Do not stand by idly at your neighbor's blood. Fortunately, there are some good neighbors in Baltimore and Maryland generally.
I don't have pictures, but I got to see America the Beautiful last night in a hardscrabble inner suburb of Baltimore, Maryland. Equality Maryland and numerous other transgender advocacy groups organized a rally in NE Baltimore County.
"We shall not, we shall not be moved.
We shall not, we shall not be moved.
Just like a tree that's standing by the water side
We shall not be moved."
Thus sang an African-American preacher whose alto voice I could not fully hear through the thick crowd and the oppressive heat and humidity of late spring in Rosedale, Maryland. Her voice was strong enough to move the crowd, but not quite to move through it without a high-powered amp and overcome the sound of the nearby traffic and the overhanging helicopter from either the local TV stations or the police. The police were thick on the ground with cars, uniforms and visible, though unbrandished, guns. As a defense attorney, I felt a little more comfortable near the Guardian Angels, who had berets and handcuffs, but no weapons as is their practice.
It was a crowd of maybe 150, though I am not good at crowd-counting; the newspapers reported that the rally in support of Chrissy Lee Polis, a transgendered woman who got severely battered by two teenage girls in the women's bathroom at the now-infamous Rosedale, Maryland McDonald's, numbered in excess of 100. Lots of cameras on tripods and of course most appropriately lots of cameras in cell phones. I - a supportive citizen but nothing more to this event - walked around the perimeter as I felt too hot in my business suit to join in. I may have led a few of the various transgendered attendees, high schoolers, NAACP officials and other civil rights leaders, elected officials from the City and the County, LGBT activists, family members of the foregoing, Socialist Party organizers and other citizens to think I was plainclothes police, though I am built like a sedentary tax lawyer, not law enforcement.
It was beautiful to see human beings acting humanely, speaking lovingly and in support of one another. I got one picture of an American flag sticking up in the distance behind a beautiful array of humanity and humaneness. Rosedale is definitely flag country. If you understand Archie Bunker's Astoria, you understand Rosedale - just knock the neighborhood down two rungs in socio-economic development to account for post-industrial Rust Belt realities, where good jobs at the Port, at Bethlehem Steel and at the GM plant are gone. Rosedale is the economically abused child of the American dream: battered, but still identifying as part of family and willing to slash the throat of a cultural intruder. But last night, Rosedale seemed a bit more colorful than the teeth-clenched red white and blue of hard knocks.
I got to see, though in the hubbub not greet, Dr. Dana Beyer, a trans activist who ran for the House of Delegates in Montgomery County. I got to see City Councilman Carl Stokes, who crossed the City Line to express his support. And then the real joy: a lot of young people - young men and women from the local high schools in every kind of personal expression: gay bois, butch women and more conventionally non-queer-styled girls in sun dresses and fellows in jeans and hard rock T-shirts.
You know who I didn't see?
Phred Phucking Phelps
Rick Santorum
Limbots
Maggie Gallagher
The Klan
Any organized hate-speakers
Any disorganized hate-speakers, either.
Rosedale would never be considered ground zero for Queer Theory or ACT-UP. If you have ever seen a John Waters movie, you understand Rosedale. It's just on the other side of the City-County line, so much so that you could talk about Rosedale-Cityside and Rosedale-Countyside, but people don't. But it's here that the fight for justice has to be won.
When it's bloody fucking safe - stone, no apologies safe - for a transgendered woman to go into a Rosedale McDonald's and take a leak, we will have won. It's not safe now, even though that McDonald's may be the safest place on earth for transgendered people for a little while. If you saw the PR freak that McDonald's did when they found out that an ASSISTANT MANAGER was helping the batterers after the fact by warning them to leave since the cops were en route, you learned about corporate America. If this keeps up, RuPaul will be dancing to house music with Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar on Mickie D's next TV commercials. Until this blows over, of course.
When it's safe in Rosedale, it's safe everywhere. And it may be more safe in Rosedale than you'd think. A 55-year-old Rosedale woman, Ms. Vicky Thoms, intervened boldly to try to stop the beating of a 22-year-old by a 14- and 18-year-old. I am 42 with plenty of bass in my voice, and I'd have hesitated to stop that sort of ass-whipping. The local folk are calling Ms. Thoms a hero, but she's denying the title. I am with the local folk here.
I am a lawyer and I live in Owings Mills on the west side of the county. Not many people in Owings Mills know people in Rosedale. Baltimore is a city of neighborhoods; a common question is "where did you go to high school" as that is a bar code for who your friends are, what your daddy did for a living, where you pray or don't pray and what kind of television you watch. I was once asked in a job interview where I went to high school; the job was a lateral position in a downtown tax firm. When my answer was "Loyola Blakefield, scholarship, high marks," the interview went south. I needed to answer "Pikesville"; I was presumed Catholic and therefore bad for business. Going to Princeton didn't matter; going to law school didn't matter. Rosedale is just a more extreme version of Baltimore sociology: there is no Baltimore, just a bunch of tiny, paranoid villages poorly connected by bus routes and an underdeveloped rail system.
I don't know whether Chrissy Lee Polis got battered for being a transgendered woman. I don't know whether she got battered for being white by two African-American teenagers. Maybe she got battered in broad daylight in a fucking McDonalds because those two girls who battered her hated the world more than they loved themselves. Maybe she got battered because she dared to speak with confidence, which so many transgendered folks fear to do out of daily humiliation, threats, mockery and assault, and this confidence got perceived as an unacceptable challenge in this toilet. I don't know. But this attack could lead you to think, as my friend from that neighborhood who teaches special ed nearby, that the whole world has gotten Springer-ed, Maury-ed, Jersey Shore-ed, degraded into barbarism: we are the Dark Ages we speak so condescendingly about.
Yet I think of the kids who showed up at the rally last night: the butch, the facial jewelry, the twinks, the straights, the uptights - and how beautiful they looked as a group. They are the future of Rosedale. And maybe, just maybe, there are enough of them to overcome the barbarians among us. Maybe the kids ARE all right.