Sending My Sad, Worn-Down Love to America

Some thoughts on my home country from Berlin.

Well, he won. 

I don’t get political online like I used to. Frankly, it’s not what I write best.

When I was younger, my opinions felt so certain and uncompromising. Less so, now. I have less patience for political discourse now and, at the same time, more leniency with differing views. That might be heresy in the wake of Trump winning, but it’s true. 

I’m seeing posts from friends saying they’ll never speak to Trump-voting relatives again. While I understand their feelings, I can’t do that. I will never have the luxury of having parents who don’t vote against me and people like me. I can’t, on principle, abandon the work of coexistence — and it is work — because of hurtful, even fundamental, differences in belief. 

I’m from the Deep South, baby. Trump Country. I grew up with these people. I know them. The woman who coached my high school quartet, the English teacher who first inspired me to write, and the lunch lady who asked me every day if I was doing okay because she noticed other kids would not sit with me: they all voted for him. The guys on my varsity football team who befriended and protected a young gay man after he came out: all mega Trumpers now. One still drives around that same small town with Trump flags stuck to the sides of his truck. 

They are not monsters. They’re people, and while I deeply disagree with their choices and oppose their beliefs — about immigrants, women, black and brown people, and me — I know that every time I go back there and say hello, I am proof that they know someone on the other side. I remove their ability to claim ignorance. They know someone affected by their vote. Whether they care or not, I can’t control that.

Every time I go home and see my parents — who told me many times growing up that men can’t love each other and being gay would lead only to death, ruin, and loneliness — I am proof that they were wrong. I will probably never have a productive conversation with my dad about anything heavy, least of all his vote, but it’s enough to be proof, evidence of another side. I want Trump people to know they know someone like me.

I was never kind on Kamala Harris, either. She has a career-long history of opposing sex work, which was my career for a long time, so I opposed her. My words on her were often pretty tough. Even my introduction to the September edition of Siegessäule, a local queer magazine in Berlin, featured a jab at her, and that was after she was the Democratic nominee.

Still, I voted for her, or tried to. One day, I got an email saying my ballot was wrong: my “voting address” was different from the only permanent address I have in the United States, the only place where my mail is sent. If that was not my “voting address,” where the hell was it? This was my first time voting abroad, so I thought I did it right. When I learned I had not, it was too late. Republicans worked hard in recent years to disenfranchise overseas voters, and with me, I guess they were successful. The process was difficult and confusing. Still, I tried. I’m sorry. 

Harris would have been better than Trump, but this whole election was a mess and all outcomes felt grim. But for me, it also felt distant: I have lived in Germany for two years and done the work of unweaving my mental health from the happenings of that country. My reasons for coming here had nothing to do with politics, and I am still (for now) an American citizen, but it's nice to be an ocean away from all that. It can still touch me, still hurt, but here, the genocide happening in Palestine feels more pressing to my heart than the ol' "red state, blue state" nonsense.

I knew he would win. I was hoping to be surprised, but I knew it. Because I know people who vote for him. While Democrats squabbled, they were ready. 

If he had lost, I might have walked down the streets of Berlin feeling — just a tiny bit — proud to be American. Can I say that? In Berlin, it’s taboo for Germans to express national pride. Because of Germany’s history, the German flag only waves over government buildings. If a private citizen wears or carries one, they’re seen by all as a neo-Nazi.

I think that’s not fair — and more to the point, I think that backfires. Discouraging any expression of national pride just fuels nationalism, and that’s happening here. Our last elections saw a big shift to the right with major wins for the AfD — Germany’s modern neo-Nazi party — in the East. And that’s happening in the United States: the American right has tied itself to this bogus idea of patriotism as a resistance movement, patriotism under threat. As a result, in America, if I see someone making the sad sartorial choice to wear the flag — objectively, not a beautiful one — I assume they’re a right-wing, hardcore Trumper. A Neo-Nazi. A fascist. 

Yes, it’s embarrassing to wear a flag. Flags aren’t clothes. Overblown patriotism always looks tacky and tasteless. But we must make it respectable to express some love of country, otherwise that love — that real feeling that occurs naturally in a person’s heart — will feel like protest, like a resistance movement, and that’s when it becomes dangerous. 

As it happened, I did not walk through Berlin feeling proud, just embarrassed. If I wasn’t apologetic enough about my home country — if I wasn’t already fighting a stigma — I am now. Now, I must do extra work in a gay bar to let a guy know I’m not that kind of American.

Europeans — even cultured, traveled ones — see America as a monolithic culture of guns and obesity and motorcycles. Even though our country is roughly the size of Europe, they think we’re all the same: “That’s so American of you,” they say, or “You have an American accent.” I always want to ask: Which American accent? There are countless accents and dialects. And which America? The United States is more like ten very different countries — or more accurately, six regions — stitched together under a tenuous political unity. I’ve lived in L.A., New York, and a small town in Georgia, and it still strains credulity that these places are in the same country.

The place I liked best was New York City. When people ask me where in America I’m from, I say New York. Because I’m a fucking New Yorker. Fuck you.

I’ve been quiet since the election. No social posts, no memes. Just lots of feelings. I fear for my trans friends, for queer kids, for my sister, and for people I love there, more than before. And on top of that, I just feel embarrassment and shame. 

I hope you all see now that Trump is not an idiot — he’s not someone who stumbled into politics just to get rich and avoid jail. It might be comforting to think he’s just out for himself — just the equivalent of your racist granddad pulling a stunt to avoid taxes — but Trump is not that. He has an agenda, a real political philosophy, and he has won the soul of the nation. 

In the war of ideas, he has done a better job at selling it — pitching a real political perspective — than any Democrat. What do the Democrats believe in, anyway? What do they want to change? Hell if I know. Fucking Biden and then fucking Harris spent the whole election reminding everyone who they were not, and that was not enough. 

Trump was elected by popular vote, which means many, many people in the country bought his perspective and felt unified by it. Sure, kick out the immigrants! Ban trans kids from existence! Criminalize all abortion! Fuck the climate! Turn women into your sex slaves, your breeding stock! Fuck the world! America first!

You people are gross. You people are childish. And you people won, fair and square. Go reap your spoils. 

I’m sick of hot takes on how it happened, how the Democrats failed, how he did it. He did it because in the battle of ideas, fear and hatred are great motivators, and faith, again, is the opiate of the people. Bring those together — fear and faith, dogma and hatred — and you have a pool of strong, passionate ideas about how the world works, or how it should work, that spreads like wildfire. Both parties are failing working-class Americans struggling to get by, but he gave them something to believe in and something to hate. There’s no simple word for his pitch: is it the New Right? Populism? Trumpism? Neo-Naziism? Fascism? Americanism? We must decide, because it’s bigger than him now, bigger than America. It is becoming the dominant world religion, and I fear we may be facing a regressive future of closed borders, the return of the isolated nation-state, the global village failed. And here I thought the Dark Ages were behind us.

Thankfully, my depression is not kicking up too bad. In bad times, I go small: I zero in on my little life and the people I love. That is how one survives: think local, and keep going. 

My mental health is my first job, and I just can’t live with that grimacing, saggy, sunburnt face on my phone every day. So, as a mental health choice, I unfollowed the news. 

It is wrong that good people should be so spectacularly failed by their country. It is wrong that a nation of difference is now one of division. A nation is made better by difference, by many voices, but those voices have split into two camps that absolutely hate each other. This will lead to more than a culture war; it will lead to a real one. History has many examples of what happens when one half of a country hates the other, even when the “other” is neighbors, coworkers, friends. It can always happen again. No nation lasts forever.

The other day, I watched “Stranger Things” on Netflix with a German friend — the scene where the teenagers go into a store to buy guns, ammunition, and weapons to kill a monster.

“Can you really do that there?” he asked. “Can you really walk into a store and buy guns and bullets?” 

At that moment, I thought about Pulse — forty-nine queer people dead on a dance floor. I thought of the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 (sixty people dead). I thought of Sandy Hook Elementary School and the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. 

“Yes, you can,” I said.

Trump is not your biggest problem, America. You can’t touch Elon Musk and Russia, and for most of you, Trump will never know you exist. But you live and work with your countrymen — trans people, brown people, poor people, under-educated people, people with total distrust in the system, people barely scraping together a life — and your job is to be among them. To not cut them out, but to know them. To learn each other. And you must, because “each other” is your biggest problem.

I’ve run from the storm, but there is still that boyish, devil-may-care — and, dare I say it, privately patriotic — thing in me that wonders if I should run back. Some days, I wonder if I’m needed there. Because, well, I might as well say it: I love America. I love the nature, the rock-and-roll, the small towns, the Rockies, and the big, unlimited feeling of all that open land in the middle.

But here’s the problem: I’m delicate. I don’t mind saying it. My mental health is delicate. I’m a delicate man. I am a privileged, lucky, and gifted man. But I am fragile. I once thought I was a fighter — that I was born to be a raging activist. That’s not who I grew into: the biggest battle I’ll ever fight is in me. I’ve kept Alex alive for thirty-two years, so I’m getting good at it, but I don’t know if I can dump this helpless, ridiculous man who can barely cook a decent meal into the messy United States, with its shit healthcare and gun violence. 

I know people who are not delicate — fearless campaigners and reporters and activists. They call politicians and organize protests and tell people off while I sit here typing away on essays about my life. That’s fine. I’m good at what I do, I’m a good guy, and — for better and worse — I am, indisputably, American. 

Even if I never go back, I will always be so, which means its problems will always be mine. No matter how many miles away I am, it will always be able to break my heart. 

America, you broke my heart again. America, you’re broken. America, I don't know what it would take — what love or work or sacrifice is needed — to fix you. America, the beautiful. America, my birthplace. My glittering New York, my oldest loves, and my longest friends are all there. Fire Island Pines, Montana, and the Georgia farm where my old dogs and favorite horse are buried in the earth: my country ‘tis of thee. 

Goodbye, America.