One of my two best friends is a butch lesbian I’ll call Jess, the other a straight man I’ll call Will. We’ve all known each other for thirty years, since we were students together in medical school. Jess is still a doctor, but Will and I left medical practice years ago. At the pandemic’s beginning, all three of us were on the same page, advising each other what precautions to take. Jess took a few more risks than I because she’s younger and in good health, but we all shared the same consensus scientific reality.
Soon, however, Will started sending me articles about herd immunity and the uselessness of masks. Previously sympathetic toward trans people, he became obsessed with trans women, lurking on their message boards. He gobbled up and vomited out at me trans-exclusionary radical feminist talking points. He expressed the fear that trans women would trick him and other straight men into thinking they were “real women” and having sex with them.
While Will had always been economically conservative, he had also been reasonably socially progressive. Now he ranted against Black Lives Matter and progressive protestors in his city of Portland. He called teachers cowards for wanting more protections before returning to the classroom. He boasted that he deceived the people into thinking he was wearing a mask by using a cloth mask with a hole in it concealed by a fabric flap, designed for playing woodwinds. I was appalled; to me that bordered on assault and made me think he was unhinged. He called the governor of his state a misogynistic slur for imposing public health measures. He began to troll me relentlessly, deliberately trying to get a rise out of me, to the point where I could no longer speak with him and dreaded his texts.
When I told Will I thought he had undergone a personality change, he said he was filled with rage because the world had gone insane with fear of Covid. He had diagnosed himself with two serious medical conditions that can be aggravated by stress but refused to seek medical care, declaring “I am not a patient.” When I pointed out that either condition could cause vascular problems in his brain that might cause personality changes, he lashed out at me for identifying as disabled, texting “Being ill, fearful of illness, and dependent on medical care is part of your self-image… Why do you call yourself ‘horizontal poet’ on social media? Is that the first thing you want people to know about you, that you’re partially disabled? The sobriquet would fit better if you were quadriplegic. You don’t begin to have an idea how much I hate it and what it does to you. Why do you gravitate toward people with disabilities of all kinds? You seem to want to cast me in the role of one of your frail, fearful, dependent friends….”
Most of my disabled friends are actually emotionally stronger and more resilient than Will, who now subscribes to ableist body fascism along with all his other repugnant beliefs. I was as horrified by the changes in Will as by the deaths of a dozen friends and acquaintances during the pandemic. I feared his personality change might be due to early dementia or mental illness, perhaps even brought on by a case of Covid.
Then, on February 19, Benjamin Jeffrey Smith shot and killed Brandy “June” Knightley, a 60-year-old queer, disabled, female, progressive activist in Portland, and wounded five other women. One of the wounded women was paralyzed from the neck down. The unarmed women had been directing traffic away from a protest against the killing of Amir Locke, a black man shot by police executing a no-knock warrant for someone else. Unlike the 2017 murder of Heather Heyer by a Neo-Nazi in Charlottesville, national media never covered June Knightley’s murder much. Maybe killing protesters had become the new normal, or maybe it was because June Knightly wasn’t young and walked with a cane. I already knew older disabled women were invisible, but the nation’s pandemic response really brought home to me how little anyone cares if we die.
The views espoused by the shooter were uncomfortably close to those now held by my erstwhile friend Will. Smith was a fan of Andy Ngo, a right-wing pseudo-journalist who demonized the protestors. Will is also now a fan of Ngo’s. I’m a year younger than Knightley, and like her I’m disabled, queer, progressive, and activist. My longtime friend is a gun owner like Smith. If someone had told me it was Will who had opened fire, part of me wouldn’t have been surprised, so incandescent is his rage. I could have been the woman he killed.
Jess and her family eat dinner monthly with me and mine, usually outdoors. On lawn chairs around the propane heater, we turn Will’s transformation and the killing of June Knightly over and over. In the isolation that the pandemic engendered, how could we have prevented online radicalization? How do we protect the right to assemble against stochastic terrorism? How do we come back from this? I haven’t asked Will about Knightley’s murder, perpetrated not far from his house. I don’t want to know what he thinks.
© 2022 Jan Steckel
Jan Steckel left a busy pediatric practice caring for mostly Spanish-speaking
children to work as a poet, writer, and medical copy editor. She is Jewish,
bisexual, and disabled by chronic pain. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet
(Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook
Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital
(Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in
Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus,
and elsewhere.
She lives in Oakland, California.
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