Breaking news: You can be mad AND have fun

Beyonce, confessions, and fears.

In the months following my separation and divorce, there were times when I desperately longed to feel joy. But even when a moment of levity appeared, I wouldn’t allow myself to feel it, much less acknowledge it. When people asked me how I was doing, sometimes I wanted to say, “Fine! I’m good!” But I couldn’t utter those words, although increasingly there were days when it was true. I simply found it impossible to give voice to that sentiment. I never understood why. 

The book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown helped me understand myself a little better, even though it’s pretty specifically not written for people like me*.

*relatively privileged straight white women who drink almond milk lattes. Honestly, I’m drinking one right now.

Photo by Fahmi Fakhrudin on Unsplash

The gist of the book is that people whose lives are surrounded by despair and injustice can still find hope and joy amid the ruins. In fact, she points out, part of activism and fighting oppression can be the very act of finding and experiencing pleasure, particularly for people who’ve literally been forbidden from joyful forms of self-expression - think everyone in the LGBTQ alphabet, for example. 

Why would people deny themselves joy in the first place? Well, therein lies my cathartic moment. When people are enduring hardship, it is, of course, hard to feel good. But there’s also a human desire to want other people to understand or at least be aware the hardship. 

When people asked me how I was doing in the immediate wake of my marriage’s implosion, I always was tempted to shout, “MY LIFE IS SO FUCKING HARD RIGHT NOW THAT IF A BLACK HOLE OPENED IN FRONT OF ME I WOULD JUMP INTO IT,” even if I had just been admiring the beauty of the ocean or drinking an excellent bourbon. I wanted people to know my pain, to see my suffering. Instead, I would give the person a tight smile and reply, “Not terrible.” The result was that whatever good humor I had managed to accumulate that day dissipated - I morphed into the martyr I thought I deserved to be.

To be clear, I did deserve some martyr status. My life was really awful for way too long a time. I also deserve international recognition for my brilliant writing. But I don’t need it to know how good I am. Neither do I need to be a martyr to recognize what I overcame. 

Around the time I was discovering this psychological breakthrough, two things happened.

First: O’Shae Sibley, a New York dancer, was murdered for dancing to a Beyonce song in a gas station parking lot. The shooter yelled anti-gay slurs at Sibley before killing him. “Sibley was a gifted dancer and member of House of Du’Mure-Versailles in the city’s ballroom community, a queer subculture that began in Black and Latino circles in the 1970s. Houses acted as adoptive families for queer and trans youth often estranged from their blood relatives, and would compete in extravagant displays of costume and voguing at balls,” according to The City, a NY news outlet.

Voguing, which is what Sibley was doing, is exactly what pleasure activism is all about - it’s a form of self-expression that exudes confidence and self-awareness, and was created to combat the notion that anything other than heterosexuality was abnormal.

Second: I went with my son to an actual Beyonce concert at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa. The previous week, she had paid tribute to Sibley after learning of his murder. My son is a member of the Beehive, which is how Beyonce fans refer to themselves. I think if I suggested he quit college and become a Beehive groupie and join the Queen Bee on her European tour, he would be gone by week’s end.

My son bought himself a ticket on the floor, which I couldn’t afford, and a very sparkly cowboy hat, which I could have afforded but found unnecessary. I sat five rows from the top of the stadium and wore a Johnny Cash black cowboy hat, but my son told me I looked okay.

What struck me about the Sibley story was the audacity - the man was literally murdered for expressing his joy. We have created a society in which bigots feel justified in killing a gay man because he’s acting….gay? 

What struck me about the Beyonce concert was hope. Tens of thousands of people attended - thousands of them dressed in drag, dressed like Beyonce, dressed in sparkly shiny fabric - and they danced and sang for 165 minutes. Most of them knew every word to every song. Nearly every marginalized group in America was represented there - persons of color, African Americans, LGBTQ people, drag queens, poor people - and honestly, the only ones I saw rolling their eyes at anything were the police officers hired to keep the peace, which by the way was not threatened a single time. 

I love the idea of pleasure activism even though I’ve never suffered oppression the way so many millions of humans have. But the concept is universal - to enjoy life not just in spite of obstacles but because of obstacles. “There is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it,” wrote the poet Amanda Gorman.

And so I enjoyed the Beyonce concert - it was a bright light in the darkness that is this regenerating discrimination of the LGBTQ community. Even from way up at the top of Raymond James Stadium, I could sense my boy’s joy, the explosion of his heart song, his love of exactly who he is. It occurred to me that O’Shae Sibley might have been feeling those very same emotions before being stabbed to death. It occurred to me that my gay son might one day be moved to dance to a Beyonce song in a parking lot. The darkness was around me. In that moment, though, my candle flickered brightly.

Photo by David Tomaseti on Unsplash

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