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Content Advisory:
This piece addresses federal law enforcement violence, the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good, and the impact of protest mockery on Queer communities. It includes descriptions of violence, references to death, and strong language, including occasional expletives. Reader discretion is advised.
I AM NOT OK WITH THIS!
I watched the video.
Not the headline. Not the euphemism. Not the careful language meant to sand the edges down. I watched the video itself.
What a grotesque display! I am fucking sick to my stomach.
A grown man stood behind glass, above a crowd, and exposed himself to protesters below. News outlets called it a “cheeky display.” A moment of levity, apparently.
A distraction.
I’m a gay man. I don’t experience moments like this as isolated incidents. I experience them as echoes.
The protesters outside that hotel weren’t there for sport. They were there because two people were killed by federal law enforcement in under two weeks.
One dangerous lesbian who had to be brutally disarmed from her lethal smile.
Another a literal healer and angel to the military community. Gunned down in public.
On American streets. Captured from multiple angles. Explained away, as always, after the fact.
And then — from safety, from elevation, from behind glass
This asshole chose mockery.
The individual hasn’t been publicly identified. No outlet has confirmed his affiliation. But that isn’t the point.
It has never been the damn point.
Context isn’t optional. Context is the story.
This happened at a hotel protesters believed to be housing federal agents.
It happened during demonstrations explicitly about federal violence.
It happened while armored officers controlled the street below.
It happened after two deaths.
It happened while grief was still raw.
You don’t need a badge number to understand what that gesture meant.
It meant: we see you, and we don’t care.
It meant: your anger is a joke.
It meant: your dead are not our problem.
Queer people have seen this before. Not always with guns, not always with riot gear, but always with the same structure: power insulated from consequence, laughing while we’re told to calm down, be patient, wait for investigations, wait for the right language.
This is how erasure works in real time. Not just by silence, but by contempt. By reducing legitimate rage to spectacle. By calling it “both sides” when only one side is burying its dead.
A taunt from above isn’t free speech in a vacuum. It is dominance signaling. It is the comfort of knowing the system won’t come for you the way it comes for the people in the street.
I’m angry. I am allowed to be.
I’m angry because I’ve watched Queer lives repeatedly treated as disposable before, then and now.
I’m angry because I recognize the body language, the posture, the confidence of people who know the rules will bend for them.
I’m angry because mockery always comes after violence, never before. A way to launder cruelty into humor and dare us to object without being labeled hysterical.
This was not a prank. It was a message.
And I refuse to pretend otherwise just to make it easier for institutions that already ask us to swallow far too much.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Colin Lloyd On Unsplash
The post This Wasn’t ‘Cheeky.’ This Was Contempt. appeared first on The Good Men Project.
