on introductions and the purposes of anger
reflections on myself, homophobia in athletics, and what this newsletter is.
One of my least favorite questions in job interviews is the open-ended “Tell me about yourself.” Obviously, I’ve memorized a standardized answer that goes over my educational and work experience, but when introducing myself in terms of my creative and personal work, I find introductions a little harder.
Maybe telling the story of how I decided to start “everything matters to me” is a good place to start.
I’m the only lesbian and nonbinary person of color on the co-ed varsity sports team I play on at my college and one of only two queer people on a team of 18 people. Though my college is a PWI, 35% of our non-athlete student population is white, and over 70% of our student-athlete population is white. Therefore, if you think about the number of student-athletes who identify as a person of color, queer, and trans, you might as well change from percentages to counting with the fingers on your right hand.
In the middle of February, a cishet white man—let’s call him Mason—on the sports team I’m a part of shouted the F-slur at a public hockey game where administration and families were present. The incident happened on a Friday night, and I wasn’t alerted until a teammate hurriedly explained the story to me in the gym right before we started an hour of workouts.
The following week was quite honestly all a haze. The meetings I was in started easily. I met with the women on the team to discuss whether we wanted to stop being a co-ed team, with the captain on the men’s side to hear how they were handling it, and with my coach to see how the coaching staff planned to deal with it.
Then, I met with the athletics director, a cishet white man. He told me Mason would only be suspended through spring break, meaning he would only miss 4 weeks of practice. Considering that we’re in pre-season and he would have the opportunity to rejoin once we were allowed to play competitively, I felt shocked that this happened in such a public place, yet minimal punishment was being given.
When I candidly brought up this fact, the athletics director had the nerve to tell me: “I was at the game, and I didn’t hear it. Plus, Mason seems genuinely sorry about what he said.”
That sentence felt like a slap in the face. Even worse, it was a reminder that pain from a person like me didn’t matter compared to the remorse of a straight cis white man.
The sting from that meeting only exacerbated during the following meetings I had with my college administration, which all felt useless because everyone kept trying to direct me to resources I already knew how to access. Several members of the administration told me about our college’s mental health center, where I already go to bi-weekly therapy, get medication to treat my mental health, and got a referral through the center to get tested for various diagnoses.
I tried reaching out for help through non-administrative resources at my college. I attempted to get an op-ed anonymously published about the situation and provided commentary about the issue of homophobia in athletics overall through the student-run news organization. But the editors-in-chief refused to publish it online, citing that they didn’t see a reason why I would want to remain anonymous, even after I explained how having my identity attached to this article in which I identify myself as a student-athlete of color would make it easy for athletes unhappy with my article to find me and cause even further harm.
Eventually, this all resulted in me having a direct conversation with Mason. I went into the conversation with low expectations, knowing that he wouldn’t really have changed. And while my expectations were low, holy fuck did the conversation go bad.
Although Mason said he was sorry about saying the word, he attempted to defend himself. First, he claimed he didn’t even remember saying the words because he was too drunk to remember. Then, he said that he understands how I feel about homophobia because he’s had to deal with anti-semitism. Lastly, he brought up that he had been in the hospital for four days sometime in the past few weeks. At the moment, I had just been so shocked that I burst into tears, visibly upset to the point where the lady working at the café had walked over and handed me a tissue box. None of what he said had to do with how I tried to figure out what he was doing to learn and grow from his actions. To be met with defensiveness and guilt-tripping was just the cherry on top of this fuck-mountain.
I’m still angry. Of course, I’m angry at the whole situation, but I’m also frustrated with myself for believing I could use my anger to make a difference. This wasn’t my first instance dealing with homophobia in my life, but this was the first time I had tried to reach out and see if the administration would help make sure adequate punishment would be given. I saw this incident as a chance to start a conversation about how normalized homophobia is in athletics, but I’ve only been shut down over and over and over again.
I’ve been angry for a long time. I’ve experienced all kinds of anger—piercing, white-hot rage; subtle, boiling resentment; uncontrollable, smash-everything wrath.
This is something a lot of people with marginalized identities often experience. Cathy Park Hong explores the anger she’s built through facing microaggressions directed towards Asian Americans throughout her book Minor Feelings. Audre Lorde aptly explains how anger stemming from identity-based harm functions in a political sense in her speech, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.”
I often use anger in a personal, creative sense. Countless of my poems and songs originate from a deep-rooted place of anger. Take “prometheus,” a song I wrote about Mason in which I have the lyrics: “sometimes i like to imagine / that i’m punching his face with my bare knuckles / and i knock out all his teeth so he can never fucking smile / or hit on a girl / or say a homophobic slur / or do anything ever again.” Or my poem, “female/trans rage,” in which I wrote: “in some ways, my trans rage is invisibilized by that of my previous womanhood.”
When I consider the purposes of anger, I think about the phrase itself. Purpose of anger. Perhaps we try to assign meaning to this all-consuming emotion because it’s easier to believe that there’s meaning behind all our pain. It’s easier to believe that this all has to mean something.
I used to be scared of my anger, definitely a product of growing up in an Asian immigrant household and being gendered as a woman by society for most of my life. But in embracing my queer and trans identity, I’ve become more accepting of my anger.
In dealing with Mason's situation and writing this, I think I’ve come closer to understanding my anger. I’m allowed to be pissed the fuck off at a bigoted piece of shit. I’m allowed to have difficulty letting go of things that hurt me. But perceiving my anger as a threat that will kill me unless I kill it first is harmful.
This is why I started “everything matters to me.” By creating and writing this newsletter, I accept that many things make me angry, thus accepting that many things matter to me. There are also many things that give me hope, and those matter just as much, if not more, than the things that piss me off.
I hope that as I share more of what matters to me, this newsletter also becomes something that matters to you.
I’m so proud of you Sam 🩷
this is incredible! the way you choose your words in such a specific way to fully communicate the depth of your feelings is brilliant!