It’s giving “I say: believe them...”

It was 16:44 PST, February 27th, and there was a New Moon in Pisces.

Notes: In the humbling spirit of transparency, I must admit that I’ve only just realized the New Moon was today. My body, an incubus for the viral plague, has only just received its sorely missed faculties. Bleary-eyed and slurping hot toddies, I am nestled in the blessed assurance only reprieve can provide. May my brief jumble of letters keep your lowly spirits high.

Dearest F@ggots,

Ten million years ago, I read and wrote about Michael Warner’s essay Tongues Untied: Pentecostal Boyhood. Of America, he writes that “no other culture goes as far as making everything an issue of identity.” With gender, class, age, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and religion permeating every facet of American life, such obsessions over individuation are infuriatingly political. Ever compelling, Warner makes a connection between the Pentecostal practice of sharing one’s testimony (an autobiographical declaration of one’s conversion) and coming out (an autobiographical declaration of one’s sexual identity). Both relate to one another because both affirm a new personality while disavowing an old one. “They,” Warner writes, “tell you to be someone else. I say: believe them.” Until now, I had always found the last sentence you read, the sentence that concludes his essay, quite jarring. After spending six well-written pages implicating and synonymizing both ends of a rather contentious spectrum, he doesn’t reject either end outright. Instead, Warner rhetorically implores his reader to embrace both the sinful nature and the new creature by using the word them. I was curious so I looked up the etymology of the pluralized third-person pronoun. “Persons or things in question or last mentioned,” the entry reads, “. . . anonymous people in authority.” Do you find the definition’s sense of temporality inspiring? Or am I the loneliest little word nerd on Substack? Jury’s not out yet. Put plainly, believe the person you are and believe the person you were. Together they form a line that spans the wide range of your queered humanity. And that range is worth believing in. So, believe it . . . or else.

Sincerely,

E.Y. Patriceanne Washington

P.S. With every passing day, I am losing interest in pleasures and pastimes that once provided great comfort and clarity. Lexapro, anyone? I trust I will be right as rain once I find my meds and the sun comes out. In the meantime, I keep listening to the following pieces: Phenomenal (feat. Doechii) by Janelle Monae, A Ted Talk on Confidence by Sharyl Lee Ralph, Believe In Yourself (Reprise) sung by Lena Horne from The Wiz, and Elmo singing “Just One Person” because I am a literal child. So, get off your ass, pop in those AirPods, and get it together, bitch. Faith without works is dead.

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