Prove it on Me

This week, usually-garbage Georgia Governor Nathan Deal surprisingly vowed to veto House Bill 757, which would have given organizations and businesses the legal ability to fire or refuse to serve BGLTQ people out of respect for business owners’ religious beliefs. Still, the bill was able to get past 236 elected officials to end up on his desk in the first place.

Last week, North Carolina’s House of Representatives passed House Bill 2—a law destroying all previous anti-LGBT discrimination laws and prohibiting trans people from using public bathrooms.

Ostensibly, this bill just prevents trans people from using the “correct” bathroom, but let’s call a spade a spade: This isn’t a question of comfort or preference. This is a question of safety. Trans people, particularly trans women of color, are murdered at unfathomable rates, the crimes are not tried as hate crimes, and murderers go free. Bigots do evil things and call it “fear,” call it “invasion,” call it “infringement.” The next time you sit down to write another unnecessary think piece about free speech and “sensitivity” and the encroachment of the ghastly notion of safe spaces, consider what is actually at stake. And by that I mean take a seat.

Now, activists are organizing efforts to convince Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam to veto Senate Bill 2387 and House Bill 2414, which would do much of the same work as North Carolina’s bill, making it (again: Let’s call it what it is) illegal for trans students to use the bathroom in school.

There is a certain feeling of growing up in a place that wants to make your existence impossible.

This is, of course, a story about the south, my home. But it is not just about the south. Self-congratulatory northerners will leap to slay the monstrous bigotry of their neighbors down south when the exact same beast is subletting a whole floor of their decrepit, poorly decorated house.

And lest we forget this place: Four weeks ago, someone tore down an all-gender bathroom sign in Harvard’s Eliot house in a fit of stupid rage. Last semester, I facilitated a discussion on gender and sexuality with the faculty of a house on this campus, and one of the Faculty Deans expressed (out loud!) profound discomfort at the idea of all-gender bathrooms in his house because of his fear that having trans women in bathrooms with cis women would lead to increased rates of sexual assault. A world scholar, a man of the northeast, a man of Harvard.

But you’ve heard this from me before. I didn’t come here to talk about this, again, nor did I come here to mourn another name, to hold any more bones that do not belong to me in my fingers, on my keypad, in my mouth.

I came here to pay a tribute.

Ma Rainey was a professional blues singer born around 1886, often referred to as “The Mother of the Blues.” She got her start in minstrel shows, working with a company that literally had “black face” in its name. I am not one to project contemporary labels and constructs onto non-contemporary historical figures. However, I do feel comfortable saying that Ma Rainey pushed the boundaries of what was an acceptable heteronormative, binary presentation of gender and sexuality in the early twentieth century. She wrote lyrics as bold and unapologetic as “They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me. Sure got to prove it on me. Went out last night with a crowd of my friends. They must’ve been women, cause I don’t like no men,” referencing a gathering of women at her home that was raided by the police, as was often the legal practice of preventing congregations of “deviant” groups (read: BGLTQ people, black people) during this time period.

Ma Rainey grew up in my hometown. Despite the fact that I spent an entire year of my middle school career devoted to learning “Georgia Studies,” spending entire class periods discussing the various types of black cotton “workers” that created the backbone of the southern economy, (One day my teacher actually brought in raw cotton plant for us to pick and sort. Unfortunately, I am not joking,) I never learned about Ma Rainey in school. I remember there being a small photo of her on the back of my Georgia Studies textbook, though I remember none of the other photos on the book—she must have been calling to me even then. We never talked about her, not in that year or any other year of my public schooling.

There is an active and violent agenda in the south—and in the north, and on Harvard’s campus—that tries to convince people like us that we are new and inconvenient kinds of people. We are so new and inconvenient in fact—and so deviant, and so wrong—that other people and their beliefs and imagined “free speech” determine the terms by which we are allowed to exist. They make it seem like this is a new movement, that this is a new identity, that we and our problems are new, and thus invented, and thus unimportant. And they are wrong.

I cannot know that any young BGLTQ folks from anywhere near back home will ever read this, or if they would even benefit from it if they did. Honestly, I wouldn’t bet on it. So perhaps I am writing this to me.

Maybe if I had known about Ma Rainey when I was a teenager in Georgia, I would have realized that these people were wrong sooner. But I didn’t know. And that was on purpose too. This, for me, at least, is not the “you are not alone” or the trite murmurs of “It gets better”; it is the “you are not alone” of something old and black moving in the thick air that I moved through, too, when I was a beautiful, self-loathing, queer 13 year-old. It is about me coming to college and imagining myself into an academic to excavate proof of my own belonging. It is about the blues, and one moaning, booming voice that bloomed out of the ground right down the street from where my grandma n’em lived. It is about the blues, about a century-old sound demanding: “Prove it on me.”

Madison E. Johnson ’18 is a History and Literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.