“What do you think it would be like to live in a world that isn’t structured against us?” I ask my partner after a group of teenagers taunt us; one of them made an effeminate jeer when we began walking away and the rest of the group laughed.
“I don’t know…” he says, confused by my question.
“This world does not accept our love and there is nothing we can do to change it.” He is silent, perhaps speechless. “How do you not care about what other people think?” I inquire, remembering him describing how he does what he wants without letting other people get in the way. I used to be this confident too before the trauma of working for MAC Cosmetics in an international airport.
“It’s because strangers don’t matter; I only care about what my friends and family think about me,” he says. I recall spending my childhood and teenage birthday wishes on not being gay before asking him whether anyone has ever harassed or assaulted him for being queer. “No…” he says, appearing frightened.
The sun is setting into the haze that obscures the city below us.
“What would you do if someone came up to us right now and called us faggots and started to get violent?” I ask, externalizing the terror that lurks within the structures of my troubled psyche. Hell is other people and I might be…
