Trans Family Picnic
Trans family picnic was last night, the only thing I feel a connection to during pride weekend. This year, hundreds and hundreds of trans people in a park in north Portland, more than I’ve ever experienced in one place. Friends and acquaintances I haven’t seen in years. New friends looking beautiful as they reconnected with long lost roommates. Children and old women and men and others gathering together, eating together, hopping from one circle of friendship to another. New friends from far away saying “I never knew there could be this many trans people in the world.”
It was exhausting. It’s impossible to know every transgender person in Portland now. It’s all a mosh pit, and it’s beautiful and overwhelming.
I saw people that I see once a year again. And every year I’m like “I don’t want to make a life with them anymore.” And every year I try to be kind.
Same problem as usual: want to spend time with all of these people one on one. I can’t be one on one with all of them at once. So I become the welcome. And I skitter from person to person, trying to make them all feel they belong. And feel like I don’t belong. Not really.
Anyway, I’m tired. I don’t know if yesterday was fun. It filled my heart. It did some of the alchemy I keep telling people to do. But fun? I’m not sure. Family can be exhausting.
And this year, I felt the weight of the people who are missing. Rani Baker. Stevie. Graye. My friend Erin asked me once if I felt a responsibility to the dead. And I do. They live only in our memories. And my friends are dead. And I wanted to see them on the fringes of the picnic welcomed into the circle. So I carried them there.
There’s a phrase in Quaker Meeting called Gathering in the Silence. It’s where you get really really quiet, and you try to listen to That Of Christ that Is In You, whatever the fuck that means.
I told my friends this afternoon about the most mystical experience that I ever had, when I was at Meeting with my ex wife, my soon-to-be-out leather wearing motorcycle riding pastor, her soon to be wife and lesbian ministry partner, the first trans woman I ever knew (dead months later), Bear and his Wife, a gaggle of other queer misfits, and we were sitting in the silence, and I suddenly felt filled with them, connected to them, right next to them, right next to the Christ of all humans, the grid of the living and the dead, all creeds and people together as God whatever she is, the billions and billions of suffering and cruel and beautiful and ugly and enriched and impoverished, and I went briefly insane overwhelmed by it, and I am still there, and I am still welcoming everyone who is part of that, all the time, separate and also imminent in me.
I don’t know how to talk about this without sounding crazy. It’s the root why I try to welcome everyone, because they are welcome. It activated something in me that tried to free me. Listening to it led me here, led me to the black dress, to this congregation of the denounced, this downtrodden nobodys pushed around by power, at the end of the pointed finger, and I want to welcome them all, have them live, figure out how to bring them to life again, even if they have died.
I felt all of this briefly last night, sitting with my friends, overwhelmed and beautiful. And then I didn’t. And I felt lonely, and I felt filled, and I felt wonderful, and I felt very very sad.
Anyway, trans picnic. It’s glorious. We are legion. We aren’t going anywhere.