This may come as a shock to some of you (I’m pretty sure it is glaringly obvious), but I am American. On 5 November I worked at my local polling place from five in the morning to half ten at night, and started refreshing my phone at seven in the evening to see a worst case scenario unfold. I immediately left to do tequila shots with my new friend, co-election inspector general Angela, as a familiar feeling of dread sunk in.
Angela told me not to look at my phone, and tried to distract me with a story of an encounter in the aughts with the actor who played Smith Jerrod on Sex and The City as I waited for the person I’ve recently been seeing to show up. Mercifully, she was nearby, and is much taller than me, so is a good person to sink into when everything feels wrong. We walked back to mine, holding hands, and tried to hang onto the shrinking feeling that maybe, just maybe, the next four years would be better, safer, for queer people and the world at large.
It wasn’t looking good but we still went to bed hopeful. At six in the morning, we somehow woke up without an alarm, and the girl I’ve been seeing for a month just said, “I’m so sorry.” That was how I found out my broken, broken country had elected a convicted felon to lead it.
We hid under the covers for a few hours. ‘If Kamala had won, we definitely would have had sex this morning,” I said. “I thought the same thing,” she said. I instantly thought of the episode of Broad City where Ilana can’t have an orgasm because of the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. “Will we ever feel horny again?” I asked her. “I don’t think so,” she said.
It felt selfish to have these thoughts in the grand scheme of disaster repeating itself a second time. But, as someone with sexual trauma, having a man who seems hell-bent on stripping all queer people, non-binary people, trans people, women and migrants of their basic human rights “whether they like it or not” and who has been accused of sexual misconduct by 27 women elected as president is, to say the least, triggering. Don’t get me started on the fact that the president-elect’s first pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, has been accused of sleeping with a seventeen year old girl.
On a deeply personal, micro level, I have experienced debilitating anxiety since 5 November and have disassociated every time I’ve tried to have sex since. Pretty much every friend I’ve spoken to about this has said the same. It’s hard to be present with your partner when every other thought is the question: “how much longer are we going to be safe to exist as ourselves?” “will there even be an habitable earth for us to birth children into via reciprocal IVF if we so choose in ten years?” “will reciprocal IVF be legal?” “why am I thinking this about someone I’ve been seeing for a month?” (answer: breakdown of democracy, climate apocalypse, and lesbian time being equivalent to dog years) and “why is that seventy six million people we share a country with basically don’t consider us worthy of human rights?”. It feels like just about every US citizen will suffer for the next four years at the hands of a wannabe autocrat.
It’s impossible to feel excited about your situationship or even wrap your head around more casual dating when you’re seriously considering what it is going to take to survive the next four years as a queer person. The girl I’m seeing caring as much as I do about things going to hell in a handbasket (Tesla) was a good litmus test for initial compatibility. Sometimes you just need to intertwine yourself in silence with a (very hot) warm body and ignore the world burning around you for a few hours while your cells regenerate.
On a macro level, the United States is no longer a safe place for queer people, trans people, and sexual assault survivors, to name just a few groups disproportionately impacted by the outcome. We have always had room to be so, so, much better than we are, but the past four years certainly marked some progress for us (and some enormous losses at the hands of a deeply unbalanced Supreme Court). But now we face the fight of our lives.
It seemed like a lot of other people on the internet had the same thought. Within twenty-four hours, I was sending the person who broke me the news – let’s call her the ballerina, we met in the incomparable Angela Trimbur’s dance class – a TikTok from @wannabehayleywilliams of them telling their partner: “babe, us having sex would be an act of protest,” with the onscreen caption “queer couple election day vibes,” to which the ballerina responded “good protesting last night.” Having sex the night after the election kind of felt like having sex in a horror movie right before getting murdered. Against all odds, in the proverbial haunted cabin that is the United States, with a disgusting, orange, villain in the wings, queer people are still having sex where everyone c*ms. We’ve always been the final girls.
That’s certainly more than most Republican leadership can say. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr thinks poppers cause AIDS, and that chemicals in the water turn kids trans, for crying out loud.
So I wasn’t surprised when the TikToks in between clips of The Handmaid’s Tale in my daily doom scroll turned into people posting about how they “were content being single but now it’s cold out, gets dark at 4pm and the political climate is absolutely terrifying, so all of a sudden you need to be held like a baby at least 3X/week” (@haleygcoaching shared this) and I refrained from screen recording it to share with the ballerina – she’s not on TikTok – because it was…too accurate.
The ballerina slept in my bed for two nights after the election and when I left that Friday morning for my best friend’s Jackie’s first solo show (go see 5th Quarter at Giovanni’s Room in LA, Jackie is bisexual), I missed her. We FaceTimed on the beach as Jackie looked on and I found words I hadn’t uttered in earnest since 2020 coming out of my mouth: “I miss you. It was weird sleeping without you last night.” “I know, it was so weird,” the ballerina said. “I didn’t like it.”
Normally I’d be hard on myself for UHauling with someone so early on, but I think we get a pass when it feels like the world is (proverbially) ending. This was better and more mature than any pandemic-era relationship I’d had. For starters, we do still currently live in the same city. That is, in fact progress, compared to how my love life shook out in 2020. I used to maladaptive daydream about my college crush and I having to flee our Ohio campus in the aftermath of Trump’s first election win in 2016, forcing us to spend an enormous amount of time in my car where we would then fall in love, so how was this any different? The sheer hope behind those thoughts propelled me with purpose past the anti-gay protesters that would show up on campus from the neighbouring Jesuit college. Besides, our schedules meant the ballerina and I wouldn’t see each other for ten days, so we had to get our serotonin fix where we could.
I’m still talking to other people, but I think we deserve creature comforts anywhere we can get them as things get scarier. The ballerina and I were both grateful we had each other the morning of 6 November. Even if things don’t work out between us, I’d far rather confront the dark dawn of what feels like a dictatorship with someone’s arms to (temporarily) hide in than alone, like I did eight years ago.
I’d joked over the summer and in October that I was “girlfriend scouting” when I visited London on holiday in case things went sideways with the election, and it only took a day or two for texts to trickle in with half-joking, half-real offers to cross the pond for good. I’m considering it – honestly, I’m torn. I feel I owe it to my community to stay and fight. But I’m not sure how useful we can be to each other under an administration that promises to essentially destroy the health, finances, and self-determination of anyone other than its leaders. Is self-preservation via individualism the long game here? I don’t want it to be. But ten days of doom scrolling and grotesque cabinet appointments in, I’m starting to think it is.
So maybe my getaway car of choice at what feels like what might be the end of a failed American experiment is a UHaul. Some people have been coping with alcohol, drugs, and visceral screams, so why not cope with someone who responds to your “I don’t want to be stranded in a fascist govt and mad at myself for not doing more” text with “we will figure it out?”
This could be the start of a love story against the bleakest of backgrounds, the absolute worst of timelines. Or it could just be two people showing up for each other in a moment that demands it, like queer people always have and always will. One thing’s for certain: it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than an expired sleeve of Velveeta cheese disguised as a person to get rid of us.