I Hope The Trump Camps Have a Zip-Line

The liberal echo chamber of Bluesky is supposed to be a safe haven, but for whom? My mentions and timeline are constantly full of blue-wave scolds who act like queer and trans people are some kind of exotic fantasy creature invented for the purpose of making insensitive jokes or resolving tiresome debates.  Every time one of these dipshits opens their mouth, I get to hear another one of their twisted fantasies about how my existence can be a suitably hilarious prank on the people they disagree with. Here are some of my least favorite examples of this kind of joke:

1. “Lol, I hope those conservatives have a drag queen for a kid, that’ll show them!” Children are human beings, not ironic punishments for adults. Also, that kid is just going to get severely abused, so I don’t know why you’re excited about that? There’s a reason most of us don’t bother with our families once we have any stability outside of the home.
2. “Lol, I’ll bet he’s secretly gay/trans/another transgressive identity I pretend to respect but am comfortable implying is disgusting when I want to insult somebody.” Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. Most conservatives are aware that they are hypocrites. Now can you please explain why you implied that having something in common with me would be a humiliating gotcha?
3. “Lol, you don’t want to [do political thing]?! Have fun at the camps for people like you, which I will now detail with Nazi imagery that goes on for several paragraphs!” Cool, thank you for sharing your elaborate fantasy about people like me being murdered because I did not participate in your voter registration drive or whatever the fuck you have going on this week! This definitely makes me want to vote harder. Maybe if I close my eyes and clap hard too there will be more states I’m allowed to piss in next year!!!

These jokes are supposed to be satirical, but they are simply conservative talking points said in a sarcastic tone. People on the internet always feel like they’re Making Some Points with the same tired bullshit weird old dudes yell at me on the train. I expect conservatives to call me disgusting when they interact with me, but for some reason I am still surprised when my allies do the exact same thing.

A fun fact about me: before I was a transsexual menace, I was a queer humorist. What does that mean? Not much, other than I was a handy name to have in one’s contacts when a larger humor publication or live lit programmer wanted to give the impression of valuing diversity for a specific iteration of a reading series or a humor vertical. I always knew why I was getting the diversity gig because the lineup of my fellow artists would look like the Burger King Kids Club after years of straight white shenanigans. 

It often felt transactional and cynical, but I was naive, and I thought if I participated I could create a better space for people like me. I was wrong about that. Also, I was ambitious and I saw it as a way to break into the comedy world. A byline is a byline and a paycheck is a paycheck. And if an exploitative person who can easily offer you both of those things will do so in return for your presence offering absolution for their previous sins, what could possibly go wrong?!

You might think the most humiliating part of these jobs would be tokenism. I was always deeply aware that I was functioning as part pro-bono diversity advisor and part cereal mascot, creating a false friendly public face for people who only cared about their IP and gave me shit behind closed doors about pronouns and my “unrealistic” expectations that marginalized writers could be paid for their work. But I expected all that going in. I had done my time as the queer swamp monster on the millennial pink ladies comedy lineups. I knew the kind of people I’d be dealing with, and I was prepared to mostly ignore them. 

Here’s what actually broke me: I briefly worked editorial at a website with an open submission slush pile. I thought maybe I could help some talented-but-overlooked writers find a platform. So I spent a lot of time in the slush pile, looking to polish the swallowed gold fillings that occasionally filtered through our submission system’s septic tank. 

And this is how I learned the dark truth of humor on the internet: no matter how many diversity-themed comedy lineups I participated in during the progressively-themed months of the year, a lot of comedians still think that slurs are hilarious.

Now, I do want to be clear about the fact that most (if not all) of these writers were not actually trying to be cruel to marginalized people, even when their work was largely composed of outrageous insults and threats towards those people. In fact, if you told these writers their work was tone-deaf or offensive, they would have been shocked. It’s satire! It’s not supposed to be serious! Nobody would actually call someone they love a faggot. It’s so obviously absurd, who could be offended by it?

I am not the only marginalized person who has experienced the chemical burn of clumsy allyship, but I am going to focus on my queerness when I try to explain why y’all need to stop doing this. Let me address the allies that make these shitty jokes, and let me attempt to say this gently: 

If you are a cishet person, your knowledge of queer life and survival is extraordinarily shallow by design. Most straight people are taught to regard queer people as a rainbow monolith that yearns for tolerance and normativity, instead of individual communities that face different kinds of prejudice depending on how far they stray from cis-heteropatriarchy. 

(Nobody is immune to the way privilege hides reality from you, not even someone who writes an essay like this. I wasn't good at writing about queer stuff for a long time either! I had to spend a lot of time in community with queer people to figure it out. I owe a sincere debt of gratitude to the folks who put up with me while I got my head on straight. Privilege does not make you a bad person, but it can make you a deeply irritating person to the people around you if you’ve never unpacked it.)

As a cishet person, you are taught to regard us this way because it allows you to ignore the privilege your normativity provides you, much in the same way other marginalized groups have been othered by dominant social groups for as long as society has been a thing. 

Because you do not have a real understanding of queer people, the jokes you make about us are going to be hopelessly shallow. They will rely on stereotypes that harm us. They will quietly imply that we are disgusting, even if you specifically do not mean to do that, because you have not unpacked enough of the patriarchal bullshit in your brain to understand what you are actually saying. It’s a combination of ignorance and arrogance that will always embarrass you and disrobe you as the poser you are. 

Unfortunately, queer people are socially rewarded for playing nice and propping up this illusion of solidarity, so most of us will not tell you that you’re actually showing your ass with your ill-informed allyship. I will, because I have already firebombed my reputation with straight folks and it’s cathartic to say these things out loud. I owe cishet folks nothing and I do not care how they feel about the things I say. Listen or don’t!

My vitriol aside, there is something valuable you can take away from this if you would like. If there is one thing I would burn into every comedian’s mind, a commandment to be seared into their brainpan for as long as they practice the art: if a joke is not about you, it is not your joke to make.

If you are indulging in gallows humor when your neck isn’t in the noose, you’re a heckler in the crowd giggling at the future corpses and making an ass of yourself. You are not a brave truth teller or champion of irreverence. 

You are nothing more than a self-involved, loud-mouthed rubbernecker that we’re all trying to ignore.