I’m a pansexual, panromantic, cisgender woman. I’ve been involved in LGBTQIAP+ activism, community coordination and social awareness campaigns in Eastern Europe for over a decade. And throughout Pride Month, I will wear the asexual flag as my icon and banner, I’ll post positivity for a-spec Tumblr and I’ll do my best to counter the angry, vicious voices that keep insisting you don’t belong in the LGBTQIAP+ community.
Why would I do this? Because I’ve always stood against exclusion. Because someone taught me that you will never find the best people, the most exemplary souls, if you stand watch at the gate like a Kerberos Hound. And because I have precisely zero tolerance for Westerners, and particularly for Americans, who come in and drown all voices with their own, insisting that the way they see and contextualize the world is universal and to be accepted above any and all other views.
I was seventeen and it was my first Pride March. It wasn’t a Parade. It was a March, full of righteous anger and zeal and fire and a desire to make a fucking impact. There were screams and there was smoke – and suddenly, eggs and firecrackers and bricks the size of my head were flying above us. We all dropped to the ground in a crouch and placed our heads between our knees, as we’d been instructed by the Pride Security Officer, letting the gendarmes and the mounted police jump over us and toward our assailants. B., a young woman next to me was panicking, so I risked looking up, then grabbed her arm and did my best to calm her down. She was a almost a decade older than me, the meekest, gentlest, softest person I’ve ever known, not at all like my perpetually angry, perpetually bristling self.
I was nineteen. B., who was still navigating the muddy waters of self-discovery as much as I was and trying to figure out why her relationship with her bisexuality was so confusing, had become my closest friend and my closest confidante. I was nineteen and I was scared shitless, because I ended up on the Security Committee for the Pride March, on account of a high turnover rate and death-threats toward the more well-known members. B. supported me constantly and always did her best to alleviate my self-doubts. When I saw well-known gay male members of the community eviscerating trans women online and calling for them to be banned from the March, I was absolutely furious. When I heard two such men commenting on how they’d take pictures at the March and make fun of the [transphobic slurs] on their blogs, I fucking lost it and told them to their faces that if they put even one goddamn toe out of line during the March, I’d have the gendarmes toss them in a taxi and take them away, on account of them making the whole thing unsafe for far too many people.
I ended up getting a large amount of hate for this (how much larger it would have been, if I ID-ed as pansexual back then, rather than a still-questioning lesbian!), but B. was among the people who always had my back, even when next year I wasn’t called to serve on the Committee, on account of being a controversial pick. At about this time, B. realized that what she had taken for bisexuality was in fact asexuality and it took her some time to adjust to this. I poured my fury and my frustration into supporting her and understanding. My education had begun, because we only comprehend the depth of our ignorance when we start to learn.
I was twenty and I came very close to dying. We were in the Republic of Moldova, our sister-country, trying to kickstart a LGBTQIAP+ Pride Fest there. The would-be March was a costly disaster. Our bus was surrounded by a screaming crowd, while the police looked away. People violently banged on the doors and the windows, while someone grinned malevolently and several times reached into the engine with a cigarette lighter. If they’d managed to open the doors, they’d have torn us to shreds. Or they’d have blown us sky-high along with the bus. B. was with me, along with people from Moldova, Romania and the Czech Republic, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, trans women and trans men. We were running out of time and out of options and finally, after talking the whole thing through, we decided to surrender our banners and our colorful wigs and our large rainbow flag. It wasn’t worth dying for them, but that didn’t make it less of a blow, B. held me as I howled my impotent anger and my despair.
I was twenty-two and I lost her. I lost B. to leukemia. Our efforts couldn’t change the inevitable. The entire community in about four different Eastern European countries rallied. We raised the money for her to have a bone-marrow transplant in Italy, but it was too late. I lost her to inevitability and the beckons of a God I love, but all too often feel alienated from. Her loss was a massive blow to all of us, because she had always been the best among us – kind, tender-hearted, always willing to give a second chance, never willing to give up. This was the woman that American teenagers, in the Year of Our Lord 2016, on Tumblr Dot Com, would have brayed and screamed and screeched against, because none of her efforts would have made her Sufficient Queer or Sufficiently Oppressed for their precious selves.
She held my hand when bricks and explosives were flying above us. She and other asexuals were a permanent fixture in the Pride March Organization Committee. On March day, if it was hot, she’d walk among the participants and distribute water bottles, bought at her own expense. And if someone had walked up to all of us then and told us ‘American fuckers on the Internet will start demanding you screen the asexuals to decide who is “cishet”. to decide who can be part of the community’,we would have spat them in the mouth for speaking lies.
She and other asexuals risked their lives and their bodily integrity time and time again in standing with us. So where do goddamn Westerners who’ve never faced a screaming, MURDEROUS mob in their whole fucking lives, get the gall to be the arbiters of who can and cannot be counted in the community?!
The A is for my beloved B. The A is for asexuality. The A is for ALL asexuals and aromantics, because I will ALWAYS support them, just as they steadfastly supported myself and everyone else under the LGBTQIAP+ umbrella, at great risk, from the start of the struggle for rights in Eastern Europe.
And as for the Westerners, the entitled American teenagers on this hellsite, who demand we do as they say? Learn to temper your rage with some compassion and understanding for what others are saying to you, before said rage swallows you whole.
I won’t waste my breath on the instigators, the Big Name Blogs behind this whole shitshow, who manipulated young activists and made aphobia seem like the Socially Just position. You’re worth less than the oreșchernițe in my grandmother’s garden soil.
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