Kathryn Brightbill 🖋️ Profile picture
Jun 12, 2018 14 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Since it's the anniversary of the #Pulse massacre, I've got a few thoughts. Like thousands of other Floridians, I waited for hours to give blood. I found out later that the @my1blood employee who was handling donor relations where I was had lost a friend in the attack.
The @my1blood employees that day were heroes because they had to get through that awful day and work hours of overtime collecting blood while dealing with their own emotions while everyone was collectively in shock over what happened.
There have been more than enough thinkpieces written about race and the Pulse shooting, but I will say that both that day and the vigils in my community, it was visibly queer people of all races and het Latinx families with young kids who were represented.
The blood drive I went to was at the movie theater, and it was all the people who were donating sitting in a stunned silence staring blankly at the TV screens tuned to CNN, while around us the white straight families carried on to their Sunday matinees like it was any other day.
There was this one family there with a toddler and I have no idea how they managed to keep a kid that looked about 2 happy and tantrum-free for four hours. One teenage girl came from her job at McDonald's and brought her mom to sign off on the donation.
It was such a weird, awful day. Earlier that day I was at a friend's birthday lunch & we got to hear his right wing bff go on about how Obama didn't use the words "radical islamic terrorism" because who needs to show concern for your bff & his boyfriend when you can trash Obama?
Anyway, every time after that when I'd donate on the bloodmobile, my pulse would be racing so fast that I'd have to sit there for ten minutes doing breathing exercises to get it down under 100 bpm so I could donate. The mental association with that day was triggering anxiety.
When I go to the blood bank to donate, my heart rate is always normal, but I had to quit giving on the bloodmobile because I'd get there and my pulse would spike every time.
This is the piece I wrote several days after Pulse about anti-LGBT attitudes in conservative Christianity and how hollow their tears were. My mom shared it to Facebook, the only response was her cousin #NotAllChristians-ing me.
kathrynbrightbill.com/2016/06/15/kil…
The day of the attack, a classmate from undergrad that I didn't even remember being FB friends with decided to show up on my wall and go pastoral on me about how how unfair it was to say I wasn't interested in anti-LGBT Christian tears. I unfriended him. He started messaging me.
People who would have normally expressed concern over something that happened in Florida because they know that's where I live but don't know how close were silent. It's like they couldn't even acknowledge a mass shooting lest it seem they were approving of LGBT people.
There's a reason I don't believe anti-LGBT Christians when they claim to love me, and it's not purely academic. It's because a grand total of maybe 2 of the people I know in that category even acknowledged a massacre just a few hours from me.
It was only once they could rewrite everything to blame Muslims that they were willing to so much as acknowledge that anything happened. And yet somehow there are some who are surprised about everything that went down politically last year and a half.
I'll wrap this up with a reminder that if you're physically capable of donating blood and not deferred for whatever reason, they always need blood. I donate platelets now because they have a 5 day shelf life. I'm giving on Friday.

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More from @KEBrightbill

Oct 6, 2018
Oh Tumblr, where we're supposed to feel bad for wealthy white evangelical women campaigning to end abortion, as if bans ever stopped them from aborting. How about we stop feeling sorry for women who have chosen to embrace patriarchy because they want to screw over brown people?
The bottom line is that white evangelical women have decided that patriarchy controlled by white men is a small price to pay for maintaining the system of white supremacy that allows them to feel superior to black and brown people.
Let me remind you that Rick Santorum's wife had a late term abortion to save her life, they both claim that it doesn't count (even though it's the exact same circumstances that killed a woman in Ireland under their ban), and use that experience to argue *for* abortion bans.
Read 13 tweets
Sep 12, 2018
I always describe Covenant as the school you went to if your parents wanted you to go to a Christian college but you didn't want all the rules. This is the dark side of that reality:
I chose to go to a Xn college, and in many ways it was a positive experience, but I was also 18 and didn't know to look past the lack of dress code to fully know what I was getting myself into. I also had no clue I was gay or the baggage Covenant's homophobia would leave me with.
Not knowing I was gay while I was at Covenant meant I escaped the fear and turmoil of being queer at an anti-LGBT Christian school, but I didn't escape the memories of the debates over whether gay people should be stoned. Or not feeling safe to really say how appalled I was by it
Read 13 tweets
Sep 8, 2018
I have some thoughts about homeschooling and pop culture gaps, and also about people assuming that your pop culture gap has something to do with being homeschooled.
First, making a big deal about somebody's pop culture gaps just makes them feel more like an outsider, so don't do it. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, has pop culture gaps unless they're a Tarantinoesque encyclopedia of everything pop culture no matter how obscure.
The problem comes when your pop culture gaps are because your parents and your subculture kept you from experiencing the same pop culture and your peers and it was outside your control. That makes every pop culture reference you don't get a reminder of what you missed.
Read 16 tweets
Aug 29, 2018
I have no doubt the Democratic Party in #Florida is going to unite behind Andrew Gillum now that he's got the nomination. He's the most exciting candidate the party has run in a while. I think a lot of people were hoping he'd pull it off even if they went with other candidates.
For what it's worth, I think that the pundits idea that the establishment wanted Graham is overstated. The establishment wanted Graham over Levine, yes, but every conversation I've had over the last year and a half has been people liking both Graham and Gillum.
Contrary to the pundits who seem to think Gillum will have a harder time peeling away Republican voters, I think he's got the potential to generate the kind of excitement that can get disgruntled, Never Trumpers on board. #Florida #FloridaPrimary
Read 10 tweets
Aug 22, 2018
The church should go down with it. The fact that you're more worried about damage control than the fact that the white American evangelicalism you're part of is morally bankrupt and are still both-sides-are-bad-ing it proves there's nothing redeemable. Burn it all down.
Maybe if there's a true cleansing fire, a chastened and repentant church will emerge from the ashes, but at this point worrying about the reputation of white American evangelicalism that's tied itself to the Republican party shows @ShaneClaiborne is part of that moral bankruptcy.
At this point, American evangelicalism deserves everything it gets. This is a faith that looks at the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, points sneering fingers while ignoring their own abuse, and has the gall to blame it all on The Homosexuals. There's nothing of Christ there.
Read 10 tweets
Jul 9, 2018
I want to be really delicate here, but I want to talk about how criticism of intentional weight loss as all being "diet culture" with a subtext of it being anti-feminist can be super ableist. People shouldn't have to apologize or feel guilty about taking steps to help their body.
I've spent the last year and a half with back pain so severe that I've struggled to function at times. I've missed marches, protests, meetings because trying to walk would send my back and hip muscles into an unbearably painful spasm.
I've spent much of that time working on losing weight, which started out because it hurt too much to walk from my bed to the kitchen to get snacks, and then became intentional in hopes that reducing the weight on my spine would minimize pain.
Read 17 tweets

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