Guilly's Guide Day 2

I don't exist: Official U.S Government Policy.

Greetings Beloved: Welcome to Day 2 of Guilly’s Guide to the first 100 days. Why are we focusing on the first 100 days and not the usual theoretical theology and expansive esotericism bit? 

I explain all that here: https://lennyduncan.substack.com/p/guillys-guide-day-one

Day 2 was meant to be the first in a short post, once a week or so, introducing one of the characters of the Trump White House. That will be tomorrow. 

But I would be remiss, inauthentic, and not the writer who spills keyboard sweat, virtual ink, and my actual blood, to bring you the messy truths that some of you have come to know if I didn’t talk a little bit about the 47th president of the United States of America and his inauguration speech. 

When there is blood, pain, or emotional labor used to prove a “point” in this newsletter I try to make sure it is my own. If you are a friend, you know that the “lenny of the pen”, “lenny as people see them on social media”, and the actual human being you get to meet: lenny a duncan jr, weird ol’ me, often don't match. I have achieved relative privacy by being more of an urban internet church myth, and my readers, who are often white and born several classes above mine, for the most part accept that as the real me. I leave them little choice. 

But even with good boundaries, supportive partners, and learning experiences that make me wince, it always feels dangerous to admit pain, even shared pain, in this world as a Black writer. 

I am overtly public, about a very select list of things. I have learned this way of being, this double consciousness of the Black writer in America for a few reasons. To keep myself, first: safe. Second, sane. Finally: a lil mystery is exactly what we need. The allure of bigger adventures, resistance and hopefully revolution. Or at minimum: mental liberation. 

There are some things you will never know of God or Gods, the realms that may follow this consciousness we call life, your enemies, or your neighbor. It’s ok that many of you only see me in glimpses. Often a few hundred pages at a time. That is by choice. 

I know after my experiences in the Church as a seminarian, then as ordained clergy, then as public chaplain for what was effectively the anti-racist and anti-fascist movement in PDX during 20,21,22 that many folks get a sense I am either brash, arrogant, or unafraid. 

Folks seem to imagine that I have somehow either remained unshaken, or for those of you who paid more attention: that after recovering from trauma received via transference as chaplain and from violence perpetrated against me, a very ugly and very public divorce, and leaving the pulpit, I have simply “bounced back.” 

I want to be honest with y’all. 

Yesterday in his inauguration speech the 47th President of the United States broke something inside me that I thought was untouchable by any politician. I am for the first time in my life unsure I believe in America's promises. 

I always believed that we the people, through struggle, strife, political action and activity, redress of representatives, marching, talking, and working together would someday create that “more perfect union.” 

Even after being houseless, seeing my parents told by a shotgun-wielding, stars and bars-wearing neighbor that it was time to move, eating out of dumpsters, being in juvenile prison for 3 grams of pot, and other horrors, I always believed that the American promise included me. I believed like my elders, heroes, and role models taught me: That the long arc of history bends towards justice. 

While there were attacks on democrats, the rule of law, the literal amendment that made my ancestors citizens, indigenous land back initiatives, and sacred renamings, even while the president also announced that he would be releasing his personal cadre of brownshirts from their prison sentences, there was a special dagger waiting for me and many others in that speech. 

It is official U.S Government policy that there are only two genders. 

In all the ways this president and many others have trod on what honor that office ever had, for some reason this one broke me. 

Not right away. Not in the first hour. But later that afternoon when my partner Sarah had to pull me blubbering from the floor.

I thought I had answered the call of this country. That I had maybe spent many years in ways that were anti-social, or “criminal,” as a houseless youth and even in early adulthood. Selfish and with a chip on my shoulder, angry that this country didn’t give me a chance as a kid. 

But somewhere along the way, America, I believed you. I believed that if I took steps toward being a citizen again – working, learning, engaging, making my community and country a better place, even if I did it “my way” – that this country would eventually start to become a union that included me. I believed in the nation of second chances, of comebacks, of a fair shot and fair deal, eventually for all. As someone who has received the grace of all this republic's second chances and took them, I assumed we were even in this era working toward that.

I now believe I was terribly wrong. 

Because the most powerful office in the land chose yesterday to tell me I no longer exist according to the U.S Government. That my American experience, rooted in the same shared stories, histories, tragedies, and triumphs we all know, is not real. 

I won’t act surprised, because I'm not. It's why I never chose the X designation offered by the U.S Government and State Governments on IDs. 

But I was crushed in a way that I don’t know if I will ever recover from. 

Yesterday the President of these United States told me I didn't exist. 

Yet here I am. 

Written in love and liberation

lenny duncan (they/them)

Tomorrow: The Cast of the Trump White House

Also P.S in case you were wondering: