i still don't believe this happened
Oct. 26th, 2012 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaTime for some more creative non-fiction about people I met downtown. This one is much less fun.
~~*~~*~~
I went into town to get groceries this afternoon. It would be a pain in the ass to haul a gallon of milk plus everything else a mile back to my house, so I decided to wait for the bus. There are two busses that stop along Broadway: one that goes to the mall in the next town, and one that goes back to campus. Because these are two popular destinations for my set of people, there were a whole bunch of us at the bus stop: to my right, a group of four people I know by sight; to my left, a group comprised of several underclassmen I’ve seen at Pride Alliance meetings. Included among them was an acquaintance I’d introduced myself to in the very beginning of the semester, because I’m always happy to meet another trans* person. I’ll call him Mike.
Okay, scene set. But wait, there was one other person at the bus stop: a muscular man in his late twenties who paced around the area, well-dressed but carrying a plastic bag of more casual clothing, smoking a cigarette. As we waited, I kept moving around, trying to get out of the path of his cigarette smoke without actively intruding on the other groups of students. For five minutes, I succeeded, and I could see the bus coming down the street. Finally, salvation! I hoped the milk wasn’t suffering too badly. I reflected that the Obama/Biden sign in the window of the jewelry store was a nice change from the Romney stickers I see around town. Then I looked up, and the man with the cigarette was looming over me, about a foot closer than is normally considered polite and with a frown on his face.
“Yo, man, are those faggots over there?” he asked angrily. His head jutted forwards on his neck.
I looked in the direction he indicated with his cigarette. Sure enough, he was pointing at Mike, who was holding hands with his boyfriend. I’ve heard people say “my heart sank”, but it wasn’t like that: it was more like my heart just stopped working.
I looked back at the man. My mind went to, of all things, a Tumblr post, in which someone posted on Craigslist condemning a man he met at a party for trying to round up a hate mob that included the husband of the first man. But I’m no macho husband, prepared to beat up potentially violent homophobes; I’m five foot seven, a hundred fifty pounds, in skinny jeans too stiff to execute a fast kick and weighed down by a backpack and groceries. “No,” I said, as calmly as I could, making sure my voice came out deep.
The man scowled at me. In the same tone, he said, “You mean to tell me that’s a chick kissing that dude?”
I froze. My brain jumped from his casual use of faggot, and his anger over the idea of two men kissing, to the fact that trans* people are even more likely to incite anger in stranger. Tranny tranny tranny, my brain chanted at me. What was I supposed to do? Lie, and subject myself to further questioning about my acquaintance’s right to kiss who he pleased in public? Tell him that my acquaintance was a guy, and risk this man getting angry at him? I couldn’t decide what to say, how to get rid of him, how to tell him that he had no right to ask me, ask anyone about perfect strangers at the bus stop. And over all of this: tranny tranny tranny tranny he’s going to figure out you’re transgender he’s going to figure out you’re a faggot he’s going to freak out that he’s been talking to a tranny faggot and he’s going to punch you.
So I said nothing. I held eye contact long past the point of comfort. I will not answer your questions, They are not okay with me, I thought.
He seemed to get the message. When he spoke next, his tone was less threatening. “Hey, man, I just want to know. I don’t got a problem with faggots.”
That threw me for a loop. I glanced out of the corner of my eye at the bus pulling up. “If you don’t have a problem with them, then you shouldn’t use that word,” I said, perhaps unwisely deciding that if he actually wanted to be inoffensive, he needed to do a better job of it, and that I should educate him.
He leaned back — still too close for comfort, but enough that the blanket of fear whiting out my brain lifted a little bit. “They don’t like faggot?”
“No,” I said firmly.
His face wrinkled. Behind him, the bus opened its doors. “Then what do I use? Homo … happy?”
Close enough, I thought. “Gay. Gay works.” I started to edge past him as the first group of students poured onto the bus, eager not to get left behind at the bus stop with this situation.
“All right, man,” he said, not sounding entirely convinced. “I just got out of jail, I’m on my way to an interview at the mall.”
“Good luck with that,” I said, running for the bus. I got on, sat down, and rested my head against the pole next to my seat. The classmate I knew from the first group asked if I was okay, and he and his friends expressed appropriate outrage when I told them what he had wanted to know. Only afterwards did it occur to me that I’d just left Mike and his friends to wait for the other bus — and then take that bus — with this man. I sincerely hope that he is, in fact, just completely ignorant about terminology and body language, and that the fact that the other students were in a group kept him from approaching them, the same way that he approached me rather than them at the stop.
END
~~*~~*~~
All right. Writing it down like that, that helped. Although I keep trying to rationalize it: I was never in any real danger, it was crowded, during the day, and right in the middle of downtown; he wouldn’t have done anything.
I have such a hard time identifying things that are not okay, and even though I was there, I know it wasn’t me making shit up or blowing things out of proportion, I still almost don’t believe myself, or that it counts as harassment, or that I still just want to track down the classmate I talked to on the bus and ask for a hug because he was there and I won’t have to actually explain why I felt so awful.
~~*~~*~~
I went into town to get groceries this afternoon. It would be a pain in the ass to haul a gallon of milk plus everything else a mile back to my house, so I decided to wait for the bus. There are two busses that stop along Broadway: one that goes to the mall in the next town, and one that goes back to campus. Because these are two popular destinations for my set of people, there were a whole bunch of us at the bus stop: to my right, a group of four people I know by sight; to my left, a group comprised of several underclassmen I’ve seen at Pride Alliance meetings. Included among them was an acquaintance I’d introduced myself to in the very beginning of the semester, because I’m always happy to meet another trans* person. I’ll call him Mike.
Okay, scene set. But wait, there was one other person at the bus stop: a muscular man in his late twenties who paced around the area, well-dressed but carrying a plastic bag of more casual clothing, smoking a cigarette. As we waited, I kept moving around, trying to get out of the path of his cigarette smoke without actively intruding on the other groups of students. For five minutes, I succeeded, and I could see the bus coming down the street. Finally, salvation! I hoped the milk wasn’t suffering too badly. I reflected that the Obama/Biden sign in the window of the jewelry store was a nice change from the Romney stickers I see around town. Then I looked up, and the man with the cigarette was looming over me, about a foot closer than is normally considered polite and with a frown on his face.
“Yo, man, are those faggots over there?” he asked angrily. His head jutted forwards on his neck.
I looked in the direction he indicated with his cigarette. Sure enough, he was pointing at Mike, who was holding hands with his boyfriend. I’ve heard people say “my heart sank”, but it wasn’t like that: it was more like my heart just stopped working.
I looked back at the man. My mind went to, of all things, a Tumblr post, in which someone posted on Craigslist condemning a man he met at a party for trying to round up a hate mob that included the husband of the first man. But I’m no macho husband, prepared to beat up potentially violent homophobes; I’m five foot seven, a hundred fifty pounds, in skinny jeans too stiff to execute a fast kick and weighed down by a backpack and groceries. “No,” I said, as calmly as I could, making sure my voice came out deep.
The man scowled at me. In the same tone, he said, “You mean to tell me that’s a chick kissing that dude?”
I froze. My brain jumped from his casual use of faggot, and his anger over the idea of two men kissing, to the fact that trans* people are even more likely to incite anger in stranger. Tranny tranny tranny, my brain chanted at me. What was I supposed to do? Lie, and subject myself to further questioning about my acquaintance’s right to kiss who he pleased in public? Tell him that my acquaintance was a guy, and risk this man getting angry at him? I couldn’t decide what to say, how to get rid of him, how to tell him that he had no right to ask me, ask anyone about perfect strangers at the bus stop. And over all of this: tranny tranny tranny tranny he’s going to figure out you’re transgender he’s going to figure out you’re a faggot he’s going to freak out that he’s been talking to a tranny faggot and he’s going to punch you.
So I said nothing. I held eye contact long past the point of comfort. I will not answer your questions, They are not okay with me, I thought.
He seemed to get the message. When he spoke next, his tone was less threatening. “Hey, man, I just want to know. I don’t got a problem with faggots.”
That threw me for a loop. I glanced out of the corner of my eye at the bus pulling up. “If you don’t have a problem with them, then you shouldn’t use that word,” I said, perhaps unwisely deciding that if he actually wanted to be inoffensive, he needed to do a better job of it, and that I should educate him.
He leaned back — still too close for comfort, but enough that the blanket of fear whiting out my brain lifted a little bit. “They don’t like faggot?”
“No,” I said firmly.
His face wrinkled. Behind him, the bus opened its doors. “Then what do I use? Homo … happy?”
Close enough, I thought. “Gay. Gay works.” I started to edge past him as the first group of students poured onto the bus, eager not to get left behind at the bus stop with this situation.
“All right, man,” he said, not sounding entirely convinced. “I just got out of jail, I’m on my way to an interview at the mall.”
“Good luck with that,” I said, running for the bus. I got on, sat down, and rested my head against the pole next to my seat. The classmate I knew from the first group asked if I was okay, and he and his friends expressed appropriate outrage when I told them what he had wanted to know. Only afterwards did it occur to me that I’d just left Mike and his friends to wait for the other bus — and then take that bus — with this man. I sincerely hope that he is, in fact, just completely ignorant about terminology and body language, and that the fact that the other students were in a group kept him from approaching them, the same way that he approached me rather than them at the stop.
END
~~*~~*~~
All right. Writing it down like that, that helped. Although I keep trying to rationalize it: I was never in any real danger, it was crowded, during the day, and right in the middle of downtown; he wouldn’t have done anything.
I have such a hard time identifying things that are not okay, and even though I was there, I know it wasn’t me making shit up or blowing things out of proportion, I still almost don’t believe myself, or that it counts as harassment, or that I still just want to track down the classmate I talked to on the bus and ask for a hug because he was there and I won’t have to actually explain why I felt so awful.
