hootOS

Making Shit Happen Without a Clue.

Community is exceedingly difficult to find away from the keyboard these days. When you're able to cycle through friend groups until you find the right one online, it almost feels limiting and discouraging to make friends local to you. However, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of a nearby support group... and maybe a few good stories to learn from.

Let's start from the beginning. Around 2011 or so - 14 years ago - I started questioning my gender thanks to online websites like Tumblr. The sheer openness of the queers on that site in particular led me to fully understand that transgender people were just normal people like me. Some of them were my age at the time, others were adults. I saw that what I wanted, was actually possible. I didn't have to dream about magically turning into a girl over night and be disappointed it never happens, I can just... go do that.

I spoke to a school counselor about it. I knew my parents didn't know jack shit about this type of thing, so why not ask someone whose job it is, is to figure things out for the students. The counselor said she was glad I came to her, but that she also knew very little. My reflex was to be disappointed, but I think she observed my shoulders slouching. She raised her finger in the air and muttered a soft, "however..."

She directed me to a provincial non-profit designed specifically to help transgender people like me with a variety of things. Whether it's navigating the requirements to change names and documents, seeking out healthcare providers and navigating the healthcare system while trans, or just finding someone who knew shit about being trans, that organization knew how to help. The counselor put me in touch with them to help get things started.

That's how I met Jaye, one of my first truly queer friends I'd ever met. I was quite a mess of a person, then, so I look back on this period of my life with a strong sense of shame. Not for being messily queer, mind you, but for just being a bad person. I was quite self-centered, greedy and demanding of attention. In certain aspects it helped me do things I never should have been able to do, like playing live solo gigs in a city I've never lived in. However, it also meant I lied and cheated people out of money that shouldn't have been mine. It sucks.

And yet, Jaye held space for me. Shit, she continues to do so. While getting tattooed last autumn she put up with me whining, complaining and getting annoyingly apologetic about my behavior both in the present and the past. In any case, as terrible a person as I was, she still held space for me because she knew that I needed a place to fuck up and learn. And so long as I kept learning, she kept holding space for me. She's radical as fuck.

It's thanks to that experience - of fucking up and getting another chance - that I learned how to be the person I am today. So who is HOOT_OS today? Well, let's run the gauntlet of what I've done:

And this year, I am part of a trio of activists organizing queer events in my city for Pride Month, the first time ever that queer people from within the city's boundaries have organized events for themselves.

Yes, I'm bragging. But I have a point to all this: I didn't know what the fuck I was doing at any time at all, and I still fucking don't.

I'm learning along the way, of course. I've gotten familiarized with flag raising requests, and addressing them to the city council in person. I've gotten familiarized with how to organize a genuinely safe space for queer people - not the fake 'safe spaces' that cis people my shade of fluorescence tend to build, but genuine safe spaces for freaky-deaky headmate-having crazy types like myself that the normies can't stand.

The thing is: even with this résumé of history-book heroism worthy of an autobiography, I didn't know fuck from shit when I was getting the ball rolling.

All I knew was my goals: get a queer support group working, make the hierarchy within it as horizontal as possible, make it as pro-neurodivergence as possible, and make it save lives. Get a group of queers together to organize our own pride events in the city. Find new friends who can help pull all of us out of our shells and be radically authentic by any means necessary.

We haven't completed all my goals yet. The -phobes are running full-tilt into violent rhetoric with the recent anti-federal separatist movements, as misguided and reflexive as they are. This makes being a radical faggot in public a bit difficult. Yet, we're making a lot of fucking progress.

All it takes is a lot of audacity, and a lot of spite, and a whole truckload of confidence. It takes knowing you will eventually succeed, even if you start on the wrong foot and fall down. It takes listening and learning, and a lot of it. It takes being open to critique, but not backing down from what you truly believe in. It takes some fucking guts.

There are alternate timelines out there where some freak with a gun could have killed me for having the gall to put a rainbow up on a flagpole. But this isn't that world, and as long as I'm still breathing, I'm going to fight.

You should too.

Go to your city council and ask about flag raising. If it's not an automatic event in your community, it may require a local to request it like mine does. Go to city council or call them, and ask them what you can do to see a rainbow flag in front of city hall. They may be called "Proclamation Requests," but they could be called something else. Cities, towns and villages can vary. The important thing is that you ask what needs to be done to put those colours up in the sky. If you feel the need, ask if your contact information can be redacted in any public publishing of council agendas or meeting minutes for safety. The worst you can get is a "no." If this is a prohibiting factor to you, that's okay. It takes a special kind of stupid (my brand of stupid) to do scary shit like this. Do what you need to do to keep yourself safe.

Go to your city library and ask them if you can host an event in their space. We told our city library we wanted to create a social get-together for other queer people and allies in the community. They gave us ideas about how to run it based on their own experiences running events in the library themselves. You don't need to take their advice, but it can be helpful. Some months we just sit and talk, others we play a game or watch a movie. Changing things up can help keep things feeling fresh, keep conversations rolling over new territory and bring people closer together. If something doesn't work, don't worry about it.

If you're in a rural community or a rural hub city like I am, don't fret about attendance. Queers are escaping to safer places as soon as they can, so their numbers are likely fewer than you might want. In reality, having a smaller group is much easier to manage. We usually get about four to eight people showing up, with that number sometimes growing to 12 or so. High attendance events often leave people feeling like they're being left out or unseen. This also may mean certain people may visit but never come back. Let that happen. Not every support group can help everyone. On the other side of the coin, even just one person showing up is a good thing. that's a new local friend for you to get to know. Even if nobody shows up, keep trying. They'll come.

Use a pseudonym if you feel you need to. My legal documentation has yet to be changed, but the name everyone knows me by is a pseudonym. This means slip-ups from well-meaning allies in conversation with -phobes won't lead to doxxing and harassment. They'll know your pseudonym, but not who you are. They'll be mad at a fucking ghost. There is still a potential for doxxing though, don't treat it like a perfect smokescreen. It just an added layer of operational security if you need it. Shit, if authors can use pen names, why the fuck can't you, right?

Finally: if you're too scared to do it, that's okay. That doesn't mean you're any less important than I am. We are stronger together. If your best way of fighting against these knuckledragging fascists is to hide or run, that's a good thing. Your safety is yours to manage. I ran into this mess with a deathwish, knowing I could very well die doing what I'm doing. Survival is just as much an important part of the fight against fascism as standing up and fighting. It's possible your aptitude is better suited to another task to help the community. Just like a platoon in combat needs medics as well as front-line soldiers, so too does the community. Activists like myself frequently need people to traumadump to and release the anxieties and stress coming from our fight. There are so many more things you can do beyond this, too, so don't take this suggestion as exhaustive. I need to repeat myself here: if all you can do is run or hide, that's still part of the fight. You're keeping yourself alive to join the fight later.

The whole point of all of this is such: I didn't know shit about any of this when I started getting things done. I mean, for fuck's sake, I'd made Canadian prairie history without even realizing it when the pride flag was raised for the first time in my city. You don't have to know exactly how things will work out, you just need to be ready to learn, adjust and keep moving. If you don't know how to fight, but you want to fight: look for others fighting the same fight and ask for their advice. Learn from them.

What's more important than any of this shit is surviving. When we make it out of this fucked up hellhole of a political situation we've found ourselves in - not IF, but WHEN - we won't have to survive anymore. We'll be able to thrive, to live and love comfortably. Even while we're trying to survive now, there is still so much joy to be found. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

We will win this. Queer people have been here since pre-history, before any historical events were written down and recorded. We will continue to be here until the last human perishes.

We were here from the beginning of time as we observe it, and we will be here until the end of it.

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