This Kid Named Leslie

September 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?

I don’t want to write about my white cultural heritage. It’s not interesting, but I will give you the highlights. There are Irish and English immigrants in my family. The most direct was an indentured servant who ended up in Louisiana, where later descendents settled in northeast Texas. My mother, father, stepmother and me were all raised there (sort of, we moved a lot with my dad being a pastor). Lindsay was not born until we moved to Houston, but we returned to northeast Texas for five years shortly after that. It was a quiet life interrupted by bursts of show mode…………….. although I did have a great, great uncle somewhere tied to organized crime in, I think, Rhode Island. That seems to track. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my next career, but mafia seems to be a viable option given my personality on some days. Anxiety and depression feel like the mafia. You get irritated and want to whack an employee, but you’re self-employed.

Yes, Where were we?

I come from Irish and English people, but not with landed titles and Downton Abbey and all that crap. My family was basically owned by the English, not even close to American slavery though very close to Reconstruction. When the Civil War ended, enslaved people were sometimes hired back to their plantations, but weren’t paid enough to really leave. That was my family’s situation. The English would do shit like give us land to rent, but they could take it any time they wanted and you’d never be able to pay off the debt you owed on tools, etc. Many, many people escaped Ireland through work contracts, which is what my ancestor did. The contract paid for his passage, and was a seven-year logging thing in which he cut off a leg two years in. Answers to the name “Lucky.”

Even with that fun fact, there are billions of people who’ve come through the US since its inception by rich white people offloading their indentured servants, enslaved people, and criminals here. America was Australia before it was cool. Still white people history. So, again, not interesting.

It’s queer history that makes me interesting.

Being queer is to take on institutional pain, passed down from one generation to the next. We don’t grow up biologically together (most of the time), so it’s a process to seek out a family that understands….. for most of history, the family that took you in when your first family just couldn’t get over their vengeful God long enough to stop themselves from being terrible parents (and worse in-laws). Children are not capable of supporting themselves at 15 and 16. You’d be surprised at how many just have to figure it out….. and not because it’s surprising to queer people. It’s surprising to the people who generally don’t want to look it up. It’s so hard to be them.

Because I did have someone queer in my life at an early age, I was braver than most because I didn’t see being queer as abnormal anymore…. but this was after two years of torturing myself first. Bad things happen when people come out. It’s more rare today than it was in the ’80s, but it’s alive and kicking. Look up the rates for homeless queer youth. It’s not acceptable. Stop pretending it is.

If you think I’m being harsh, fuck your feelings. This has got to stop, and I know because I’m from the belly of the beast. If you think legislation about trans kids’ medication in Texas is bad, you’re just seeing the surface. Imagine what these kids go through at home when they’re born to people like this rather than to people fighting against them. Trans people are taking the fire right now, but gay people were (and still are in some circles) called mentally ill pedophiles for centuries.

Gay people are not predators. Predators are predators. And straight people are like, 85-90% of the population. It’s not gay people that are the problem, because even though there are gay predators, too many kids are abused for those numbers to check out. Not many people are gay. Many people are power hungry and some are ill enough to take it from a child.

So, to straight people, the call is coming from inside the house.

I was never molested by a queer person, but certainly had my life interrupted by that kind of absolute power imbalance. But having my life interrupted wasn’t all bad because I came out earlier. I don’t think I would have had an easy time in school if I’d stayed in the closet all the way through. There were too many people that used it as leverage. I know this because it was very popular to tease me for being gay even though I never said I was. They just knew it got the desired painful reaction and liked it.

Once I started wearing rainbow shit to school, all that stopped. It wasn’t blackmail, so it wasn’t fun……… which is how I have a legacy at Clements and my girlfriend at the time doesn’t. She was with me, but she wasn’t out, Therefore, I know I did something that makes me happy because I had the courage to do what many people couldn’t. It’s not a slam on her, it’s saying that I didn’t realize how important the story would become to me now that it’s been so many years. That I’m happy I had the courage to stand up then, because it makes me feel strong now.

I don’t have to wonder if my life would have been better had I come out later, because it was hell on earth then. I was just surviving, doing what I had to do. In retrospect, it feels like a badge of honor.

My sister is almost six years younger than me, with our birthdays being June and September, respectively. So, she didn’t get to elementary school until I was in junior high and didn’t get to high school until I was in college (and I would have been gone if I’d taken four years). So, I was a junior at University of Houston before I heard what happened:

When my dad left the church, I really stopped giving a shit about who knew what. I wore Pride rings (fruit loops) and had a rainbow ring and a couple other things that I bought under the radar (we all think that. Give it to us. Let us believe we are oh-so-clever.). It got me two things. The first is that I stopped getting teased. The second is that I could advertise.

She was an athlete. I felt like a god.

So, in addition to getting the girl, it was the rainbow accessories that made me a legacy.

I was off doing my own thing, oblivious.

My sister told me that she saw a group of kids with rainbows on their backpacks. She thought it was really brave, so she asked them about it. They said, “oh, we all do it. That way no one knows who’s gay.” Lindsay said, “who started it?”

They said, “I think it was this kid named Leslie.”

I will never do anything in my life more important than this.

Sermon for Pride Sunday 2021

June 20, 2021 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When Tara asked me to speak on “What Pride Means to Me,” I said yes… Then, I sat down at my desk and e-mailed a friend. In that moment, all I was feeling was that I wasn’t particularly proud of being gay. It seemed like taking pride in brown hair… or brown eyes… or being able to eat a medium pizza all by myself. These things weren’t unique, just intrinsic to me.

As I wrote, that feeling lasted for five minutes. For five whole minutes, I forgot the rest of the world exists. It came crashing back, bringing me a sermon seed. From the riots at the Stonewall in to the foreseeable future, pride isn’t about being gay. Pride is about your reaction to others’ disappointment, fear, and anger at something that doesn’t need an opinion.

In fact, homophobia, transphobia, and acts against the queer community fueled by hatred conspire to form the perfect storm. Lightning bolts come at us through major events. Sodomy laws weren’t completely abolished until 2003. Gay marriage wasn’t legal until 2008. AIDS has been a never ending struggle because it has been the proof that conservative Christians needed that being gay was a sin and we could die from it. Conservative Christians are still struggling with the sin aspect, when other scientific progress has been institutionalized. For instance, we no longer think of the left-handed or the divorced as morally bankrupt.

Hypocrisy echoes like thunder all around us.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus and the Disciples are out on a boat in what is now Lake Kinnaret, then called the Sea of Galilee. Mark writes that it is storming, and Jesus is asleep in the boat. The Disciples are scared, and wake Jesus up. They say, “Teacher, do you not care that we are in peril?” In short, what they want is for Jesus to wake up and help bail water.

Biblical stories are often told in parables. This one is not spoken by Jesus, but imparts a lesson all the same. In the Bible, storms are often used to represent chaos. The Disciples internalize it by saying, “Teacher, do you not care that we are in peril?” Jesus isn’t having it. Instead of working through the storm, he yells at it.

It obeys.

The AIDS crisis begat the slogan “silence equals death.” To me, that plays right into our gospel, because as all these messages of fear and hatred are coming at our community, progress is not measured in how well we go along, but how well we stand out.

We dismantle chaos when we yell at it. We dismantle chaos when we refuse to take it in. The storm is not of us, it is around us.

What pride means to me is not pride in the fact that I’m gay. It’s pride in yelling at the storm, even when my voice was shaking.

Amen.

The One That’s Mostly About My Sister

June 11, 2021June 11, 2021 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s the middle of the night and I just randomly woke up. I can’t get back to sleep, so I’m going to tell you about a funny conversation I had with Sam and then start reading. If I’m not hooked, I’ll go back to bed. If I am, I can’t think of a better way to spend a few hours than blissed out on the dopamine of a good book.

So, Sam wished me a happy Pride. We were talking about the events, and I asked her when the parade was. Then, I said, “I used to feel embarrassed about having to ask straight people when the parade was, but then I realized that no introvert willingly knows when events this size happen. We know it’s coming up, but we’ll wait until we know the approximate date and time before asking the exactly details.” I think it’s because we’ll spend time being anxious about the crowd- it’s sensory overload on every level imaginable. I like to be surprised with answers like “it’s tomorrow” or “it’s three days from now.” I do not want to know that the Pride parade is in three months. That’s three months of worrying about how to participate in the smallest increment of time possible.

She replied by telling me when it was (I don’t remember now…. I’ll have to look it up….. again), and then said that straight people like to be asked when the Pride parade is because they like proving they’re in the know. They like being thought of as “hip.”

Fine with me. I am not hip. I am the worst gay who ever gayed.

I’ve really only had one Pride parade that was so fun I never wanted the night to end. My sister marched with me, and we were both really young. I think she was 15-16, so that would have made me 20 or 21. There is nothing better than seeing the Pride parade through a kid’s eyes, because they notice everything and their perspective is just, well….. It’s better. They’re blown away by the floats, beads, flags, etc. and they just want to love you up and make you feel appreciated. They GET IT. Kids understand better than most adults, because they don’t like it when they feel like their loved ones are being attacked for something they can’t change, and the idea of one night to celebrate with a big party in the middle of the streets is catnip to a teenager. I think the meaningful parts of Pride move her differently than me, and I can tell you exactly why. If someone’s going to hate their sibling, it has to be them. Anyone else is just asking for a knock-down drag-out. Earrings will be taken out. Ponytails will be hastily made.

It’s not just the neighborhood block aspect. It’s also that my sister isn’t gay. She hasn’t had years and years and years of being picked on, so she has no immunity to it. We’ve never had this conversation, but I think it’s a tiny bit like Quentin Tarantino being worried that Jamie Foxx would recoil at saying the n-word while filming “Django Unchained.” Foxx said not to worry. It was Tarantino that was going to be uncomfortable, because for him, it was just Tuesday. If you are queer, homophobia and transphobia are just the iocaine powder to which we’ve built up immunity.

The struggle did not go unnoticed. The Pride parade impacted my sister’s life just as much as it did mine. She gave me so much self-confidence and love. I gave her the will to take on state and federal legislators who want to outlaw trans medicine by exposing her to what was going on in my community early and often.

My sister is pretty much the straightest straight woman I know, but at the same time, I’ve “raised her” to be a better gay person than I’ll ever be. Like, there’s no contest.

She’s a lobbyist for a federally funded health clinic that serves the queer community, working in Austin and DC. She knows more about queer issues than I’ve forgotten, and if I have questions about trans medicine, she’s the person I ask first (I’m not trans, I just always have questions about medicine). She was one of the people fighting prohibition of giving teenagers puberty blockers and the ban on trans girls in sports.

I don’t have the desire, will, or stamina to talk to Texas Republicans about that, because the fact that puberty blockers would alleviate their concerns was beyond them. Puberty blockers are a non-permanent way to treat gender dysphoria in children while giving them plenty of time to see a therapist and decide if they’re happy with their bodies as is, or whether they’d like to have surgery. It also gives them an “out” if they decide not to transition at all. As soon as you stop taking the pills, puberty resumes. I can’t imagine the disgust I would feel for my body if my entire brain was wired as male and I started seeing breasts grow in. By keeping trans people’s bodies immature, it also makes surgical transition easier later, because your face hasn’t grown into the appearance of your assigned gender- the one people decided for you because you’d just been evicted from your first apartment and measured on the Apgar scale.

For trans women, this could mean that their Adam’s Apples aren’t as pronounced and their facial features stay soft. For trans men, this could mean that their hips don’t widen in preparation for childbirth, they don’t start menstruating, and they only have to have bottom surgery later on.

It’s also misogynistic that this stuff is being targeted at trans girls, because I’ve never heard a legislator talking about males assigned female at birth and how that would affect boys’ teams. No one brought up trans men during the bathroom bill debate. It’s almost as if being female is the problem.

I don’t have the chutzpah to even read this blog entry to legislators, but my sister will keep knocking down obstacles on my behalf.

She is my Pride.