I was studying to be a priest in Brooklyn when, in the spring of 2011, President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden. I would never be ordained, it turned out, which was for the best; even if I could have put being transgender aside. My time there taught me how idiosyncratic my Catholicism was, and how little it seemed to have in common with most of the men entering ministry alongside me. I held to what I thought, at the time, was a pretty straightforward kind of Jesus-ism: that simplicity, service, humility, and openness were both preconditions and consequences of trying to embody the gospel of love. I am over-simplifying, because otherwise I’d ramble on about why and how. But it gave me a reputation as something of a bomb-throwing anarchist amongst the golden chalice set. To borrow from John Adams, I was suspected and unliked.
As we gathered around the lone television in the common room, back when broadcast was still a thing, absorbing the news, my brother seminarians, mostly folks I never really connected with but who I, broadly, genuinely considered decent people, celebrated. Of course they did. This was Brooklyn, and most of them were lifelong New Yorkers instead of repatriated transplants like me. They had been there, under the smoke. Some of them watched the towers fall in person. Some of them lost people in the horror. And I, in my naive religion, was stunned. Weren’t these men supposed to be better than this?
“Osama bin Laden was a human being,” I said. “God loves him, and we ought to pray for him. Aren’t we against the death penalty? Abortion? Don’t we believe in the dignity of all human life? That everyone deserves love? That nobody is beyond compassion or understanding?” This is, of course, paraphrased; that was the gist of it. Almost to a man, they looked at me with cocked heads and blank incomprehension.They’d endured the tragedy in ways I, a few hundred miles away in Richmond, hadn’t, and couldn’t. It was personal.
A couple of years later, after I left seminary to transition, a road that took five more years and routed through a failed marriage, two young men – brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, bombed the Boston Marathon, killing three. I watched, with the same horror, as people who called themselves Christian screamed and raged and cried for blood. “But what of Christ?” I wondered aloud. “God loves Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.” The response was usually some variation of “God may, but I don’t.”
Whatever else could be said about who I was before I transitioned, the young man I was desperately trying to be was someone who took the Gospel seriously in its radicalism. Naive, yes, in the sense of inexperienced, but I was eager in that unreadiness, and committed to what I still believe are revolutionary ideals. Love was, always, my guiding star. Love pointed me to Christ and love demanded I never deny anyone their humanity, not even the worst of us. Leo Tolstoy, in his extraordinary pacifist-anarchist The Kingdom of God is Within You, said that God is infinite good, and we are all infinitely far from infinite good, so what matters isn’t where we are but which direction we’re heading in, and that our calling is to strive to move toward rather than away. You know, forgive them, Father; they know not what they do and all that. I took the Sermon on the Mount taken as a genuine program of social life, and not a pretty set of might-be-nices, and tried – haltingly, painfully – to embody it. I was scrupulous, terrified of my own sin, and determined to be the best person I could according to the program of love so clearly laid out in Christ’s preaching. I had convictions of aspiration, an impossible perfection I could nonetheless always try to move toward.
I found out Lindsey Graham died a bit over ninety minutes before I started writing the first draft of this essay, and I did what I usually do, now, when someone loathsome dies. I made snide jokes. You know the ones, because we’re all making them, gallows humor from the ghoulish mob and not the man swinging. “That’s a shame,” goes my favorite Seinfeld gif. And I mean it. I mean it with every ounce of sincerity I brought to my Christian compassion for Tsarnaev and bin Laden. I meant it without irony, or dissonance, or distance. I am not sorry.
Graham was a spineless little twat, a hypocritical climber without an ounce of honest principle beyond his own proximity to power. A gay man who worked to hurt gay people. An anti-Trumper who fell in line, disavowed Trump, and then fell back in line the moment it became clear supporting an attempted coup would help him. A worthless slug of a man, beneath contempt, beyond my care or concern, for the horrifying things he helped to happen as he carried water for people who would just as soon throw him against the wall themselves if they had the chance. Nobody respects a turncoat, least of all the ones he turned out his coat for. They know men like that cannot be trusted. They know that loyalty is a token easily revoked. They keep men like Graham on the tightest of leashes, and mock them to their faces, and make sure they know the cost of turning that coat again. I have nothing good to say about him, nor any impulse to say nothing at all. He is dead, and I am glad he’s dead alongside millions of others, and I am still not sorry about that.
Let me be plain: fuck him. Fuck him with iron fresh from the forge. Hoist his head on a pike. Parade his body for jeering. Throw rotten fruit. Shit on his grave.
I didn’t used to be like this, is what I’m saying. I didn’t used to hate. That’s not a brag, by the way; I genuinely didn’t really know how. I was jealous, arrogant, and wildly insecure, but spite tasted bad to me. I made a principle of specifically never saying “fuck you” to someone and meaning it. I powered through anger to both seek and offer forgiveness. I tried, as hard as I could, to do unto others, to extend the grace I wanted to receive, and to make reconciliation a lived discipline.
Much of that is still present, by degrees at least. I still struggle in my fiction to write bullies and villains because I have a hard time grasping malice as such. It always feels cartoonish to me, beyond rationality. How can feeling like that, acting like that, even thinking like that not make someone sick to their stomach? Have they never had heartburn? Don’t they know much it hurts to keep bile bubbling into your throat?
Yet here I am. Cheering and joking and mocking, fruit flying from my hand, hating this man who, unlike those I once prayed for, has never to my knowledge actually murdered anyone. He died, and all I can say is I wish it had happened sooner, and been more humiliating. I gleefully entertain fantasies my editor has asked me to cut from this text. Ten years of public scorn and mockery for trans people as a category and for myself personally showed me how. Ten years of being told we are affronts to God, a danger to children, sick, deluded rapists have been my education. I have, at last, learned how to hate.
That’s the bit, the fact of my hate, that makes me flinch, burns my own gullet. That’s the dark little piece of me I can’t pretend doesn’t exist. Men like Lindsey Graham have taught me how to hate, and I’m worried it can’t be unlearned. Ten years after I transitioned, I am a better person in countless ways – but in this, the most important one, I am worse. Ten years of abuse at the hands of bigots and opportunists, ten years of eliminationism, ten years of my own father’s endorsement of these people; all of that has taught me to hate, to hate fiercely. To wish ill. To dream of the moment I can say, at last, these fuckers are dead, and it is better this way. Do you understand? They didn’t just make me worse. They made me like them.
How? Let me count the ways. I was for an extended period of time one of the primary targets of Comicsgate, one of the many -gates descended from 2014 attacks on games journalists Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. This particular one, headed by the first man I ever despised, destroyed a large portion of my life with endless threats and harassment. I was bullied my whole childhood for being weird and distant, but never had anything approached the vitriol thrown at me. These were the sorts of things I didn’t know people could really, genuinely think about another human being. I couldn’t say a thing online without it turning into yet another video about what a horrible, lying monster I was, or about how I was faking being trans for SJW clout, or about how I should kill myself, or be raped, or be murdered. People sent me photos of my apartment building. People followed me at conventions. People called me at home. I actually fled New York at one point, legitimately afraid for my life.
Even then, I still tried; I reached out to the foremost of my abusers and offered peace and forgiveness. It was partly tactical; I desperately wanted it to end, and assumed that, well, if I showed them I was a human being maybe they would grasp the harm, or at least question themselves. I made a point, for a few years, of sending my enemy a Christmas greeting. I tried, multiple times, to negotiate a truce, just so I could have some peace. But I meant it, I really did. I didn’t like the invective spewing out of my own mouth. I didn’t like how angry I got, or how much ill I could wish on them. It felt like decay. It felt like dying. I’d never felt like that before, not for anyone, and everything in my heart told me it needed to stop.
But showing them I was a person did nothing. Extending peace and goodwill did nothing. And here, for the first time, I faced the failure of the things I believed and practiced, and part of me started to give in. How could I owe love to people who wanted me dead? They were ascendant, emboldened by their president, raging and cackling with hateful glee as they fell upon me, upon my friends, with unambiguous contempt. Was I supposed to take it? Was I supposed to let them destroy me? The Gospel seemed to say yes.
But I don’t think I really understood what had been done to me, what I had chosen, until my father died last year.
I have written at length about this in, of all things, a Rocky Horror Picture Show essay anthology, but the last thing my dad ever said to me was that he wished he’d pushed back harder, had fought harder, when I told him I was transitioning, that one of his greatest regrets in life was that I am a woman. It wasn’t that I didn’t know that, on some level. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand his opposition, the way he resisted every basic courtesy, like using my name to my own face.
At the end of his life, the only thing he wanted was to get right with his God, not his daughter, and that meant saying the cruelest words he’d ever spoken to me. You must understand; his politics and his faith were always tightly entwined with his very sense of self, though his principles about the Constitution had vaporized as he joined a movement aimed at destroying his enemies. One of those, it turned out, was me. He regretted that fact, and it caused him a great deal of heartache, but it was true. I was not subject to the order of love, and he was not sorry.
In the two weeks following that video chat, I hopped on the phone with one of my old friends from seminary, a wonderful man named Fr. Daniel Kingsley who I have stayed in touch with and count as one of the kindest human beings I have ever met. He let me rage at him about my dad and the heartless things he said and did, and it was there, in that phone call that was a confession in every sense but sacramental, as I no longer believe in sacraments, that I made the connection that I had been reduced to this state. I’m hateful, now, too, just like the people who spent years torturing me. Maybe not in kind, or in degree, but hatred wasn’t there before, and now it is.
That’s the worst part. The hate infected me. I am now petty, and cruel, and voracious for their suffering. I have no kindness to offer them, no forgiveness to extend, no love, and I still believe everyone deserves love. So I am a hypocrite. I spit venom, same as them. I want their suffering. I mock their dead. I’m still not sorry, but God, I am angry at that, and at them, and at myself, for the simple pleasure the suffocation of Lindsey Graham’s pathetic candleflame of life gives me. I hope he died in pain. I hope he died alone. I hope he understood, at the end, that everything he did was monstrous and vain, and felt every ounce of pain he facilitated on the bodies of others. I hope he is in hell, and I don’t even think hell exists. He has returned to the universe, as we all must, and he has left it a little worse than he found it, and I don’t think there will ever be an accounting of that fact.
And he has marked me, as have the fascists he allied with, with a little piece of themselves, the dark little pomegranate heart that ties me, forever, to this cold, empty place underground. My candle burns a little dimmer, and I am yet another of Hades’ brides.
Once, when I was young, I believed in God, and in heaven, and in the resurrection of the dead. Once, I believed Jesus Christ was the lord of love, and that love was a calling and everyone – everyone – was owed it as a matter of course. It was my first, best principle. It was the center of my soul, and now that I no longer believe in souls, I find that principle has nowhere to guard itself against the hatred now sticking to my skin. I am not sorry, but I am afraid.
Magdalene Visaggio is the Eisner Award-nominated comics writer and novelist behind KIM & KIM, ETERNITY GIRL, and VAGRANT QUEEN. Born on Long Island and raised in Richmond Virginia, she lives with her wife and two cats in New York City.
