For three decades I have walked this world as a conscious thing — someone who fed on learning people, embracing them, lifting them by the collar of their own worth. Blame the gentle men of public television who half-raised me between cartoons, the cardigans and the puppets who swore up and down that a neighbor was something you were *supposed* to love. Blame the small tilt in how my mind is wired, the earnestness I never learned to sand down. Either way, I believed it. Foolishly, tenderly, I still do.
But the north taught me a colder catechism: not all skinfolk are kinfolk. The ones who share your face will not always share your fight. And here — in this pale, polite country of snow, where nice is a coat people wear so you can't see what they're hiding under it — even others who've tasted the edge of otherness will shrug at what it actually costs to be Black and queer in a room built for neither.
Because I finally understand the thing I kept refusing to believe: most of these people do not want community. They want the photograph of community. Community is a debt — it asks you to show up when it's inconvenient, to lose something, to stand in the cold beside someone whose fight isn't trending. Optics only asks you to be seen almost caring. A repost. A black square. A promise to "do better" with no verb attached. Too many wanted the clout of standing near my Blackness, my queerness, my culture — the flavor of me — without ever paying the cost of protecting it.
This community — my community, the rainbow one — can love a sassy Black friend the way you love a candle. Bright. Warm. Decorative. As long as you never let it become an actual fire.
So they called me a firestarter. For asking how the staff would be cared for. For asking whether the people filling the room would be treated like people. For the crime of wanting other folks paid and protected, I was rebranded as the danger in the room.
And the deeper cut came from my own. Shunned by people who look like me, because I'd had the nerve to ask that they be given the respect and the money they were owed. Or worse than shunned: met with that polished, boat-steadying silence of people who decided their comfort was worth more than my name. One was even sent to me, mouth borrowed for someone else's message, to say I'd go further if I'd just quiet down about Black issues — as if my tongue were the thing holding me back, and not the room holding the door. I watched a partnership between two Black people who were *thriving together* get quietly pried apart, by design, by a hand that knew how much easier we are to manage divided than whole.
For nearly a year now I have stood outside the Saloon and asked it, simply, to be accountable. Not for money — for dignity. And for nearly a year that door has answered me with nothing: no words from the ones who own it, no reckoning from the one who raised a threat at me and then dissolved into silence. What surfaced instead were posts from inside the house that appeared and vanished like breath off glass — my grief recast as "attacks," my asking recast as aggression, and the same reflex a certain kind of room always has: to look away from harm the moment looking might cost it the wrong customers.
And none of it is new. Years before this, that same leadership was pulled into daylight for shaming one of its own about the body they lived in. There was outrage. There were promises. There was that phrase again — *we'll do better* — hung in the air like it was an action instead of a costume. I know, because I stood in that same light and said my piece: that when I tried to open a door for Black and brown folks, I wasn't thanked, I was told to go exercise. To lose some weight. To put down my "negativity," and maybe then I wouldn't be so angry. As if my body were the argument. As if wellness were a weapon you got to swing at a Black queer person for the sin of asking a question. And now, right on schedule, they reach for the oldest costume in the drawer and try to dress me as the angry Black brute — loud, unreasonable, dangerous — because it is so much easier to fear me than to face themselves.
But I know exactly what I carried into that room across two years. I showed up on time. I was kind to the staff, to the patrons, to every DJ who ever shared a booth with me. I brought culture in with me like an offering — joy, care, a full floor. And I have the proof: the messages, the footage, the mouths of witnesses who were standing right there. I am not the story they are telling. I never was.
And then, in the middle of all this shouting into a room that would not answer, an elder found me.
A Black man who stood in that very same booth decades before I ever touched it — hired, like me, because they wanted the sound our people make, the R&B and the soul and the funk that fills a floor. His booth hung high above the dancefloor, so he was spared the emojis and the taunts I caught up close. But he had his own version of it: the empty floors, the arms folded across chests, the what is he playing looks thrown up at him from below like stones. He was called the same slur I was called. He was headbutted by a "regular," and when he asked for the man to be barred, an owner waved it off — he's alright, he's just an alcoholic who acts out sometimes. That, he told me, was the day he learned inclusion was never going to be an easy ticket.
And still — still — he built something. He made a night and gave it to us, to R&B and funk, and brought in the city's Black radio selectors to hold it down. He said he knew it would never be enough for the change that place actually needed. He said he put a big dent in it anyway. Twenty-five years behind the decks. And when he heard what was *still* happening in that same room all these years later — the name-calling, the little emojis sharpened into racist knives, that old familiar feeling of being the other in a house that advertises welcome — he told me he was not surprised. Only sad.
That wrecked me, and then it steadied me. Because it told me the truth I most needed and least wanted to hear: this was never really about me. I am not a malfunction. I am a verse in a very long song. We have been handed this same cold room across the generations — asked to warm it with our rhythm and our joy, then left unprotected inside it, each of us denting what refuses to fully move, each of us told the dent was not enough. What I am living is not a private wound. It is an inheritance.
So forgive me the quiet grief I carry watching people who call themselves community keep laying their money down on that same bar — feeding, dollar by dollar, the very thing that has been chewing us up since before I knew its name, as I am attacked physically and mentally by its coked out staunch defenders, who ironically are permanently banned. I am not asking for your rage. I am asking you to notice whose hand your hand keeps filling.
But let me turn now toward the light — because there is so much of it, and it has earned the last and loudest word.
To the ones who showed up: who packed into my rooms and let my sound move them; who texted me at midnight just to say I see you, keep going ; who booked me when it would have been easier not to; who put what little they had into my hands so I could keep the lights on and the work breathing — I love you in a way I don't have clean words for. You held my name gently while others used it for target practice. You are the reason I never once believed the story they told about me. You are my actual community — not the photographed kind, the chosen kind, the kind that costs something and pays it gladly.
And so, at last, the honest answer to the question I started with. Is the rainbow enuf? Not the one they wave for the cameras every June and fold away by July. Not the one that only glows when a Black queer person agrees to be small. That rainbow was never enough, and it never will be.
But you — the ones who stayed, who showed up, who loved me out loud and on purpose — you are a different spectrum entirely. You are the light I actually bend toward. And that rainbow? That rainbow is more than enough. It always was.
I am still the fire they warned you about. I have only learned, finally, exactly who I am willing to burn for.
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