As queers have long insisted, we are everywhere

Tim Mak was reporting from the war in Ukraine for NPR until that network laid him off in March in response to funding shortfalls. The former DC journalist and US Army combat medic decided he wasn't done. So he has stayed on in that invaded country and launched a substack, The Counteroffensive, promising: 

Readers will come with me to cities all across Ukraine, tasting the soups made by Ukrainian cooks, meeting the heroic animal shelter volunteers in frontline cities, and listening to patriotic Ukrainian music that’s making a comeback.

You will also experience the cruelties of war: walking through bombed out cities with Ukrainian soldiers; late-night conversations in a bomb shelter with a four-star general; observing war crimes that the Russian military and Putin are responsible for.

Pursuant to that mission, along with his journalist friends, he followed a story -- and get a rude reminder of our domestic culture war.

Editor’s note: This week we posted a story highlighting a trans activist in Ukraine; after all, Russia cited LGBTQ+ rights as a reason for the war. We didn’t anticipate the negative reaction: more than 1,000 readers unsubscribed, and we lost paid subscribers as well.

For a publication that is just two months old, it was devastating. We work seven days a week to grow our audience. However, we believe that subscriber numbers don’t mean anything if we don’t hold true to our values. We will continue to highlight marginalized communities and the people you don’t hear about in other outlets.

The Counteroffensive offers both paid and free subs. Check it out. 

• • •

Over the past weekend, the Episcopal Church commemorated the life and witness of the civil rights activist and legal innovator, the Rev. Pauli Murray. Decades before Rosa Parks, Murray refused to move to the back of a segregated bus and was arrested for her pains. 

While in law school at Howard University in DC during World War II, she participated in sit-ins demanding service at a lunch counter that refused to serve Black people. (I think we can assume Murray would have viscerally recognized the threat to all public accommodation laws implicit in the Supremes' recent decision exempting a website designer from the legal obligation to serve all comers.) 

NAACP lawyer and future Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (he's May 17 in the Church calendar) called Murray's writing "the 'Bible' for civil rights litigators." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited Murray for developing the legal underpinnings for Equal Protection law -- which is all we've got in the absence of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Late in life, Murray followed a calling to be ordained a priest, one of the first set of women to take up the vocation in 1977.

Murray enjoyed a long, complicated friendship with First Lady and human rights agitator Eleanor Roosevelt; the fragments in the previous couple of paragraphs derive from the short bio of Murray posted at the National Park Service site for one of ER's residences. 

That site attempts honestly and honorably to present one of the puzzles the amazing Pauli Murray sets for us in our current state of understanding of who people are (and who they were) to themselves:

Pronouns, Gender, Pauli Murray

Terminology and language referring to LGBTQ communities, gender expression, and gender identities is different today than it was in Pauli Murray’s lifetime. Murray self-described as a “he/she personality” in correspondence with family members. Later in journals, essays, letters and autobiographical works, Pauli employed “she/her/hers'' pronouns and self-described as a woman. Scholars use a range of pronouns when referring to Murray: “he/him/his” pronouns (Simmons-Thorne), “they/them/theirs” pronouns (Keaveney), “s/he” pronouns (Fisher), and “she/her/hers” pronouns (Rosenberg, Cooper, Drury). We don’t know how Pauli Murray would identify today or which pronouns Pauli would use for self-expression. This remains an ongoing discussion in the National Park Service, but we do recognize that pronouns matter.

Exactly. We don't know how Murray might have engaged with the possibilities of expanded understandings of sex and gender. But I think we can be sure she would have engaged forthrightly and bravely.