meet the elders
What they talkin’ ‘bout?
They ain’t talkin’ ‘bout nothin’. – Kendrick Lamar
So, here I am at my mother-in-law’s house. It’s Christmas time, and my wife’s family is big on the holiday, so naturally, when Judy Collins is doing a Christmas show near her mom, we go. It was a lovely time; honestly, time spent with my mother-in-law usually is. It took me a while to really understand how that family works, but now that I do, it’s an extreme pleasure to get to watch my wife be loved. On our way out the door to go home, she and I stopped and talked about that for a moment—about the way that people constantly miss the things we both see so clearly about her. About the way she is assumed to be working in bad faith, or trying to be provocative before she’s even opened her mouth. But I’m ahead of myself, because it was that morning, after taking a shower, and getting a little early packing done that I walked out into the living room, when my wife handed me her phone.
“You’re not going to like this,” she told me. Reader, I didn’t.
El had gotten a letter from the Northeast Thing’s Special Investigation Committee informing her that she was banned from their event, citing a rule that had simply not been there when it might have been used to consider the targeted harassment levelled at my wife and my community by that event’s president, David Carron. I would love to say I was surprised by this, but I don’t think anyone who’s been paying attention possibly could be.
I have, to this point, kept my tongue. Not that this has stopped multiple people from silently unfriending or blocking me over El’s actions—which is wild for a group of people that spent years not raising an eyebrow at someone whose husband paraded around the event with a confederate flag mug. But I don’t want to flame out of the community, even though I feel its leadership is making cruel and frankly dangerous errors, because I love it, and I’ve loved this event. I have hinted at this in some places, and stated it in others, but my primary work right now—and if you know me, you will know how important my work is to me now that my health is in a place where I can finally do that work—is studying to become a priest of Sága, a goddess of language and divination for whom I keep a small vé at the event. Each year, I’ve run a ritual for her, and have a couple more years worth of ideas for how I’d change and grow that ritual now that I’ve had a couple runs to teach people what to expect from it. The space itself had gravity. We set it up as a social space; a goddess of language needs stories, and stories come from people, not just books. Unsurprisingly, this drew in a mostly young to middle aged queer crowd, several of whom I know have also had seismic spiritual experiences in that vé, in the space I set up and invited my goddess into.…
