Silence
Pride on the Page Day #10
Each of the mini-essays I’m publishing for the month of June are part of a creative challenge to share joy during Pride. You can find out more in the link below. You can even participate, if you’d like!
Wild Lion*esses Pride from Jay
10. Silence
The Nebraska cold was enough to cut right through any layers I was wearing, and the sun beating down on me didn’t make much difference. I shrugged it off as I read name after name, none of them the person I was looking for. It took a while, a lot of walking, several times pulling my phone out to check the gravestone listing of where Brandon Teena was supposed to be. When I found him, it was doubly painful—his gravestone had his name reversed, a denial of who he was, who he told the world he knew himself to be. It was hard to look at it that way, backwards, inverted, like a desecration of his resting place done by his own family. My eyes tried to play little tricks with the raised letters, to rearrange them. It didn’t work.
I stood there over his grave and thought about all the things I would have wanted to say to him, but all I ended up doing was standing in silence. There weren’t any words in me worth sharing. I wanted to say that we were kin. I wanted to claim him as a brother. I wanted to ask him what the good parts of his life were like. I wanted to share that silence place with him. Maybe I did.
Or maybe I just stood in an empty cemetery. I still have no regrets.
Your trans friend,
Robin
PS - I visited Brandon Teena’s town and gravesite on a long road trip last year. You can read more about it in this specific post.
Finding My Trans and Gay Brothers
I recently embarked on a long journey across the United States with a good friend. There were a couple of important places I wanted to visit, namely Lincoln, Nebraska, and Laramie, Wyoming. Lincoln is the city where Brandon Teena lived and was murdered in 1993. Laramie is where
That is so upsetting about the name. Even in death, misunderstood and unheard.
Robin—
you walked into that silence and stood there, fully present. I understand why you wrote no regrets. You brought your whole self to that place. You claimed kinship where it belongs—without permission, without needing those letters to align with truth. You already knew.
Sometimes silence carries presence when words cannot hold what must be held. You offered that presence.
Thank you for bringing this here, for letting us see through your eyes, through the step you chose to take. It matters. You matter. You are not standing alone.
I know this act, too. I have done it—for myself. I stood, and I broke silence at my parents’ graves. I spoke what had long waited. And I stood as I needed to stand.