It took me a few days to process the fact that Tucker Carlson put "Dan White Society" in his yearbook. I want to share the impact that right-wing terrorist Dan White had on my own life as a queer kid growing up in the Bay Area in the aftermath of White assassinating Harvey Milk.

I hadn't been born yet, when right-wing terrorist Dan White went to San Francisco City Hall to shoot Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk. He shot both men multiple times, "finishing" them off with execution-style shots to the head.

I was born a few years later. However, my dad was a businessman who knew the mayor, and frequently went to City Hall. It's very possible he knew Dan White. When my dad heard the news of the assassinations, he would've thought, "I could have been there.”

My dad was also very "weird." People liked him, but he didn't have any real friends in the city, despite living there all his life. I now realize many of the ways my dad was considered "weird" are traits I exhibit, and recognize as part of my non-binary gender expression.

He tried so hard to look conservative, always wearing suits and a very clean cut haircut. Looking at a picture of him, you would have no idea he was "different." But meeting him, you'd know within minutes because of the way he carried himself, and the bizarre things he'd say.

I owe so much of my sense of humor to him, which really tears me up when I think about it, because to me being funny means being vulnerable and emotionally honest. But for him, it was like he was hiding something... playing it off as a joke.

I can't know anything for sure about my dad’s gender or sexuality, because he was a tragically repressed conservative. But I know *other* people questioned his sexuality. He married somewhat late, carried himself oddly, and various other "suspicious" anecdotes I won't share.

So not only would my dad have reacted to the assassination with “I could have been there at City Hall,” he very likely would've thought, "If Dan White saw me, he would've read me as gay, and executed me, too."

The news of Harvey Milk's assassination broke the same month my parents got home from their honeymoon. Their marriage began in the shadow of an ex-cop assassinating the first openly gay man to win a non-incumbent election for public office.

As I said, my dad was also deeply conservative. He was a Nixon apologist, he loved the fact that people said he looked like George W Bush, and by the time he passed he'd lost touch with reality to the point that he thought Donald Trump was his soulmate.

Yet, despite that, he did show compassion for LGBT people when I was a kid. He spoke fondly of his cousin who was gay (who coincidentally passed away from AIDS in the 80s). He didn't use homophobic slurs, or demean people for being gay. His homophobia took a different form.

He was deeply aware that no matter what he did--no matter how “conservative” he looked and dressed--if people read him as "queer," a right-wing assassin might walk into his place of work and shoot him in the head simply for existing.

He was deeply aware that if one of his children turned out to be queer, no matter how respectable we were, a right-wing assassin might walk into our place of work and shoot us in the head simply for existing. To him, being queer was a death sentence.

So before I was even born, my dad decided that I was "not gay." For my own good. Before I had a chance to develop my own identity, he marked an entire lifetime of possibilities as “FORBIDDEN.”

One reason it took me so long to put together my thoughts about the “Dan White Society” thing, is that my dad’s method of trying to make me “straight” wasn’t to bully me into it--not at first, anyway. His method was to ignore things, to conceal things, to deny things.

I remember him telling me about Mayor Moscone’s murder when we went to Moscone Center for a convention. He told me about how Dan White climbed into City Hall through a window to avoid the metal detector. He knew the details intimately. But he didn't mention Harvey Milk.

I grew up in the suburbs, and I remember being terrified of going to the city when I was a kid, because of the way my dad would talk about murders. He told a story about some old businessman he knew who got killed for 20 bucks in a parking garage. But never Harvey Milk.

Another weird thing about my dad: I never heard him say a curse word in my entire life. He said when he was a kid, his mom literally washed his mouth out with soap--basically describing a torture scene. He never cursed again.

His whole life was spent avoiding *saying* things. Instead of saying fuck, shit, whatever, he’d say “fiddlesticks,” and goofy things like that. A grown man, furiously shouting “fiddlesticks!” and “gosh darnit!”

His preferred method of homophobia was erasure. To the point that he tried to erase my individuality.

Things like Harvey Milk’s assassination, or anything about LGBT people--whether positive or negative--didn’t exist. It was like a giant black hole sucked up any hint of those things, despite the fact that SF was and is one of the most visibly queer places on Earth.

When I was young, he’d constantly point out women on the street and comment on their attractiveness, as if to try to convince my brothers and me to be straight. Even when we were kids, it annoyed the hell out of us, because it felt so forced.

Imagine your dad trying to say bawdy things about women, but refusing to use any dirty language. It was a lot of “look at her bazoombas,” and silly shit like that. It was like getting advice on women from Bugs Bunny.

As I got older, his homophobia got less subtle. Partially because I got “weirder,” but also because the assassination of Harvey Milk was a prelude to the mass murder that Ronald Reagan would carry out on gay men via the AIDS epidemic.

So not only could being gay get you shot in the head by a right-wing assassin, it could get you killed slowly by a right-wing President, too.

As I said, my dad’s cousin died of AIDS in the 80s. But I didn’t hear about that until after we saw Dallas Buyers Club in 2013, and he finally told me that story. And my mom finally told me about *her* gay cousin who died of AIDS.

The first 20 years of my life were spent in absolute misery, and I didn’t even know why. I inherited my dad’s weirdness, which was clear, but I also inherited his repression, his self-hatred, his denial--none of which I even realized until decades later.

I always knew I was “different.” When I was in high school, and all the other kids in my class were making plans for college, I couldn’t imagine my life past 18. I couldn’t explain why, but it was like, once school was done, I imagined I’d just wander into the wilderness and die.

I knew a “conventional” way of life didn’t make sense for me. But I didn't know why.

I had a complicated relationship with my dad. I love him, but he drove me fucking nuts. I loved who he really was: his weirdness, sense of humor, & kindness. But there was this other thing. This thing that felt like a parasite, a sickness, a disease: his conservative ideology.

No matter how much conservatives abused or threatened him--getting his mouth washed out with soap, the side-eyes he’d get from his business associates, the LITERAL RIGHT-WING ASSASSIN who murdered people he knew--he obeyed the party line.

My dad did everything in the world to try to appease conservatives. He destroyed his relationship with his own child for them. And what would they give him in return? A bullet to the head, if given the chance. Topped off with a smirk and a giggle from Tucker Carlson.

In the 80s and 90s he joined the San Francisco Friends of the Police Committee, a business association that awarded a “Cop of the Month” plaque. I now realize my dad was on the committee to make himself visible to cops, so they wouldn’t murder him.

Eventually the Friends of the Police Committee was disbanded because somebody realized it was a terrible conflict of interest: a bunch of white businessmen basically bribing cops in return for preferential treatment.

And if you think I’m exaggerating about cops being murderous, please read this description of how the police reacted to the assassination and the ensuing unrest. The police “smiled” at the killings.

What really breaks my heart is that I know that my mom fell in love with my dad because of his weird side. She’s pretty weird too. But as they aged, his weirdness turned to bitterness. His sense of humor dried up.

I would do what I could to try to be there for her, to try to get him to be better to her. He couldn’t take his anger out on conservatives, so he’d take it out on us, his family. I never gave a shit that he was cruel to me. But when he was cruel to her, it was devastating.

Recently my mom told me that when the family business was going under, she worried my dad was about to kill himself. “It’s a Wonderful Life” was on, so she got him to come downstairs and watch it. She swears it saved his life. Pretty sure part of him died that night, anyway.

“Right-wing death squads” is a conservative meme. They think it’s funny. They think assassination is funny. They think destroying families is funny. They think homophobia, queerphobia, and bigotry are funny.

I’m the product of a conservative household, terrorized by right-wing extremism. My dad did everything “right” by the conservative playbook, and it nearly destroyed our family.

Around the time I was in high school and college, there was a period of about 6 or 8 years where my dad and I basically didn’t speak. Didn’t look at each other. I felt repulsed when they’d hug me. I felt repulsed by all physical human contact.

For years, I stopped saying “I love you” back to my parents. My dad didn’t seem to care, but I know it hurt my mom.

That physical repulsion contributed to me hating my own body. Compounded by the fact that I’d always had some degree of body dysmorphia, I never felt at home in my own body.

Around that same time, in high school, I started experiencing chronic pain that distanced me from my own body even more. Migraines and other health issues led to so much pain, I just wanted to escape my own body.

As I mentioned earlier, I was always weird. I carried myself awkwardly and clumsily. Another symptom of that awkwardness, was that I had trouble speaking.

For the first 30 years or so of my life, I had trouble clearly speaking a single sentence from start to finish, especially with strangers. I couldn’t articulate my thoughts. I couldn’t answer simple questions. Almost every spoken interaction felt like an interrogation.

This was coupled with cognitive issues like ADHD, dyslexia, and OCD. Words didn’t make sense. I couldn’t read a book. I couldn’t do my homework. I couldn’t function in class. Teachers thought I was just misbehaving, no matter how hard I tried to focus and do well.

I had almost no friends for the vast majority of my life. I was too weird, couldn’t follow trends, couldn’t interact with other kids in a way that they thought was “normal.”

But of course, I “knew” that I was a straight boy, so I pursued girls. I had zero ability to develop any kind of a meaningful romantic relationship, thanks to the fact that I hated my own body, and couldn’t engage in even the most basic conversation/flirting.

The first few times I went out with girls, I got so nauseous, I had to excuse myself to go throw up. There was something deeply wrong, and I had no idea what. My body could feel the repression and self-hatred, but I didn’t have the words to articulate it. I couldn’t understand.

I made zero friends in college. I would just go to the library, check out a stack of books, and read in my bedroom. At that point, I’d at least trained myself to focus enough to read about topics I was interested in.

I also watched every movie I could. Movies were a window into human interaction that was safe, because I could just be a fly on the wall. Even in real life, I was very emotionally intelligent when I was eavesdropping or watching *other* people interact.

But the moment someone looked me in the eyes and asked me a question, or otherwise expected something from me in an interaction, I would lock up and panic.

My life didn’t really start until I moved down to LA in my late 20s. And even then, it took a few years before I really felt like I was living a life.

Now I’m nearing 40, and despite all the horrible shit going on in the world, at least I can say I’ve found myself. I’m in a relationship with an infinitely loving, kind person who gives me the space to find myself. I’m happy for the first time in my life.

I hope these thoughts are helpful to someone who is in a similar situation to what I was in.

I hope people come to better understand how these phobias and bigotries and denials actually function within society and within our families. Otherwise, kids will stay trapped, like I was, confused and with no legible map out of the dungeon.

I’m here. I’m non-binary. And I’m not going anywhere, no matter how bad Tucker Carlson wants an ex-cop to put a bullet in my head.

By the way, the reason the family business went under is because a national corporation came in and crushed it using unfair, illegal, anti-union business practices. So my dad didn’t even get the financial reward that conservatives pretend you earn if you “play ball.”

Instead, he spent the last few years of his life worshiping the same corporate conservatives who ruined his livelihood. Once the family business was gone, he lost the will to live. They didn’t kill him with a gun. They killed him with capitalism. And he loved them for it.

People’s understanding of homophobia / queerphobia / transphobia / enbyphobia / etc is so elementary. Like if someone doesn’t explicitly say “f*g” then it’s not actual bigotry. But there are much more subtle forms of those bigotries which are just as deadly.

If society is going to do anything about systemic injustice, white America needs a reckoning. White supremacy starts in white homes, where white children and white women are subjected to the tyranny of white patriarchs, and it spreads from there.

White people are the the perpetrators of white supremacy, but they are also the first victims in the cycle of abuse and violence. They perpetuate that violence, to convince themselves that they’re not victims, that they’re in control.

But they’re not in control. They’re carrying out the will of an ideology that doesn’t care about them, an ideology that would execute them as soon as smile at them.

One of the ways that white supremacy infects young white boys’ (or people who’ve convinced themselves they’re “boys”) minds is by getting us to tell ourselves we’re “tough.” We’re “real men.” “Real men” don’t cry, or complain, or do any kind of self-care.

As a young non-binary person, when I felt pain, I’d tell myself, “But I’m tough. I can handle it.” Even when that pain made me want to die. Even when that pain was so strong, I knew something was wrong. Something was off. Something didn’t add up.

Conservatives have a whole economy of “toughness.” The gun industry is one giant scam to get people to pay thousands of dollars to prove that they’re “tough,” while simultaneously giving them the ability to murder people that white America thinks it’s okay to murder.

Well, as an openly non-binary person, I’m tougher than I’ve ever been. To borrow some logic from a problematic sci fi story: “The first step in defeating the enemy, is recognizing who the real enemy is.”

I used to feel like I was an error, like I was my own worst enemy. But now I see who the real enemy is. The Tucker Carlsons of the world is my enemy. My own father chose to be my enemy.

My dad had a spark within him, a goofy, wonderful joyous spark. Over the decades, that spark died out as he tried to hide it, to conceal it from the men who would happily murder him if they got a glimpse of it.

In closing, Tucker Carlson deserves to burn in the hottest circle of Hell imaginable. He has the blood from every hate crime in this country on his hands.

My dad passed away when I was gathering the courage to come out as non-binary to my parents. But I’m finally ready. I’m going to come out to my mom, next time I visit.

If this thread meant something to you, you can read more of my writing on similar themes in my novella, here: https://gum.co/wRgHa  and a short fictionalized memoir, here: https://medium.com/@pyramidneed/no-words-b52e3afee601 Thanks for listening.