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A few days ago, tire tracks etched on the rainbow sidewalk in Prescott made the news. The mayor of the community said that it was “impossible to interpret the action this evening as anything but a statement of hatred toward the LGBTQ community.” Seems like a bit of an overreaction right, for something that visibly could have been accidental?

I’ve been musing about writing a short horror story grounded in reality.

So often the horror genre makes the object of fear a disfigured man, a man with mental illness, a trans woman, someone living in poverty, someone with an accent, a black or brown person. It echoes the ableism, classism, white supremacy, and exceptionalism of the dominant culture. If it’s not this, then it relies on the made up – ghosts, aliens – or is set in the past.

The agent of horror is never that suburban cishet white person doing the normal things they do in today’s world. It’s a missed opportunity because they can be plenty scary.

I’m turning 35 in a few months.

One of the nicest things about getting older is seeing queer people in my life shaping their life to their desires. Renting a place and making it cute with plants and art from pals. Camping in the woods or going on hikes. Celebrating milestones with partners and friends. Moving towns and going back to school. There’s a predictability and loving entourage to their lives that was not quite there a decade previous.

This made me think to the queer anger that so many of us have lived through, the onset forming in our teens and twenties. This anger is justified – the result of finally acquiring language that validates years of being made small and suffocating those we love. It is compounded by unrecognized emotional trauma, a lack of housing and financial security, being in toxic relationships, emotionally immature parenting, a constant exposure to injustices, and all the challenges of being in the world that are that much more acute during those years.