Y’all, I want to say something about Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, but I just don’t know what there is to say. Like, obviously, the situation is funny and unseemly. And it’s funny, unseemly and infuriating that people like McNally — who like to stand on the edges of marginalized communities and enjoy the little bit they are brave enough to interact with — don’t have the guts to advocate for the communities they benefit from.
I don’t know if Randy McNally is gay. Gender and sexuality and sexual attraction are all spectrums, and there are lots of places on those spectrums he could fall that might lead to a situation where he’s appreciating a young man in his underpants. But I do know that Randy McNally can’t be gay. As a devout Catholic Republican with a wife and kids (and grandkids, and great-grandkids), a man who is pushing 80 who has a reputation for being a do-gooder even if it means wearing a wire for the FBI and risking his reputation with his fellow politicians, this is a man devoted to his sense of duty. This is the life he chose, every step of the way. He chose to forestall any other possibilities.
I’m not trying to convince you to have any sympathy for McNally. I’ve been laughing hard about it. Hell, I even sent a message to one of his staffers asking if there was a GoFundMe I could donate to to get that kid some clothes. (Unsurprisingly, I received no reply.) There is nothing funnier to me than watching people march straight into utterly foreseeable stupidity and getting stuck in the obvious stupid situation. And a man using his political social media accounts to comment on a picture of someone’s butt is deeply, deeply stupid and obviously someday going to blow up in his face.
But imagine if McNally had been young now. A 20-year-old McNally could look at all the butts and bare chests he wanted to on the internet and be free to decide if he found it titillating or not. He might have gone on a couple of dates with one of the men those butts belonged to. And it might have been lovely and fun and a little hot, and McNally could have decided that it wasn’t for him. He can appreciate that a dude is good-looking, but whatever the secret ingredient is that turns something from “yeah, he’s cute” to “this is my man” isn’t there for him. He could then have gone on and married a woman and had kids and a happy life, with his curiosity sated. And that would be fine! Most people would not notice, let alone care. Especially if he did his experimenting in one of Tennessee’s lovely liberal cities.
But this is not a line of self-exploration most men in Randy McNally’s current circumstances allowed themselves to take. Until they’re pushing 80, I guess.
Yes, there have always been gay people. Yes, there have always been trans people. But in America, until very recently, most people did their duty — got married, had kids, etc. — and didn’t let themselves entertain the idea that their lives could be otherwise. They didn’t exactly make the choice to be straight or cisgender. They made the choice to do their duty, regardless of whether it made them miserable. And they made the choice not to look too hard at why doing their duty made them miserable. And the trans people and openly gay people at that time were the people far enough to one end on those spectrums that they simply could not live otherwise. People who could, did. Not just because it was safer, but because that was the choice there was to make.
Again, I’m not asking you to have sympathy for people who chose to never examine this aspect of themselves. They’ve been incredibly destructive and continue to be so toward people who are, frankly, braver than they are.
But in the past 30 years, a tiny crack has opened up in this stupid situation where people just set aside their own happiness in order to do what’s expected of them, and more people feel free to live as their authentic selves. Even if they could get married to someone of another gender and make it work well enough to be only somewhat miserable, people don’t have to do that anymore! They don’t have to feel trapped in bodies they don’t recognize as true to them. They can be themselves. We can love who we want. We can be ourselves.
I have been noticing something in the 1870 census in rural Middle Tennessee. I first saw it with Montgomery Bell’s grandson, but now that I know to look for it, it was fairly common. In 1870, James P. Bell is listed in District 10 of Cheatham County. He’s a 34-year-old white farmer. Living with him are Margaret (37) and William (11), Eliza (10) and Richard (6). Margaret, like any wife at the time, is listed as “keeping house.” And the ages of the children are very typical for that time, with a hole where there was a war. As you’ve probably guessed, Margaret and her children were not white. But there they are, after Emancipation, living as a family with a white man.
By 1880, James has a white wife and white kids, and Margaret and her children have vanished. Think about James. Again, I’m not asking you to have any sympathy for him. I just want you to consider these types of men, who had families with Black women (and yes, there are all kinds of issues of consent here, and the vast power differentials and how much choice those women had since these relationships started in enslavement). And consider how we see evidence in the 1870 census that these men, many of whom had just been fighting for the Confederacy, had come home and established recognizable households with Black women.
For a brief moment, these men lived with their chosen partners and the children who resulted from that. And every one of them I’ve found in this situation in 1870 has a white wife by 1880. Whatever window of possibility these men half-wedged themselves through in 1870 had been slammed shut by 1880. And none of the men I’ve found were brave enough to stay true to their 1870s life. They abandoned whole families and rushed into the safe arms of white women and a white-supremacist society that rewarded them for this betrayal of themselves and their first families.
I’m trusting you to understand how harmful this was to Black people. It wasn’t just living under an unjust system of racism, but it was living under that system of racism perpetuated by your family members — your fathers and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins — who were using their oppression of you to prove to themselves that they had made the right choice to abandon and deny you. Just as I’m trusting you to understand how harmful it is to gay people and trans people to have their very existence so heavily legislated, and legislated by people who are or seem to be indicating that they’d like to be their lovers.
But what I’m asking you to see is how both situations have, at their root, people who are choosing conformity over what their heart wants. This is the problem. This has been a problem for a long time. And it makes a lot of sense why they’re banning books and narrowing curricula and passing laws. It’s not that they don’t want kids to know they’re gay or transgender or for them to find out about racism. After all, if a kid is a member of a marginalized community, they will find out all about what being in that community means by experience. They want to protect themselves from having to know that there always have been other options, and they could have chosen to strive for happiness.
But the flaws in that approach always show, eventually. Sometimes as flame emojis.
