(no subject)

[kradeelav]

ivan coyote, from Many Little Miracles, from The Slow Fix, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008:

“But I was curious. I had never seen a queer auto worker before. Fags who built Fords. Transsexuals who assembled transmissions. Were they built tougher than big-city gay waiters were? Were they harder than the hairdressers, more calloused than a carpenter dyke’s hammer hand? Could they get me a discount on a Ford Focus station wagon? Did they get a union job on the assembly line right out of high school just like their dad and older brother did? Did they dream of this job, or did they drop out of college and into dark blue overalls? Did they ever lay awake in bed at night and wonder how many more brand new Trans Ams the future world will actually need, or did they sometimes wish they owned a Toyota or one of those hybrid things the yuppies like to feel good about driving, not for looks or reliability, but because of the price of gas these days?

The LGBT members of the CAW were there to organize, to strategize and fight for the right to work alongside their straight union brothers and sisters without fear or harassment. Together they imagined a workplace where they didn’t have to lie or leave out parts of their lives when the guy who worked beside them asked what they got up to over the long weekend. They dreamed of a day when the truth didn’t cost them a promotion, a day when they could walk all the way across the parking lot alone without needing to look over their shoulder to see if anyone was following too close behind, even after a graveyard shift.

They were there to fight for all of these things and I was there to entertain them. I wore my steelworkers T-shirt to show some solidarity, but then one of the organizers took me aside and told me to change because auto workers and steel workers had been in a longstanding feud over fundamental beliefs that were too complicated to get into, and it was a sore spot that I would be better off not bringing attention to.

I made a muscle-bound leather daddy who was the shop steward in a muffler factory cry like a baby when I told the one about my nephew the crossdresser. I sold a book to a man who leaned across the table to tell me a low whisper that he couldn’t read, and that his boyfriend had promised to read my stories aloud to him in bed before they fell asleep at night.

Later, in the bar, I met a sixty-year-old woman who had worked on an assembly line since just after her sixteenth birthday, and had been forced into early retirement by a twenty-eight-year old manager with a Master’s degree in squeezing blood from stones. When I asked her what she was going to do next, she pretended she hadn’t heard my question, then whipped out her gold Visa card and ordered another round of tequila shooters for everybody at the table.

There was a painfully shy transwoman sitting quietly alone in the corner of the bar, her shoulders slumped forward in an attempt to shrink some of her six-foot frame into the smaller body it looked to me like she wished she lived inside of instead. She mouthed the words to the tinny karoke songs, and sipped ginger ale through a thin pink straw. The leather daddy finished off his beer and strutted across the room and asked her to dance with him. When she looked up at him, I saw the lined that framed her lipsticked mouth stretch into a beautiful grin that revealed a face that seemed suddenly thirty years younger, when her life was simpler and less lonely. “How could I say no to you?” she purred, and covered her mouth with one palm.

I watched the two of them slow dance to “Stand By Your Man” by Tammy Wynette, and it was such a beautiful sight, him in his GWGs and her with a run up the back of one leg of one of her nylons, that I had to just thank providence that somehow I ended up being there to see it.”

Comments

[sokol]

well damn, now i'm crying in the club on a tuesday night

[kradeelav]

<3