I wasn’t going to write anything about Orlando. So often, when something brutal and devastating happens, the last thing I want to do is post about it, and mostly I don’t. And yet as I tab back and forth, social media to my manuscript to this window I’m typing in right now, I can’t stop thinking about something a friend said the other day, in comparing the ways we navigate our jobs and lives with respect to identity: “You’re in deep cover.” My Wikipedia entry notwithstanding, if you know me in my day-to-day life, my queerness is invisible unless I talk about it, and I don’t always talk about it.
But today I can’t not talk about it. I want you to know, whoever you are reading this, that I feel gutpunched, that I sent money to the Zebra Foundation as a small but hopefully useful action, that I listened to Nia King’s We Want the Airwaves podcast and read from The Collection: Short Fiction From The Transgender Vanguard and Glitter and Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy and As The Crow Flies because I needed to experience queer voices, and that I’m trying to work on my own book-in-progress but I can’t stop thinking about all the voices that have been silenced.