Inclusion Soup
Pride | Fable 5
The motion on the ballroom screen reads FINALIZATION OF THE LETTERS, and the line at the floor microphone formed an hour before the panel found its seats.
Dr. Marisol Vega gavels once, gently, the way the facilitation workshop taught her. Beside her sit a sociolinguist, a movement historian, and a parliamentarian flown in from Ottawa who has already objected to the coffee. “Item four,” she says. “Two minutes per speaker. Green light, amber, red. We leave this room with a ratified acronym.” She believes this the way she believes in agendas generally: as a load-bearing wall.
Carol Jean Whitfield reaches the microphone first, sixty-eight, field organizer, a HAWAII ‘93 button riding her lapel beside the newer ones. “We won marriage with one message, one ask, one ring. Message discipline knocked a million doors. I love this community, every syllable of it, and I am telling you the list has become the message. Cap it. Ratify it. Let us get back to work.” Half the room applauds. The other half applauds differently, which Marisol has learned to hear.
Desmond Croft arrives with a printout. Forties, consultant, the kind of blazer that has a podcast. “Favorability, 2015, before and after.” He taps the paper. “The backlash found its target the year the T went on every yard sign. I’m talking strategy, people. Sequencing. Some of us could have crossed first and lowered the rope back down.”
The room detonates. Roxanne Delacroix is at the microphone before the parliamentarian can locate the relevant rule, seventy if she’s a day, rhinestones, a voice sanded by four decades of marches. “Sequencing. Honey, I was the sequence. I was in the church basements when your donors were still married to women. Ask who the police grabbed first. Ask who ran the phone trees in the plague years while the respectable letters buried their friends at noon so the papers wouldn’t see.” She turns from Desmond to the hall. “You inherited a roof. I helped pour the foundation, and I will be in this acronym when they carve it on my stone.” At the panel table, the historian writes one word on her legal pad and underlines it: Compton’s.
Three people are chanting. Two are crying. The parliamentarian has found the rule and reads it to no one. Marisol gavels until her wrist aches.
Order returns the way weather does, in patches.
By four o’clock the draft acronym on Marisol’s slide carries two footnotes and a proposed second A. Juniper Hale, twenty-nine, lanyard heavy with pins, argues the plus has become a waiting room. “Enumerate it. Polyamory. Kink. Aro, agender. A plus sign is a door you keep people standing behind.” A bisexual delegate answers that the B is still fighting to be believed and the line has to hold somewhere. A leather elder in a vest older than Juniper rises to say his people marshaled the first marches and staffed those phone trees, and he will thank the room to remember it. An asexual delegate, hands folded on the podium, requests the A be printed on the banner this year. An intersex delegate notes she was added in 2015 and still spends every panel proving she exists. From the back, a Two-Spirit delegate raises one hand. “The 2S is older than the alphabet holding it. English arrived late.”
The sociolinguist leans into his microphone for the first time all day. “For the record, languages refuse to hold still for votes.”
The red light cycles. The line shortens. Marisol’s pen hovers over a slide that has begun to resemble a settlement negotiation.
The last speaker is Walter Finch, seventy-eight, cardigan, cane, a Queer Nation pin gone soft at the edges. He waits for quiet and gets it, which tells Marisol something about rooms.
“I’ve been listening all day. Every letter on that screen got argued in through a gate, and the arguing is the gate. We had a word once. They threw it at us on street corners. In 1990 we picked it up and wore it, and the whole point of the word was that anyone could wear it. Room for every person who ever got thrown out of a room.” He steadies himself on the cane. “I move we scrap the list. One word. Queer.”
Marisol looks at her slide, ten characters and a footnote, and sets down the pen.
“Seconded,” she says.