’t let that go.
I’ll be here, holding on with you.
Here are some other things you can read, and support their voices if you like:
A.R. Moxon’s “The Reframe” has a good piece on where we go from here. He writes long but well-constructed essays.
Wonkette is one of my favorite sources for news and also for feelings:
Jeff Tiedrich is great if you want to listen to someone tell all the fascists to fuck off, all day every day (more or less).
I donate to the ACLU because they have been and will be very busy in the courts defending our rights.
To support news in the rapidly decaying field of journalism, I donate to The Guardian; WIRED and The New Republic are also pretty decent.