Fuck Trump

Finishing up a bunch of unnnecessarily complicated paperwork for one of our funding sources, I look up and a headline catches my eye “NYC Mayor Eric Adams targets transgender student bathroom access." I knew when he was first running that Eric Adams was no friend of the LGBTQ community. I was one of the Grand Marshals of Brooklyn Pride in 2003 and there were several events with Adams, who was then the Brooklyn Borough President. You could tell he did not want to be there in the way he stood stiffly a little too far away from the rest of us and in the way he arrived late and left early. He knew he had to pretend, he needed our queer votes to win Brooklyn and, later, the City but that’s all it was. I tried to tell people but with progressive candidates getting knocked out right and left, too many people took the bait. And now here we are with the corrupt Adams sucking up to Trump to save his own ass, throwing the immigrants and queers who make up the heart of this city to the MAGA wolves. As I read the article, my blood boiling, I came to “We’re going so far away from common sense,” Adams said at an unrelated press conference. “My utmost importance is to ensure that when my children are in school, they’re in a safe environment. And I do not believe a safe environment is allowing boys and girls to use the same facility at the same time.” I want to get in his face and say, "you know what’s common sense? Letting trans youth use the bathroom where they feel comfortable!" Steaming about this as I approach the Port Authority, I hear someone say they like my shirt and I look up to see a trio of gay white men. One of their faces is familiar and I blurt out “Perry!”, having run into the author and activist Perry Brass. He introduces me to his friends, and one of them tellls me it must take some guts to wear my Fuck Trump shirt. I tell him I live in Bay Ridge and I expect some trouble there, but not in midtown. We say goodnight and I head across the Port Authority and down the subway stairs. At the bottom, a middle aged woman in a salmon pink shirt also compliments my shirt. “There’s a big march on Saturday,” I tell her. By this point in the day, having stayed late to finish the paperwork, I am brain dead so I pull up my list of protests to give her the time. “12pm, at 49th and Park.” People’s reactions to the shirt make me feel like we need to make our resistance visible. I know by talking to everyone from my doctors and their staff to random people on the subway that tons of people oppose Trump, but you can’t see that looking around. I think back to the crisis years of AIDS and the symbols that we wore that made you know that someone was an ally and showed the world how many people cared about AIDS, the pink triangle and the red ribbon. I think I need to make a bunch of Fuck Trump buttons and hand them out to anyone who likes the shirt. It’s a drop in the bucket of visibility but it’s something. I get on the train and a young woman offers me her seat, I tell her I’m fine and start wondering, again, why people offer me their seats so often. I am objectively not that old, not quite 50, although I often feel 80. I wonder if I look particularly tired, or if the pain in my leg shows in the way I stand, trying to keep the damn thing from turning into a mass of jelly and collapsing under me. If we were moving she might have seen the way sudden jolts send a flash like lightning searing along the hardware in my spine. But it remains a mystery.