The Soft Butch That Couldn’t (Or: I Got COVID-19 in March 2020 and Never Got Better)
Today is Long Covid Awareness Day. It’s also the three-year anniversary of the beginning of my own Long Covid journey, which still continues. This article was originally published in August 2020.
I was already in a hospital the first time I realized I needed a wheelchair. A sprawling full city-block of a hospital in midtown Manhattan with a lobby that looks strikingly similar to the cavernous Ministry of Magic atrium. My neurosurgeon had sent me in for an emergency MRI three months after I’d been diagnosed with COVID-19. Death or a two-week flu were the only options for people who contracted COVID, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and I wasn’t dead so surely lingering coronavirus wasn’t the thing that was causing my body to go so berserk. Racing heart, palpitations, stroke-high blood pressure, chest pain, weak legs, fatigue that felt like my body was made of lead, nausea, loss of appetite, extreme weight loss, shortness of breath, brain fog that caused me to forget how to form sentences, bladder dysfunction, and creeping numbness and tingling in my feet and legs.
It was those last things that caused my neurosurgeon’s alarm. I have what’s called “remarkable” cervical stenosis. When my neurosurgeon first showed me my CT scan and diagnosed me last fall, I thought he meant it in a good way. Exceptional. Impressive. Miraculous. He did not. Remarkable, he explained, in the sense that I have the spine of a person who is 300 years old. And with such a spine, when you can’t remember the word “carrot” or how to turn on the oven, and your legs are tingling all the way up to your knees, there’s a chance your vertebrae are crushing your spinal cord en route to paralysis. It could happen over time, or it could happen right now.
As I stood swaying in the hospital lobby while the nurses and security guards debated what to do with me, I realized I should have taken my neurosurgeon up on his offer to send an ambulance to my house to get me. But I’d already racked up one ambulance ride when my feet initially lost their feeling. An Uber was faster and, frankly, less expensive.
The problem was I didn’t have a positive COVID test or a negative COVID test, because when I’d gotten sick over 90 days before, no testing was available in New York City, unless you were admitted to the hospital, and the telemedicine doctor told me not to go to the hospital unless I couldn’t finish my sentences or my lips were turning blue. But also I still had COVID symptoms. But also I wasn’t there to be treated for COVID symptoms. I was there because my neurosurgeon told me to meet him there. Did I belong in the COVID triage tent? Did I belong in the regular emergency room? Was I a danger to everyone in the lobby? Were they a danger to me? Who did I think I was, anyway, walking in off the street demanding an MRI in the middle of a global pandemic?
“I’m sorry, I hate to be dramatic,” I said, as I waited to see if they were going to let me into the hospital to find out if my spine was squashing the feeling out of my legs permanently, “but is there anywhere I could possibly maybe please sit down?”
There was not. The visitor chairs had been removed for social distancing. I glanced over at the security guard’s stool. “Don’t,” he said.
I decided my only hope was utilizing my gift for defusing tense situations with humor, so I decided to do a Ministry of Magic gag. “Broom Regulatory Control, level six” is what I meant to say, but I couldn’t remember the word “broom.” I started my joke; “broom” fell out of my head; I made the motion of sweeping, then stepping over the handle of a broom, then lifting up off the ground and whooshing around. I heard myself make a vrooooooom sound, like when an airplane spoon is heading toward a child’s mouth.
“Ma’am,” the security guard said, even more apprehensive than he had been, “Have you been drinking?”
I called my neurosurgeon and he sent an intern down to get me.
My COVID onset was pretty normal, in terms of what’s considered normal for a novel coronavirus that shuts down the entire world. I started displaying symptoms a week after New York City went into lockdown in March. Slight chills and a mild sore throat that progressed to chest congestion and tightness, a cough, and shortness of breath. I was really tired and I didn’t have much of an appetite. I got winded just walking down the hallway to the bathroom. Hot showers left me hacky-coughing for hours. It was terrifying — hospitals were overflowing; the only sound outside my bedroom window was the constant scream of ambulance sirens; the death toll skyrocketed every day; the Empire State Building was programmed to flash red like a beating heart as a showcase of solidarity with healthcare workers, but it looked like some kind of apocalyptic lighthouse — but after two weeks, my body started feeling better. Slowly, the band around my chest seemed to loosen, my cough eased up, my breath came back and I could walk down the stairs again.
I thought, “I survived! It really was, for me, just a bad flu!”
But I never got all the way better. At some point, I started to feel like I was relapsing — and then: new symptoms. The heart stuff and lung stuff and fatigue stuff that had me woozy-wobbling that night in the hospital waiting for my MRI, and a whole new kind of panic attack where the adrenaline that flooded my body was so extreme it caused tremors in my legs and arms that lasted for hours.
My startle reflex started operating in overdrive. If a loud noise woke me up in the middle of the night, I’d immediately burst into a panic attack. Nothing I did could get them under control. Not meditation, not medication, and exercise was out of the question — the only way I could get down the stairs at that point was to basically fling myself forward from the top and hope for the best.
The weakness seemed to settle into my bones.
I lay in bed, day after day, week after week, too tired to sit up for more than a few minutes. Stacy made my meals and brought them to me. Each time, I ate a few bites and had to lie back down to gather up enough energy to sit up and eat a few more. I tried to work, but couldn’t make it through a full day, and then couldn’t make it through a full morning. I asked for an extended leave of absence. I moved all of my toiletries from the bathroom to my nightstand. I could hardly manage a two-minute shower.
The telemedicine doctors all told me I’d be fine; of course the virus would knock me out for a couple of weeks, but I’d bounce back in no time. I explained it had actually been quite a lot longer than “no time” and they smiled and thanked me for calling. My primary care physician said it was anxiety. My psychiatrist said it was depression. New York City’s newly opened Longterm COVID Care Center told me I didn’t have antibodies so I hadn’t had COVID. And anyway, my bloodwork was excellent.
“Is it possible,” I asked the doctor, “that this antibody test might not be a foolproof way to determine who actually had COVID? And that you might not have all the answers for this brand new global pandemic-causing virus we find out something new about every day?”
“No,” she said. “Not possible.”
I needed a wheelchair to leave the Longterm COVID Care Center, but I was scared to ask for one. The doctor seemed to think I was overreacting about having a simple flu. I paused and leaned against walls to steady my legs and catch my breath instead. It took me 20 minutes to finally make it out of the building, and as I waited for my Uber, I sat down on the sticky summer sidewalk right in the middle of Union Square.
My neurosurgeon is renowned. In the good way; not in the way that “remarkable” means “yikes” in spinal vernacular. When his team arrived in the emergency room to handle my emergency MRI, everyone stopped treating me like a woman who’d stumbled in and mimed flying a magical broom around in the lobby and started treating me like a quadruple sapphire iridium medallion frequent flyer. Harried nurses who’d been grumbling about demanding doctors behind their backs for an hour were happy to volunteer when my neurosurgeon’s intern announced that he needed someone to help him check my anal tone. Doctors suddenly had time to come by and offer me a kind word. Nurses kept bringing me juice.
It was the most attention I’d had from medical professionals in months, despite having spoken to dozens of doctors about my COVID symptoms by then. I asked every nurse and doctor who came to look in on me if they knew anything about people suffering from COVID long term, about unusual symptoms, about the antibody tests. What I found out over the course of my night in the ER is that doctors and nurses still had no idea what COVID was about, but they all agreed it was weird and getting infected in mid-March at the onset of the outbreak meant that I was one of the first people in the U.S. to be dealing with LongCovid symptoms; I was the science.
My neurosurgeon likes me, as a person; I can tell because in my after-visit notes from the first time I saw him, he wrote that I was “bright and amiable” and transcribed what I told him when he asked if my neck cracked when I moved it: “like an undead lich rising from an ancient throne in his tomb in the empire of necromancers.” I’d been in bad shape on my initial visit for a pinched nerve; I’d lost 70% of the strength in my left arm, shoulder, and hand. He’d told me I could try physical therapy but that surgery was probably inevitable. I went so hard at PT that the next time I saw him and he gave me the strength test, I sent his wheely chair whizzing across the room and smashed him into the wall. I said, “Now, that’s remarkable!”
The emergency MRI showed that my spine was a little worse than last time, not by much. Surgery was not urgent. But my neurosurgeon was still worried about me. He said I seemed heavy, faint, deeply exhausted, muted. And there was still the matter of words slipping out of my brain, pins and needles in my jelly legs, a wildly overactive bladder. He had the ER doctors run a battery of other tests; all of them were clear.
I said, “Do you think all this could be COVID?”
He leaned back in his chair, pinched his eyebrow and said, “I don’t know. But you’re not yourself. So maybe.” He studied me for a long minute and decided: “Yes.”
I knew exactly who I was before I got COVID: a woman disposed to rise to every occasion. A bitch who gets stuff done. The person everyone relies on to do the thing no one else has the heart or guts or fortitude to do. A soft butch holding my family and friends and my whole little world together with nothing but love and tenacity.
I had huge plans when lockdown started. I was going to finish my book, remake our outdoor furniture, grow fruits and vegetables in my container garden, learn to cook Stacy’s favorite pie (strawberry-rhubarb), run a delivery service for my neighbors for prescriptions and groceries, and connect (and re-connect) with my dearest family and friends.
I didn’t get a chance to do any of those things.
Stacy took over doing all the laundry and dishes and vacuuming and toilet cleaning and shopping and cat feeding and grooming — my jobs, the things I love to do, the homemaking projects I’d longed to be in charge of my entire life, the caretaking tasks made my days feel full and valuable — while working day and night from her makeshift editing suite in the living room. The only thing I saw beyond my bedroom walls was the sky outside my window: grey then blue then purple and gold and cinnamon and orange then black then grey again.
Before COVID, my friends and I spent glorious weekends gathered around a table in my living room, sharing meals and wine and stories from our weeks and hours and hours playing Dungeons & Dragons. The real world so often tried to rob us of our power, but inside our D&D campaign we were unstoppable heroes. We saved towns. We slayed beasts. We made an entire queer universe of inside jokes. We moved our game online during lockdown and I told my friends maybe next week I could play, and maybe next week I would feel better, and maybe next week I’d be back to my old self. When I finally told them they should start a new Dungeons & Dragons game without me, that I wasn’t really getting better and I didn’t know when I would feel okay again, I laid in Stacy’s lap and sobbed with such fierce and broken hoarseness I didn’t even recognize the sounds as my own. I told my therapist, over Zoom, in my bed in my pajamas, that I’d only ever heard people cry like that at funerals before.
“I’m losing everything,” I told Stacy. “I’m losing me.”
My neurosurgeon called me on a Saturday, out of the blue, two weeks after my MRI and said, almost giddily, that he’d asked all of his colleagues and finally found something he thought explained what was going on with me: dysautonomia. That same day, during a Q&A with my LongCovid support group, a different neurologist made the same guess. And so I made an appointment with a cardiologist who specializes in dysautonomia and dragged myself back into Manhattan to be disbelieved by another doctor. I dressed nicely. I had all my paperwork in order in a crisp manila folder. I typed out the main words that kept falling out of my head in the Notes app on my phone, just in case. I’d taken a series of videos on my phone of my heart rate and blood pressure using five different devices total, over the course of two weeks.
I started listing off my symptoms as soon as I sat down in the cardiologist’s office, and within 30 seconds, she held up her hand to stop me. Here we go, I thought. She wants a positive COVID swab or a positive antibody test or this is just anxiety or what happens after a cold and buck up and take a nap and you’ll be fine.
Instead, she said, “I know exactly what’s wrong with you.”
I blinked at her, stunned into total silence.
“You have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. POTS.”
POTS is, in fact, a form of dysautonomia. A person’s autonomic nervous system controls all the things we don’t think about, like heart rate, blood pressure, circulation, digestion, body temperature. When people with POTS sit up or stand up, our autonomic nervous systems can’t properly control our circulation, so all the blood rushes out of our heads and down our bodies, ultimately pooling in our feet. This, of course, makes us very dizzy, to the point of passing out, and also causes our hearts to start beating like mad and our blood pressure to go berserk to try to get our blood back up into our brains. It also causes big time spikes in adrenaline, because our fight or flight systems are almost always activated. Our hearts are often in the cardio zone all day long, and so of course we’re exhausted.
POTS can be caused by many things, one of which is a viral infection. I was this specialist’s first post-COVID case; she said maybe I was the first diagnosed post-COVID POTS case in the entire city of New York.
I jumped up when she diagnosed me; nearly passed out; sat back down, hard; and started to cry so hard my tears soaked through my face mask.
“It’s called an ‘invisible illness,” the cardiologist explained, “because you look fine and your tests and lab work also look completely normal. But it affects every single system in your body. And you feel absolutely miserable. Doctors almost always write it off as depression or anxiety.”
Every morning now when I wake up, I sit up slowly in bed and lean back against my headboard. I drink a full liter of water, eat some salted almonds, put on my compression socks for the day, and take a beta blocker for my heart and an SNRI to keep my adrenaline more in check. After 30 minutes, when my body has adjusted to sitting up, I can stand.
Downstairs, I make the first of three Liquid IV drinks of my day and eat a small breakfast. I drink four liters of water, total, and take more SNRIs and beta blockers as the day progresses. I sit on a stool when I take a shower. I sit down at a little portable table to do all the vegetable chopping and potato peeling for our meals. I wrap an ice scarf around me and sit down near the oven to cook. I use my office chair to wheel around the kitchen when I’m putting away groceries or dishes. I use a cane when I leave the house, which I only do for doctors appointments; it folds out into a stool so I don’t have to sit on the ground.
My cardiologist asked me on my second visit how I was adjusting, emotionally, to having a disability.
I said, “Do I have a disability?”
She said, “Well, yes. I thought you knew.”
Before I left for my most recent trip to the hospital, Stacy checked my backpack to make sure I had everything I needed. She tucked my facemask straps behind my ears, and kissed me on the forehead. “If they don’t have your wheelchair ready when you get there, ask for it,” she said. “Okay?”
I said, “I will, I promise,” and smiled with my eyes so she could see it.
Stacy is scared to be overbearing, because I’ve always hated being told what to do. She’s scared to be underbearing, because my brain fog has made my cognitive functioning less sharp, especially in the morning and at night. She’s scared I’ll do too much, because I’ve always done too much my entire life, that I won’t listen to my body, that I don’t even know how to listen to my body. She’s scared I’ll begin to feel angry at her for what she can do that I can no longer do, that becoming a caretaker to me when I’ve always been a caretaker to everyone else will create an emotional wound that will grow and fester.
She watches me open my pillbox first thing in the morning and slowly work out what I need to take right then and what I need to save for later; she asks if I need a hand; she pretends not to notice that I clench my jaw against her offer and the knowledge that, actually, yes, I could use some help. She leaves my bike, my most prized possession and my lifetime beloved hobby, untouched in the living room on its stand, because maybe one day I’ll be able to ride it again.
I’m scared too. Overachieving isn’t something I do; it’s always been who I am. Now that my sympathetic nervous system is misfiring in a way that makes simply getting through the day out of bed an achievement, there’s no energy left to overdo anything.
What will happen to my career now that I can’t show up early and stay late to help our community survive? What will happen to mine and Stacy’s lease now that I can’t keep my landlord extra happy by doing all the yard work and fixing all the leaky, crumbly, broken things in our house? What will happen to my friendships if I never have the energy or brainpower to sit at a table for five hours and roleplay zombie battles and villager rescues again? What will happen to my relationships with my family when talking on the phone wears me out, and I don’t know how to answer the question about if I’m feeling better? How is it possible that Stacy won’t grow to resent me when I can’t even walk two blocks to pick up my own prescriptions, when my newly diagnosed illness is already eating into our savings, when I can’t stand in the hot kitchen long enough to make our favorite soup, when I can’t even really carry on a conversation at night because my brain and body are so spent?
What if I’m not disabled enough to use the word “disabled?” I’m a person with a huge platform; what if I talk about disability in the wrong way, or miss the mark on my advocacy because it’s (shamefully, mostly) new to me? What if I hurt people who are already hurting with my naïveté, or accidentally dishonor the work of the queer disabled activists who came before me, some of whom I love and cherish as dear friends? What if I can’t find the balance between hope and acceptance? What if I become one of the 30% of POTS patients who are too disabled to work at all?
Is a soft butch a soft butch if she can barely hold even herself together? Is a soft butch a soft butch without her swagger?
Yesterday, I called Stacy on a banana-phone; walked from the kitchen into the living room where her office is set up and ring-ring, ring-ring-ed. She looked up from her computer monitor and saw me holding a banana to my ear and quirked her eyebrow. “Hi yes,” I said, “This is the last banana and I was wondering if you were planning to go to the store for more bananas in the next few days and so I can go ahead and use this in my smoothie or should I save it for a banana emergency?” She wanted to be annoyed with me because I was interrupting her workday and she was on a deadline. She wanted to be miffed because I’d pulled her out of her creative flow. But her mouth twitched into a smile because I was asking her for something I needed and could not do for myself, and I was being ridiculous, and it’d been so long since I’d been ridiculous. She said she’d run out to the grocery store tomorrow. I thanked her for her time, hung up the banana-phone, and turned it into a microphone to interview our cat Socks about the rumors that he’s a marshmallow head.
I’m scared, but I’m alive.
I’m scared, but I’m not broken.
In LongCovid support groups, we say our name and where we’re from and how long we’ve been sick. I’m Heather Hogan from New York City. Week 19/Day 133.
Week 156/Day 1,095 Update: You can buy a copy of The Long Covid Survival Guide, which I contributed to, if you’re looking for a good resource to help yourself or a friend/family member suffering with Long Covid. It might also make you happy to know that while I am still fighting Long Covid, I was finally able to get back on my bike!
Practical Magic: COVID Is Here to Stay — So What Does It Mean to Keep Each Other Safe?
The first time I got COVID, sometime in May of 2020, it was practically inevitable. The virus had taken the world by storm that winter and spring. How it spread was still emerging science, leading to unprecedented global shutdowns in an attempt to curtail the devastating quantity of fatalities.
Two and a half years later, on October 2, 2022, I got COVID again, and a few days later I had a positive rapid test to prove it. Unlike my experience in 2020, I know exactly how I got it and from whom. And this time, it was completely avoidable, even as the U.S. and countless other countries around the world threw caution to the wind and eliminated pretty much all COVID safety measures in the name of preserving global and national economies.
From a political and public health standpoint, things were certainly going in the wrong direction, I felt. At the end of the day, that’s also not how I got COVID: it wasn’t at work, it wasn’t on the train, it wasn’t at the store or the museum or the theater.
I got COVID visiting a friend at their apartment because they were in denial about their own mild symptoms after attending a big concert, misread their rapid test results, and did not tell me about any of this uncertainty until I was already inside their apartment, after having traveled over an hour to get there.
Most of the media explainers about how to mitigate COVID risk would say this was probably ok. I was 33 at the time, healthy, not immunocompromised, and fully vaccinated with one booster. By all accounts, it should’ve been a mild case that set me back a week or two, at most, before I was up and kicking again.
The first time I got COVID, I had extreme fatigue and a low-grade fever that lasted through July. I basically worked half weeks for two months, and on the days I did work I was extremely sluggish and my head felt like it was on fire. Some nights, I’d hear phantom Bollywood music and wonder who in my building could possibly be blasting that specific genre at 2 am. And then, after plenty of rest, one day, it just all stopped, and I was able to resume my life. I ended that summer going on long walks in my neighborhood or down to Liberty State Park nearly every day.
The second time I assumed that since I was fully vaccinated, I wouldn’t get the mystery not-quite-long COVID symptoms again. But of course, nothing is guaranteed.
You can be in your early thirties, healthy, not immunocompromised, fully vaccinated and boosted, get COVID and four months later, still struggle to get out of bed some weeks, even after sleeping ten hours a night. Still find basic interactions to be so mentally exhausting your head rings for hours afterwards. Still fall asleep or wake up hearing phantom music and wonder if it’s your neighbor’s record player through the wall or your confused brain forming patterns out of the ambient sounds or both. Still struggle with memory and cognition so often that you seriously start to wonder how much this has heightened your risk for dementia or Alzheimer’s or related diseases in the future, despite having no family history of any of them. Still have symptoms so poorly understood that even after seeing three different doctors and two different specialists the best medical advice you can get is, “Well, it sounds like you get better with rest. So just keep resting,” or, alternatively, to take medications off-label that might fuck up your sleep even more. Still be so worn out and tired that you seriously debate quitting the job you really wanted and finally got after years of trying, and the only thing really keeping you from letting it go is the fact that you wouldn’t have the health insurance you need for the surgery you were supposed to have in December but had to postpone indefinitely.
There are large, systemic failures at the global level that have led to the devastation we continue to bear witness to more than three years after the coronavirus SARS-CoV2 was identified as spreading rapidly among humans. Frustrating — and, frankly, soul-crushing — as that reality is, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it, other than find our hope and joy in the small places we can.
But what we can do, is be a little more thoughtful about how we interact with others during these enduringly uncertain times. I’m not here to tell you that you can’t see other people or to wear masks endlessly. As angry as I can still be with the friend who gave me COVID when my symptoms are at their worst, I also recognize the faults of my own decision-making in that moment, largely clouded by the fact that I live by myself and was desperate for intimate, in-person connections nearly three years after we’ve all had to make our lives much, much smaller.
The Basics: Vaccinate, Test, Mask
The best way to protect yourself and others from COVID is to get vaccinated, plain and simple, and to be on top of your booster shots. Now, not everyone can get vaccinated for a number of legitimate reasons ranging from access to ongoing medical issues. This is all the more reason for the rest of us to keep our own vaccinations up to date because, more than protecting ourselves, this is about protecting others.
The same applies to testing and masking. And look, I know that tests, especially, can be expensive, are not consistently covered by health insurance, and in the U.S. at least the days of publicly available tests, vaccines, and treatments are quickly coming to an end. But honestly, if you’re planning on going to a large event (especially if it is indoors) or traveling, then add the price of several days’ worth of masks, rapid tests, and potentially a PCR to your costs. I know that’s a shitty calculation to make and in a time of rampant inflation it might make life feel even more inaccessible, especially if you are already uninsured or under-insured.
But the alternative is that you’re in a space with a large number of people, contract COVID without realizing it (maybe you’re asymptomatic), don’t test before and afterwards, don’t mask, give it to someone else, and that person may experience a particularly bad case of it or get long COVID. In other words, by not testing before attending a crowded event or after potentially exposing yourself and by not masking, you’re literally paying the price in someone else’s health.
Test Effectively and Accurately Use the Results
There seems to be a certain amount of confusion and uncertainty around the rapid tests. After speaking with two close friends, both trained in epidemiology, here are few facts to keep in mind.
First, if your rapid test result is really faintly positive, that doesn’t mean you’re less symptomatic or that your result is a false positive. The testing kits state this quite clearly, that a faint positive test is a positive test, plain and simple. There is no debate there.
Second, it can take a few days to actually turn up a positive test. So if you know you’ve been exposed or you think it’s possible (because you were in a poorly ventilated indoor space, for instance), and especially if you’re starting to experience symptoms of fever or fatigue, keep testing with a rapid kit and possibly even seek out a PCR. If you’re really not sure whether you have COVID or not, talk to a healthcare provider before assuming that you don’t.
Third, for all intents and purposes, unless you are or have spoken with a trained health care provider, operate under the assumption that there is no such thing as a “false positive” test result. There are false negatives, yes, but a positive test is a positive test, and you need to act accordingly.
Plan to Cancel
At the height of the shutdowns, I was video chatting with a friend who made an incredibly astute observation, that to be able to plan for the future is a privilege, and the COVID-19 pandemic has taken that privilege away from all of us. Nearly three years after that conversation, I still think about it, and I think about who continues to see the world through that lens and who doesn’t.
The truth is, with COVID a firmly accepted part of our lives, my friend’s words are no less true now than they were in 2020. And especially as I’ve had to live with my own long COVID, I’ve had to grapple with that reality again and again, as I repeatedly made plans that I had to later cancel and then, eventually, just stopped making plans.
If we really want to protect ourselves and, more importantly, protect each other we need to make plans with the understanding that we may have to cancel them. We might lose a lot of money. We might have to harbor disappointment and sorrow and the pain of not being able to pursue something we had hoped for. We might have to miss life events or an opportunity to connect with someone who could change our life.
Because if you test before a flight or a trip or a concert or pretty much anything that exposes other people to you and your result is positive, you should cancel. If you were in an indoor space — especially if it was poorly ventilated and you were unmasked — and you start experiencing even mild symptoms, but your test result is still coming back negative, you should also plan to cancel. If you’ve been planning for something special for months and then there’s a COVID surge right when you’re about to see those plans through, you should also really seriously think about canceling or, at the very least, take even more precautions than you would otherwise.
You almost certainly won’t get your flight or your booking refunded. It will likely end up meaning missing a wedding or a funeral or a birth or some other milestone that means the world to you. But as I said earlier, to refuse to do so, to think about your financial or personal loss first, is to literally pay the price in someone else’s life and livelihood. And believe me, whatever it is you didn’t cancel, that other person will end up paying for it tenfold, probably without you ever even knowing it. A really cruel irony, isn’t it?
Quarantine and Mask
The most basic way to “stop the spread” is to not allow spread to happen in the first place. So if you know that you have COVID, isolate for the recommended number of days from the onset of your symptoms.
Again, when I think back to that rainy Sunday afternoon in October, after which my life would never be the same again, I remember thinking, It’ll probably be fine, and I really want to see this person, I really want to explore whatever possibility might be here between us. I’ve been so lonely and so isolated for so long, after all. It’s only in retrospect that I realized that my pursuit of short-term gratification (really, we’re talking about a few hours that afternoon) came at a long-term price. I can’t even tell you how many days since I’ve spent alone, lonely, and isolated.
I do want to acknowledge that many employers have eliminated paid (or unpaid…) sick time for quarantine and isolation, if they ever even offered it, and that most people don’t have the option to work remotely, like I do. And so in that situation, where you know you likely have or were exposed to COVID but you must go to work or risk losing your job — first of all, I’m really sorry, for all of us, that this is your reality. And second, be sure to wear a proper mask and increase ventilation in your workspace to the extent possible, even if this means opening a window in inclement weather.
Be Honest with Others
Over the last few months, I’ve tried to come to terms with the fact that my luck ran out, as far as getting COVID a second time goes. I know that there’s nothing constructive from playing the blame game, but in my long months of off and on brain fog and endless exhaustion since then, I can’t let go of the fact that my friend waited until I was inside their apartment to tell me about their positive test. And it’s on me for not thinking much of it at the time, for assuming that I was likely going to be ok even if I got COVID again.
But it’s also an unfair situation to be placed in, by a friend, to have to decide on the spot whether you’re going to stay or go after you’ve traveled over an hour to get to their place and they’ve spent over an hour cooking for you. And I know that my friend didn’t mean harm. Like the countless articles I’ve read on The Atlantic, NPR, and Vox — to name a few — my friend probably assumed that the risk was low for both of us, and in fairness that was my assumption as well.
The truth is, with COVID, you just can’t know. You really just can’t know what your risk will be. That’s not to undermine the science, but as of now there’s no science that can predict long COVID risk, and I really would not wish this on anyone.
So communicate and be honest with others. Don’t make assumptions about their health or their risk tolerance. If you’ve tested and you have a faint positive result or you’re experiencing mild symptoms or anything else, let the people you made plans with know beforehand so they can have the proper space to make their own decisions, weigh their own risks. And please, if a friend asks you to test before you get together or to mask through a gathering, take it with grace and do what they ask of you.
Bonus: Things Not to Say to the Person in Your Life Struggling with Long COVID
As a final closing, I want to leave you with some guidance for approaching people with long COVID. Ultimately, this boils down to the same advice for offering someone support through pretty much any difficult situation.
Meaningful compassion is always welcome, but please refrain from the following:
- “My cousin’s friend’s brother’s aunt has long COVID, and she found this vitamin supplement helpful.”
- “Have you tried keto?”
- “Hope you get better soon!” (As my sister put it, you would not tell a cancer patient, “Hope you get better soon,” or constantly ask how they are feeling. Long COVID may not be a terminal illness, exactly, but there is no definitive cure for it, either.)
- And for the love of what little joy exists in the world, please don’t tell them to “manifest good health.”
Instead, ask the person about what they need. Reach out just to let them know that you care and you’re thinking of them. Meet them where they are at in terms of how they can connect, whether that’s over the phone, video or in-person, masked or outdoors, in a place they feel up to going to or a place that they can easily access without too much exertion on their part. And show real understanding and kindness when, inevitably, they find they have to cancel because they’re having a bad day of their symptoms.
Practical Magic is a column that curates how-to articles for living your best queer life, edited by Meg Jones Wall.
How I’m Navigating Play Parties as a Disabled, Immunocompromised Kinkster
“Whatcha got in here, a dead body?!”
The valet lifted a large purple suitcase into the trunk of the Uber, followed by a smaller one. I’d flown Southwest. I always fly Southwest for their two-bag policy, and I’d need no less than two bags to do what I’d come to do.
“Better be careful with that one,” I said, pointing to the largest suitcase. “If you aren’t careful, it’ll start vibrating.” He stumbled back and licked his lips. Before he could respond, I was on the way to the Airbnb.
Once I arrived, I hung up and set aside my outfits: one-piece teddies with a cutout crotch; iridescent thongs; sequined nipple pasties; short, silk babydoll dresses; a purple leather harness; a black collar with an O-ring; a pink feathered robe.
Toys went in a smaller go-bag: my favorite purple flogger, a wartenberg wheel, nipple clamps with rhinestones and pink tassels, a Womanizer clit stimulator, my favorite rumbly Doxy vibrator, a black riding crop, and a wooden paddle. Next to the toys? Particle respirator masks, KN95s (enough to double mask for seven to ten days), wet wipes, hand sanitizer, and a bevy of rapid COVID tests. I had a feeling that none of these things would be provided by the dungeon, not even during a pandemic. But I wanted to be wrong.
“Here’s your goodie bag,” the person at the event registration said. My own bag fell awkwardly and heavily across my shoulders. I shifted my cane to the other hand and grabbed the bag of condoms and lube. Okay, so I’d have to add a few masks of my own in there, but not to worry — I’d bought a pack of 50. Plenty for me and any potential play partners.
“Then you’ll take one of these purple stickers to put on your name tag if you’ve been vaccinated for COVID-19.”
“And what about folks who haven’t been vaccinated?”
“No worries! It’s a self-selection process. Some folks don’t even use the purple sticker!”
At that point, I ran into the bathroom and took a Klonopin.
I had, in fact, been vaccinated and boosted, and prior to that trip, I’d basically become a hermit. I’d spent the last three years abstaining from travel of any sort. Pre-pandemic, I’d drag my Blackqueerdisabled personhood onto a plane every other month — doing keynote speeches, workshops, panels, and performances. I started masking on planes in 2019 after I noticed I’d get sick after each flight. I had a process and a regimen — one bag for clothing, toiletries, and shoes; another bag for Vitamin C tablets, prescription medications, back braces, a heating pad, and a thermometer — things to make traveling with fibromyalgia (and then some) a bit more manageable.
That’s the thing they don’t tell you about being immunocompromised. You don’t go to the doctor for a physical and then they lean in close and say, “My dear, you are immunocompromised.” They talk about the diagnosis — if you’re lucky enough to get one in the first place — and give you the prescription. They don’t tell you about the sheer exhaustion you’ll face every time your immune system has to fight hard in order to keep you well. A lot of this shit you find out for yourself.
If I was getting sick before a global pandemic hit, then I certainly wasn’t taking any chances with one in play. In 2020, it seemed possible that societal norms were shifting — health and wellness services went online, folks began working from home, gatherings got smaller, and masks were normalized. Yet as the years passed, as airline companies demanded that flights stay full, as real estate companies and employers across fields insisted folks come back into the offices they’d left, as the CDC shifted its guidelines (if you’re sick, stay home for two weeks; no, five days, no, three days…), as government stipends dried up, as mask mandates were dropped, as COVID strains mutated, as RSV and monkeypox entered the picture, as flu season rolled back around, as US governmental bodies held televised proceedings with unmasked officials, the message became clear: COVID safety is no longer a priority.
The People’s CDC reports that in the week of January 4th, 2023, week of January 4, at least 2,731 people died of COVID nationally. The US saw more than a quarter million deaths from COVID in 2022.
Yet there I was…in a bathroom, in another city, holding an optional purple sticker for an event that had about 400 RSVPs. I would have to throw myself on the mercy of double-masking, personal daily risk assessments, and prescription anxiety pills.
“Fuck! I should’ve known better!”
I’d been so consistent about checking the (mostly non-existent) COVID safety policies for every event I was invited to attend. Then the policies rolled back. Then the invites stopped coming.
Prior to that, I lived out my fantasies largely at home, finding refuge in the few remaining online play parties. Prior to that, I argued with my therapist. “HOW can this moment be called ‘POST-pandemic’ if the shit literally still going on?” She’d smile sadly and say, “I know…I know. I just want you to find ways to reconnect with the things that bring you joy!”
Heaux shit brings me joy.
Negotiating scenes, talking about limits, exploring new possibilities for our bodies, feeling my eroticism, and sharing it with others brings me joy. And I was at a dungeon led by sexual wellness experts. I knew they felt that STI and STD screening was important. I knew they taught about safety and risk awareness in BDSM culture. And I made an assumption. I assumed that this wellness ethic would carry through in their COVID safety. I wanted to believe that, even though I knew it wasn’t likely. I was wrong.
Every confirmation that immonocompromised, disabled, and/or chronically ill kinksters aren’t a priority is painful for me. I’m rightfully sensitive that way. So, I went back to my hotel room to breathe (hyperventilate), meditate (pace the floors), and text the disabled/chronically ill babes who’d been keeping my spirits lifted all pandemic. “You’re there now, mamas. And once again, the ableds are doing what the ableds do. So, what can we do to adjust? You’ve got your rapids, your masks, and your good sense. You know how to assess risk and set a protocol. Lean into that and know you can always stay in if it’s too much,” they said.
The dungeon was sprawling and alive with players. In a corner, I saw one other masked person. Besides that, they wore nothing but form-fitting boy shorts and nipple piercings. We moved toward each other, communicating the complexity of our experiences through touch and wax — six feet away from everyone else.
Afterwards, I knew I wouldn’t see them again. I’d decided to stay in the hotel room for most of the day’s remaining activities to reduce my COVID risk. On the other days, I prioritized 8am workshops, which were always lightly attended. I masked everywhere and tested every day. Other than that, I wished for sheer luck.
A few months after that event, I got a DM from another immunocompromised lifestyler. “How can you say that you want folks to get a clue about COVID safety if you’re out here at events?!” I’d chosen three events to attend that year in order to learn skills, compare and contrast safety protocols, and begin brainstorming ways that I could network with folks to encourage kink-friendly events for immunocompromised lifestylers. None of those events required masks. None of those events were outdoors. None of them required COVID-testing. One of them required vaccination. Each time, I bought my own safety kit and sat near the door for easeful exits. This is the case for most kink events right now.
Previously, I’d worried about my small “sample size” of three events — but I also wasn’t trying to get COVID while reviewing what the COVID landscape was like for immunocompromised kinksters. I’d noticed a sharp, ongoing decline in online lifestyle events while folks (mostly socialized as able-bodied) declared, “Well, we’re just all Zoom-ed out.” And in that DM, I felt a familiar pang of the sheer isolation that immunocompromised kinksters are expected to swallow down and make peace with. I knew that space intimately. It takes a huge toll on our mental, emotional, and sexual health. YES, I’m saying that a lack of COVID safety protocols takes a negative toll on our sexual health and wellness. If kinksters say they’re concerned about safety in general, why wouldn’t that include the safety Disabled, Chronically Ill, or Immunocompromised kinksters? That safety work is work that we’d all be wise to do, particularly given the fact that these are identities any of us can enter at any time.
How are we really dealing with issues of consent if we balk at and ignore the needs of immunocompromised kinksters who have not — cannot — give us consent to see them without a mask on? Imani Barbarin, Disability Justice activist and speaker writes, “If disabled people want to do fuckshit, they should be able to do it accessibly.” And should we just want to fuck? We should be able to do that accessibly, too.
Queer Nonbinary WNBA Star AD Durr’s Long Covid Documentary Is a Must-Watch
I sometimes feel like the only thing I have written about, talked about, and thought about the past two-and-a-half years is Long Covid. Part of it is that managing my Long Covid symptoms — crushing fatigue, cognitive impairment, nervous system dysfunction, exercise intolerance, vitamin deficiencies, shortness of breath, muscle weakness, chronic pain — is a full-time job. But most of it is that I don’t feel like I have ever really expressed myself about Long Covid in a way that has actually allowed people to see me. I have never been so desperate to be understood. Which is why queer nonbinary WNBA star AD Durr’s Long Covid documentary, Never Knocked Down, had me sobbing from start to finish. For the first time since Covid hit me in March 2020, I saw myself and my own struggles, lessons, and triumphs reflected back at me. It is — and I do not say this often — a must-watch for literally everyone.
AD Durr was the second pick of the 2019 WNBA draft, landing with the New York Liberty after a stellar college career at Louisville, where they were nearly unanimously voted ACC Player of the Year. They averaged 10 points and 27 minutes their WNBA rookie season, a solid outing in a league with a notoriously steep learning curve. And then, when the first wave of Covid swept through New York City in spring 2020, they were flattened by it, and became one of the first people in the world to deal with Long Covid, something that didn’t even have a name at the time.
Never Knocked Down, — which was produced by the sports collective TOGETHXR in partnership with Lebron James’ athlete empowerment brand, UNINTERRUPTED — follows AD as they seek treatment for their symptoms, and try to keep training to play a professional sport despite the fact that every action they take has completely out of proportion physical consequences. It’s the trickiest thing about managing post-viral illness: Your body often doesn’t respond to what’s happening until hours or days later, so it’s impossible to “listen” to it, and to know when to stop. After even a light workout, without cardio, AD finds themself nauseous and vomiting, with burning chest pain and the inability to even lift their head in bed. None of the tenacious, resilient lessons they’ve internalized as a world-class athlete matter anymore because “pushing through” is the worst thing they can do. (There are moments where trainers, coaches, and doctors insist that what’s going on with them is mostly mental, which is really my only quibble with the documentary. That’s both incorrect and a dangerous way to frame Long Covid or any post-viral illness.)
AD’s journey with Long Covid is about so much more than getting back on the court. “Covid stripped me of my identity,” they say, as they invite us into sessions with their amazing therapist, who pushes them to go deeper when they talk about their identity, to examine how they came to understand who AD really is, and how they’re choosing to communicate that with the world. During their battle with Long Covid, AD, who was always openly gay, also came out as nonbinary and changed their name to AD. When they’re finally seeing some progress in their recovery, they tell their trainer, “You know what will really motivate me? Call me AD. That’ll hit a switch.” Their parents are trying hard. It’s not easy for them to make the name and pronoun change, but they very clearly love their child very much and want to honor them by getting it right. Taylor Johnson, AD’s fiancée, is with them every step of the way in their recovery journey and their gender journey.
When AD’s therapist asks them who they are, they say: “Who am I? My fiancée calls me her husband. All of my close guy friends call me their brother. It’s just natural. That’s what feels natural to me.”
Never Knocked Down sees AD make their return to the Liberty and struggle with minimal playing time, and then finally find their home when they get traded to the Atlanta Dream, where they start playing major minutes and putting up game-changing numbers. “Identity is so much bigger than just basketball,” AD says after finding success in the ATL. “And now I know, if I can get through Long Covid, I can get through anything in life.”
Never Knocked Down is available to stream for free on YouTube. Follow AD on Twitter for more information about their career and their Long Covid advocacy.
Joe Osmundson on Expansive Science Writing and Living in an Impossible World
When I speak to Joe Osmundson over Zoom on June 30, the frustration in his voice is palpable. It is the last day of Pride month, he is in the middle of a self-funded book tour for VIROLOGY, and history is repeating itself — again. “It has been really, really difficult to be on book tour for a book called Virology as yet another, quote unquote, emerging virus [monkeypox] is negatively impacting queer people, including people that I know very well,” Joe says. “It has been incredibly painful to sit in meetings with people from the CDC, and the federal government, and the White House, and once again be pleading for action as people are getting sick.”
Joe and I met a few years ago, before I knew what the words “global pandemic” really meant, at Tin House Writers Workshop. I promptly started following him on Twitter and listening to his podcast, Food 4 Thot, getting to know him as a funny, kind, brilliant, queer creative writer and scientist. When alarm bells started sounding in early 2020 about a novel coronavirus, it was Joe and his tweets that I turned to. His feed held the appropriate level of concern about the harm the new virus may cause and the actions we could all collectively and individually take to mitigate that harm. He and the other scientists in his community seemed more equipped to guide the public through a pandemic than the government or any of the people actually tasked with helping us.
When the pandemic hit in full force and then marched on (and on, and on, and on), Joe became my north star for realistic information. Though we are not close friends, I DMed him all sorts of questions. He always answered. The way he cares for other humans is evident in all of his work. His studies of both viruses and queer history positions him perfectly to speak factually and candidly about bodies, viruses, and the ways the two interact; to borrow from his book title, he is literally an expert on “the living, the dead, and the small things in between.”
It came as no surprise to me that Joseph Osmundson wrote the perfect book for the COVID pandemic. It is incredibly depressing that upon publication, the book is more relevant than ever. “I’m a bucket of rage,” Joe says, the day we speak, just one month ago. “We’re all grateful to be in a place where we can advocate for our community… where we can push on the levers of power to work faster, even as people are actively getting sick. But it’s been really painful to have to see the levels of inaction.”
He could have been talking about February 2020. But he wasn’t. He was talking about June 2022. He was talking about right now.
Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things In Between is an ambitious book that succeeds in its efforts to shed light on viruses with science writing, yes, but also to shed light on the messy realities of life with queer theory, journey entries, archival data, personal essays, and above all else, naked honesty.
“It’s only looking back that I can see the four pillars of the book,” Joe says, “which are science writing, literary analysis, queer theory, and memoir. And only looking back can I see what I was trying to say — that viruses, especially in this viral moment, are biological but biology is insufficient to really understand them… all of those things together, actually may allow us to wrap our mind around these sub microscopic particles that are the most abundant things on planet Earth. That can also kill us sometimes.”
The book is made up of eleven essays, each one weaving a different story relevant to virology: “On Risk,” “On Replication,” and “On Going Viral” may seem like obvious titles in a book about viruses, but “On Private Writing,” “On Mentors,” and “On Whiteness” find their places comfortably in the book, too. The hybrid nature of the text makes its messages vast and expansive; Joe’s ability to collaborate and to parse through dense theory and make it relatable give the book texture and layers that may surprise the casual reader or someone who picks up the book expecting a scientific textbook. In my opinion, it’s a welcome surprise.
“I’m a writer who, you know, if I weren’t making a certain type of reader feel uncomfortable, the book would not be a success,” Joe says. “I want to write science work from the point of view of a scientist that says, hey, scientists do have sex. We are people with emotions, doing science is emotional, we live in a biological world, but also a world that is more than just biological. And all of that needs to be contained within the pages of science texts, if we’re going to be honest about who we are and what we do.”
When I ask Joe how this book came to be, he says very simply: “The book discovered itself every day through the writing and editing process.” He explains that he’s been writing about viruses — mostly HIV — for a decade, but when “the writing was on the wall” in February 2020 with regards to COVID, he couldn’t write.
“I was just doing activism,” he explains, “because I felt like the thing that I could do was use my molecular biology virology expertise. We were in these rooms with city, state, and federal health officials. This was the Trump administration. It was a very difficult political atmosphere… I loved being a resource for people, it made me feel good to be able to help people understand what was going on. And my friend Alex Chee said, well, writing is an extension of that. You know, you don’t have to just help your friends, you can write, and help people understand this moment, who aren’t your friends. And so then I started writing, in addition to activism.”
Mo Crist, the editor of Virology, reached out and asked if Joe had a book. Joe said, yes, a book about viruses, about COVID. No, Mo countered — not about COVID. About viruses. To be honest, perhaps that is why this book feels (at times, unfortunately) truly timeless.
“And then we conceptualized the book together with my agent at the time, and with Mo and with me, doing the collective work of thinking,” Joe says. “It was a community project… it’s my political belief that no book is written by one person. It has one name on the cover, but I really wanted to queer and disrupt that sort of sole ownership.” He is quick to point out his collaborators in this book: He co-wrote the chapter “On War” with Patrick Nathan, he includes the interior worlds and thoughts of his quaranpod mates in the snippets of his COVID journal featured in “On Private Writing,” and one of my absolute favorite chapters, “On Activism and the Archives,” is made up of a lot of archival material including multiple conversations with Steven D. Booth, professional archivist and one of Joe’s dear friends.
And then there is Joe’s community of writers. “Lacy Johnson suggested the order in which the essays find themselves,” he says. “She specifically suggested that the first essay of the book as it is now needed to be the first essay of the book. And so many readers have said that essay introduces the book in the perfect way, and that’s Lacy — that’s not me, nor even my editor — who was so thoughtful about every single word. So it’s really important for me to allow that community of thinkers and makers to be visible so that other people who are writing or younger folks who are writing have that notion that this is how books are made. No capitalist notion of one person crying in their room. I know some people make books that way, but I don’t, and a lot of us don’t.”
While Joe has seen their book in the science section of a bookstore, they say it’s also important to them that the book is situated in its proper queer lineage, too. “I love queering science,” they say. “But I also want to make sure that the book exists in the legacy of queer theory that it was built out of — in the legacy of contemporary queer essayists like Alexander Chee and Hilton Als, the legacy of the poetics of the 80s and 90s that the book is built out of, poetics of folks who were living with or living around or very near to HIV and AIDS, the legacy of queer essayists like Audre Lorde and Susan Sontag, who wrote about bodies and illness from a very explicitly lesbian point of view. The book sits in a literary lineage that does not actually include much science writing. So not not only should the book sit in the science section of the bookstore, but it should carry the science section of the bookstore into the legacy that gave me the tools as a writer to be able to do the work that I tried to do in the book.”
If there is one beating pulse thrumming behind every page, every sentence, every word in this book, it is the value of community care.
When Joe and I talk about life in general, about the ways in which his book can help us all make sense of this moment (just like Alexander Chee suggested to him a couple of years ago), we land on how we’re both coping with the current realities of being alive right now. We compare our masking strategies, we talk about exposures we’ve experienced, we express frustration that the government has told everyone to stop wearing a mask on an airplane. And then we talk about how challenging it can be to spend years avoiding a virus, to really not wish to become infected with the virus, and then to accept the reality if you do become sick, and to find ways to care for yourself and for others around you while not catastrophizing when that is the case.
“That is the mental gymnastics of being alive on a viral planet,” Joe says. “We are being asked to live in an impossible world. Being alive in late capitalism, being alive as so many of the structures that we thought protected us are either being dismantled or shown to never have existed in the first place… it is tension. Living well on a viral warming planet is too much to ask of any person. And yet it is what our circumstances are asking of us. So what do we do but rise to those circumstances? We have paths that we can use those circumstances to make life significantly different. In our wake, significantly better.”
I’m publishing this piece almost one month after my initial Zoom conversation with Joe; the monkeypox outbreak and the government response has not gotten better. It has gotten worse. On Sunday, July 24, Joe tweets: “The queer community’s overall response to monkeypox should be viewed as an example for all. We’ve led by demanding tests, vaccines, and treatments. Since May. When the government failed us, we devised strategies to care for one another even as we continue advocating. We were trained by HIV and COVID work. And were working SO HARD to help people who are sick and to prevent more suffering. We’re tired. But we show up.”
I think about HIV, about COVID, about monkeypox. I think about what viral outbreaks might happen next. I think about what it looks like to care for each other in difficult circumstances. I think about the living, and the dead, and the small things in between. I pick up Virology and I start reading Joe’s essays again. I want to learn how to live in an impossible world while building a better one with the people around me. I know the lessons I need — the lessons we all need — exist in this book.
Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things In Between is out now.
Join Autostraddle for a Virtual Workshop on COVID-19 and Queer Sexual Health
This article was created in partnership with Rainbow Health.
This article was edited on 6/9/22 with updated accessibility information.
Dating in the LGBTQ+ community is tough, especially during an ongoing global pandemic. As queer and trans people pursuing love, connection, and orgasms, we’re always assessing the emotional risks and sexual health risks of dating, and for the past two+ years, we’ve had to navigate COVID risks, too. Social distancing has changed the nature of our intimate lives, and with ever-changing COVID restrictions and mixed messages from government and health agencies, everyone seems to have a different idea of what it means to date “safely.” It’s hard! And our readers have lots of questions like:
How do you ask a potential date about their COVID practices?
Do I have to tell a new partner I’m trans?
How do you disclose a chronic STI?
Does anybody actually use dental dams?
We have a panel of experts who are here to help! On Monday, June 13th, at 4pm PST/ 6pm CST/ 7pm EST, Autostraddle will host a virtual sexual health workshop featuring experts who will answer these questions and more. The best part? You get to decide what the questions are in advance!
Send us your queer sex and dating questions here by Friday, June 10th, and make sure you register for the event here. The workshop will also have a live chat, so you can interact with each other and ask follow-up questions in real time. Live captioning will be available, and we’ll also be publishing a transcript on our website.
For this workshop, Autostraddle is partnering with experts from Rainbow Health and Family Tree Clinic. For nearly 40 years, Rainbow Health has been advocating for and serving the LGBTQ+ community, those living with HIV, and all folks facing barriers to equitable healthcare in Minnesota. Family Tree Clinic provides a wide variety of sexual health services and specialized care for LGBTQ individuals in Minnesota and is committed to improving the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer individuals through affordable, respectful sexual health care and education.
Here’s some info on your panelists:
Taylor Chambers (they/them) – Juvenile Justice Sex Educator
Family Tree Clinic
Taylor is the Juvenile Justice Sex Educator at Family Tree Clinic. They are passionate about prison abolition and creating equitable communities. Taylor is constantly amazed by the young people they serve. During their free time, Taylor enjoys cooking and baking, adding too many books to their to-be-read list, learning how to bartend, and doing arts and crafts.
Chandler Daily (he/him) – Sex Educator
Family Tree Clinic
Chandler is a sex educator who learned everything he knows from the powerful legacies of queer public sexual culture and the DIY ethos of trans people everywhere. Before coming to Family Tree Clinic, Chandler has worked as a stage manager, a sexual health sales associate, a performance curator, and an artist. He’s currently getting his kicks learning the names of his non-human neighbors living around the Mississippi River. Chandler is working towards a future in which all of our sexualities can be inner resources of joy and connection with the wide world.
Eli Wright (they/them) – Behavioral Health Clinical Director
Rainbow Health
Eli is a licensed professional clinical counselor in practice for 30+ years whose focus is on building strong therapeutic relationships. Eli believes that people are experts in their own lives and prioritizes a non-pathologizing, collaborative, curiosity-based approach. For Eli, therapy is a sacred, creative space in which one develops one’s preferred story. It can be difficult, lonely, and confusing to navigate some of the twists and turns that life brings our way — sometimes it helps to have someone to listen, to care, and to intentionally hold space for you as you discover what you need and what you want in this part of your journey.
Zarra TM (he/him/she/her) – Community Health Advocate
Rainbow Health
Zarra is a Community Health Advocate at Mainline Syringe Services Program. Among other duties, he works in HIV, Hepatitis C, and Syphilis testing, education, and management support. Zarra previously worked as a lead Sex Educator through Macalester’s SEXY program.
Ro White (they/them) – Sex Writer, Pleasure Educator, Sex & Dating Editor
Autostraddle
Ro (that’s me!) spent several years paying the bills as sex toy store employee while they worked towards becoming a mildly successful actor and a locally famous performance artist. Then they gave up big screen and the stage to stare at a computer full-time. Ro now teaches pleasure-focused sex education workshops for adults of all genders and orientations and writes about sex for publications like Men’s Health, GetMeGiddy, and Autostraddle. They’re also Autostraddle’s Sex & Dating Editor.
Don’t forget to send us your questions by Friday, June 10th, and register for the workshop using our registration form!
A+ Roundtable: Dealing With the Push To ‘Go Back to Normal’
It feels like, to me, personally that messages about “going back to normal” are springing up everywhere and have been for several months, even during the Omicron surge. We’re seeing in-person events resume (and maybe some of us are going to them!), mask mandates lift and a push to ‘return to work’ (whatever that means because people have been working), we’re also continuing to see the rampant ableism that has been characteristic of this pandemic come out in full force, including disregard for people who have pre-existing conditions or who cannot be vaccinated (or for whom vaccines may provide less protection) or both, along with the many folks coping with Long Covid symptoms. As the US and other countries lift mask mandates and Covid restrictions, the way that we navigate risk has become even more of a personal decision (or a personal burden) than in past months. I asked the team to share how they’re dealing. I shared how my partner and I have been coping, too. I’m holding the hope that we can use this as an opportunity to connect and to feel a little less alone, and that you’ll share your experiences and how you’re living right now in the comments. Sending you so much love!! Thank you, as always, for being a member, and for being a part of everything we’re able to do here.
xoxo,
Nicole
‘Faster’ Isn’t Always ‘Better’
A lot of big things happened in my life last year.
First, I went through a breakup. Then a global pandemic began. At the time, I was making most of my income through film acting, live performance and retail work, and all of those industries, of course, promptly shut down. I contracted COVID-19, and while I was never hospitalized, I was sick and scared for over a month. Once I finally recovered from COVID, I developed a yet-to-be-officially-diagnosed illness, which has affected my body every day for a year and a half.
Despite those challenges, I was (and am) in an incredibly privileged position. While COVID claimed lives across the world, the virus didn’t kill me, and it hasn’t taken the lives of my loved ones. I started a beautiful, solid relationship, and my girlfriend and I leaned on each other for support during eerily apocalyptic times. I was eligible for unemployment benefits while I figured out my next career move, and ultimately, I landed on a path that feels more sustainable and more fulfilling than my previous work. I quit acting, which I’d been doing professionally on-and-off since I was five years old, and committed myself to working full-time as a freelance writer and sex educator. I’m grateful that I had the option to work from home while COVID cases soared in my city and I’m still grateful to have this option on days when my illness symptoms are especially debilitating.
I think about that particular form of gratitude often, because my girlfriend lives with a chronic illness called Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, or POTS, which affects her autonomic nervous system. This system controls automatic bodily processes like breathing, digesting and circulating blood to our hearts and brains when we stand. When an illness interferes with those processes, it’s a big deal. Every day my girlfriend is forced to carefully calculate if and when she can go for a walk or cook or complete a household task without compromising her ability to work. Watching her go through this and living with my own frustrating symptoms has heightened my awareness of how ableism and capitalism are intertwined. Many chronically ill and disabled people are stuck working jobs that exacerbate their symptoms or even put their lives at risk in order to pay bills and cover medical expenses. And due to asset limits, those who receive SSI benefits are often trapped in poverty and are financially unprepared for crises. I’m deeply aware of how lucky I am that my symptoms only limit some of my activities some of the time and that my flexible work schedule can accommodate my needs.
This year, one of my favorite work projects was the Autostraddle series “How To Survive A Post(?)-COVID World,” which I curated and edited in June. I hoped to help readers navigate the logistics and trauma of a pandemic-stricken world, covering topics like long COVID, unstable housing, financial insecurity, grief and more. Autostraddle was able to budget for this project and many others thanks to donations from our readers during our last fundraiser. That’s one major advantage of working for a reader-supported publication — since we don’t have to chase cheap clicks, we get to concentrate on the needs of our community without sacrificing our integrity. We need your continued support to maintain this standard, and that’s why I’m asking you to donate to our fundraiser. Can you help us out?
While “How To Survive A Post(?)-COVID World” was ultimately well-received, readers probably wouldn’t guess that there were some unexpected hiccups behind the scenes. This was my first time editing a written series on my own, but as a Very Confident Aries, I wasn’t worried. I’d had plenty of experience curating variety shows, producing comedy shows and directing rock musicals. I’m painfully organized. I figured that editing a series wouldn’t be a big deal. I’d find some writers and an illustrator, I’d set some deadlines, the writers would turn in their work and boom — a series is born. But it wasn’t that simple. Two writers dropped out at the last minute. Others needed deadline extensions. My hyper-organized, “we-must-adhere-to-the-plan-at-all-costs” brain panicked. I wanted to keep the promises I’d made in my editor’s note. I wanted Autostraddle’s senior editors to be happy with my work and I worried that my plans for this series were about to crumble.
Then I took a step back and thought about what I was actually doing. My series was featuring the voices of people who were actively struggling. I was asking writers to excavate their current trauma in order to offer guidance and solidarity to our readers. Of course some writers were dropping out. Of course others needed more time to complete their drafts. I should have expected that. Creating this kind of content is painful and taxing, especially in the context of an ongoing global pandemic. I realized that if I wanted to make this series happen, I was going to have to be flexible with my expectations and timeline. And I knew how to do that. After all, since I started living with a mystery illness, I’d been forced to adjust the timeline for a lot of things in my own life, including my work.
A few months ago, my girlfriend pointed out that I’ve been operating on “crip time,” which refers to the way that disabled, chronically ill and neurodivergent people experience time differently than non-disabled and/or neurotypical folks. I honestly don’t know if I can consider myself part of the “chronically ill community” — my diagnosis hasn’t been confirmed, and I still don’t know whether or not my illness can be treated — so instead of defining this term myself, I’m going to hand this over to Alison Kafer, a queer, disabled writer and professor, who says: “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” In her book Feminist, Queer, Crip, Kafer explains, “Crip time is flex time not just expanded but exploded; it requires re-imagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and bodies.”
Over the past year and half, I’ve been forced to establish new expectations for “how long things take” in my life, because some days I feel like shit. Some days I have multiple doctor’s appointments. Some days I’m spending way too much time sending strongly-worded messages through my patient portal so I can access the medical care I need. It’s been hard, but I’ve finally reached a place where I can acknowledge what my symptoms are doing on any given day, and — when it’s possible — adapt. Yes, this Very Confident And Occasionally Rigid Aries learned how to shift plans! If I could do that for my own life tasks and writing, then I could absolutely tweak the timeline for my series. And Autostraddle’s senior editors supported me every step of the way.
I rearranged the publication schedule to account for deadline extensions and found two incredible writers to replace the contributors who dropped out. I even added an additional article to the series because I loved the pitch so much. I’m humbled to have worked with writers who were willing to bring so much vulnerability to their articles and I’m proud of how the series turned out, even though the publication timeline wasn’t what I’d planned on.
A few months after my series was published, I stepped into an official editing role as Autostraddle’s Sex & Dating Editor. Since my first bumbling editing attempt, I’ve learned a lot about the editing process and Autostraddle’s values. I deeply appreciate working for a publication that centers marginalized voices, and because of that commitment, there are times when we have to change our plans or operate on a slower timeline than other publications. Sometimes readers ask us why we haven’t covered a certain topic yet. We’re always doing our best to keep up with the news cycle, but our priority is finding the right person to tackle any given topic — someone with direct, lived experience — and sometimes that process warrants its own timeline.
When news of the Texas abortion ban hit at the beginning of September, Autostraddle responded immediately with a link roundup and a long list of abortion funds that readers could support (thanks, Carmen!). But we knew that we needed more coverage, ideally a personal essay by a queer person who had experienced abortion. Finding a writer who was willing to share such a personal story was difficult, and, unsurprisingly, the first two writers I started working with dropped out. And that made sense — sharing a deeply personal experience with a wide audience is hard, especially when that experience is a subject of national debate. But then Autostraddle’s Culture Editor Shelli stepped in and wrote an achingly honest essay about her abortion. We were able to get it up on our website by September 9th — that’s “late” by traditional media standards, but the outcome was clearly worth the wait.
At Autostraddle, we do our best to offer journalism that’s fun and thoughtful. We don’t always rush to get articles out into the world — we can’t if we’re going to produce quality work that centers the voices of people with lived experience of the topics they’re covering. We’re able to operate this way because we rely on support from our readers and we want to continue producing work in a way that reflects our principles. Can you contribute to our fundraiser and help us nurture those values?
I’m still a (very) new editor and have a LOT of experience to gain, but here’s what I know about the coming months: I want to continue hiring writers whose lived experiences are underrepresented in the media and I want to pay them well for their work. Autostraddle is a small publication with a small budget, but with the help of A+ members and support from our readers, we can offer greater compensation to writers whose work deserves a platform. I’m honored to be part of the team that gets this work out into the world. If you have dollars to spare, will you join A+ or contribute to the fundraiser? Thank you, in advance, for investing in our work — we’ll continue doing our best to make you proud.
What The Pandemic Taught Me About Healthy Queer Love
I sit on a plush beige couch as Walesca rustles through a bag of hair products. She sits behind me and weaves her fingers through my hair, separating flirty Black curls. Halfway through braiding blue box braids that stretch down my back, my scalp calls out for a break. Walesca starts heating a kettle of water and turns to ask, “Do you mind if a friend drops by to hang out?” I shrug, barely looking up from my endless scrolling and nod. “No problem, not like we’re going anywhere for a while.” A half hour later, Mickey walks through the door, and I can’t stop gawking. I am instantly in love with the way their tattoos kiss their left arm and tell you a secret, the small lisp that makes whatever they say sound endearing, the constellation of freckles that dance down their right cheek. We watch The Circle on Netflix as I steal small glimpses of them in my periphery. I drink in their aura and hold it close, hoping it won’t be the last time I can indulge.
Do you remember the first time you met a great love? In movies and TV shows, there’s always a dramatic meet-cute that sets the scene for the first encounter. Real life isn’t quite so scripted, but the first time I met Mickey, there was an undeniable electricity in the air around us — there was a force greater than us at work, watching us with glee.
The night of our first date, I change my outfit at least three times, only to return to the original option and leave my room looking like the Tazmanian devil made a guest appearance. I swipe on my favorite warm matte coco Fenty lipstick for a boost of confidence and down a shot of Casamigos for some courage. I stare at my reflection, carefully adorned with gold rings and my trusty Dr. Martens. I run my fingers through my blue braids one more time before I jut out the door and squeeze into my Uber. At least Mickey will get to see my braids in full action, rather than the work in progress they initially witnessed, I think to myself as the car wiggles its way down Atlantic Avenue. My fingers are anxious, itchy, searching for something. As a pleasure-seeking Taurus, first dates are a common ritual. But this one feels different.
There’s a certain shade of surrealism that marks the weeks leading up to the arrival of COVID-19 and the beginning of state-mandated quarantine. A nostalgic haze that hangs in my memory, reminding me of what was. Mickey and I reveled in the streets of Brooklyn, making out in crowded bars and cuddling to hide from the chill in February. As the honeymoon days of a budding love extended into weeks, I started to feel scared — scared of what this could turn into, a real love that would require me to show up, vulnerable and open. But the familiar lure of learned toxicity was just too convenient.
I started dating other people who were clearly more interested in lust than love. I ignored some of Mickey’s messages. I tried to poke holes and emphasize the things I didn’t like about Mickey. Years of a previous narcissistic relationship convinced me that being vulnerable left me open to manipulation and deceit. The person I gave my love to abused that gift, neglected it and allowed it to wilt. I mean, let’s face it: the American idea and application of love is faulty, spoiled rotten, twisted in the nightmares of capitalism and patriarchy. This is only amplified when it comes to narratives of queer Black love, for which representations are scarce and tragic. The Black queer community of Brooklyn is a prime place where this dichotomy reared its head — a space that has so much love to offer and simultaneously is limited by attachments to toxic masculinity, femme superiority and sexual domination. I believed that love wasn’t enough. Well, mostly believed.
I nuzzle in closer to the sweet spot between Mickey’s right arm and their chest. They smell of frankincense and shea butter, a scent I would return to as a reminder in the coming months. “I can’t believe you’re leaving,” I whisper in the groggy early morning hours leading up to their flight. They hug me closer, kissing the top of my forehead, “I’ll miss you, yene konjo, but I’ll be back before you know it,” they reassure me. I was not assured. It was the first week of the pandemic, and uncertainty was the name of the game.
And so the FaceTime dates began. We shared old family stories, nerded out on political theory and whispered sweet nothings. We talked and talked for hours on end, only interrupted by the necessity of sleep, yearning to be close to one another again. I couldn’t help but feel scared. Did I take for granted the time we spent together? Did I miss out on the opportunity for something real? It felt like the Universe was testing me to see if I was capable of change. Without the constant buzz of fuckbois, alcohol abuse and FOMO clouding my vision, it became painfully obvious how much genuine care I held for Mickey and the ways that they had been consistent in showing the same. It was time to get my shit together.
I lay on my back staring at the chipping paint flecks on my ceiling. I reach for my phone, and it blinks open to my bright home screen that reads 1:24 PM. A long sigh escapes my throat and I groan internally — there’s still so much time left in the day. I turn to my stomach and reach for my unopened copy of The Ethical Slut tucked in the bottom drawer of my nightstand. A few hours in and the book balances steady between my hands as I devour one chapter after the next. My right palm is smudged by the inked annotations scrawled along the margins. A zeal overtakes me as my brain begins to fire off ways I can incorporate healthy boundaries and agreements in my young relationship with Mickey. As if they heard me, my phone pings with an incoming text from them, flashing 4:44 PM on the screen. I chuckle to myself and eagerly begin texting them my reactions to the book. They meet my curiosity with encouragement and fodder that keeps us debating the ethics of non-monogamy till dusk. I feel nourished by this information, by the meaty frameworks that allow me to imagine a relationship born outside of the patriarchal holds of monogamy and its repercussions. A relationship co-created in Black queer liberation where love is a practice of self-care and community-care, where love is abundant and freely given without expectation.
They say that everywhere you go, there you are — no truer words have been spoken throughout the course of the pandemic. Long stretches of uninterrupted time facilitated room to hear my own thoughts, parse through them and differentiate what is coming from me and what is coming from my pesky ego. Even the ever-bustling streets of New York City quieted themselves and left an expanse of silence in the absence of movement. This silence was healing, urgent, necessary. It offered me the clarity to address what hides behind my fear of intimacy. It provided room to admit that my beliefs of unworthiness stem from a complex history of emotional trauma. It gave me the space to offer compassion to my inner child, to forgive myself for not offering love to myself when I needed it most. And ultimately, it gave me permission to give that love to myself now and it gave me courage to allow others to love me as well. Falling in love with Mickey during the pandemic taught me that love is always going to be uncertain, because life is. Achieving certainty is not the point (it’s actually a losing bet). Establishing a loving trust with yourself is what will carry you through change.
I tie a pink scarf around my hair and apply my nighttime face cream. Mickey takes off their shirt, and I poke at the small dimples on their lower back. They squirm, giggling under my fingers before diving into bed. A year later and that sound still makes my heart sing. I crawl in and lean in close to kiss them goodnight. My lips hovering for a moment, we look at each other with a deep knowing that is familiar, sacred, ancient. I start crying, realizing that somewhere along the way, I let go of my fear to love. I chose — and continue to choose — to show up for love and all its uncertainty. We stare at each other, teary, unflinching, wide open.
Today, I understand that if someone lies to me or deceives me, it is not a reflection of my actions. More often than not, all it really means is that they have some real shit to work through. The only way I can receive honest and nourishing love is to offer it in return. In hindsight, my nerves before my first date with Mickey were telling me to slow down and trust my gut, to not only trust the love drunk stupor of our meet-cute, but to trust a person who consistently shows up, who can communicate with honesty and whose words match their actions.
So it turns out that love isn’t enough — not on its own. It calls on us to be brave, to look within the crevices of our hearts that whisper, “You are worthy of a healthy love.” Our ideals and values of love are learned from the ways we were loved or not loved and from the images and messages we receive about love from our environment and culture. To give a love that is healthy asks us to love ourselves first, to pour from a place of abundance. To live out a love that is healthy, queer and non-monogamous has been a source of deep personal transformation. What it has given me is timeless.
I dash into the bodega to pick up some tampons and run into Walesca standing in line. We greet each other and exchange small talk when she lovingly comments on an Instagram photo of Mickey and me. She jokingly adds that she wants to be invited to the wedding. I blush and nod with a huge grin, “Don’t worry, we are saving a special seat for you!”
The 5 Stages of Choosing Myself During A Pandemic
This is Autostraddle’s “How To Survive A Post(?)-COVID World” series. In some areas, COVID restrictions are lifting, but regardless of how “post”-COVID some of our individual worlds might feel, a pandemic and its lasting effects rage on. These writers are sharing their struggles and practical knowledge to help readers survive, heal and thrive in 2021.
I. Dreaming
In the dream, I am running breathlessly through the woods at daybreak. There is nothing chasing me and I am running, which assures me this is a dream. As my legs slash through the brush, thin branches cut my shins, and dew on grass washes the blood away in a lullabilic rhythm that soothes me just enough to keep going. If there are animals watching my fat Black body rumble through the woods, they do not make themselves known. There are no crickets chirping, no rustling of leaves, no rivers running. The woods let my breath take up all of our shared space.
I run until the grass becomes dirt, until the dirt becomes rock, until the rock becomes nothing. And I stop. I sit down right at the edge, my thick thighs folded criss-cross applesauce as if I am back in primary school on Ms. Hood’s reading carpet. This is the second sign that this is a dream. My thick thighs have not criss-crossed since primary school, but in this dream — I run, I breathe, I cross my legs and sit on the edge of cliffs as if to say, “This here is mine — this life, this moment.” When I wake, the cliff fades back into my bed and the valley beneath it is just chilled hardwood.
I tap my wife. I hate waking her in the middle of the night. She will be at her computer screen teaching science to black squares hours before I even exit the bedroom in the morning.
“I can’t sleep.”
She stirs and tells me to come and lay in her arms. I stay long enough to hear her fall asleep again.
The night is long with nothing to fill it, a marathon to nowhere. At night, all I hear is the sound of my rotating fan and our breathing: my wife’s, the dog’s, and my own, labored with grief and exhaustion. I go to the bathroom and check my phone. Swipe down, click, swipe down, switch app, click, swipe down, refresh. I repeat until my legs fall asleep and I will them awake by standing and staring at my reflection in the mirror. I am tired of running.
II. Running
When I was in high school, I was a four-year varsity letterman in track and field — heavy on the field. I was a mediocre shot-putter at best and mostly just showed up because I liked sports and was too fat to make the basketball team (there is more running involved in shot put than advertised). Twenty years later, my thighs burn just thinking about the mile we ran to warm up. I always dreamt of being a distance runner, long and fast.
“Keep pumping your arms!” The coach would yell at the distance kids as they trained around the track. “When you are tired, keep pumping your arms and your legs will know what to do!”
I spent the first nine months of the pandemic running full stop. I had just quit a horrible job to focus full-time on my studies and consult more; to be “free.” Terrified, I kept running. Most days, I was afraid to leave my work to get fresh air. The only steps I took covered the distance between my bed, couch, and desk. Yet, where my body wasn’t moving, my dreams were active. I created a collective. I built learning experiences, communities, and programs for folks to stay connected as the world fell apart. I facilitated open spaces, scheduled Zoom dates, read, researched, applied to PhD programs, worked, fucked, and tweeted in order to keep myself alive. If you keep pumping your arms, your legs will know what to do even when the world is crumbling around you.
When it got too hard to run in our 600-square-foot home in Boston, I ran to Vermont to breathe. The mountains met me with openness that let me go, go, go until I could no longer feel the ground or my legs, into a numbness with a beautiful backdrop of greens, blues, and the reds and oranges of the most picturesque sunsets.
III. Sitting
Fate meets you regardless of how fast you run.
My dad died sometime between lunch and bedtime on my wife’s birthday in the second worst year of the decade. At 32, I was an orphan and a seasoned runner. Up to and through my father’s death, I spent my life running, afraid of what might happen when I stopped to rest. Afraid that my community, my job, this world might deem me worthless or invisible without my contributions.
Ain’t you tired of running, baby? my soul asked.
I did not respond. Grieving while the world is grieving is the loneliest lonely I’ve ever met. When my mama died, folks flocked to hold space for me and my healing. During the pandemic, most of my circle was just treading water and I was my own buoy, gasping for air on days the sun shines. It was just enough for me to keep going.
We buried my father’s body. For the first month after, I spent most of my days in bed. My grief, a new, unexpected lover, spooned me tightly as she took everything I could muster. Each morning, I ate oatmeal from a glass measuring cup and spent my days staring at empty Google Docs and measuring my water intake. I did not work. I did not respond to other people’s texts about him — about how sad they were, about how they were thinking about me. The honeymoon phase of grief is just as all-consuming as new love. It envelopes your being and latches onto your heart, reminding you that you are — were — loved and treasured and desired by someone so fiercely that the mere absence of them makes you crumble.
Instead of running from this grief, I chose to sit in it. I was supposed to spend six months writing and instead I spent six months crying, sleeping, and watching the same romantic comedies with all-white casts and predictable endings. White rom-coms are like fantasy movies for folks like me: comforting in a “this is completely unrealistic and yet wouldn’t it be nice if everything also worked out” kind of way.
At the end of Eat, Pray, Love, Julia Roberts, who has somehow afforded a year abroad despite a costly divorce, tells Javier Bardem she loves him. “I decided on my word,” she says. “Attraversiamo. It means ‘let’s cross over.’”
Sixteen months into a pandemic and six months after my father’s death, I wonder what it means to cross over into what comes next.
IV. Being
On Saturday nights in the mountains, my wife and I drive forty three miles south to a restaurant where everyone knows our name. We are the fat, interracial, queer, vegan couple that drives from a different state to order a sandwich and french fries and call it fine dining. We drive past white folks’ country homes surrounded by empty land with “keep out” signs — as if anyone might think of traipsing through the tick-infested tall grass to enjoy an evening picnic. White people are always worried about someone else taking what they took.
Mura Masa’s “What If I Go” blasts through the speakers of our Subaru. “Wherever you go / I’m going with you, babe!” Bonzai sings. The bass is just thick enough to hold my grief and sorrow; to make me bounce and smile as we drive through more darkness I knew I could — then yell.
A bear lumbers in front of our car, across the street, and traipses through the tick-infested tall grass like he didn’t see that “no trespassing” sign them white folks posted. My wife shrills in half-excitement, half-shock. We check off “see a bear” on our “before we leave the mountains” bingo card and keep driving.
In the woods, we can see stars that are hidden by the clouds, buildings, and smog in cities. When we drive after sunset, I count stars to the beat and get lost in thoughts and rhythms.
“Can I ask you a question?” I ask my wife. She is still reeling from the thrill of seeing the bear, but can hear the promise of tears in my voice.
“Of course,” she says.
“Do you think my dad is with my mom?” I ask. My grandma raised me to believe in heaven, but death, trauma, and homophobia have exhausted most of the faith I had left.
“Absolutely. Scientific law says that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. So I imagine that their souls have found each other because that connection is forever,” she responds. My wife is a scientist; sometimes her healing comes from knowing that explanations exist for the most unfathomable grief.
Mura Massa’s track stops and another begins, with my silent tears as accompaniment. Like a broken record, I play my wife’s response on a loop in my head, bringing me equal parts peace and relief – not just in my grief, but in choosing to not to run this time — in choosing to invest fully in my own healing and rest.
V. Choosing
It’s confession time: I never ran the entire warm-up, even when I said I did. I usually jog-walked two laps and called it quits. I think my coaches knew back then what I know now. It’s not about the distance but about knowing yourself enough to push through when necessary, and rest when you need it.
If what my wife (and Albert Einstein) says about energy is right, I’d like to imagine that queer energy (and connection) is the same way, especially for folks like me – queer, Black, nonbinary folks forever seeking home and a soft place to land. That even when we choose ourselves, we do so with the love of a community that will forever exist, even amidst isolation, fracture, and heartbreak.
And ain’t that freedom? That we can fly, knowing the ground ain’t going nowhere; that we can heal, rest, and love ourselves without fearing the loss of what once was; that despite everything that happens — we will always be.
I’m tired of running. You go ahead, baby. I’ll get there when I’m ready.
We — this community, our love, this moment — is forever.
Wherever you go, I’m going with you, babe.
Art by Hannah Mumby
Chicago’s Black Sex Workers Hold Each Other Up
This is Autostraddle’s “How To Survive A Post(?)-COVID World” series. In some areas, COVID restrictions are lifting, but regardless of how “post”-COVID some of our individual worlds might feel, a pandemic and its lasting effects rage on. These writers are sharing their struggles and practical knowledge to help readers survive, heal and thrive in 2021.
“$50 and a tre?” CJ texts me at 8AM on a weekday much like the ones before it — at the last minute with hopes of negotiating. I am exhausted, too exhausted to go back and forth with him, but I manage to stand my ground with a quick and simple “no” in response. “You sure?” he asks. “Sure you don’t need anything?”
The framing of this question from a former client who is well-aware of my rates and boundaries during a global pandemic angers me. Him offering far less than what I regularly charge plus a bag of weed adds insult to injury. But what bothers me most is that he knows exactly what he is doing. CJ sees me as a discounted sexual object — one unworthy of boundaries and, more than likely after this conversation, a very ungrateful one.
When he calls, I forward him to voicemail and block him soon after. Though this brings me some level of comfort, I know that we will have to cross paths in the near future. We stay in the same neighborhood.
There are other sex workers in the area who also keep their distance from CJ and others like him. He has a reputation on the blade as a boundary-pusher who never pays up the full amount once he gets us (Black “survival” sex workers/ lower-income providers) alone. Some of us experienced threats of physical violence. Others have been humiliated in public spaces or at community gatherings. And while hoes on the South and West Sides of Chicago navigate survival during this particular time, these kinds of experiences are getting worse.
On My Block
Chicago’s racialized geographic history shows over a century of Black erotic labor pockets throughout the city, starting with the Levee’s existence from the 1870s through the early 1900s. Then white flight happened along with post-Great Migration gentrification and the strategic development of segregated neighborhoods. This pushed entire Black communities, including laborers of the sex industry, further south and west, creating the strolls and vice districts we are familiar with today. The city’s segregation established a clear difference in the value attached to one’s erotic labor. The further south or west you are as a Black sex worker, the more likely you are to experience attempts at price negotiation, heavy policing and violence.
In addition to anti-Blackness and whorehobia/ heauxphobia, there is also the stigma attached to labor in lower-income communities and predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods. With that comes limited views on fair treatment, legislation, compensation and what it means for clients to get their “bang for your buck.” We are supposed to be grateful for what we get, even if that means being tossed scraps and disrespect. This is the case whether you’re dancing in clubs or working the stroll.
Sociologist Siobhan Brooks discusses this dynamic in her book Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry: “The criminalization of desire industries, along with intersections of racism, classism, and geographic location, adds to isolation of people and the disruption of communities.” She continues, “This last point is critical to understanding how zoning laws, along with systemic disinvestment in low-income communities of color, affects workers in desire industries, and the larger community that surrounds them. It also affects how customers view strip clubs and the value placed on the women who work in them regarding safety and wages.”
Black sex workers are deemed less valuable, creating environments where they are expected to perform more emotional, physical and erotic labor for less compensation than their non-Black peers and colleagues. This places them at the bottom of the heauxarchy/ whorearchy pyramid and aids in developing environments where harm and violence are oftentimes overlooked. Whenever I see civvies cruising red light districts for laughs and entertainment, I think of this. When I am reminded of club raids and street sweeps, I think of this.
In my neighborhood, there are two strolls with a park in-between them that has been used as disposal grounds for prostitutes in the area for well over twenty years. This, too, crosses my mind when considering the stigma attached to race, location, sex work and value systems.
We Were Here and We Were Loud
Around this time last year, we gathered at Washington Park for a march and vigil organized by Chicago Hoes for Sex Work, Stripper Strike Chicago, Aura House, Molasses, Kopano and Lynzo. “I specifically chose Washington Park because I believe Black Trans people and Black sex workers deserve to sit in the parks of their communities and watch the best sunset on the southside of the city,” Lynzo said.
We mourned community members who are no longer here with us. We celebrated their lives. We built an altar. We sang and we danced. The entire summer, the city erupted in protests and uprising. We were tired. We were angry. We were drained.
Just months before that, COVID-19 had entered the picture, drastically affecting our livelihoods and loved ones. We were already feeling the impacts of recent legislation like revamped loitering laws aimed at prostitutes and FOSTA/ SESTA. I thought about what it meant to be part of Black sex working community and our long history of organizing, mutual aid, protests and movements. I thought about what it meant to stand beside one another screaming at the top of our lungs. Who else but us will remind the world that we have been here rooted in rich soil that we cultivated and nourished?
Fight, Flight and the Gray Areas In-Between
We are now over a year into this pandemic reality. Some sex workers have retired or are on hiatus, and others are making it work with current stipulations in place. I have found myself fluctuating between long breaks and “turbo mode” periods where I struggle with what’s best as a full service provider (and sometimes cam model). My best-paying client of more than ten years no longer frequents my boudoir or smut sites. Other clients have made more attempts at nickle-and-diming than I would like to count. “Freestyling” has been difficult. Violence on the clock has increased and staying caught up with rent and other bills has been an obstacle. I am never satisfied, whether it be full-service, camming or creative projects like @HeauxHistory. I always feel this sense of imbalance, never quite focused on one particular thing, which leaves me with an odd feeling of guilt no matter how “productive” I am. Comrades remind me to be kind to myself. I remind myself (and them) that I am trying.
Offerings
In the past few months, we’ve lost quite a few sex workers. Before we even have a moment to process, we begin planning around funeral costs, survival needs for family and friends and what memorializing and celebrating our loved ones looks like. We gather and mobilize. We pass around the same $20 – $100 to help each other through. We take a second to feel and get back to work. We light candles and pour out libations on the block.
When I got the news about my grandmother passing, my heart sank. Although my family had planned around this and I was able to get in some bonding moments before she left, I knew I was losing a certain kind of understanding that only existed with her. Granny survived and provided for her family through multiple gigs, including erotic labor. When I got into the game and was ostracized by other family members, she took me in. I always had a home with her.
Already feeling the loss of two community members (rest up V and Nona), I prepared for another memorial event of a fellow Black sex worker. It wasn’t saying goodbye that was difficult — it was recognizing that this particular part of her history and life would be ignored, erased, glossed over.
When I spoke at her funeral, I shared the last voicemail she left me. I wrote a letter, but I couldn’t bring myself to read it. Instead, I placed my message to her in the coffin along with a crystal I carried for weeks. I went to the water and sprinkled orchids and peonies into the ripples and waves. I thanked her for loving me, for showing me what it means to build community, for teaching me how to stand my ground, for showing me how to apply make up, for gifting me my first set of silky slips and pajamas, for waiting up for me during late nights to make sure I made it home safely (and to gossip).
When I made it home, I could not eat or sleep much. Sex worker friends checked in, offered their support, reminded me that I am loved and that “the work” can wait. For days I sat with how many of us have had to say goodbye to our loved ones. I thought about the ways Black sex workers impact their communities, the way we share our stories, the urgency in our cadence and how important it is that we celebrate ourselves and one another. When I am asked how we are surviving COVID-19 I consider the ways we pour into one another and band together. We survive hand in hand, side by side.
Art by Hannah Mumby
What Long COVID Taught Me About Mutual Aid
This is Autostraddle’s “How To Survive A Post(?)-COVID World” series. In some areas, COVID restrictions are lifting, but regardless of how “post”-COVID some of our individual worlds might feel, a pandemic and its lasting effects rage on. These writers are sharing their struggles and practical knowledge to help readers survive, heal and thrive in 2021.
On May 1, 2020, I was tested for COVID. This was part of routine testing across our Minneapolis social service agency following positive COVID cases among our clients. My positive test was a surprise to me — I didn’t have any symptoms beyond what I thought was pandemic-anxiety creating shortness of breath. I completed my ten days of isolation at home and returned to work. It was remarkably unremarkable. And — given that two weeks later George Floyd would be killed, the city would ignite in flames and hundreds of us would take over a hotel to get unhoused people indoors and off the militarized streets — it goes without saying that the “asymptomatic” COVID case I had was quickly forgotten. Instead, we were creating mutual aid networks to get supplies to neighborhoods whose groceries stores burned down. We activated community defense networks to protect homes and respond to fires. We raised thousands, then millions of dollars for abolitionist efforts around the city.
It wasn’t until around July 2020 that I started noticing what I would come to understand as some combination of Long COVID and post-viral fatigue. I started wearing a pulse oximeter when things like walking to the kitchen sink would leave me breathless and spike my heart rate. I missed two days of work after walking my dog one July afternoon because I got so sick afterward. I was experiencing shortness of breath; heart palpitations; tachycardia; night sweats; changes in taste, smell and appetite. Even the smallest exertions required recovery time. Every single entry I wrote in my journal during the month of July references my fatigue.
This pattern of vague, diffuse symptoms that left me completely wiped would continue for months to come. An entry in my journal from October 14th reads, “Well, I think a lovely evening drinking with my brothers brought on a relapse of symptoms. I’ve been off work Monday and Tuesday this week and I’m feeling like crap today. I wish I had started keeping a symptom log earlier in this process because it feels silly to try and start one nearly six months in”. It continues with a list of symptoms: short of breath, chest pain/ pressure, shaky hands, flushed face/ itchy skin, fever feelings/ chills despite no fever, brain fog, palpitations (“not racing heart, but pounding heart”), muscle weakness/ heavy limbs, headache (“dehydration? COVID?”), fatigue (“as usual”).
Despite this list of symptoms, no doctor or test found anything wrong. My blood work was normal. The Zio patch heart monitor I wore for two weeks was normal. In September, I took myself to the ER thinking I had deep vein thrombosis due to swelling in my ankles and a severe calf cramp that lasted almost ten days. My CT scan and the ultrasounds were normal. Every additional COVID test I got was “not detected.” With a litany of normal tests, it was hard not to question my own sanity. Am I actually sick? Am I making it up? Do I really even actually feel that bad? And yet, I was still missing multiple days of work per month and the time between sick days was getting shorter and shorter.
I finally collapsed in January 2021. I had been sliding down a hill picking up speed toward this inevitable collapse for a while, but I just hadn’t been able to admit it to myself. It wasn’t until I literally shit my pants at work that I finally admitted defeat and requested a short-term disability leave. January 29th, 2021, was the first day of what would end up being a three month medical leave.
In May, I returned to work part-time. It turns out that the medical leave wasn’t actually enough to cure my Long COVID symptoms, but it did give me enough space to reflect on which COVID lessons are worth carrying forward into the post(?)-COVID world. Going back through my journal entries, notes in my phone and blog posts from the last year, it surprised me to realize that the same things I need in order to manage my Long COVID are the things we all need for the future we are creating: mutual aid, seasons of receiving along with our seasons of giving, self-care that is directly connected to community care, less work, body trust and disability justice.
If you’ve never had a health crisis like this before, it’s quite humbling. I’ve never been good at asking for help, but when you’re so collapsed that you literally can’t manage, you’ll be amazed at how much help you ask for and how the help you ask for still won’t be enough. I had always believed in mutual aid, but I can’t say I had fully comprehended the mutual part. Mutual aid is mutual because, as much as I hate to admit it, we all need more support than we can provide ourselves. I had to ask for help not just once, but repeatedly for months, and I’ve come out the other side as a mutual aid evangelical. People ordered me dinner — not once, but weekly; delivered me meal boxes; brought my flowers and sent me care packages. The more we can think about our personal resources as resources that are meant to be shared, the more we can get our own needs met in our own seasons of receiving; our “winters,” as Katherine May calls them in her book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.
I spent weeks in collapse mode, unable to even consider “active recovery”. I watched eight seasons of Supernatural in the first three weeks of my leave and showered only three times in that same timeframe. And do you know what I would find myself thinking about in moments of quiet? Work. How fucking miserable is that? It’s like even though I knew I was off work, my body didn’t know I was off work. It occurred to me that there is a part of my body that has been made to feel unsafe by the chronic demands of work under capitalism. Intellectually, I know I feel safe at work and, arguably, it sounds ridiculous and even dangerous to throw around phrases like “feeling unsafe” so loosely. But my body’s autonomic responses to stressors don’t know the difference between “real” threats and perceived ones. The pervasive demand by society to Do More left me feeling trapped and even — as my therapist sometimes suggests — traumatized by insidious pressures to work, even as my body continued to wear down. In a March 4th blog post, I wrote, “Tonight I did a really casual search for ‘social work’ across a couple of job boards just to see how it felt. I started to cry.”
I did eventually stop watching Supernatural and turn toward healing. It turns out that the diagnostic and treatment process for Long COVID, even in a very mild case such as mine, is practically a full-time job. My process has included a post-COVID doctor that I’ve seen every six weeks since February, an MRI of my brain, a neurology appointment, chest x-rays, an overnight sleep study, multiple sleep appointments, a referral for a neuropsych exam I still haven’t had, a pulmonary function test, a pulmonology appointment, weekly physical therapy, weekly occupational therapy and, coming up, voice therapy for my damaged vocal cords and breathing muscles. My occupational therapist prescribed me fatigue management tools like blue light glasses and note-taking, an 8:30pm bedtime, sunglasses in the grocery store, smell and taste training and more. My physical therapist prescribed me a maximum heart rate of 120 (now, after two months, 140) beats per minute, thoracic stretches, breathing exercises and 20 minutes of walking every day. The sleep doctor prescribed me iron supplements to help with restless legs — supplements that also cause digestive distress. The neurologist told me nothing was wrong “except for the obesity.” The pulmonologist prescribed me an inhaler and suggested that it will be awfully hard to lose the weight I gained when my heart rate needs to stay so low.
Throughout this entire process and as of this writing, the short-term disability claim I initiated in late January has never been approved. I had zero income during my leave because the insurance company still doesn’t have the right medical documentation to prove that I needed to be off work. Even with relatively good health insurance, healthcare is prohibitively expensive and disability insurance benefits (not that I ever fucking got them!) only cover 60% of wages. It was here that the mutuality of mutual aid really came into high relief. After years of facilitating things I call “barnraisers” on Twitter, I needed my own barnraiser. I created a Plumfund, emailed a pointed ask for help to 36 people and shared my ask on Twitter. In four days of fundraising, my community put together over $12,000 for my partner and me. Caring for myself and asking for that help allowed me to get back to the business of recovery and has kept me connected to my community, even in my season of receiving.
I returned to work in May — not because I was physically or spiritually ready to go back to work, but because that was when my short-term disability benefits were due to run out (not that I ever fucking got them!). And, in order to potentially qualify for long-term disability benefits, I had to return to work at least 20 hours per week. If I’ve become an evangelical for mutual aid during this health crisis, I’ve become a zealot about the need for all of us to reduce how much we work. I learned from Long COVID (and my occupational therapist) that my body is my compass and also my captain. If I don’t submit to my body, it will shut the lights off regardless. From my March 19th blog post: “My body has been very clear with me in it’s absolute refusal to participate in work. I said to a fellow disabled friend yesterday that the level of bodily refusal to even entertain the *idea* of work feels so strong that I actually feel like I will be abusing myself if/ when I have to return to work.” My body gives me very clear cues (fatigue, malaise, brain fog, tinnitus, body pain, nausea, hand tremors, etc.) when I exceed my capacity. While I used to be too stubborn to listen, I am listening closely now. My body no longer cares about what is expected of me by society, about how my bills can’t get paid while I’m trying to prioritize my health or about any obligations or guilt I feel toward my job. I am no longer in control of this body (was I ever?); it is in control of me.
My sense is that many of our bodies are reaching this point. A year-plus of pandemic living has revealed just how much our bodies can bear and the end of what we can bear no longer. People are tired, and our bodies will not be forced against their wills. We are all long overdue for a transformation of our working conditions, and our bodies know this. Your body might not have reached outright mutiny the way mine has, but it will — give it time. It has become an essential part of my thoughts to find a way out of this way of working because working like this will literally kill me if I don’t. Becoming disabled by the world is radicalizing, and I already thought I was pretty radical.
Perhaps if you take all these things together — the COVID, the mutual aid, the community care, the body trust, and the urgent need to divorce our health and living from our ability to work — what you get is what disability justice movement has been trying to tell us forever: our bodies are the site of that we carry. As Aurora Levins Morales puts it in Kindling: Writings on the Body, “What our bodies require in order to thrive, is what the world requires. If there is a map to get there, it can be found in the atlas of our skin and bone and blood, in the tracks of neurotransmitters and antibodies.” Looking forward to the world we are shaping (hat-tip to adrienne maree brown) beyond the pandemic looks pretty similar to the radical roots all bodies require for living.
Art by Hannah Mumby
How To Fight An Eviction
This is Autostraddle’s “How To Survive A Post(?)-COVID World” series. In some areas, COVID restrictions are lifting, but regardless of how “post”-COVID some of our individual worlds might feel, a pandemic and its lasting effects rage on. These writers are sharing their struggles and practical knowledge to help readers survive, heal and thrive in 2021.
Loss of income, untreated mental and physical health issues, unemployment, lack of family support — these are just a few reasons why people end up evicted. When it happened to me in 2012, I was a year out of college pursuing a career in both music journalism and in the non-profit social impact space. I spent part of the year covering bands and live music in Detroit and another part of the year in Central America freelance writing while also working and volunteering at an arts and human rights organization. I came back home to Michigan after my contract ended, and only six months later, shortly after signing my lease, I was being forced out of my home.
On the outside, I probably looked like I had my shit together. But in reality, I was depressed, unemployed and grieving the loss of my brother who had died earlier in the year. I was ashamed, so I told no one about my downward spiral. Like so many people who live with depression, I felt uncomfortable bringing attention to what I was going through. I didn’t want to inconvenience or burden anyone with my problems and I was afraid of making people worry about me. In my silence, I wanted to be stronger. But because I wasn’t taking care of my mental health in the aftermath of his death, I missed deadlines and forgot about events and assignments. I lost the main writing contract that had been my financial life raft, and slowly over time, the bills started piling up. As a first generation college graduate, I didn’t have any family to fall back on. Eventually, I received an eviction notice, and though I secured new employment and tried to explain my situation to my landlord, it was too late. I was swiftly kicked out.
My story, like so many others, shows the way a single life event can create a ripple effect that leaves an already vulnerable person to deal with housing insecurity. As COVID-19 spread across the world, many people suddenly found themselves unemployed, scared and searching for answers amidst a chaotic political environment. As of today, hundreds of thousands of Americans have already been, or will be, evicted from their homes since the pandemic led to widespread job and income loss in March 2020. Given the poor protections for tenants, the economic fallout and the chronic lack of access to affordable housing and healthcare, America’s housing crisis has only deepened since the pandemic began. Over 6000 evictions were filed last week alone.
Eviction laws vary state by state, but there are steps to understanding and fighting eviction that can apply to everyone. Though the CDC extended the nationwide pause on evictions through June 30th, 2021, state and federal protections are not automatic. If you’re one of the millions of people experiencing financial insecurity right now, there are many steps tenants need to take to secure their housing. Let’s break down what you need to know:
Your Housing Rights
- Your rental agreement is 100% the most important source of information about your housing rights and responsibilities as a tenant, so make sure you read it carefully to understand what’s expected of both you and your landlord. When in doubt, you can contact a housing counselor with questions or search for laws relating to your state via the Housing and Urban Development website.
- Advocate for yourself — document EVERYTHING. Make sure to take photos of your unit before you move in so you have proof of any potential damage that occurred before you got there. If you ask your landlord for any sort of accommodation, send it in an email or do it in writing. Receipts aren’t just for catching your shady ex in lies — they’ll back you up and provide evidence if anything with your landlord gets taken to court. If the landlord agrees orally, send a letter to them confirming details of what you discussed.
If You Can’t Pay Rent
- Check your lease or rental agreement to find out if you have a rent grace period and how long it may be (five days is usually standard). Communicate with your landlord about your struggles as early as possible to see if they are willing to accommodate you with a flexible payment plan. If you have any documentation of your loss of income or unemployment, present that information to help your landlord understand the situation. Tell your landlord when you believe you can have the payment or suggest a payment plan to pay some of the rent now and the remaining rent in installments over a period of time. When you reach an agreement together, put it in writing immediately.
- Ask your landlord if they are getting mortgage help. If your landlord is receiving mortgage forbearance relief from the federal government during the pandemic, they have responsibilities to their tenants and aren’t allowed to evict them. To find out if your property has an HUD/FHA mortgage use the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) property search tool.
- If you live in public housing or if you have a housing choice voucher, contact your public housing agency to let them know that there has been a change in your income, and they should adjust your portion. If you live in a federally assisted property, contact the property management to have them adjust your portion.
How the Eviction Process Works
The eviction process varies state by state, but in most cases, the first step of the eviction process is a written notice. Keep in mind that even when you’re facing eviction, you still have rights. Use government resources to aid your fight. All states have unique statutes and laws regarding eviction, so check with your local court system for more details about the eviction process.
In most states, there are specific guidelines about how landlords can present eviction documents to their tenants and exactly how long the tenant has to respond. If your landlord fails to meet any of these requirements, their eviction may be dismissed, which means they’ll have to start all over with the whole process. Keep in mind that if your lease has expired or if you have a verbal lease agreement, the landlord can simply give you a written eviction notice.
Attend your eviction hearing. Though most were closed during the pandemic, eviction courts are beginning to reopen across the country to process the increasing backlog of evictions that were filed in the last year. It’s important to show up, especially if you hope to fight and hopefully win the case. It’s at the eviction hearing you can advocate for yourself and present any evidence that may be helpful to the judge.
Seek out legal help. Find out if you’re eligible for free legal services to be able to speak to a lawyer to learn about your rights. A lawyer can help explain whether you’re protected by the CARES Act or other local mandate, as well as how regular eviction laws apply in your situation and what exactly you need to do to fight an eviction. Just be sure to collect any information you have regarding your rental property, including voicemails, texts, emails, letters, pictures, receipts, lease agreements, notices, etc., before reaching out to a lawyer, as they’ll want to have a clear understanding of the situation. Your local tenants’ rights organization regularly helps people facing and fighting eviction and can offer resources on any pro bono help available to tenants as well.
Regardless of what your situation is, don’t ignore the eviction notice. Make sure to check and double check the document date, including the one for the actual eviction, the court date and, most importantly, the date by which you must notify the court that you want a hearing. The earlier you ask for help, contact organizations and apply to rent assistance programs, the sooner you can feel some relief in finding a solution.
Federal Eviction Protection
Through the CARES Act, U.S. tenants are protected against eviction for nonpayment of rent through at least June 30, 2021. Renters seeking federal eviction protection must meet certain requirements, sign a form and give it to their landlord. If you break certain terms of your lease, though, like damaging property, you can still be evicted. The CDC order doesn’t apply to homeowners facing foreclosure, and the CDC protections don’t apply if you live in an area that already has the same or better eviction protections, which is why it’s important to check on your local housing policies.
State and local protections can widely vary, and several states have extended eviction moratorium dates. Find out if your state extended protection and research and apply for any rent assistance programs that may be available.
Check with local housing officials, tenants’ councils or other similar non-profit organizations to see if they have additional resources to share or any other enacted protections for eviction or foreclosure that potentially give more protection than the CARES Act or last longer.
Art by Hannah Mumby
The Revolutionary Anger of Asian Women
This is Autostraddle’s “How To Survive A Post(?)-COVID World” series. In some areas, COVID restrictions are lifting, but regardless of how “post”-COVID some of our individual worlds might feel, a pandemic and its lasting effects rage on. These writers are sharing their struggles and practical knowledge to help readers survive, heal and thrive in 2021.
This article covers racist attacks and includes discussion of sexual assault with no graphic descriptions.
On May 5th 2020, Melbourne bubble tea shop owner Jennifer Li was attacked verbally and physically by a white woman and a white man who thought she was a “virus carrier” while she was serving her customers. She reported the incident, an unusual move for a diasporic Asian woman. “The way that we’ve been educated is that you don’t provoke things,” she said in an interview. “If you can let it go, just let it go.”
The pressure Li felt to just “let it go” is indicative of a widespread and insidious expectation that Asian women should not express anger. We are expected to be submissive and non-opinionated. We are discouraged from speaking up. Across Asian cultures, from China to Cambodia, the silent endurance of oppression, such as staying in abusive relationships, is often hailed as a virtue.
For Asian women in the diaspora, the denial of our anger exists at the toxic intersection of sexism and the model minority stereotype, enforced on two fronts by white Western culture and from within our own communities. The prohibition of our rage actively endangers us. But attempts to suppress our anger also reveal its power: it poses a threat. Our anger can be a tool of resistance in a post-pandemic world. Instead of burying or relinquishing it, we should learn to use it.
From a young age, Asian girls are conditioned to be restrained. “While growing up, I would see my brother’s tantrums explained away or not disciplined,” writer and activist Regina Yau told Soraya Chemaly, author of the book Rage Becomes Her. “Meanwhile, my parents and all the adults around me came down hard on any expression of anger from me.” Asian girls are taught to forgive, not to protest.
In Rage Becomes Her, Chemaly describes the punishment of women’s anger as “a powerful regulation,” one inextricably tied to the upholding of unjust power structures. She argues that women’s anger cannot be legitimized because that would require a reckoning with centuries of violence and discrimination. Anger is also a tool that we are deprived of using to liberate ourselves. “By effectively severing anger from ‘good womanhood’, we choose to sever girls and women from the emotion that best protects us against danger and injustice”, she writes. Asian women suffer this silencing in double measure –– not only is our anger an unacceptable form of womanhood, it is also disruptive to the model minority myth.
The effects of this silencing are very real, putting Asian women at risk of cycles of domestic violence, gendered violence and racist violence. In a toolkit for British health professionals working with female Asian patients who have been victims of domestic violence, anonymous survivors talk about how they could not protest for fear of escalating the violence. Some talk about how in their cultures, patriarchy is used to normalize abusive behaviour in men and boys, husbands and elders. These survivors are under immense social pressure to forgive and remain with their abuser. “My family told me [my brother] would lose respect if his sister got divorced. After a week, he took me back to my [abusive] husband and said I’d made a mistake and should not have left”, said a service user of Pukaar, a London-based domestic violence organization for Asian women.
In recovery from abuse, victims are expected to relinquish anger in favour of forgiveness in order to ‘heal’, an idea present throughout mental health discourse. TV’s Dr Phil put it like this to Oprah Winfrey: “You choose to forgive [abusers] for what they did to you… I just did not want to spend life energy with bitterness and hatred towards them because it changes who I am as a husband and a father and a friend and a person.”
The aim is to get the victim to a functional state within the dominant paradigm as quickly as possible. The problem is that the dominant paradigm has never worked for marginalized people. For us, there may be no such thing as a ‘functional’ state within the current paradigm. This is why it is particularly violent when mental health professionals ask us to give up our anger. In doing so, they disregard our context and strip us of a powerful emotion that can fuel positive changes in our own lives and our communities.
JS Lee, a Korean-American writer who is a survivor of sexual assault, found healing in staying angry. “The traditional sense of the term “forgiveness” carries too much acceptance and grace”, she said in an email. For Lee, forgiving her abuser felt like valuing him over her own self in a time where she barely had the energy left to care for herself. She found self-worth and self-care in learning to validate her feelings of anger towards her abuser. She also situates her experience within a long legacy of sexual imperialism against Asian women. “I still don’t forgive,” Lee said, “but I do try to understand the fucked up society that bred it, without taking their own responsibilities away.”
In Chinese-American Amy Tan’s novel The Kitchen God’s Wife, protagonist Winnie Louie, who is jailed for deserting her abusive husband, says that she “would rather sleep on the concrete floor of a jail than go to that man’s house!” Many years later, as she retells that story to her daughter Pearl, she gloats over how that awful man died on Christmas Day, expressing joy at no longer having to worry about him unexpectedly coming back into her now happy life. Winnie Louie uses her anger as a life-affirming force that helps her survive abuse and rebuild a loving family. This kind of regenerative anger is a force that can obliterate old toxicity and create new wellness.
As we are living through the burning 20s, with a rising tide of anti-Asian racism, the threat of climate change, and multiple social injustices, we need that revolutionary angry force. Angry Asian Girls (AAG), a Boston-based collective, fulfills that mission by running creative events that give voice to angry Asian women who want to push back against the supremacist mainstream. On their colourful Instagram, many posts combine anger and healing together to form positive experiences of joy and resistance. As Chemaly writes, “The anger we have as women is an act of radical imagination. Angry women burn brighter than the sun. […] In them, anger has moved from debilitation to liberation.”
At its core, anger is just another emotion. The reason it is coded as unacceptable and destructive is that it threatens to disrupt our currently unequal world. It is time for Asian women everywhere to use anger as a tool of liberation in a post-pandemic world, because anger in the face of injustice is love for ourselves and our communities. We have to learn how to deconstruct what we’ve been taught, so that next time we are angry, we won’t just let it go — we will use it for our own benefit.
Art by Hannah Mumby
Editor’s Note: On ‘How To Survive A Post(?)-COVID World’
An inside look, just for A+ members, from Autostraddle’s editors on the process, struggles, and surprises of working on what you’re reading on the site. We learn so much from this work before it ever even makes it to your eyes; now you can, too!
We do not live in a “post-COVID” world.
While some parts of the world resume normal activities, the virus remains alive and mutuating. As you read this, India’s COVID death toll has climbed past 300,000. South America has lost over one million. COVID variants, which are more easily transmissible, have spread across the globe. The wealthiest nations are still hoarding vaccines. In the US, more than half of residents are still noxt fully vaccinated, some of them by choice, and AAPI communities are facing a heightened level of violence and discrimination in the name of COVID-blame. And regardless of how “post”-COVID our individual worlds might feel as restrictions lift, we are all still living through the trauma of a global pandemic.
We are grieving those we lost to COVID. We’re facing ongoing health complications after surviving the virus. We’re unemployed and in debt. We’re readjusting to in-person work and school. We’re recognizing the failings of leaders who did not and will not protect our most vulnerable communities from the pandemic’s wrath. This series serves as a reminder that we’re not alone.
“How To Survive A Post(?)-COVID World” came from my own fears and frustrations. My family members live in a state where only 36% of the population has been fully vaccinated. I live in Chicago, where our mayor spent $281.5 million in federal COVID-19 relief money on the police. I’m watching my city and my loved ones continue to suffer from the mental, physical and financial impact of the pandemic, and I’m trudging through my own ongoing pandemic-related struggles. Still, I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, but for so many people, that light won’t be visible for a very long time.
The writers featured in this series share their pain, their coping skills and their practical knowledge to help Autostraddle readers work towards stability in a COVID-stricken (and perhaps, someday, a truly post-COVID) world. I’m grateful for their vulnerability and guidance, and I hope that you’ll find some help and healing in their stories.
Remote Learning Is Over, But I’m Still Disabled
This is Autostraddle’s “How To Survive A Post(?)-COVID World” series. In some areas, COVID restrictions are lifting, but regardless of how “post”-COVID some of our individual worlds might feel, a pandemic and its lasting effects rage on. These writers are sharing their struggles and practical knowledge to help readers survive, heal and thrive in 2021.
I have been disabled for several years now, though I didn’t recognize it. However, disability has been a large part of my life. A considerable part of my friends and family are disabled or have medical conditions that are legally disabilities. For years I have witnessed the ableism they were subjected to in academic spaces and workspaces. They were expected to perform despite the detriment to their health, and their requests for accessibility were treated like favors or inconveniences. One opted not to seek accommodations as I did. In their case, it was to avoid the stigma of disability in the workplace. Often, the accommodations or services provided were of no use to them. And if they were unable to function as abled people do, they were blamed or reprimanded. In my academic setting, my physically disabled classmates were forced to attend courses in barely accessible classrooms in hardly accessible buildings at an institution with poor infrastructure.
I’ve been aware of how resistant the corporate and academic world is to remote work, and I was confused by this expectation that people be physically present in the age of emails, smartphones and video conference software. But when the pandemic reached Puerto Rico and the United States, suddenly remote work and remote learning became viable options. I was angry for the people in my life that had been denied the possibility of studying and working in a modality that was accessible to them. A year later, that anger would apply to me.
I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and depression during my late teens. Both disorders were a result of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which I began experiencing in my freshman year of college. Even though my academic performance was occasionally impacted by my mental illness, I refused to seek out accommodations at my college’s Disability Services office. I was acing my classes and was convinced that I had no need for accommodations. Requesting them would make me yet another person that abused the system. The pandemic reached my homeland of Puerto Rico in mid-March, the beginning of my last trimester of college. The isolation, the loss of my routine and the tragedies at a global scale pushed me into a month-long depressive episode that made completing my final semester extremely difficult. I submitted most of my work late and almost lost the opportunity to defend my honors thesis. Nevertheless, I graduated (with honors!) and was admitted to my current master’s program. Both my depressive episode and my degree had ended, and I was thrilled to begin my move to Atlanta for graduate school with my partner.
But between late May and early June, my health began faltering. I started experiencing sudden weakness, headaches, dizziness and light-headedness. Running errands left me extremely fatigued. My (former) endocrinologist was inattentive and unhelpful during our telehealth appointments. The cardiologist found nothing wrong. Laboratory and radiology tests did not indicate anything out of the ordinary. Appointments with other specialists were unavailable for months. My move to Atlanta came, and I did not yet have answers.
After I had paid my deposit and booked my flight, the institution I had enrolled in announced that my classes would be taught online. Being able to socially distance eased my anxiety about the pandemic. My fear of contracting COVID in an unfamiliar city in a country where healthcare is so expensive was significantly lessened. I was able to remain in my home for weeks at a time. However, the loneliness and the challenges of virtual learning, along with my poor health, sent me into more depressive episodes. Time that I meant to spend reading and writing papers was instead occupied by medical appointments for vertigo and migraines, and frequent naps. I was sleeping most of the day and waking up feeling tired. I couldn’t concentrate. I fell behind in my classwork. Fortunately, my professors were understanding and accommodating. I took incomplete grades for the semester and flew to Puerto Rico to visit my family, visit more specialists and have a tiny marriage ceremony.
The end of the semester and the Caribbean sun improved my mood significantly. I also adopted an emotional support dog, which gave me great comfort. The migraines virtually disappeared. But the dizzy spells continued. The fatigue that overtook me at the smallest physical exertion persisted. I spent the larger part of my summer vacation in bed. I had yet to find a specialist that would heed my concerns.
Upon returning to Atlanta, I had to rebook my return flight twice because the U.S. Department of Transportation had recently allowed airlines to ban Emotional Support Animals (or ESAs) in the passenger cabin, and my dog was too large to fit under the seat. The ruling was meant to culminate years of passengers claiming their untrained pets as ESAs to avoid pet travel fees. This was perhaps the first time I began to think of myself disabled. If I benefited from accommodations for disabled folk, and the removal of said accommodations impacted me, it made sense to think of myself as having a disability, even if I did not always find it to be disabling. When I learned the news about ESAs, I shared the indignation of other disabled people about the injustice of the situation. Why were people with mental, emotional and intellectual disabilities being punished and forced to incur more expenses because abled people exploited the accommodations for convenience?
Recognizing my disabilities didn’t prompt me to seek accommodations for the spring semester. I already knew what to expect and I was convinced that I could handle it. In addition, I knew that professors were being — or attempting to be — flexible due to our collective circumstances. I had appointments lined up with more specialists, hopeful to obtain a diagnosis. A month into the semester, I was getting worse. The fatigue worsened and I started experiencing joint pain, muscle aches and brain fog. This once again worsened my depression and anxiety. My general physician referred me to a rheumatologist. The laboratory results were “abnormal,” but inconclusive. I was caught in a cycle of mental and physical unwellness that made the most mundane tasks an incredible chore. And even with a lighter workload, I concluded the semester with two more incompletes and failed a class for the first time in my life.
Despite all the difficulties that I faced this past year, I consider myself lucky. I’m lucky that I have a supportive, attentive and understanding partner who encourages me to rest. It pains me to say that I’m lucky to have access to healthcare. Moreover, I’m lucky that I became physically disabled during a year when I wasn’t required to be anywhere. It’s very possible that if my first year of graduate school had not been remote, I would’ve had to drop out of the program I was thrilled to be a part of or risk becoming more ill. Even on my worst days, I could attend class by logging into a virtual classroom from the comfort of my bed. Some of my professors recorded their classes, allowing me to revisit them if I was too weak to take notes or was unable to focus on the lesson. So when the university I attend announced a return to face-to-face classes, I felt afraid.
I haven’t yet received a diagnosis to certify that I have a physical disability that requires accommodations. I’m afraid I won’t have the spoons for the one hour commute and the three to six hours of sitting in a classroom. I’m afraid professors’ empathy and understanding ended along with remote learning. I’m finally requesting accommodations, but they are limited to disability-excused absences and I fear that this won’t prevent me from missing material and possibly falling behind.
Most of all, I still fear COVID. Recently, people who suffer from PCOS have been identified as high-risk patients, although we’re not included on the CDC comorbidity list. I don’t know if my yet-to-be-diagnosed illness also puts me at higher risk of contracting the disease or suffering severe symptoms. My loved ones who, like me, obtained relief, rest and safety from remote work will soon be expected to return to taxing and ableist environments. COVID is still a threat, especially to disabled and chronically ill people, because we are considered disposable. Our world is more than eager to go back to the inaccessible “normal” of before instead of building a new one where disabled people can use the numerous technological resources of today to learn, work and live our lives on our own terms.
What now? I will keep wearing my mask. I will not push myself to meet impossible demands for me and my body. I will continue to advocate for myself in ableist spaces. And I will continue to rest in a world that devalues me because I cannot go without it.
Art by Hannah Mumby
Extra! Extra!: What Do We Make of the US’s Latest CDC Masking Guidance?
Extra! Extra! is back after a three-week hiatus and wow… so much has happened around the world in that short time. This week we look at the latest horrifying anti-trans legislation passed in Tennessee, the ongoing failures of America’s criminal justice system one year after George Floyd’s murder, the latest round of violence in Gaza, disparities in vaccine access and more.
LGBTQ+ News
Businesses will now be forced to post signs announcing they serve transgender customers in Tennessee
Himani: The horrifying and shameful onslaught against the basic rights and dignity of trans people continues. As the headline states, Tennessee just passed a bill requiring businesses to publicly declare that they serve trans customers. One can easily imagine that this law will make it near-impossible for trans people in Tennessee to go about the basics of day to day life, like going to the grocery store or filling up a tank of gas — as if those encounters weren’t fraught enough with rampant transphobia and the constant looming threat of harassment and violence. Basically, the state just sanctioned even more harassment from businesses and other bigoted customers. Of course, there will be the businesses that stand in solidarity, but I think we all know the kinds of protests and boycotts they will be met with.
There is one way to stop this, which is to pass the Equality Act. But that and so much other legislation has been stymied by the likes of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin in their adamant refusal to change the Senate rules around the filibuster.
Rachel: This is so sickening to even read about, and its implications, as Himani explains, are even worse — one thing that strikes me is that this is designed to respond to the fact that trans people actually have more support and solidarity among the general populace than the right wing would want, and that there are business owners who want to serve them. Much like how their inability (thus far) to fully criminalize abortion has led to Republican laws that require doctors who provide abortion to have outlandish and unnecessary levels of certification and resources just to make it harder for them to do their work. The goal here is to punish not only trans people, but any business owners who don’t want to shun them by othering them as well and trying to make them vulnerable by association to the violence and harassment directed at trans people.
Vermont becomes 13th state to officially ban evil gay and trans panic defences. Only 37 to go.
Himani: On the other end, Vermont has joined a handful of states and Washington, D.C. in banning the use of the legal argument violence against a gay or trans person is jutififed on the basis of those identities. While this news is certainly welcome, it’s becoming increasingly frustrating to watch basic human rights move in opposite directions on a state-by-state basis. This is, of course, the case with trans rights, but we see the same thing, more or less, happening with reproductive rights and voter suppression (more on this below). One of the many things that’s alarming about this trend is that the states which are passing the most repressive laws are also the ones that have the most outsize power on the federal level. For instance, my rights may be safe in New Jersey, for now at least, but it’s hard not to wonder what the future holds in terms of repressive federal legislation on some of these issues, given the state of the U.S. Senate and the ultraconservative Supreme Court.
“They need to care about our humanity”: death of Tongan LGBTQ+ activist sparks calls for reform
Himani: This was utterly heartbreaking news. In response to the violence and the need for protections for LGBTQ+ people, activist Ymania Brown is quoted saying, “It’s hard for me to say, yes, Poli’s death is going to result in wide sweeping changes, because a lot of it depends not on us, because we’re ready, it depends on legislators and parliamentarians in the Pacific to stand up and develop a backbone. They need to care enough about humanity to say, yes, this is a group of people that need protection and then we can have changes.”
In light of the onslaught of anti-trans legislation in the U.S. and Sinema and Manchin’s obstructionist support of the filibuster (as noted above), it’s hard not to feel like that statement rings true broadly across the world.
The Price of Being Gay in the MS-13 Gang? Death
Himani: This was a heartbreaking look at a previously uncovered side of the depravity of MS-13. And a warning that this article is quite graphic in its descriptions of murder and violence.
The Ongoing Failures of America’s Criminal Justice System
‘The trauma keeps coming’: How Black girls grapple with witnessing police violence
Natalie: I’ve been thinking about Darnella Frazier every day since the Derek Chauvin was found guilty. I’ve been worried about her. I’ve worried that police will retaliate against her as they’ve done with others. I feared for her life, just as Feidin Santana worried for his — “I felt that my life, with this information, might be in danger,” he said — as he held onto the video of Walter Scott’s killing in Charleston, South Carolina. And, on top of it all, she was just a kid: forget worrying about the future, how does she recover from what she’s already seen?
My heart broke as I read her statement, on the one year anniversary of Floyd’s death…that she’s having panic and anxiety attacks and remains (understandably) hesitant to trust. How do we protect Darnella Frazier (and all the future Darnella Fraziers)? They deserve to be protected. I wish this piece had offered more answers about how we can do that.
Himani: This is again one of those situations where the Black community has been raising these issues for years — how the violence of police brutality extends beyond those directly harmed — and the rest of the country has been slow to respond and to address that reality. As Natalie says, there truly are not enough resources dedicated towards supporting those who have been and continue to be traumatized by the violence and constant threat of violence they are forced to live with on a daily basis.
We talk about defunding the police and we talk about reparations. This is just one more aspect of the systemic issues that adds urgency to both.
Rachel: One thing that specifically haunts me in Darnella’s statement and coverage of her aftermath is how much responsibility she feels — she talks about her guilt for feeling like she should have been able to save George Floyd somehow, and that she’s carrying that on top of the compounded trauma and grief is unconscionable. I think it speaks to not only the emotional fallout of watching unspeakable violence for a child, but also the deeply warped system America has tacitly developed for “justice” against killer police — that if any accountability it all is to occur, it will only be because of a bystander with a phone who commits to becoming an overnight civil rights activist and giving over years of their lives and the loss of a private identity just to stand by the proof that this murder happened. The reality is that when footage is in control of the state, like body cams or CCTV footage, they can just… decide not to release it, or cover it up for years while lying about what it depicts (like the footage of the murder of Adam Toledo,
or the months-long coordinated effort by multiple journalists and activists that was required to release footage of Laquan McDonald’s murder).
In the years of public debate and state hand-wringing over police murders, it’s slowly become widely accepted that one of the only effective tools we have in even getting the state to admit a murder happened, let alone address it, is private citizens’ video footage — which effectively deputizes every individual citizen with a crushing amount of responsibility, and holds them accountable for the impossible task of ensuring their community members’ safety against an overpowered and violent state. I’m so furious and heartbroken that Darnella had to witness George Floyd’s murder, and the fact that she’s made to feel responsible for it on top of that because the state has tasked her with the job it’s supposed to be doing is one of the most evil phenomena I can imagine.
4 Years After an Execution, a Different Man’s DNA Is Found on the Murder Weapon
Natalie: End. The. Death. Penalty.
Himani: Again and again and again we learn that every institution in this country lacks the most basic of considerations when it comes to how they treat the Black community. It’s truly galling.
And How’s That “Police Reform” Going, One Year Later?
Emails show Minneapolis police chief coordinated with PR pros to fight council, protect budget
Natalie: This headline feels a little misleading…this isn’t an embattled police chief hiring Olivia Pope to get them out of trouble — that would make sense and wouldn’t be much of a surprise to me — this is a police chief working with a defacto Pro-Cop Political Action Committee (Operation Safety Now). I don’t trust a marketing/PR consultant who works for free in a city that he doesn’t even live in. Everything about this seems shady.
I coupled this piece from the Minnesota Reformer with a recent piece from The Appeal, contrasting the mayorships of Minneapolis’ Jacob Frey and St. Paul’s Melvin Carter. The explanation about the decentralized mayor’s office in Minneapolis explains why Frey would coordinate with a group like Operation Safety Now.
Natalie: I’ve been following Samuel Sinyangwe’s work with Campaign Zero and Mapping Police Violence for a while now…so perhaps the only thing that really surprised me about this article is that people were expecting police behavior to change. If witnessing unjust black death was capable of changing the behavior of police departments, it would have been changed long ago.
But police are failing because the system enables them. The system that, in the wake of George Floyd’s death pledge $50 billion towards building racial equity — both in their communities and within their organization — and, according to a report in the Financial Times, only $250 million has been donated thus far. In Congress, the George Floyd Policing Act sits awaiting Senate approval (and faces a likely filibuster if the Democratic Majority tries to force a vote). Even municipalities and states that have tried reform, “progress in each has been fitful and difficult”…and most of that progress was, really, just the bare minimum. It’s hard not to feel discouraged…like all we’re ever going to get from those who can enact change is lip service.
Dems have a problem on police reform — and it’s not the GOP
Himani: This article is from a few weeks ago but the situation has, basically, remained the same. The legislation put forward in Congress is not enough to address the magnitude of the problems in the criminal justice system, and yet even that legislation is at a full stand still. And while it’s true that to really change policing requires changes at state and local levels, the fundamental issues at every level are, more or less, the same: the disproportionate power held by the Republican party; the unequalled money and influence of police, police unions and related special interest groups; the unmerited adulation of law enforcement in this country; and the complete gutting of non-police services and resources for people to rely on when faced with any number of crises. As Natalie says above, it’s really hard not to feel discouraged.
On the Violence in Gaza
Right-Wing Israelis Are a Huge Threat, Israeli Security Officials Say
Rachel: One perspective I’ve really appreciated as an American the past few weeks is that it’s not possible to oppose the U.S.’s police state and legacy of colonialism and imperialism while supporting the occupation of Palestine — not because they’re parallel, but because they’re actively linked and interdependent. Palestinians were offering advice to Ferguson protesters on managing tear gas assaults back in 2014, because (as the last story illustrates) Israel’s occupation is executed with American funding and weapons, including the same tear gas canisters our militarized police departments use. This coverage of “right-wing Israelis,” in which “Right-wing Jewish groups openly organised a series of attacks on Palestinian homes and businesses via WhatsApp, which the Shin Bet official said hinted of broader organsiations, such as political parties, being behind at least some of the violence” comes the same week that the U.S. senate has failed to move forward on even forming a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 coup attempt by right-wing American extremists. Much like how Trump’s election accompanied a surge of neo-fascist political efforts across the globe, from Jair Bolsonaro to Marine le Pen, American legacies of violent nationalism that exerts itself through violent subjugation of an othered minority group isn’t confined to American borders.
“I Did Have Some Trouble Reporting the Truth”
Himani: I like to think of myself as a person who is unflinching about condemning violence. And yet, on this particular topic, I often find myself self-censoring. I’m hesitant to say what I think, though I believe it and know it to be true. If we were talking about police brutality in the U.S. or Hindu supremacist extremism in India, for instance, I certainly would not mince my words. What happened most recently in Gaza and has been happening for a long time is truly unconscionable. I’m really appreciative of the journalists who came forward for this reporting to talk about the longstanding challenges of reporting about what’s happening honestly because I deeply believe that the way in which we talk and write about issues informs how people think about what’s actually happening. The censorship journalists have experienced from their own organizations on covering what’s happening on the ground is incredibly shocking, given that the Israel Defense Forces (once again) targeted news organizations in the latest round of violence. I’m also deeply appreciative of Jewish people who are saying what needs to be said at this time.
COVID around the World
“We Are Always Behind Other People in the World”
Himani: We’ve been talking about the global disparities in access to vaccines for months now, and that problem persists. I really appreciated this article for giving voice and perspective to people all over the world on how these disparities are affecting them.
Covid made the Philippines’ hunger crisis worse. So why does hardly anyone want a vaccine?
Himani: I’ve been watching the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in the Philippines because I had previously read about the catastrophic rollout of the dengue vaccine a few years ago. Basically, a vaccine to protect against dengue fever was administered in the general population, despite concerns in the scientific community that the vaccine could have unintended consequences. And then it did. This led to a more general mistrust of vaccines and a subsequent surge in measles that killed well over 300 people. Four years later, the Philippines is still dealing with the fallout as vaccine hesitancy is contributing to low uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines. This is despite recent surges in COVID in the Philippines leading to a horrifying shortage of hospital beds.
I think what’s hard is that there’s this constant push and pull with the pandemic, and there has been from the start. The science on what is happening with COVID has both decades of precedence and is, at the same time, emergent. There’s an extent to which I can understand why people are hesitant. But I lay the blame of that squarely on the shoulders of unethical and incomptent political leaders who have downplayed the pandemic from the start, undermined science and refuse to provide adequate economic support to their populations, and the pharma industry which has too long of a history of putting profits over people’s health and well being.
As we’ve seen again and again in the pandemic, the only real answer is transparency around what we do and don’t know about the vaccines, making them available to people who want to get them (so that their successes can help build trust within the larger communities) and a more inclusive community outreach strategy.
Southeast Asia Had COVID-19 Under Control. What Went Wrong?
What to Make of the Latest Masking Guidance in the U.S.
Confused By CDC’s Latest Mask Guidance? Here’s What We’ve Learned
Natalie: I agree with Dr. Boyd that the CDC should have waited to make this recommendation “when it is reasonable and safe for the populations made MOST vulnerable, not for those who are the least.” Though their guidance was supposed to be applicable to only people who are fully vaccinated, it was completely predictable that non-vaccinated folks would shed their masks as well. Only 48.5% of adults in my home state of North Carolina are fully vaccinated at this moment but if I walk into a grocery store or sit on crowded the sidelines of my nephew’s soccer games, the other 51.5% aren’t still wearing their masks. They heard what they wanted to hear…and the CDC should have anticipated that.
People Aren’t ‘Addicted’ to Wearing Masks, They’re Traumatized
Natalie: This article is from a few weeks back but still worth a read if you’ve seen some of the other critiques of people wearing masks (i.e., The Atlantic’s piece on “Liberals who Can’t Quit the Lockdown”). We need to make space to acknowledge the trauma that we’ve all experienced. We keep trying to rush back to normal but millions of people have died all over the world: things are never going to be normal again.
On the State of Voting in America
Are Democrats sleepwalking toward democratic collapse?
Natalie: Absolutely. Yes.
The Supreme Court made the GOP’s new voting restrictions possible
Natalie: John Roberts’ entire career has been leading up until the moment until the moment that he can kill the Voting Rights Act, and he is on the cusp of victory.
Leaked Video: Dark Money Group Brags About Writing GOP Voter Suppression Bills Across the Country
What if the Unorthodox Arizona Audit Declares Trump Won?
Natalie: Back when Arizona Republicans were moving to audit the Maricopa County vote for the third (!!) time, they bypassed groups with experience and the field and contracted with Cyber Ninjas, a group that “had not placed a formal bid for the contract and had no experience with election audits.” Jennifer Morrell, a national expert on post-election audits, went down to Maricopa County to observe the proceedings and reported back, “In more than a decade working on elections, audits and recounts across the country, I’ve never seen one this mismanaged.” Earlier this week, the tech company running the audit opted not to renew its contract and an Arizona-based group, with no discernable experience (natch!), has taken over.
Arizona Republicans wanted to restore the reign of their grifter president so they got a grifter organization to try and help them do it.
I’m less worried about the outcome of the audit itself — I’m not convinced we’ll ever see reporting from it, to be quite honest — as I am about the precedent being set. We are on a scary path that leads away from democracy and towards more authoritarian leaders determining which election results they deem legitimate.
Additional International News
In purging Russia of Navalny, the Kremlin is humming a Soviet tune
‘They will kill me’: Belarusian blogger’s descent into horror
Natalie: This is so, so scary. Raman Pratasevich’s work became a lifeline following the election in Belarus when their authoritarian president shut down the internet to hide the fact that he’d stolen an election. Really stolen an election, not fake stolen an election as Donald Trump suggests. Authorities in Belarus released a video of him, with bruises that suggest that Pratasevich is being tortured, in which he coerced into confessing to the crimes that he didn’t commit. Pratasevich’s girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, who was also taken off the flight, is being held at a prison notorious for its torture of political prisoners. The whole thing feels like it’s out of a spy movie…and the thing that makes it worse? I’m not sure there’s anything the international community can do to stop it.
So far, the EU has enacted some sanctions and it prohibiting flights into Belarusian airspace…and the United States will likely follow their lead…but Alexander Lukashenko is going to align himself with Vladimir Putin in an effort to stymie European opposition. Once Russia gets involved — as a big player in providing resources to the rest of Europe — there’s going to be an increasing reluctance to do anything, especially to save Pratasevich. GQ‘s national security and foreign policy correspondent, Julia Ioffe, summed it up in a recent interview:
I think that’s what people like Putin and Lukashenko have learned: that you don’t have to give an inch to these people, and you can kill them, and also — what we saw with [Mohammad bin Salman] and Khashoggi — you can kill your opponents in the most horrific, brutal, medieval ways. And people will fuss in the West and they’ll condemn you and issue statements. They might even punish you economically. But at the end of the day, they’re not going to come and force you from your throne. The days of Iraq and George W. Bush are over. And I think the lesson is repression works.
Whatever statements and sanctions are issued, it seems clear: there will be more Raman Pratasevichs…and now we’re clearing the way for countries to pluck them out of the sky…and that’s a horror we’re going to have to learn to grapple with.
Pakistan Is Cracking Down on Uyghur Muslims Who Fled China
Natalie: This isn’t dissimilar to the conversation about Russia’s tacit support of Belarus and how it will stymie the opposition from the European Union…even countries inclined to do the right thing are hamstrung by their economic fates being tied to one superpower. For the EU, that’s Russia and for Pakistan that’s China. As Vice notes in their reporting, “the promise of Chinese money seemingly overpowers the desire to stop what is happening to Uyghur Muslims.” I worry that the lure of Chinese money will keep others from offering refuge, including — most egregiously — Turkey who, despite sharing a linguistic, cultural and religious heritage with Uyghurs, have contributed to spreading China’s lies about what’s happening there.
See Myanmar’s Crisis Through the Eyes of the Photographers Risking Their Lives to Bear Witness
Himani: So much of what Natalie said above about what’s happening in Belarus applies to this situation in Myanmar. Over 800 people have been killed, and yet the military junta isn’t even flinching because they can basically do whatever they want.
Samoa is experiencing a bloodless coup. The Pacific’s most stable democracy is in trouble
Himani: It seems there are two ways that democracies die. One is through outright violence, typically involving the military, since they have so much power. And the second is the slow gutting of democratic norms to effectively disenfranchise and silence dissidents. We are watching both play out across the world. And, at the same time, it’s hard for me to not see the blatant parallels to what has happened in the U.S. since last November’s election. In some ways, we’ve had both: we had the violence of the Jan. 6 insurrection and the state-by-state voter suppression efforts. I really do worry what the future holds for us. As I look around the world and see how these issues are unfolding elsewhere, things don’t look so hot anywhere, really.
Extra! Extra!: How to Begin to Process the Unfolding Horror of COVID in India?
This week, COVID returns to the forefront of this week’s Extra! Extra! as we look at the outbreak in India and the threats posed by variants across the globe. We look at the one thing that’s proving stronger than COVID: capitalism and how that’s impacting our recovery. The team also examines new developments on the immigration and criminal justice fronts and ponder what it means to hear the president tell transgender Americans he’s got their backs.
The Pandemic Ravages On
WHO is closely monitoring 10 Covid variants as virus mutates around the world
Natalie: Last weekend, our governor lifted the outdoor mask mandate and so when I ventured out to my nephews’ soccer games, many of the spectators were watching without a mask. I still wore mine, despite the fact that I’m vaccinated. And while some articles try to suggest that continuing to wear masks, despite the CDC’s evolving recommendations, is its own brand of lunacy — the peak of the “both sides” journalism we’ve come to expect — the truth is: there’s so much we still don’t know.
We don’t know what those variants will bring or how effective the vaccine will be against them.
But what we do know is that there’s a subsection of this country who still don’t believe COVID is a thing or that masks protect others or that the vaccine is safe. We do know that children now make up 22% of new COVID cases and that they can’t be vaccinated yet.
Wearing a mask and remaining vigilant about the ongoing threat to public health feels like the absolute least I can do.
Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe: ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’
India Is What Happens When Rich People Do Nothing
Why Is India Running Out Of Oxygen?
Natalie: When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke at the World Economic Forum back in January, I had flashbacks to May 2003 when George W. Bush landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and stood before a banner that read “Mission Accomplished.” Driven by narcissism and a need to diminish critics, an egotistical leader claimed victory for a game that had barely begun…and it was a prelude to more death and more destruction. Sadly, the same has come to pass in India… and it’s far more calamitous.
But all these pieces get at what the pandemic has exposed all around the world: for far too long, we have built systems that were built to do the absolute minimum. With an investment of just over 1% of their gross domestic product in public health, people in India were already dying because of inadequate care… the pandemic just exposed the chronic underfunding for the world to see.
If you want to help address the situation in India, here are 12 places where you can donate.
Rachel: It’s heartbreaking and infuriating to see absolute disregard and indifference to human life the institutions of power are displaying toward the people of India, and the loss that’s resulting. It’s also infuriating because it’s the product of the exact same belief system that some people are disposable that we saw here in the US in its own way; I’m hopeful that the people who were abandoned in the same respect here, like frontline workers, families with young children and service industry workers will recognize this and be able to organize some degree of international solidarity and support with the subcontinent, and that xenophobia and sinophobia won’t lead us to reproduce the same deadly attitude our world governments have.
Himani: Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of that article by Arundhati Roy is when she mentions doing daily roll call over the phone with her friends to keep track of who’s alive. As this situation has gone from bad to worse to horrific to unfathomable, I increasingly wonder how many of the people I know and have met in India will still be alive at the end of this. Parts of my family over there seem to have skated by (not everyone, though), but I wonder about all the domestic staff, the drivers, the house keepers, the nannies — the seemingly invisible people that I took a closer and closer look at each visit back. What of them?
I think about what Rachel has written above, “the people who were abandoned in the same respect here, like frontline workers, families with young children and service industry workers.” But in India, these people were abandoned long before anyone even knew COVID existed. It’s hard for me, in these moments, to not think bitterly of all the shameful scenes I’ve witnessed in my life, of watching people treated as if they were truly expendable, disposable really. That happens in the U.S. too, without a doubt, but sometimes it feels like the scale, the ruthlessness and the acceptance that inequity of that extent is on a whole other level in India. Vidya Krishnan draws a parallel between upper caste and wealthy Indians’ indifference to the pandemic to the Bhopal gas leak disaster in 1984. But the same exact parallel can be made with the water and air quality crises.
The other thing that feels inescapable in this news is how close the U.S. came to this type of disaster. In October, the White House issued a press release stating that “ending the COVID-19 pandemic” was among Trump’s accomplishments. Conspicuously issued a week before the 2020 presidential election, this moment definitely felt like a callback to Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” that Natalie referenced and foreshadowed Modi’s gloating in January, which was also politically motivated because of the at-the-time upcoming and now recently passed state elections in West Bengal. Had Trump won a second term last November, I really don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the U.S. would have found itself in a crisis of similar magnitude as India. (And that’s not even getting to the fact that deaths as a result of the pandemic are massively under-reported. A new study released just this week estimates that 900,000 people have died as a result of COVID in the U.S.)
Nepal facing ‘human catastrophe’ similar to India’s amid Covid surge
Natalie: After seeing the initial wave of COVID spread across the globe, it seems inevitable that what’s happening in India will spill across its borders to other countries…even if we enact well-intentioned travel bans. A global question requires a global answer and I hope that we’re able to unite and provide one.
U.S. to send vaccine materials and other supplies to hard-hit India, officials say
Natalie: We talked about this in our last edition of EE and the administration is finally stepping up and doing what’s needed. I am a little bothered by the language around allyship and the United States giving help to India as returning a favor. That’s less about this particular situation and more thinking ahead to what could be around the bend for the world: does Nepal deserve our help less because they didn’t send ventilators to the United States when we needed them?
Biden Backs Waiving International Patent Protections For COVID-19 Vaccines
Natalie: This feels like the obvious choice, right? Waiving international patent protections seems like such an obvious solution to getting the vaccine out to the most people. We’ve seen the cost of not waiving patent protections before: “rigid adherence to patent laws directly led to millions of lives lost to HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s.” And yet, here we are again, fighting that same battle. I’m glad that Biden is on the right side of this issue.
On the other side? Capitalism. Per Bloomberg’s reporting, “Without the incentive of profits from research and development spending, drugmakers might not move as aggressively to make vaccines in the future.”
Himani: This has been an ongoing issue. In fact back in December, we talked about how the effort to loosen IP restrictions had been already been underway for months at that point. In many ways, this long standing unwillingness on the part of the Western, wealthy world to relax patent enforcement is responsible for the crisis in India. India has one of the largest manufacturing capacities for producing vaccines, but doesn’t have the relationships with Pfizer or Moderna to produce either of those vaccines.
‘We’re just trying to survive’: what Africa risks from a new Covid wave
How Senegal stretched its health care system to stop Covid-19
Himani: I found this article to be a really interesting and informative read. There’s so much to think about here. First, how a low-income country like Senegal managed to protect its people from a virus that brought far wealthier countries to their knees. Second, the critical role of community advocates and buy-in to actually get people to follow the public health policies and recommendations from the government. And third, how the longer this stretches on, the harder and harder it is for people to adhere to any of it — which, of course, comes at the cost of human life.
Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe
Natalie: This is my shocked face.
Himani: And yet we are reopening. What little safety net there is, is being gutted for the sake of capitalism. Employers are forcing people who have proven they can do their jobs remotely back to work. People are talking about their hot summer plans.
In light of all of this news about the pandemic, I struggle to differentiate between a measured risk and flippant disregard for other people’s lives. The truth is, I’m not sure that anyone has a good answer on that. As Natalie said earlier, there’s a lot we don’t know. But there’s also a lot we do know that we don’t want to accept because we’re all tired, lonely and — inarguably — we have all paid the price in our mental health after more than a year of social distancing.
For all the time I’ve spent in my life thinking about probability and risk assessment, there’s one thing I always come back to. No amount of advanced math will ever tell your future. At some point, it comes down to making our best guess. But again and again, in this pandemic, I feel like the approach has been willful ignorance of the inconvenient truths we do know and using the charade of statistics to justify our selfish decisions. And so, here we are. Herd immunity is unlikely in the U.S. Like Natalie, I’m not surprised. I do wonder, though, how long it will be before the U.S. gets a double, triple, ultra deadly variant like what has spread in Brazil or in India?
In a meeting about coming back to working in person in the fall, a colleague of mine asked why we still have to wear masks in our offices if we’re fully vaccinated before declaring, “We have to learn to live with this thing!”
She’s not wrong. We have to learn to live with this thing. We certainly have to do a better job of living with this thing than we have over the last year and a half. But, as I’ve said before and as I’m sure I’ll say again, I’m really not sure we’re actually learning anything.
LGBTQ+ News
Biden White House Is Preparing to Confront States on Anti-Trans Bills
Natalie: I agree with activists that actions matter…and we need for the Biden administration to speak through their actions. The Department of Justice needs to sue each and every state that’s advancing these bigoted bills. They need to immediately establish a task force to address the scourge of anti-trans violence that’s taken two black trans women away from us this week.
That said, I think words matter too. Hearing the President say unequivocally from the well of the United States House that he has the backs of transgender Americans is a big deal…and I just don’t mean for transgender folks (who I wouldn’t presume to speak for), but to Sue Collins who has been wavering on her previous support for the Equality Act (mostly because she’s still in her feelings about the Human Rights Campaign endorsing her opponent in her re-election campaign in 2020). Collins has been parroting some of the far right’s talking points on the bill which she previously sponsored and this was the president calling her on her bullshit.
Sex Workers Want More Than Just the Right to Work
Himani: I really appreciated the context this interview with journalist Melissa Gira Grant provides on the Manhattan DA’s decision to stop prosecuting sex work as a crime. As Grant argues, there’s so much more that needs to happen to ensure sex workers are treated humanely and with dignity.
Criminal Justice News
Many Juvenile Jails Are Now Almost Entirely Filled With Young People of Color
Rachel: Reading this made me feel so ill – it’s such a damning case study of the function of mass incarceration as anti-Black violence (and reproductive violence in its targeting of children and separation of families), and also just so incredibly cruel to children. Although there are “fewer children were incarcerated than at any point since at least the 1980s” because of releases of juveniles due to COVID risk, the overwhelming majority of the youths released were white, meaning that “many youth facilities are increasingly holding almost entirely Black and Latino teens” – the unsaid portion there being ‘left to die from COVID exposure,’ on top of the trauma and violence of incarceration.
…while the number of White youths has remained historically low, the number of Black and Latino youths has risen slightly, said Tom Woods, a senior associate and juvenile justice data analyst for the Casey Foundation. The racial gap in detention is worsening even though teens, including those of color, were arrested less often in 2020, data shows.
State-level Republicans are making it easier to run over protesters
Natalie: This is absolutely nuts… and I can’t imagine it would apply to me if I tried to run over anti-vaccine/anti-mask protesters who rallied at the state legislature in North Carolina this week, despite the fact that these people represent an actual threat (not an imagined one) to my safety and well-being. I can’t qwhite put my finger on why, though?
‘We’re terrorized’: LA sheriffs frequently harass families of people they kill, says report
Natalie: I’ve been thinking, since the Derek Chauvin case concluded, about the eyewitnesses and what they’re going through… especially Darnella Frazier. I’m worried for their mental health and I’m worried about their safety. I thought about Ramsey Orta, who shot the video of the murder of Eric Garner, and how the police tormented him for revealing the truth of what they’d done. So, I suppose it’s not surprising that the same people who would harass eyewitnesses would also terrorize the families of those they killed, but still… my gosh, is there no bottom for these folks?
4 ex-cops indicted on US civil rights charges in Floyd death
On the Safety Net
Biden’s $1.8 Trillion Plan Would Be Historic Boost To Social Safety Net
South Carolina becomes the second state to cancel federal unemployment benefits
Natalie: Through this pandemic, we have forced “essential” employees to go to work with mediocre protection, low pay and ineffectual health care when/if they did get sick. And now, after being shown that their workplace won’t protect them, those workers want to go elsewhere…and their government deigns to step in and tell those workers that they won’t be provided for as they seek new employment? This is absurd.
As a CEO, I worry about the erosion of office culture with more remote work
Natalie: Since this piece went up, the staff of the Washingtonian has gone on strike and the CEO has apologized. Still, though, it’s gives an insight into the thinking of business leaders…and feels particularly pertinent in this moment.
Education News
Does your child’s teacher know how to teach?
Rachel: File this one under ‘issues we’ve needed to address for a long time, but were overlooked by many until the pandemic made them legible in a different way.’ I feel a certain personal concern for this as someone with (limited!) previous teaching experience – I taught entry-level college courses to pay my way through grad school at a state school with a unique program where all local high school students had their college tuition covered, and frankly, I should not have been teaching! I’m a smart and capable person who cares about my job and kids, and also had no specialized training, no competency around the evidence-based ways to respond to their lived experiences as far as caring for family, full-time jobs, or struggles with health and wellness; I was give a two-week crash orientation and told to take one semester of pedagogy at the same time as I was teaching. Ever since then I’ve been horrified by the weird double standard we often have around education in the US; it’s supposed to be a major priority, we want to believe the US has the gold standard of the whole world, people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on special private school educations – but we often don’t think as much about what makes a good teacher as we do about test scores or ‘outcomes,’ we don’t really have standardized evidence-based expectations around what kind of training or experience teachers should have, and we tend not to question what the impact is of running educational spaces with the infrastructure of a business.
This article does a good job unpacking the specific and layered ways in which these issues harm Black and Latino students by disproportionately saddling them with teachers like I was, inexperienced and uncredentialed, simply not equipped regardless of their best intentions to give students the experience they deserve. “…by channeling a proportionally larger share of less qualified or alternatively credentialed teachers to schools with higher percentages of Black, Latino and disabled students. Black and Latino students are more likely than their white peers to be taught by teachers in training who are in alternative teacher preparation programs. These alternative route programs differ from traditional teacher preparation programs in at least one significant way: Most alternative route teacher interns become teachers of record prior to completing any teacher training… This trend of placing untrained and uncertified individuals as teachers of record in schools serving the urban poor and disabled students is accelerating during the pandemic as states utilize more back door routes into classrooms through emergency certificates — in some states, these are granted to individuals with only a high school diploma.”
Although I do think there’s room to examine somewhat the conflation of advanced degrees with teacher quality, it’s undeniable this is hugely harmful – I’m hopeful that at least some people have gained a new understanding of how incredibly challenging and high-skill teaching is, and maybe think differently about how we all want our educational spaces to look, and especially how we prioritize education for Black & brown kids – no matter how many times you’ve seen Freedom Writers, it isn’t enough to give kids of color classrooms that run entirely on intentions and ~vibes~.
A school district tried to address racism, a group of parents fought back
Natalie: This is why things will never get better: white people will always fight harder for the right to be racist than the fight to protect black lives.
(And lest you think this is an issue only in the South, perhaps revisit Nikole Hannah-Jones’ seminal piece, Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.)
Developments on the Immigration Front
The Pushback Worked. Biden Will Raise the Refugee Cap to What He Originally Promised
A Mother, Separated from Her Children at the Border, Comes Home
Natalie: The immigration system that was handed to this administration by the last one is akin to someone saying they’re giving you a car but only ultimately giving you the body. No engine, no tires…nothing to actually make the car operational…but still a car, nonetheless. I understand that that’s what they were given and getting everything working in proper order will take time. I’m sympathetic to that argument.
But we have to move faster. These families have been separated for far too long and anything short of reunification, restitution and permanent status in this country is a failure.
Trump Might Be Gone But Trumpism Remains
Natalie: This is infuriating and should anger all of us…and, of course, it was the Trump administration that eliminated the possibility that Gallagher would escape any possible punishment for his crimes and elevated him as a hero.
Liz Cheney Has Only Herself to Blame
Natalie: Seeing self-proclaimed liberals elevate Liz Cheney this week as some paragon of virtue has been a sight to behold. I’m grateful to Adam Serwer for setting the record straight on her culpability (and her family’s culpability) in getting us to this moment.
Arizona Review of 2020 Vote Is Riddled With Flaws, Says Secretary of State
Natalie: What a shit show.
NY Post Reporter Resigns, Says She Was ‘Ordered’ To Write False Kamala Harris Story
Natalie: The Post has always been trash so I have a hard time mustering up sympathy for a writer that’s contributed to that garbage heap since the 90s. But the more important lesson from this is to remain viligant against the disinformation campaigns that Trump and his allies continue to perpetuate.
International News
Brazil has already lost 30 Manhattans of Amazon rainforest this year
Natalie: If COVID doesn’t kill us all, capitalism definitely will.
Dying by blood or by hunger”: The war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, explained
Himani: Every time I read about this crisis in Ethiopia I’m left floored and speechless. To say the very least, this is a tragedy of catastrophic proportions.
Netanyahu Opponent, Yair Lapid, Given 4 Weeks To Form New Government In Israel
When I Got COVID, My Wife and I Went Through It Together; How Will Things Change When She Returns to the Office?
This essay is part of a series from Autostraddle writers about how they’re approaching dating and relationships at our current stage in the pandemic – read the rest here!
I read the first Boxcar Children book when I was eight years old, and immediately daydreamed a world where I, too, lived in an isolated little shack or tiny house or cabin, growing my own food, no one telling me what to do, or how to be, just me and the wide open world. I checked out books at the library about gardening and chopping wood and building fires. I cut out magazine photos of cottages nestled into the snowy mountains, not another living soul in sight. I love being alone. I have always loved being alone. I spent most of my life planning a future for just me and the pets I would love.
So of course it’s deeply ironic that I chose to get married and live in New York City. But my wife, Stacy, isn’t like anyone I’ve ever known, and when I met her and fell in love with her, it was like some kind of magical introvert alchemy. She is the only person I have ever known who always energizes me. I still need a lot of alone time, but being with her, even after ten years, is my favorite way to be — and so I just folded her into my daydream. Me and her together, alone, in a secluded cabin in the woods. The last year has kind of been like that, but with the option to have groceries and prescriptions and takeout delivered directly to our door. Our relationship has never been better or stronger or happier. We trip over each other in the kitchen multiple times a day, and still our affection bubbles over.
It’s impossible to know if that’s how it would have been if I hadn’t gotten Covid and Long Covid, but I did, and so every moment we have together — watching women’s basketball, cooking breakfast, playing board games, singing silly songs to our cats, lying together reading, sitting in the same room playing our own video games, or even working at our own jobs directly across from each other at the same table — is rooted in gratitude. We are both keenly aware, in ways we never have been, of how fragile everything really is, including our health and our bodies and our actual lives. We’ve stared down mortality this year. Not just me and Stacy. All of us.
I’m so happy things seem to be trending in the right direction with the pandemic. Mostly of course so we won’t continue to lose hundreds of thousands of lives, so doctors and nurses and grocery clerks and delivery people and janitors and surgeons and all our frontline workers can move through the world more safely and with less physical and emotional trauma. And also of course so people can be with people again! So I can see and hug and sit in the same room with my friends and family! So Stacy can pick up on the astronomical trajectory of her career that was skyrocketing before the world shut down! So we can stop living in constant fear of this virus and all the destruction it has caused!
But also I am afraid of emerging from this cocoon I’ve been in for a year and having to relearn to navigate the world and all my relationships as a person with multiple chronic illnesses and a disability — especially without Stacy by my side. That’s a hard thing to write because even though Stacy and I have been together for a decade, and even though we’ve built our lives around each other, there’s always been a deeply independent streak in both of us, a pride as individuals about how self-sufficient we both were. We both had very full and separate lives outside of our life as a couple, before Covid. I don’t know if either of us really understand how much that has changed in the last year.
In terms of being a person with a disability, I’m mostly self-sufficient (again: as long as delivery exists!), but sometimes I have terrible and terrifying crashes, and Stacy knows just what to do now, just what to say, just what to bring to me, and just what I’m trying to say, even when my Dysautonomia robs me of my words. She springs into action during those times and handles anything that needs to be handled: finishing up the chore I was in the middle of doing and had to abandon, taking care of our cats, making dinner and bringing it to me on a tray when I can’t get out of bed, translating my mish-mashed phrases. And all the things she does when I’m not crashed, just daily things, like preparing my Liquid IV every night and bringing it to my bedside every morning, or noticing when I’ve gotten too busy working and forgotten to pause and take my meds, or helping me keep track of everything every doctor says because she can overhear every call.
Mostly, though, her presence makes bearing it all so much easier. She makes me laugh all day, she constantly encourages me, and she’s a sounding board when I get upset that, say, someone yelled at me for crossing the street too slowly, or when I’m experiencing some kind of frustrating or demoralizing situation where I’m having to request the same accessibility accommodations over and over and over. Over the past 12 months, I have been forced to do the thing I’ve always been the worst at: be real about what I’m incapable of doing, and ask other people to do things in a way that’s not easiest or most convenient for them, so it will be accessible for me. It’s hard enough to do it once. But I’ve discovered that it’s actually never just a single ask. I have to keep asking because people keep defaulting to their normal, to my old normal, and every time I have to speak up and say, “No, actually, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t, remember? I can’t.”, it eats away at my very limited energy and forces me to re-confront my shifting identity.
But when that happens and Stacy’s home, I can rest my forehead against her forehead, or hold her hand in my hand, or rant and growl, or even just share a look of understanding. So much of my identity is solidified in proximity to her, and in her belief in me. “That’s not a you problem; that’s a them problem,” is what she says, and I believe her every time.
I’m also just kind of sad to see our Boxcar Children time coming to an end. We probably won’t be together this much again until we’re both retired, and even though it has been, at times, harder than anything either of us could have imagined when the pandemic started, it’s also been some of our sweetest, most intimate, silliest, funnest times we’ve ever had as a couple. The playlists! The quest to cook the perfect scrambled eggs! The board games! The Great British Bake Off and Top Chef marathons! The singing and the dancing and the never-ending inside joke! We got married in our own living room, for goodness’ sake!
Over the last decade, mine and Stacy’s relationship has been through so many incarnations, and I know it will go through a zillion more over the course of our lives. One thing that hasn’t changed is my Boxcar dreams. What’s next will bring its own challenges and joys, like all the manifestations before it, and we’ll rise to meet them. I’ll sigh a big breath of relief on the days I draw the Hermit from my tarot deck. I’ll keep bookmarking photos of secluded cabins (for two). I’ll text her at work when someone honks at me because I’m baby-stepping through the crosswalk, and she’ll say, “Fuck them!” And, “I love you.” And, “Let’s play Yahtzee when I get home.”
They Planned to Grow Old Together
This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and republished with permission from The American Prospect.
For 24 years, Marie Giardino and her partner Michaeljon Blue made a home, a cozy yellow house with a front porch and fenced backyard in Rochester, New York. They lived with many cats and dogs lucky enough to once cross Blue’s path: “If a baby needs a home, he will come here,” she liked to say. Not long after moving in together, Blue gave Giardino a silver band. She never exactly said what it was for — Blue was never one for labels and doesn’t believe in marriage — but Giardino took it as a sign of the love they still share.
“We know each other about as well as any two people could know each other,” Giardino told me. “There were always things that we could talk about. We just were comfortable and safe in each other’s presence.” They passed the time driving along scenic Route 104, shooting pool at a local bar, and going to a diner in town, where the waitstaff would let them chat late into the night. Mostly, they just liked the feeling of being together.
They planned to grow old together, and for a while they did just that. Yet this dream has been cut short, not because of a breakdown in their relationship, but because of deep fractures in the systems intended to provide care to disabled and older adults. The trouble began with a hospital visit and ended with Blue being evicted from a nursing home, putting the two partners 80 miles apart while deeply in debt. “It’s a very hard situation. I’m not even sure I can put a lot of words around it because it’s a day by day [experience],” said Giardino. “If I had my choice, I’d be living at home with Michaeljon and we’d be taking care of our animals, doing our thing.”
The situation illuminates a painful reality for many nursing home residents who come into contact with the byzantine system of how Americans pay for elder care. It’s incredibly easy to grow old and die in the United States without community or proper care, especially for low-income, chronically ill seniors who rely on Medicaid. These residents are especially vulnerable to being evicted from their nursing homes and involuntarily transferred elsewhere, and this is often wielded as a threat to get exorbitant and even predatory debts repaid. “It’s a way to bring pressure on the family, who often fear the loss of being able to see their loved one,” said Jeff Nieznanski, a supervising attorney at Legal Assistance of Western New York, who is representing Blue as she attempts to reunite with her partner.
The last of Blue’s many jobs involved driving semitrucks across the country, but her asthma got so bad, she had to stop. Not long after, she began showing signs of dementia — leaving the stove on, getting lost while driving. Giardino started bringing Blue to work with her at Genesee Community College, but then her post-polio symptoms (exhaustion, decreased mobility) started worsening. So she retired to care for herself and Blue.
Shortly into this retirement, Blue grew severely disoriented and nonresponsive, so Giardino rushed her to the emergency room. It turned out to be atrial fibrillation and a urinary tract infection, which contributed to her confusion. She was discharged to a nursing home and then back home, but the same issues emerged again as the dementia progressed.
Over the next six months, she returned to the hospital twice more. After the third visit, she was discharged to The Shore Winds, a nursing home in Rochester. It wasn’t in the plan, but Giardino soon realized that she was no longer able to care for Blue, and made the hard decision to indefinitely extend her stay at the nursing home.
In October 2017, about a week into her stay, Blue was provided with a notice that her Medicare coverage would be cut. The nursing home determined that she no longer needed Medicare-covered rehabilitative care. The notice was supposed to be delivered to Giardino, who has Blue’s power of attorney and would have appealed the decision. Instead, Blue signed away her right to appeal, without fully knowing what she was signing.
After Medicare was cut, it took another three months for Blue to be covered by Medicaid, which pays for longer-term nursing home care. There’s a built-in flaw in the Medicaid system: It requires a near-total lack of financial assets, and the assessment of five years’ worth of financial records to prove that an applicant has exhausted their resources (without gifting any assets), to qualify for coverage. This “look-back period” often results in delays that can throw applicants into a period of limbo. Typically, Medicaid will pay retroactively to cover any delays after the application process begins, but an unexplained transfer in 2012 of $62,000 from Blue to Giardino, which neither could explain, led Medicaid to impose a penalty period, leaving Blue without coverage for months, despite being destitute.
Blue’s bill accumulated to $38,467, two-thirds of which accrued during the gap in coverage between Medicare and Medicaid. Giardino disputes the majority of the bill, given that she wasn’t provided with the Medicare cut notice and informed of the change in coverage, which violates Medicare rules. “Medicare rules say a facility is not allowed to charge services if they don’t follow the rules. Nevertheless, they did charge and that’s why there is this outstanding bill,” said Nieznanski.
When Medicaid began paying, Giardino also made a common mistake: She initially didn’t realize she had to pay for a portion of this bill with Blue’s monthly Social Security check. Unlike Medicare, which fully covers the first 20 days of one’s nursing home care, Medicaid-paying residents owe almost all of their income, known as the Net Available Monthly Income. This part of the debt Giardino doesn’t dispute.
In February 2019, Giardino was informed that Blue would be evicted from The Shore Winds to another nursing home 80 miles away, unless she squared the debt. She offered to pay the undisputed charge as a lump sum of $12,674.27 and a recurring monthly payment, but the nursing home declined. She didn’t have the funds for the rest. “I can’t give them what I don’t have,” Giardino told me.
In April 2019, a hearing was held by the New York Department of Health, in which Giardino testified, “I hope that we’ll come to some decision that will be equitable for Michaeljon because her well-being is my only concern.” This, however, did not persuade the judge, who determined that the eviction met regulations.
A few months later, Blue was placed in a medical cab, without understanding where she was going or why. Giardino likened Blue’s capacity to that of a baby, aware of her surroundings but not sequences of events. As she watched her partner being evicted, it didn’t seem to Giardino like she was being cared for as a person forced to leave her home should be. “It just seemed very matter-of-fact,” Giardino told me. “I didn’t see anyone from the staff saying goodbye to her.”
Giardino asked to ride in the medical cab by Blue’s side, but was told she couldn’t. So she followed behind her for the drive to Hornell Gardens, part of Hurlbut Care Communities, the same corporate nursing home consortium as The Shore Winds. When they arrived, the staff were aware that Blue was coming, but not the time of her arrival.
Giardino’s biggest concern about the new facility was that it would prevent her from regularly visiting and checking up on her partner, given that her post-polio symptoms made it challenging, and sometimes impossible, to travel such a distance.
“I left there that day with a heavy heart,” Giardino told me. Since then, she has called Blue every day, for five to ten minutes, but it isn’t the same. After all, what she liked best about their time together was being in her presence.
The administrator of The Shore Winds, the administrator of Hornell Gardens, and a representative from Hurlbut Care Communities did not respond to a request for comment.
Marie Giardino, left, and Michaeljon Blue at the Hornell Gardens nursing home in January 2020, the last time they were able to see each other indoors. Photo courtesy of Marie Giardino.
Since Blue’s eviction, Giardino has been fighting the decision with the help of lawyers at Empire Justice Center, Legal Assistance of Western New York, and Disability Rights New York. She appealed the New York Department of Health’s decision, a largely unprecedented move that makes this one of the first nursing home eviction cases to enter the New York court system. Under state and federal regulations, it is legal to evict a nursing home resident for nonpayment, even if they lack capacity. However, by separating Blue from her partner, her community, and specialized doctors, lawyers argued that the eviction failed to follow regulations on safe discharges and resident rights, and that a resident shouldn’t be evicted when a large part of the debt is disputed. In March, the appeal was denied.
Blue’s legal team is deciding whether to pursue another appeal, potentially bringing the case to the New York State Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state. “It would create a new precedent,” said Nieznanski. “It would essentially make law in New York as to how these discharges are to be handled.”
Nursing home evictions, technically known as involuntary discharges or transfers, are consistently the most common complaint received by the Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, a federal program that advocates for the rights of nursing home residents. The program received 3,883 complaints related to nursing home evictions or admissions in 2019, the most recent year that data is available. Between January 2016 and June 2019, the New York Department of Health heard 113 cases on nursing home evictions, including to homeless shelters and a motel, according to documents obtained by Nieznanski through a Freedom of Information Act request. This captures only a fraction of nursing home evictions, the majority of which never have a hearing.
“This happens under the table. That’s the whole point. In so many of these cases, the facility just says, ‘Get out,’ or ‘We’re moving you,’” said Eric Carlson, a directing attorney at Justice in Aging, a nonprofit focused on senior poverty.
Even an eviction to another nursing home can be highly disruptive. It can lead to deteriorating health and cause residents with dementia to act out, which Tracy Greene Mintz, a national expert in the study of transfer trauma, described as “a completely normal response to being yanked out of your home and put in some other place.” Mintz notes that it is common for symptoms of trauma from an eviction to be misattributed to dementia.
There is some data to suggest that LGBTQ elders are especially vulnerable to nursing home evictions. In a 2011 national survey, led by Justice in Aging in collaboration with LGBTQ nonprofits, abrupt or attempted evictions from nursing homes on the basis of one’s “actual or perceived sexual orientation and identity” was found to be a top concern among LGBTQ seniors. Tim Johnston, who works at SAGE, the nation’s oldest nonprofit for LGBTQ elders, notes that nursing homes may discharge LGBTQ residents whom they deem “difficult,” due to an aspect of their identity. The facility can claim they are unable to meet their health needs, which is one of the permitted reasons for a discharge, but can be used to justify discrimination, or simply a lack of competency in LGBTQ care.
Blue’s lawyers and partner do not allege discrimination, yet her case does reflect some common experiences of LGBTQ adults in nursing homes. For one, Blue’s eviction led to her separation from her partner and long-held friends in Rochester, an example of just one of the ways nursing homes fail to recognize and accommodate the chosen family of LGBTQ residents. “[Nursing homes] are not particularly well set up for integrating friends, volunteers, community members, or other folks who might not be legal relations, but should be a part of the person’s circle and possibly care planning,” said Johnston.
On top of this, LGBTQ seniors experience high rates of poverty, as they often lack a social and financial support network, which can make them vulnerable to a nursing home eviction due to nonpayment. Nonpayment is one of the most common reasons for evictions, especially within Blue’s nursing home consortium, the Hurlbut Care Communities.
In 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services began requiring nursing homes to send involuntary discharge notices to state ombudsman programs. Soon after, Alana Russell, who then directed the ombudsman program at Lifespan of Greater Rochester, an older-adult advocacy nonprofit, began noticing a rash of evictions all coming from Hurlbut Care Communities. The corporate nursing home consortium operates 13 facilities in the Finger Lakes region of New York, including The Shore Winds and Hornell Gardens. Between 2017 and 2021, there were 38 transfer notices between nursing homes within the consortium issued due to a failure to pay, according to data collected by Lifespan of Greater Rochester.
The notices stood out to Russell for a few reasons. First, they were specifically for nonpayment, often astronomical sums accrued unintentionally or due to financial exploitation. Residents or their representatives often didn’t fully understand what they needed to pay, something Russell described as “benign, unintended nonpayment.” More concerning to Russell were the evictions that involved pocketing the resident’s Social Security checks, which are required by Medicaid to help pay for the nursing home bill. In response, the nursing home that took the resident’s source of income punishes them with an eviction, despite residents often lacking capacity and legal authority over their own finances.
It also struck Russell as odd that all but one eviction notice resulted in the resident being sent to the same destination: Hornell Gardens, where Blue now resides. “It is their furthest-away facility, in a totally different county, in Steuben County,” said Russell. “I wondered, ‘Why are they choosing this farthest-away place?’”
Nursing home evictions for nonpayment do not directly resolve the issue of a debt, much less financial exploitation. Yet a looming eviction can threaten a family into paying a debt, using access to loved ones as a prod to force payment. There’s also the consideration that Medicaid-paying residents are less financially desirable to nursing homes than Medicare-paying residents, given that Medicare has a higher reimbursement rate. This creates an incentive to fill more-lucrative Medicare beds, potentially by shuffling lower-paying residents to another facility.
Even throughout the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Hurlbut Care Communities facilities, along with nursing homes across the country, continued to threaten residents with evictions. Between March 2020 and January 2021, three residents received discharge notices from a Hurlbut Care Communities facility to Hornell Gardens, according to Lifespan of Greater Rochester’s data. The federal government, along with many states, instituted a moratorium on residential evictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19, yet this did not extend to nursing homes, where many of those most susceptible to COVID-19 reside.
Hornell Gardens ended up having a large COVID-19 outbreak and is now under investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James for safety failures during the pandemic. In April 2020, Blue tested positive for COVID-19, but she fortunately didn’t show any symptoms. Around the same time, a resident who had been evicted and transferred to Hornell Gardens due to a debt — the result of delayed Medicaid coverage — ended up dying of COVID-19.
If he hadn’t died, he would be in a similar position as Blue, indefinitely separated by 80 miles from his family in the Rochester area.
Nursing homes are businesses, but they’re also meant to be homes where many people spend the last years of their lives, often with diminishing capacity. People who live in nursing homes are referred to as residents rather than patients. It’s this idea that’s at the heart of the 1987 Nursing Home Reform Act, a sweeping piece of federal legislation that established a bill of rights for residents, including the right to a dignified existence, self-determination, access to community, and rights during discharges.
In March, New York passed a law strengthening protections from evictions for nursing home residents, especially to dangerous, temporary locations. Yet the law doesn’t prevent nursing homes from discharging residents for nonpayment and exploitative debts, nor does it address the financial motivations that often spur evictions, at the expense of a resident’s health, well-being, and social connections.
“[The law] doesn’t really target the central issue, unfortunately, which is that these involuntary transfers or discharges are from the business office,” said Alexia Mickles, a staff attorney at Empire Justice Center. “They’re business decisions. It doesn’t account for the medical needs of the residents.”
The decision to evict Blue was a financial one, not involving the input of a social worker or doctor. Maggie Ganon, who at the time was the director of social work at The Shore Winds, testified that she was not involved until after the eviction decision was already determined, nor were any of Blue’s specialized doctors consulted. “It is apparently the decision of the respondent’s corporate office to put this frail and aged resident out even though she has been paying current charges since 2018,” wrote administrative law judge John Terepka, in his decision. Nevertheless, Terepka determined that Blue’s eviction was aligned with regulations.
Michael Scott-Kristansen, a lawyer representing The Shore Winds, contends that Blue’s eviction is lawful. “With respect to any resident transfer and/or discharge, our client strictly adheres to its legal obligations, safely transferring residents only when it is legally permissible and only with appropriate planning and advance notice,” he wrote, in response to a request for comment.
A question, then, at the heart of Blue’s case is the extent to which the emotional, social, and the complex medical needs of a resident should be legally considered during nursing home evictions. Blue will not just be separated from her partner, but also the group of gay women that she and Giardino would go to a diner with every Sunday. Is the prospect of tearing apart partnership, friendship, and love enough to stop an eviction?
This arose again in the oral arguments for Blue’s appeal case, where Fiona Wolfe, a senior attorney at Empire Justice Center, argued that the distance alone makes the discharge inappropriate. Appellate division judge Erin Peradotto pushed back on this in the hearing, saying that the two nursing homes “could provide the exact same services to the petitioner” — that the two nursing homes are, essentially, interchangeable.
Eric Carlson, of Justice in Aging, who is not involved in this case, took issue with the idea that distance shouldn’t matter in discharges. “If you value nursing home residents as human beings, then you have to recognize that it does matter,” he told me. “The environment matters. The stability matters. The personal connections matter. The community matters. The ability to get visits from your family or friends matters. It all matters.”