This Week’s Mark McNease On Topic (Substack)

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Well, it finally happened. Donald Trump was indicted, and not the kind of ‘nothing’s going to come of this’ indictment many of us thought was handed down in New York. This is some Espionage Act, serious prison time stuff, and it has left me … ambivalent.

As much as I loathe Trump (almost as much as I loathe DeSantis, and that’s more loathing than I can fit into a thousand Substacks), the idea of a former American president sitting in a prison cell still manages to shock my sensibilities. I felt no sense of joy, no thrill of revenge, when it happened. I felt like we were finally coming to the end of a grotesque tragedy America wrote, produced, and starred in for its own entertainment. American exceptionalism is all the rage, and what could be more exceptional than a trial-by-jury of the most catastrophic head of state we have ever had?

The only enjoyment I’m getting from this is knowing how absolutely out of their minds it’s making the right-wing nut-o-sphere. Their cries of weaponized justice and the criminalization of political opponents rings more than hollow, coming from people who chanted “lock her up” at Trump rallies, and who are currently passing vicious, cruel, draconian laws in Republican-run states in a brutal but doomed attempt to eradicate trans and queer people.

Speaking of the Dystopian State of Florida …

It was never about “the children.” It was always about eradicating — for that is the proper word to use, not the soft-serve-sounding ‘erase’ – transgender people, then moving on to the rest of us via the nearest drag queen dressing room. If this were about children in any way, why are these states making it almost impossible for trans adults to access the care they need?

It is about killing us, one way or another. I do not personally differentiate between me, a cisgender gay white man, and them, the great variety of human beings I share this planet with. The attacks on terrified trans kids and adults, the assaults on drag performers, the oh-so-old-and-tired accusations of pedophilia, are aimed at me! At all of us. To Nazis, there were no ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews.’ There were only Jews. To the people attempting to annihilate us, a trans person is the same as a drag queen is the same as a shiny happy white gay married man. Make no mistake. Their worldview, and the political power they have amassed in service to Christian nationalism (good riddance Pat Robertson), makes no distinction between us. We are ‘them,’ the other, and we are to be exterminated in spirit, mind, and body.

In other news …

We went to see Sean Hayes in ‘Goodnight, Oscar,’ on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre. The play has received mixed reviews, but Hayes’s performance has been almost universally praised. I enjoyed it.

I did not enjoy the smoke from the distant fires in Canada. It was alarming to see how thick with it the air was in the city, and even in Jersey where we live. But there’s no climate crisis! Jesus has it under control.

Three more chapters from Kill Switch: A Kyle Callahan Mystery (19-21)

Fasten your headphones for another three chapters of Kill Switch: A Kyle Callahan Mystery. This was perhaps the darkest book in the series, in terms of its psychology. We have Kyle traumatized and seeing a therapist. We have a cold case involving the brutal, seemingly random murder of a teenage girl. But was it random? Follow along as Kyle and his friend, retired detective Linda Sikorsky, try to solve the case, for Kyle’s own well-being, and to provide answer to a grieving father. The shock waves from what they discover will reverberate all the way to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office and beyond.

There Once Was a Trans Woman Named Stephanie …

I don’t know how many people we meet in life who truly affect us and whose presence determines how we see the world. Ten? Six? Twelve? But for me, one of them was the late Stephanie Mott. I met her through an email I sent when I’d first started my website for LGBT older people, LGBTSr.com, over a decade ago. She became a contributor to the site, and she joined me on a panel in Boston at the NLGJA journalists’ association convention.

Why do I bring her up now? On a June day in 2023? Because of articles like this from Salon: For my transgender daughter, there are only 18 States of America.

I bring her up because she was fierce, beautiful, strong, and at least ten times more intelligent than I am. She would have been furious with the current attacks on trans (and drag and queer) people, and she would have been doing something about it. This was a woman who read my inquiring email while traveling the state of Kansas on a trans-informational tour! A meet-and-greet for people who’d never met a trans person before. Ten years later, some cities in Florida canceled Pride events because of that state’s Republican- and Evangelical-led hate-the-gays agenda and its ongoing criminalization of our lives. Stephanie would never cancel a parade. She would show up and be her own damn float if she had to. And I miss her.

We need Stephanie Mott. We need Sylvia Rivera. We need Larry Kramer. And yet … all we have is ourselves.