Cops and Little People

an evening with Casey Parks

“Stop right where you are, pal! You know the score. If you’re not cop, then you’re little people.”

That’s a not-very-veiled threat. It means if Deckard doesn’t do as he’s told, if he doesn’t hunt down and kill his own people, then he’s “little people,” and, in this world, little people don’t matter. Bad things happen to little people.

I may have just spoiled the end of Blade Runner for you. If that’s true, I apologize. If you’ve never seen Blade Runner by now, I may not be the right writer for you.

I write between six and ten one-thousand-word essays a week. That sounds like a crazy exaggeration, but it’s not. I try to write at least one of these essays about LBGTQ issues every week. It annoys some people. It annoys them quite a lot.

It seems incongruent that an older, straight white guy with a bit of a reputation for womanizing should care about these things. So, what’s my motivation? It’s simple, really. I know the score, pal; if you’re not cop, then you’re little people, and in Mississippi, very bad things can happen to little people.

If you’re from here, then you know I’m not being overly dramatic for effect. In Mississippi, from our first day until this, marginalized people tend to die at the hands of mysterious strangers. In Mississippi, no matter how well-educated, how well-connected, and employed they are, queer and trans people are little people, and in Mississippi, every day I wake up, there’s more political pressure pouring on them to destroy, first their civil liberties and then their lives.

Casey Parks delivered two addresses at the McMullan Writer’s Workshop last night at Millsaps College. At both of them, my eye kept falling on the map of Mississippi and Lousiana tattooed on the back of her arm. She’s from Louisiana. She lives in Oregon. There’s a story in why she included Mississippi.

In my mind, Casey will always be one of our “bright young students,” even though she reminded me last night that she and her classmates are now in the universe of forty-year-olds by at least a year and change. I’m not entirely ready for that.

When I think of Casey, I think of someone who came to Millsaps still emotionally a child who soon learned there was a fierceness inside her, so much so that she shaved her head into a mohawk to make a point and became a woman. I learned she probably didn’t feel very fierce after reading her book, Diary of a Misfit. That’s not unusual. People only feel fierce when there’s blood in their eyes. We all have battles nobody knows. We all fight to scrape the chains from our wings, put there by people who love us, in their mind to protect us, but end up serving other purposes.

There are about seven years when Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, graduated a string of people who became very significant writers. People like Casey, Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy, and Michael Guidry, editor of Mississippi Today. I’ve thought many times about what it was that we did differently, about what we did in those years to produce such a satisfactory result. Other than the people we had on faculty at the time, I can really only blame the stars.

Casey covers the “family and gender,” and now the “LGBTQ” beats for the Washington Times—the actual Washington Times, not Washington County, Mississippi. Her regular readership exceeds the combined total of every surviving Mississippi Publication, and she writes about people and issues that have become the specific targets of political factions in the United States, especially in Mississippi.

Someone will say that I’m exaggerating and that nobody is being targeted. I can prove it. Some will say they brought this on themselves. They can’t prove that.

At the end of Casey’s remarks last night, I asked the people around me who are far more connected than I, who covered the LGBTQ beat for Mississippi Today and Mississippi Free Press. Nobody knew the answer. Fortunately, I know the editors of both papers well enough to just ask. One of them is my age, one is Casey’s age, and both have close ties to Millsaps. Long ago, Millsaps figured out that words themselves are among the most important things in the human experience.

Part of Casey’s narrative last night was how, when she was at Millsaps, there were more out-queer faculty members than there were out-queer students. I laughed and suggested that even then, there were as many, if not more, who were not yet ready to be out.

She mentioned Greg Miller. I took Milton from Greg. He was brilliant, but it was Milton. I knew going in that it’d be a struggle to keep up with my ADHD and Dyslexia. I’ve always had this idea that if I jumped in way over my head, then I could fight like hell and make things work out. It doesn’t always happen, though. I immediately got woefully behind the rest of the class. One of the great ironies of ADHD is that words come out of me much easier than they go in.

I’m sure Greg thought I hated his class; quite the opposite was true, but that was a time in my life when I told nobody alive that I had a problem reading. My mother asked me once if I’d told my wife about my reading problems. I told her I would. I never did. Unless she reads my stuff, I don’t think she knows now.

I thought about asking Casey to tell the story of the ink on her arm. Tattoos can be very personal, so I decided to wait. When I got home, I checked her online anthology to see if she’d written about it. I didn’t find anything. Ink on your body means something. For someone who is not from here, a map of Mississippi means we had something to do with creating her identity. Knowing that she remembered us so made me happy.

Casey spoke about a piece she wrote telling the story of a mother in Mississippi who drove to Alabama to buy male hormones for her trans teenager illegally. That made me angry. When I was a teenager, I illegally bought male hormones nearly every week. Sometimes, I bought them from a man who worked for the Jackson Police Department. In the entire state of Mississippi, there’s a very small number of teenagers seeking hormones for gender reassignment—but every single high school has three or four boys buying nearly identical drugs to help them play sports.

Last year, the Mississippi State Legislature voted on an entire slate of laws prohibiting medical and hormonal treatment for trans teenagers and trans adults and not a single bill about sports drugs. One is a real issue, while the other is very imaginary. Sports drugs are actually very dangerous. The liver damage I have is very likely due to the male hormones I injected as a teenager to become stronger, not the gallons of whiskey I consumed since then.

I don’t understand why Mississippi considers social conformity such a vital political issue, but it’s always been so.

Richard Dawkins explains that our genes seek to reproduce themselves, and this instinctive desire makes us resistant to social diversity. Dawkins doesn’t explain how our genes determine who looks and acts like us, but I’ve tried to refute his theories for many years and haven’t been able to. To be fair, I have similar problems with the parts of Jung’s theories that he leaves as a black box. Neither seems very upset with my concerns.

We don’t know why one person becomes queer, and another from the exactly same environment does not. Many people have studied it. None of them have produced theories that hold water. What we do know is that there’s absolutely nothing you can do to make your child gay or trans, but there’s absolutely nothing you can do to prevent it, either. Everything you hear about people “grooming children to be gay” is just garbage. It’s not possible to do. The American Psychiatric Association says so. What they’re expressing is hate repackaged as “concern.”

When Frank Hains died, Eudora Welty wrote a beautiful piece about him to run where his collum normally would in the Clarion Ledger. She never mentioned his sexuality. The rest of the paper had no problem plastering it over the front page for weeks. Most of the “Frank Hains Found Slain” articles were published without Byline. When he died, Frank had been at the Clarion Ledger/Jackson Daily news longer than most of the staff, including whoever was covering his murder and the subsequent trial and the murder of the man who murdered him.

People tend to remember Eudora Welty as a flower-petal-frail little old lady of impeccable manners and a quiet voice. In many aspects, that’s true, but in other aspects, it was a deception.

When Miss Eudora was alive, there were only a small handful of people willing to be openly queer in Mississippi and quite a few more where everyone knew, but nobody ever mentioned it. They all found safety, companionship and solice hiding in Miss Eudora’s skirts. She was a lady, that’s true, but she was also a social matron and, when the situation called for it, an extraordinarily effective mother bear. Giving people a place where they can unapologetically be themselves can be the most effective form of advocacy.

Last night, Casey talked about how, when her mother found out she was gay, she called everyone she could find at Millsaps to blame them for it. It’s in her book too.

My father was chairman of the Millsaps board for about three decades. When Casey came to Millsaps, he had only been dead four years. I can barely remember him when he wasn’t in that position. Every year, parents would call or write Daddy to complain about what those liberal professors at Millsaps were doing to their children.

Parents pack up their precious seventeen-year-olds and drop them off at Millsaps every year, thinking not much will change in them. For children who never lived anywhere but their mother’s home, college can be a very transformative experience. In college, they can discover parts of themselves that lay dormant in the more confining environment of their mother’s skirts. That force is often stronger than anything a professor can do to them.

I don’t accept the dichotomy of cops and little people. For one thing, little people can be far more powerful than anyone expects. I’ll keep writing about these things, but I don’t think that’ll do the trick. What we need is more people like Casey. Mississippi and other states are passing a growing body of legislation to curtail the civil liberties of otherwise innocent people. I have a problem with that. I can’t promise that adding my voice to the fray will move the needle even a little bit, but enough voices will.

Going to Millsaps gave Casey a foothold to become what she always was. This voyage of self-discovery is perhaps the most valuable thing a person gets from college. Right now, Mississippi is trying to define queer and trans people as broken. They are not. They’re stronger than you’ve ever imagined.