I'm old enough, and not naïve enough, to know why the murder of Indigenous actor Jonathan Joss, who voiced the character of John Redcorn on Kong of the Hill isn't the front page of every newspaper in North America.
Or why Time magazine, for instance, has not done a cover story on the way Trump regime's relentless campaign to terrorize, even eradicate, queer people has granted tacit permission for a spike in violence against them by their fellow Americans.
I know that, at the end of the day, there will always be people who see queer people as less American, even less human, than other people. The taste in the back of my mouth is my earliest memories of the social climate of the 1970s, when I first became sure of my difference, and the 1980s, when I first came out.
I remember the edicts, both spoken and unspoken, that we were, at best, an annoyance that people wished would go away, and that those people would help that happen, one way or another.
But here are the bare facts in the Joss murder, in June of 2025: after an extended two year period of terrorizing Joss and his spouse, Tristan Kern de Gonzales, their neighbour burned their house to the ground with their three dogs inside.
Two years later, the couple were still receiving their mail at the site. On the fatal day, doing a mail run, the couple found the skull of one of their dead dogs laid out in the driveway, obscenely festooned with his harness and leash.
Then, as the couple grieved anew, in near hysterics, their neighbour, who’d been harassing them for years pulled out a gun and began firing. Joss died pushing Kern de Gonzales out of the way of the bullets, taking them himself instead, and dying in his spouse's arms.
This is why I've grown to hate platitudes like "love is love." This is why I'm no longer interested entertaining the outer edge of a "both sides" argument when it comes to LGBTQ+ existence.
It's why I am utterly impervious to emotionally manipulative claims about the "danger to women and girls" of trans women using the women's restroom, claims that are based 100% on lies, with no facts to back them up, and which are designed to wrap ugly transphobic bigotry in the mantle of both feminist respectability and a dated, violent, corrosive form of fake chivalry that is rooted not in the love of women, but in male ownership of them.
It's because I can still taste the hatred of the 1970s in the back of my throat this morning, reading about this murder, and because that hatred should have died out fifty years ago. Progress is designed to move in only one direction, not to be fractured and maimed, and turned back on itself, repurposed into something horrifying, and terribly, terribly old.
It's because this should never, ever, still be happening, and because the outrage our fellow citizens ought to be feeling— friends, family, and allies, political and otherwise—should be rattling the very rafters of heaven right now.
RIP, Mr. Joss, and peace and comfort to his suffering spouse, Mr. Kern de Gonzales, who is currently living the nightmare that all of us who love on our own terms—our natural terms—dread most.
