Thursday, March 26th ’26.
It’s 9:15am. I’m getting ready for the day ahead of me, absent-mindedly brushing my teeth and dissociating into the fogged mirror. As it clears, the dark circles under my eyes speak to yesterday’s early morning and yesterday’s late night. They remind me that yesterday was 13 hours away from home. It was four hours at one job, four at another, and finally, four at a city council meeting.
It was the scheduled vote on a proposed Diversity and Inclusion Ordinance that brought me to Elgin. The community had asked for a show of solidarity with organizers and our immigrant neighbors. While I moved out of Elgin some years ago, the City in the Suburbs still calls me back; the vibrant downtown is without parallel, full of independent shops and eateries, a relaxing waterfront, and excellent public transit, all of it a reflection of the beautiful people who call Elgin home.
This meeting opened with the heartfelt and vulnerable words of people on the front lines: delivering food, transporting children, running errands, patrolling the neighborhoods, connecting people with resources and help. People who accept requests for help no matter what, even when the resources have run dry and there aren’t enough hours in a day. Who are giving even when there is so little left to give, because if they don’t, no one will, and anyone who has ever faced true and total ruin, who has ever watched their entire world shatter around them, knows the difference between having only a moment of help versus none, knows the difference it makes just to know someone cares and is trying.
After these opening statements, some bids and budgetary items, and a short back-and-forth over data privacy, was an hour-long presentation and polite conversation about micromobility devices and how Elgin should potentially be regulating them; it ended with what can only be summarized as “the state is working on it, so we should wait and see what they do first.” To say that my eyes glazed over during all of this would not be a lie, although I will admit that I miss when these were the moments of great importance at city and village council meetings, when we discussed updating ordinances, infrastructure, budgeting, zoning, and the like. Some people might remember when these altogether deeply boring events were called “politics”. They could be largely ignored with barely any effect on one’s life beyond perhaps being rankled over another 0.01% tax increase.
Finally, after what felt like surviving my first filibuster, it came time to vote on the Diversity and Inclusion ordinance…
…Or not. The council instead decided that they need an additional 60 days, atop the 180 they have already had, to review it. Somehow, with six months to do so, they hadn’t found time to read the entire twenty pages. They were undone by the complexity of a 20-page ordinance proposal. One councilwoman is personally responsible for the reach my crippled spine had to make to collect my bewildered jaw from the floor when she asked what a policy is, what that word means. Another made a motion to postpone the vote.
The motion passed.
And so, the ordinance was tabled yet again.
The collective grief of the assembled audience reared its head and howled as apathy once again won out over action, as yet another meeting concluded without anything resembling progress. The anger and pain and exhaustion of people abandoned by their city to fend for themselves and their community tore through the room. I yelled with them, I shamed the council with them, I backed their voices as best I could.
Because I know their pain. I know their grief, I know that feeling that you’ve been left behind, abandoned by the people who promised you that they would uplift you, protect you, represent you. People who will call themselves your ally and friend to your face, and then prop up the systems that strip you of your humanity, dignity, and rights.
The proposed Diversity and Inclusion Ordinance would have provided a municipal ID for Elgin residents, a legal defense fund for people abducted by ICE or facing deportation, language access for city meetings and documents, and more. And while all of these things are important, the most painful loss from it not being passed is the message it sent: “Your city is not with you. Your city does not stand behind you. Your city does not have your back.”
“You are on your own.”
And we are on our own. When I asked a shop marked as an LGBTQ+ Safe Space on Google Maps to hang up a flyer for the most tame and sanitized of protests, a No Kings march, I once again foolishly forgot how many “safe spaces” are not really safe. “Actually… No. I don’t want to alienate the weirder customers.” This one hurt more than usual. It came from someone I considered to be a friend, someone who I thought understood what holding a safe space meant.
It means protecting the space, holding it for those who need to shop and live and work safely and may have few or no other options. A space is only safe if the person responsible for it keeps it that way; keeping it safest for people who want me and everyone like me thrown into a concentration camp instantly nullifies the supposed safety for the queer community.
Allyship means being the shield between us and those who will cause us harm. It means being uncomfortable sometimes. It means that you’re ready to carry our weight with us, not just ra-ra us from the sidelines as long as you don’t have anything else going on, or to feel like you did something nice that day. It means being in the muck with us, showing up at city council and village board meetings, being the only white or cisgender or heterosexual or documented or male person in the entire room, and it means being okay with that, not needing to follow the trend but needing to be the helper, listener, learner.
It means placing our humanity, our dignity, our rights, our lives, our futures, above the fragile feelings of our oppressors.
What breaks my spirit time and again is not that my government wants me dead. I’m used to that, and I’m still alive, much to a lot of people’s ongoing irritation. Nor am I particularly distraught by the fact that some of my own neighbors are frothing at the mouth for ICE to dispose of me. I’m used to that, too, and quite frankly, I cannot and will not find purpose in caring about the opinions of people whose moral fiber shifts with the whims of whatever miserable, soulless, conservative husk they obediently follow.
No. What consistently stings is the carelessness and recklessness of those who proclaim to support the marginalized. The fair-weather friends who repost the Trans Lifeline phone number in June, but won’t repost fundraisers for trans refugees in July. Or May. Or September. Or any time other than when it’s fashionable because the other liberals are doing it, too. The self-proscribed “allies” who will look a trans person in the eyes and tell them all about their lovely trip to Florida, the new Harry Potter movie they took the kids to see, the money they spent on Amazon dot com and the cute shoes they picked up at Target. The mother who will spend her entire life voting against her gay son’s rights, while still saying she supported him and did everything for him and can’t understand why he doesn’t visit back home in Texas anymore, using her low-contact son’s existence as a shield from criticism because “I can’t be homophobic, my son is gay!” and never reckoning with the damage she’s done and continues to do.
You look us dead in the face and tell us that our oppression is unimportant to you. That your comforts and capitalist joyrides hold more value for you than our existence.
We hear you. Whether you say it loudly or you whisper it so only us two hear it, we do. Whether or not you even meant to say it, you did. And we heard it.
I don’t know how I’m not used to it, how it still manages to hurt every single time. But it does. If anything, it hurts more each time I have to walk through that grieving process, learning that yet another person in my life loves me on the condition that I am convenient, that I am quiet about my own marginalization and oppression, because having to confront it, face it head on, be tasked with doing something about it, is asking too much of you, and so we are not only expected to eek out a living in a hell that your apathy built for us, and that your apathy keeps us in, but also to do so quietly and without making a fuss.
Because making a fuss means that your allyship is put to the test, that you’re being tasked with recognizing the weight we carry and your role in it. And that brings up some hard questions, doesn’t it? It demands that you grapple with your own complacency, how you took that bribe of comfort and relative safety (for the time being) in exchange for stepping aside while social and literal genocide rain down on immigrants and BIPOC, the trans community, Muslims, and more. It demands recognizing that the comfort you refuse to step out of was never afforded to us, that we never had the option of retreating back to safety in the first place because your apathy and silence in our oppression bar us from even knowing it.
Being an ally means being afraid like we are.
Being an ally means getting hurt like we do.
Being an ally means losing some business like we do.
Being an ally means placing a human life above comfort, money, property, feelings.
Maybe I’ll meet an ally someday.
