![]() ![]() It needs all of us, our combined strength, our histories, and our futures, to hold it up. How the future reflected in the crystal ball shows a ceaseless pull toward one another: demonstrations, lock-ins, chains across bridges. This is how a girl climbs out of the body of a girl, how a boy learns to read tears as though they are crystal balls. We rescue each other from locked rooms at the centers of ourselves, we teach each other to dance. ![]() We find doors inside each other and push them open too. We are inside one another, a lemniscate handshake, a loop infinite. It might have something to do with bravery. It might have something to do with descendancy. I still don’t know why a young enby could mean Child to me. But I suppose it’s got something to do with ancestry. I still don’t fully understand how an older gay man-silver-backed and beautiful, clothes walking ahead of him-could mean Father to me. The room is bright with understanding, with unspoken amity, with languages learned in secret and finally spoken aloud. Gender outlaws, sexual dissidents, wrong walking women, gentle men, and seditious dykes. Butches, queens, queers, femmes, enbies, and transgender people occupy the room behind the door. We know that if we do not stand together then we will be buried apart. The project to divide us will fail because we know: when the gun speaks it will say all of our names. The gun does not care about acronyms or pronouns. We know this because we all look the same under the club lights. Long lines of marching queers lesbians invading the BBC or abseiling into the House of Lords irreverent foul-mouthed nuns or saints like Derek Jarman making the whole world before us somehow holy again. And when Section 28-the UK law brought in in 1988 that banned the “promotion of homosexuality”-was proposed, the disparate parts of us came together like poetry. We are the multitude of courageous gay men who fought for our right to basic equalities. They took out rubbish and brought in compassion. They took out rubbish and brought in food. It allows you to combine multiple skills and abilities to unleash dazzling combo attacks the guns you come across in-game can be customized with a variety of ammunition, all while also having a choice of incendiary bombs, sticky grenades, homing missiles, and many more to suit your situation. They volunteered in hospitals and hospices. The Blood Sisters as they were known were ordinary lesbians who answered the call to donate blood to our brothers. We are a people of multiple histories: the dykes queuing to give blood during the first wave of gay men infected with HIV, the bravery of a held hand, a shared coffee cup. ![]() I had opened the door to an otherworld of love, and friendship, of resilience and solidarity. The long years of solitary adolescence combined with the weight of being made outcast and ugly, were finally over. I opened it and the whole world opened up too. When I first found my people, it was a door on a bar that made the difference between exile and belonging. ![]()
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