Malcolmina XOX

I am up early and standing at the curb outside my building waiting for a neighbor because we have a date this morning to go to the Laney College flea market—that great, traveling souk that comes to town every Sunday with blaring music, corn roasting on sticks, puppies for sale, and an entire department store complete with cooking demonstrations laid flat on burning asphalt. I am 10 minutes into a large Blue Bottle coffee that has me shaking like a bobble-head Chihuahua in the rear window of a Chevy. But my friend is oblivious because he is putting his makeup on and that takes time as any diva can tell you. I don’t mind waiting. The early morning sunlight spreads across Jack London like butter sliding down a stack of hot, buttermilk pancakes. It’s going to be a great day so it is odd that, waiting for the Age of Transformation to conclude, I should be musing on the nature of revenge.
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What is the revenge of those without power; the antipodal feet of the human bell curve on which the rest of the world securely rests? Do those without power exact a puny, unseen, unfelt revenge and, if so, is that really revenge? Isn’t the essential nature of revenge that it is felt by its target; felt as deeply as the hurt it is intended to remedy?
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When I was a child, I spent hours—no, years—plotting revenge against an older brother who baited me as though I were a caged bear. He pestered, poked, bullied, and hit until I cried in helpless rage. He stole from me, broke what was precious to me, and lied to our parents, blaming me for his faults and they believed him. I hated him so thoroughly, I wished he were dead. That is the revenge of an eight year old.
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As I grew older, I simply gave up, choosing to bide my time under the radar as much as possible until I could break free and escape my cage. Ultimately, it was a good strategy although it left simmering on the back burner feelings of revenge that permanently blackened the pan that cooked them.
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Leaving home, I never once looked back but kept moving forward into some unknown life that would be, whatever else it might have to offer, better. After an entire decade of distilling in the crucible of university, I emerged in Chicago in the 1980s where I stood on the train platform in $1,500 worth of corporate drag every morning, commuting to a corner office so high up that I could look down on the traffic helicopters. I ran the god-damned world of commerce while my brother became an alcoholic who couldn’t hold a job.
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It took a long time to grow weary of a business career based mainly on being what my brother couldn’t be—successful—and eventually, I walked out of my corner office to do work that meant something to me. I forgot about revenge but persisted in a hugely damaging need to be right all the time until the day my brother settled the barrel of a shotgun between his teeth and pulled the trigger. Then my seething righteousness was made painfully evident to me and shown to be hollow. As the eighth anniversary of my brother’s suicide approaches, it is no longer possible for me to savor a win when someone else loses so badly. All of this to say that I do not wish ill on the dominant, straight culture; only that they would get their jackbooted foot off my neck.
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Being an exile in a society that imagines itself progressive is a wound of a thousand daily cuts; rarely a slash, it accretes. I first understood that the world would not be welcoming to me when I was in middle school—that great sorting, when children have their first glimpse of what kind of future they can expect. Children sense the stakes are high and the ethos of elementary school—sharing and mutual respect—give way to social jockeying. I began to hear the boys call each other homo and queer, words that could knock a rival down more surely than a fist; words I’d never heard before growing up in the Eisenhower/Kennedy years.
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One small freedom we enjoyed in my strict Catholic school was the right to get up at any time and go to the dictionary. It was, in fact, the mark of a dedicated young mind at work. Thus entitled, I walked from the back of the room one day all the way to the front and began to ruffle through the big, unabridged book to find out why the names the boys used on each other had such power to devastate. I knew better than to ask anyone; it would mean losing face for not being hip to the point of jaded. As I read what a homo was, my life as I had known it fell away. I knew my emerging sexuality was going to be problematic. I liked girls. But in that moment, there in front of my known world, I learned I was a pariah, something to be made fun of, and fair game to every bully or worse. I did not think I could turn around and face that class or get back to my seat without fainting. I understood then that I would serve a life sentence for a crime I did not commit.
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As Malcolmina flounces to the curb to embrace me with a dozen kisses and escort me up the avenue, it is obvious that gay people are lovers not fighters and therein lies both our greatest strength and most debilitating weakness—we have been slow to demand our rights. Like the unwanted girl children in China and south Asia, we have acclimated to gruel while our fat brothers gorge; taking anything they want from a table where there is no seat for us. Instead, we are left sitting in the dirt with sticks and rocks.
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But wait. Before you collapse weeping, have you seen what we do with sticks and rocks? Using an ancient alchemy, we have ground those rocks against the stone of prejudice and manufactured glitter and eye shadow. We have taken our sticks and pounded them down on packed earth to create the pulsing beat of disco and house. We have taken the vile manure of hatred and created a garden of earthly delights—a culture focused on sensuality and pleasure pulled from the thin air of repression. Any scorn inflicted by the straight majority comes back to them, presto change-o, as something they cannot live without: hair styles, couture, beats, and home décor.
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Perhaps some readers will complain that I borrow too heavily from the black civil rights movement; that it can’t be that bad, at least not for a middle class white girl from the Midwest. I am not trying to draw parallels—to the extent they occur, they occur naturally because I know what it is like to be hated, to be scorned. I know what it is like to be the object of ignorant, unremitting hatred for something over which I have no control and I know to be harmless. I know what it is like to be interpreted to myself wrongly; to be pushed to the extreme outer limits of society; to have my good life broadcast back to me in a series of lies; to be overlooked, shoved aside, and blamed for the ills of society. I know what it is like to live hidden and unobserved—something people of color cannot do with the exception of the few who “pass” and then they pay a terrible price for their invisibility. I used to wish that one day, all the gay people in the world would wake up to find we were purple or green. So that no one could hide; so that all those Republican Congressmen who are closet fags would be revealed. So that all those ministers whose admiring congregations reward them for outright gay bashing in their churches, would be silenced. But now I am older and I know the world does not work that way.
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The LGBT people of my generation have had to hide a huge part of our natural selves just to get by in a world that does not want us. I was 40 years old before I could talk to co-workers about my whole, integrated life without fearing the loss of my job. I know now that my generation has paid dearly for being so marginalized. It is in the pit of ever-anger we carry in our stomachs. Until a person has experienced the humiliation of having their basic human dignity put to a popular vote, which is the very essence of Prop 8 in California, they can never understand the unquenchable rage that I must tame every day. It is hidden in the posture I assume when I say I am okay so as to reassure the straight people who are my friends. I am not okay. I am anything but okay.
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Escorted down the street by Malcolmina XOX, a black drag queen the size of a city bus, I am filled with love for this royal woman who takes not one ounce of shit from anyone. Pink hair flouncing with each step, her yellow skirt blowing in the breezy summer morning, her polka dot handbag swinging like a metronome, she is a monarch butterfly and I her loyal subject. Long may she rule, baby, rule.