A really nice thing that happened this afternoon: I am sitting outside the Kendall/MIT stop, reading Derek Jarman's At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament (1993).
For the first twenty-five years of my life I lived as a criminal, and the next twenty-five were spent as a second-class citizen, deprived of equality and human rights. No right to adopt children—and if I had children, I could be declared an unfit parent; illegal in the military; an age of consent of twenty-one; no right of inheritance; no right of access to a loved one; no right to public affection; no right to an unbiased education; no legal sanction of my relationships and no right to marry. These restrictions subtly deprived me of my freedom. It seemed unthinkable it could be any other way, so we all accepted this.
Somewhere in Thatcher's '80's, I look up. There's just me and two couples on the benches. They're both male. One couple came walking hand-in-hand across the courtyard and are now sitting a bench down from me, wrapped around each other in a comfortably talking, massively public display of affection; the other met up on the bench opposite me, where the last time I looked it was just the one guy reading, and are leaning with their shoulders together, looking at something on the other guy's phone. This is remarked on by absolutely no one except me and the disparity between the page and the plaza. I'm good with it.
For the first twenty-five years of my life I lived as a criminal, and the next twenty-five were spent as a second-class citizen, deprived of equality and human rights. No right to adopt children—and if I had children, I could be declared an unfit parent; illegal in the military; an age of consent of twenty-one; no right of inheritance; no right of access to a loved one; no right to public affection; no right to an unbiased education; no legal sanction of my relationships and no right to marry. These restrictions subtly deprived me of my freedom. It seemed unthinkable it could be any other way, so we all accepted this.
Somewhere in Thatcher's '80's, I look up. There's just me and two couples on the benches. They're both male. One couple came walking hand-in-hand across the courtyard and are now sitting a bench down from me, wrapped around each other in a comfortably talking, massively public display of affection; the other met up on the bench opposite me, where the last time I looked it was just the one guy reading, and are leaning with their shoulders together, looking at something on the other guy's phone. This is remarked on by absolutely no one except me and the disparity between the page and the plaza. I'm good with it.
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