Take a deep breath, dear reader. Why did my last blog post have to be so explicit about childhood trauma?

Because I’m committed to making the world a better place for the teenagers who are now going through what grown-ups spent my teenage years with their eyes closed, pretending couldn’t possibly be happening around them. Because when adults tell me now, as an adult, “I’m sorry that happened to you,” or “I’m sorry I did that to you,” I want to see their verbal “sorry” backed with observable, meaningful action to prevent those harms from happening again. Faith without works is dead.

I don’t tell the stories of my childhood trauma because I’m unhealed; I tell these stories because I have done the work to heal, and I have come to realize that my silence helps no one but abusers. I tell my stories out loud to take away your plausible deniability that this is happening in your own county, your own city, your own communities. I tell my stories so maybe another 11 year old, hurt by the same unjust and abusive systems that began as slave patrols, which we’ve refused to dismantle and re-culture for the past 400+ years, won’t have to tell their stories of childhood abuse 23 years from now.

My mother says if I’ve truly forgiven her, I would let the past go and not bring it up again. But there is another 11 year old to whom my past is still happening. Forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending the harms never happened. Forgiveness is agreeing to work through the mess of repairing the damage rather than holding onto anger about the harm that’s been done. You do not have to be physically present with your abuser while they undertake the work of repentance, to forgive them. Repentance is agreeing to work through the mess of repairing the damage you’ve contributed to, refraining from perpetuating that harm against anyone else again, and taking a stand against allowing that harm to be committed against others again.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean folks of African descent whose grandparents endured chattel slavery should “forget” the harms white people have done to them. Forgiveness means they give us the chance to make reparations and repent.

Repentance means white folks step up to help heal the damage we’ve caused, and stand up against allowing that harm to be committed again. Repentance requires white folks to acknowledge, “I can’t change the past, but I’m going to make this active effort to ensure this harm doesn’t continue to be the next generation’s future any longer.” Repentance means denouncing mistreatment of humans; holding our elected representatives accountable for abuses of the 13th Amendment’s exception clause and its role in the for-profit prison system; holding our local county jails accountable for their worker release program’s failure to pay minimum wage to shackled, enslaved laborers who are disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and/or Latine; and cultivating community resources that divert our neighbors away from prisons, drugs, and crimes against one another, proactively.

Forgiveness from Native American peoples doesn’t mean they stop talking about their experience of colonization ever again just because we feel bad and want to forget our grandparents ever started it. Forgiveness means Native American peoples agree to let white people put our apology into action and contribute to their collective healing. Their forgiveness is an opportunity for us to stop perpetuating harms, and put our sincere desire for a better future into motion by humbling ourselves and offering our energy to restore and rebuild what we’ve unjustly taken from them.

Repentance means we show up for Native Americans in the supportive ways they ask us to, without defensiveness, and take our white discomfort about this to our therapists instead of unleashing our guilt-driven feelings onto people we’re supposed to be making amends to. Repentance means honoring every existing Treaty, giving back custody over lands to the tribes from whom they’ve been taken, investing as much in the search for missing and murdered Indigenous people as we’ve invested in Jon Benet Ramsey and Gabby Petito, and shifting ourselves to non-fossil-fuel sources of energy that do not require white-owned companies to encroach on sacred or Treaty-protected lands held by Native American peoples. If you are not showing up in some way to end the genocide, you do not repent of the genocide, and you are contributing to the ongoing genocide.

Repentance is agreeing to work through the mess of repairing the damage you’ve contributed to, refraining from perpetuating that harm against anyone else again, and taking a stand against allowing that harm to be committed against others again.

I name abuses that I’ve personally experienced because it’s a way to offer everyone who has been complicit in abuse an opportunity to repent. When I’ve made these offers in private, they’ve been dismissed. So now I make the offer publicly, before a wide audience. When people of color take a knee, or protest in the streets, or even just quietly shake their head at me while my white-culture-trained mouth is moving again, I am grateful to them for expressing to me, in the best way they know how, that there is more opportunity for me to repent of my ways of thinking, of doing, and of being that keep causing them harm. I also am sorry that their less-public, less-attention-grabbing efforts fell on un-listening ears for so long.

My mother doesn’t want to hear the opportunity I keep offering her to have a relationship with her own offspring, if she would please, please, please just repent of the abuses she emptily says she’s “sorry” for. This is as simple as not attempting to silence me or deny my identity, and just doing something — literally anything constructive at all — to keep the same abuses from happening again to other children like me. But, abusers take the opportunity to repent as if it’s an attack on their personal character. Abusers want us to pretend the harms never happened, and maintain their comfort at all costs.

Why wouldn’t everyone want to repent and be forgiven by those we’ve wronged? Why does anyone say, “You should talk to your therapist instead of writing online. Not everyone needs to know about the family’s dirty laundry,” as if my therapist can do the work of ending child abuse in your neighborhood for you? As if my therapist can make reparations or call your legislators for you? As if my therapist can show up in November to hold your nose and vote Democrat on your behalf?

As if the point of airing my trauma-stained laundry is for me to feel better, rather than for you to learn something new, discuss these learnings with your neighbors, and do better?

Take a deep breath. We have an opportunity to do better for one another, starting today, here and now. What will you do with the opportunity?

Lots of small-minded folks weaponize BDSM against Queer communities, claiming that we are immoral heathens who can’t be trusted due to the things we do between fully consenting adults. In a twist of immense irony, they ignore the fact that BDSM is often an adaptive strategy we use to cope with the sadistic pain, bondage, and control they exercise over us without our consent.

For example, when I was a teenager I used to write rape fantasies in my diary. I wrote about being choked and physically forced to do things I absolutely would not have consented to and did not want to happen. These fantasies were part of how I coped psychologically with my body being sexualized by all the adults around me from age 10, when I first grew breasts. I felt like maybe if I could write about those fears, if I could turn them into something safely contained in a book like Goosebumps novels did with the monster under the bed, maybe being raped wouldn’t feel so gross when it inevitably happened to me. I thought I could use my words in private pages to turn the kids on my elementary school playground groping my breasts and bullying me, into something that, somehow, I could gain control over. As an 11 year old with an acute sense that men could and would do whatever they wanted with my body whether I allowed it or not, I believed rape was unavoidable forever. And not too long later, in a predictably abusive relationship I stayed in to “prove” I was heterosexual, after a student in my high school attempted to murder me for being Queer, that rape finally did happen.

When my mother invaded my room to read my diary as a teenager while I was at school, I came home to find her sitting with a bookmarked passage in hand. She made me read the rape scene out loud to her and her new husband while I squirmed uncomfortably and cried. What I was forced to read was a private thought, never meant to be shared with her or anyone else. She asked me why I was such a slut, and what I would do if this really happened to me, and told me if I got myself pregnant from “letting” someone rape me, I would have to carry the baby even if it killed me, and live with the punishment for the rest of my life. That’s the kind of humiliation and coercion even many of the most seasoned BDSM veterans I know won’t touch, because it’s the kind that can do irreparable harm to a person’s psyche. In BDSM, we care too much about one another to cause that kind of harm. What my mother did there was violate my consent, dispose of my autonomy, and deny my sense of safety in my own home. She convinced me that if I was raped, it was my own fault. If there were consequences to that rape, I would be the only one burdened with facing them. No wonder I was thinking about intimacy in terms of sexual assault as a young teenager! No one ever taught me I could have my consent respected! No one taught me a place existed where my body was safe. No one around me bothered to create a world where I could even imagine I was safe as a queer teenager.

As an adult, my mother and I went to a family therapy visit once. She brought up those diary entries again, saying that she “had to be” the way she was — controlling, invasive, dominating, forceful, disrespectful, humiliating, shaming — because I was (*gasp!*) fantasizing about being raped and writing about it in my diaries. No acknowledgement that she should never have read my private diary in the first place. No acknowledgement that she taught me “boys only want one thing”. No acknowledgement that she had a responsibility to create a world around me where I felt safe enough as a child to say “no” to someone forcing their control over me. No acknowledgement that she forced her control over me in ways that showed me I had no freedom, no right to my own consent or privacy in the home she forced me to live in under legal threat if I ran away. No acknowledgement that she had a responsibility to create a world around me where I felt empowered to say “yes” to what I truly wanted instead. Just blame.

Stop blaming Queers for how we cope with what you do to hurt us.

This is where anti-Queer people fail to observe the massive plank in their own eye when threatening us with violent domination and forced control, stripping away our freedoms and human rights, over an alleged splinter in ours. They say we shouldn’t engage in BDSM, that it’s immoral or some such insanity. But BDSM is literally just consenting adults getting together to play consensual, negotiated, respectful games with power, pain, and control. The irony of using your authoritarian-style power to cause us emotional and physical pain, deprive us of the freedom to heal ourselves in the ways that works best for us, and control us in ways we do not consent to by restricting how we are(n’t) allowed to express ourselves, runs deep. The irony of my mother blaming me for having rape fantasies as a teen instead of blaming the environment she created which caused me to feel I had no alternative, consensual, safe reality I could turn to, runs deep.

BDSM is a common and vital coping strategy for Queers. The weaponization of our coping strategies plays out every year at Pride parades between folks who want family-friendly, historically-sanitized, corporate rainbow events — and those of us who express leather-bound, minimally-clothed, AIDS-epidemic-aware gratitude for the unconventional coping skills that have helped us survive against all odds. People do exist who call themselves queer but then shame those of us who use BDSM as a healing strategy. I don’t know what kind of paradise they’re living in that they don’t feel the need to process their oppression through kinky affirmations of identity, love, trust, and respect in the privacy of their own home, ever. I do know that sometimes they try to earn brownie points from cisgender, vanilla outsiders by eagerly distancing themselves from us to show how “respectable” they are. Those folks can take their betrayal of the Queer community up with God.

Judgment of our coping strategies has been the basis for oppressive legal maneuvers to erase us for decades, by the same people who refuse to simply cultivate a less traumatizing world where maybe BDSM wouldn’t be necessary to cope with what they do to us. In the absence of that utopia, BDSM remains an historically imperative tool that trans and Queer people use to 

•reclaim our identities

•explore power dynamics in ways that have been denied to us by the patriarchy

•establish our bodily autonomy

•give voice to our consent in a world where where consent is not always afforded to us

•process pain and trauma in healthy ways that allow us to let go of what isn’t good for us

•and liberate one another from the absolute exhaustion of being on protective high-alert at all times in a society that loathes us. 

At a physiological and neurochemical level, BDSM functions to bring many of us down from daily states of fight-or-flight, recover from PTSD, and transcend the overwhelm so we can bear to face another day. BDSM is consent-respecting, safe, healthy, queer, cathartic, empowering, and usually community-centered. It’s an activity that allows us to collectively say, “This is the pain the world has caused me, and this is what we’re going to do for the next two hours to reclaim my sense of safety, personal responsibility, and healing from that pain.” Erasing BDSM from the trans experience is to erase much of the trans experience itself. Erasing BDSM from conversations about queerness means erasing Queer trauma, Queer survival strategies, and Queer methods of overcoming indescribable barriers. To deny us conversational space where BDSM is acceptable to discuss is to deny us conversational space where being fully, unapologetically Queer is acceptable. 

Is there any safe enough space to express myself? If so, where is that space? Does it only come one week a year? And only ever the kid-friendly version? Does that safe space even exist in Arkansas? What do we need to do for and with one another to create an adequately safe, adult, emotionally supportive, judgment-free space together?

Recently, I overheard more than a dozen teenagers gathered outside in a courtyard, passing around their phones and discussing their BDSM test results. One of them said “My highest score is age play,” and I shuddered. Is anyone sitting them down to teach him consent? How to negotiate? How to respectfully honor boundaries? How to choose dates and partners who will respect their boundaries? Or is that just going to be left up to the Washington County police officer who lives next door to them, like the one who taught me these things with his hand in my pants from the time I was 12 to 14?

One teen came up to me and asked how to tell the other kids he didn’t want to talk about it when he goes back to school, because the BDSM test has been a popular discussion topic in his jr. high school. He said his friends have been getting their sexual health education from Reddit because only abstinence-only education is allowed in Arkansas schools, which means they get no real education about sexual health and safety at all. For us to pretend the kids don’t already know about BDSM, and refuse to construct healthy conversations with them around it, is to set them up for a probable future of abusive relationships, mismanaged consent, and poor boundaries. 

I believe we owe the kids better education than to let them suffer through the unsafe learning experiences that taught me about BDSM when I was their age. I believe we owe them a world that doesn’t push them toward BDSM as a necessary coping strategy for reclaiming their autonomy from a society where their literal human rights, medical rights, and rights to participate in sports with their peers are being legislated against as though these teens are already second-class, sub-human citizens.

If you have a problem with teens exploring BDSM amongst themselves, stop doing non-consensual, sadistic forms of domination to them through legislative and social maneuvers designed to mistreat, abuse, and denigrate them.

And if you have a problem with adults who engage in BDSM as a completely valid, scientifically proven strategy for lowering our blood pressure, disengaging an overactive fight-or-flight response that stays hyper-engaged all the time for fear of what the next attack on us is going to be, and psychologically cushioning the impact of harms against us that are beyond our control — how about you take all your misplaced outrage, and turn that energy toward making the world less harmful for us, so we can find easier ways to relax than being tied up and beaten? You trying to control what we do with our bodies is precisely why we do what we do with our bodies to regain the control over ourselves that you’re taking, or allowing to be taken, away from us.

When you stop trying to control and take away personal power from Queer people, you might just be pleasantly surprised to find that we stop going to such intense lengths to take back our personal power from you.

Some light reading, for your educational convenience:

This article explores BDSM and how its practice can be used to cultivate healthy romantic relationships.

A new study finds that practitioners of bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism, or BDSM, score better on a variety of personality and psychological measures than “vanilla” people.

Recent research suggests that BDSM does not indicate a disordered mind and that its practitioners have relatively good mental health: they’re less neurotic, more conscientious, less sensitive to rejection and more open-minded. In 2013, a study also found that they report being generally happier than the general population.

It’s all about creating a safe space. It’s no wonder that some practitioners report feeling relaxed both after scenes and within their romantic relationships.

Camp was amazing. I am exhausted. The kids are alright.

Last week, 85 queer, transgender, and queer-friendly teenagers filled the building of our little Arkansas church to share activities, laughter, tears, sweat, creativity, and passion together. I was a “parental”, or what most folks would call a camp counselor. Spending the whole week with other queer adults providing safe space and support for queer kids was a tremendous nourishment for my soul.

I’ve decided we need to make a world where we get to be Queer together all the time. Straight people get to be around straight people all the time, everywhere they go. Cisgender people can expect to be around cisgender people in every space they occupy, daily. They just take for granted that the people around them are usually like them. And those of us who aren’t like them, we’re expected to keep our mouths shut about how we’re different. I know the social consequences of being the only openly trans person in an office, or the queer person, or the autistic person. We are expected to hide parts of ourselves that are integral to who we are, so the people who aren’t like us don’t feel uncomfortable, even though their insecurities are really not our problem. It’s even become second-nature to censor ourselves so we don’t upset the cis-hets.

Last week I didn’t have to censor myself at Queer Camp. I didn’t have to pretend some key part of my identity doesn’t exist. Even cooler, I was surrounded by people who shared these attributes with me. I felt at home. This needs to happen more than one week a year. And not just when we’re getting together for the kids. We need this deep community connection as adults, and we need it often.

My team co-leader cuddled with me at the end of Monday in the hallway of the church. That felt reminiscent of when I was in Seattle and had daily access to physical intimacy from a number of good friends. Cultivating active community where physical touch is normal, healthy, consensual, and nurturing is so underrated in Arkansas.

Halfway through the week, Jason Moore — yes, the director of Avenue Q and Pitch Perfect — showed up to help lead the campers’ film production project. I noticed him sitting in the auditorium on Wednesday and walked over to find out who the adult stranger in our midst was. We ended up talking for hours. Turns out he’s from Fayetteville and hadn’t been back in town for years. While many of the kids went fan-girly over his fame and fanfare, I found myself bewitched, bothered, and bewildered for a much rarer reason: Jason Moore is perhaps the most gracious human being I have ever met. When Jason walks in a room, he draws all the energy around him like a lightning rod. He commands that energy with indescribable grace, organizes it into gentle encouragements and humble suggestions, and disperses it back into the folks around him like rich seeds dropping into fertile soil during a light spring rain. He is kindness and brilliance incarnate — and he flew all the way to Arkansas from New York City just to hang out with us at Queer Camp like the kids were his very own beloved children. He learned their names. He played games. He was 100% down to earth, and just an absolute joy to be around.

Early in the week, I caught myself developing a crush on the Kitchen Lead. This startled me, because I’m typically attracted to gay men, and she is very much a lesbian woman. I dismissed the attraction all week in favor of focusing on my duties with the campers. The single most attractive feature that draws me to a person is competence, and she has plenty of that. Competent people tend to already be busy with all the important things going on in their lives though, and I assumed she wouldn’t be interested. But wouldn’t you know — she messaged me Saturday after camp to ask if we could get to know one another better!

Since then, we had our first date: a Quorum Court meeting where we both spoke out against the Republican Justices of the Peace’s efforts to expand the county jail and imprison more of us instead of investing in the drug rehabilitation and mental health services our communities need, and lack. I got up in front of the court to talk about how I was abused as a child raised by law enforcement professionals, and how I believe we need to heal the authoritarian culture within jails and police departments before we give any consideration (or taxes!) to expanding that culture. My date heard me lay my ugly truth out in full public witness — and she still wanted to hold my hand by the end of the night, so I guess the dating is going well. Thanks, Queer Camp!

Callie and Andi directed and led the camp this year with outstanding prowess. They took feedback, made adjustments, and rolled with the punches unfailingly. They handled crises. They organized the whole kit and kaboodle. They lifted the kids up, and lifted us volunteers up, and made the whole experience safe, honest, and real. If someone had told me five years ago I’d be spending a week in a church volunteering for a youth camp, I’d have thought they were out of their mind. But Callie and Andi, and the volunteer team they brought together, made it all worth showing up for. They helped turn a church, a place known for its history of harming queers, into a place that gave us healing.

Already we’re planning better things for next year’s Queer Camp. It’s a high bar as-is. Teaching queer youth how to hold space for one another, to heal their own hurts rather than oppressing others as they’ve been oppressed, and to recognize and resist bullying amongst themselves, is no small task. We’re talking about major cultural changes that take shape one conversation at a time. But next year, we’re going to build upon what we’ve learned in 2022 and hold such a space even better.

In the meantime, we have a whole year to explore being kind to one another, giving the love we want to receive in our communities, and practice being the kinds of adults we want our queer youth to grow into.