Being OK With Feeling Sick
A Reflection On (The Eve Of) The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election
This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.
Election Day in the U.S. is tomorrow.
I voted weeks ago. My entire state does mail-in voting which means no long lines at some obscure polling location or having to deal with exit pollsters or feeling rushed to make a decision instead of taking my time to look up all the candidates and see who I think is best. Sometimes you have alt-right weirdos camped outside ballot dropboxes racially profiling those who drive up but that’s the worst of the voter intimidation I’m familiar with.
As many have noted, elections in the U.S., particularly presidential elections, are becoming increasingly fraught events. I know my anxiety around them grows each time they come up, although I also choose to pay attention to what is going on in my community, state, nation and world which is bound to make you anxious if you have any semblance of critical thinking skills and empathy.
I’ve been reading a lot of other Substackers’ takes on the presidential contest and what its outcome portends. Much of it all is thoughtful, maybe even has a shred of light on the horizon, despite the state of things. I want to write something equally pensive and inspiring to contribute to the discourse around this likely history-making election.
But I am sick to my stomach.
This is generally how I have felt about this country for a while. Of course I did during Trump’s presidency. And I was still on Twitter on January 6, 2021 and couldn’t help but to scroll and scroll and scroll and watch something out of movies and video games and news footage from other parts of the world happen here.
But it didn’t go away after the Insurrection. Over the past four years that same nauseated feeling welled up as I watched community members demonize queer students at local school board meetings while those queer students were in attendance to speak about bullying and suicide rising among their friends. It rose into my throat when another local school board this past summer passed a resolution to ban transgirls from girls sports, despite state law and youth league regulations prohibiting such discrimination. I had to cover my mouth when a local city council member badmouthed in a council meeting a local business for holding a long-standing drag brunch because it happened to fall on the moveable feast of Easter Sunday, leading that business to be vandalized and targeted with death threats.
A Democratic administration has not eased my illness. I’ve fought the urge to keel over from learning about women dying because doctors are afraid of being suspended or jailed for providing them care, of children dying because lawmakers are afraid of incurring the wrath of well-moneyed arms manufacturers and a violent subculture, of an entire people dying because our nation is more concerned with being accused of anti-semitism than of being accessories to genocide.
Yet, I feel a bit silly writing some impassioned plea for people to support a presidential candidate over another. I voted enthusiastically for Kamala Harris. But, in all honesty, I know I have relatively very little to lose materially regardless of who is sworn into office in January.
I’m a cisgender white man. College-educated. Married with children. Even church-going. Sure I’m currently unemployed and queer as a three dollar bill but those can be mitigated. I can get a job pretty quickly if I lower my standards of living and self-respect enough. And I’ve been het-presenting almost my entire life, so if push came to shove, I could walk around in a closet outside my home if necessary, sever or bury the ties to others in my queer circle.
I can even protect my wife and kids to some degree. I’ve been snipped so virtually no risk of unwanted pregnancy for my wife, which would be life-threatening given the hypertension her last pregnancy gifted her with. If my daughters were to be in a situation where they needed to terminate a pregnancy, I would provide resources to achieve it and insulate them from repercussions.
But I am still sick to my stomach.
Because even if the candidate I voted for wins, women and children and whole people will likely continue dying out of our nation’s action or inaction, at least for a time. That even if my candidate wins, there will still be unrepentant bigots and racists seeking to use positions of power, whether in my community or other states, to harm others or, at best, not actively help them because of who those others are. That even if my candidate wins, those deplorable flags will still wave from the backs of trucks for the foreseeable future.
’s most recent piece for his Substack, , has come the closest to aligning with where I am right now. While acknowledging that civil disobedience has a role to play, he was critical of the tactic of progressive single-issue voters to either vote third-party or not at all because of the crimes against Palestine and our nation’s role in them. He referenced ACLU attorney Chase Strangio’s recent pronouncement that he is voting for Kamala Harris not out of belief in her to bring change, but as means to harm reduction for disenfranchised people from the U.S. government.It’s a position similar to what Sarah Schulman, an activist, writer and professor at Northwestern University, took in her first book of essays published in the mid-1990s. Despite all the efforts to make queer folk more visible and enshrine their rights in state and federal constitutions since Stonewall, she noted that the federal government continued to ignore the AIDS epidemic, anti-gay legislation was still showing up on state ballots and queer folk were still being violently targeted, such as in the arson-related deaths of Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock in Salem, Ore. in 1992.
Concepts like revolution just become reminders of the impossibility of change. Revolution has come to represent everything we can’t have and can’t achieve.
Sarah Schulman, Why I’m Not A Revolutionary1
Back in August, a review of Surviving The Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies. I wrote that, despite the stark contrast between my worldview and ideology and the anarchism the book promotes, I still gained a lot from reading it.
As much as the essayists deride and reject the popular culture and current world order, none of them advocated for violence or the forced assimilation of individuals to their ideology. They are radical, yes, but little happens in our world without radical folk. They plant the seeds of a more fair, more just, more human world.
This is not to say those seeds need or should be allowed to grow wild. Good intentions can choke out others. But that’s where progressives come in; we see the potential and work to make the most of it while balancing it against the bigger picture.
And just as I chipped away at my resistance to their militancy, I saw them chip away at their disdain for the mainstream…
That caring for each other, and for other communities that have similarly been devastated and ravished by the monstrosity that is popular culture and hierarchical entities, is paramount.
This election provides an embarrassingly miniscule opportunity to bend the arc closer to justice, however imperceptible that bending may be. Or maybe no further bending, but at least the prevention of reversal.
Yes, it is disappointing. It is frustrating. It is sickening.
Maybe that’s what we need right now, to feel sick. To know that we aren’t better. It’s not fair, I know. Sickness, along with pain and suffering, will still be with us after Election Day, even with the best possible electoral outcome.
But most people want to make themselves feel better. They want to stop feeling sick. And they look for ways to help themselves feel better, to heal. Few are panaceas or cures. Some treatments may be unpleasant. And not all are guaranteed to be successful. But sometimes, enduring a treatment is the strongest resistance you can put up to what ails you. It can be the best way to mitigate long-term harm.
And there are signs that others in the nation and even my staunchly conservative community are wanting to feel better. Nationally, polls and research show that the dogged Republican strategy of attacking trans folk is not getting their candidates traction and may actually be driving folk away. The overturning of Roe v. Wade several years ago has been nothing but a political albatross for conservatives, even in traditionally conservative states, as voters have sought to enshrine access to reproductive care in their state constitutions and support a woman’s right to choose.
The local school board that entertained anti-LGBTQ+ speakers at its meetings? The community recalled the three members of the five-member board encouraging that behavior and causing other disruptions for schools last year. Similarly, folk rallied around the restaurant hosting a drag brunch and targeted by a city council member. Residents across the political spectrum here are working to make sure a January 6 participant is not elected as representative of our U.S. congressional district.
And then there was something that happened recently that gave me some additional hope, at least for my community. I scheduled a handyman service to come out and give me an estimate on some projects I need to get done before winter hits. I didn’t have a reference for the service, just saw their phone number on the back of their trucks while in traffic and figured I needed to just get someone out here.
Anyway, I saw him arrive and start walking up to my front door so I went ahead and walked out on the porch—where I have two Harris/Walz signs securely strapped to the railing—to greet him.
“Morning!”
“Morning!” Thank you for coming out.
“Sure. Before we get started, can I just say I love your signs? It’s great to see some blue.”
He did not strike me as someone who would be left of center. I’ve worked with plenty of tradespeople and I can generally tell from their appearance where they lean, either by the clothes they wear, the bumper stickers on their truck or something else. This guy struck me as just another straight white suburban dad. And yet, he seemed physically relieved that I wasn’t conservative.
So, I know I will be sick to my stomach for the time being, knowing, at best, things will only get marginally better and more likely stay the same, at least in the foreseeable future. Who I voted for—who I hope other people vote for—is a far cry from a cure for what ails our country.
I’m ok with that. I need to be ok that I am putting up a resistance, however small in the grand scheme of things. Because that’s the only way I think we can get better.
But instead, I have to choose, every day, the path of one act of resistance. Once a day say something complicated, take on something difficult, challenge yourself, surprise the people around you, resist acting for the approval of straight people, of white people, of men. Talk about Hattie Mae Cohens at work tomorrow. Say her name.
Sarah Schulman, Why I’m Not A Revolutionary
Reprinted in The Columbia Reader On Lesbians & Gay Men In Media, Society, & Politics