John-Paul - Queer Nite

MARCH 22, 2020 © Right Here, Right Now.

I am cycling through panic and calm very rapidly the past week. So, before this, I was putting together my camp for my 75 students. I run a camp called “IncluCity”, and we bring in students from all over the city, and we have students coming in from Lincoln. We teach them about social justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s all about really loving yourself, and loving who you are, and then finding out who you can be an ally and advocate for others. Just great stuff! Really give me passion, just motivates me in everything I do. So, we had to cancel that, and that came from the responsibility of knowing what was coming. And we know that this is going to affect marginalized people… more than we know. And it’s terrifying and it’s scary. We are already at a struggle to survive like there’s many of us who are doing without, and now we just have this pandemic. And that’s just… it’s a depression. What do you think is going to happen people? So yeah, that’s where I’m at.
It’s scary and I wish we can talk about it more openly. I think we have this idea that “Oh, to be American, we have to, you know, keep strong! We have to keep-”. No, we can stop. We have to stop. This train is out of control people. I see our city doing that. That is making me feel better. We are socially distancing, but that’s the reality behind it. We can come up with a perfect plan, but people are still going to die. Six months from now, we’ll be like “Remember when we were on our Zoom meetings?”. People’s lives have changed, and that is why I’m out here, and I’m going to keep talking about it, and I’m going to keep going to the community because they’re still there. People are still working. People are at the grocery store. The world economy is going to continue people. Unless the president says “we have to stop” and he’s not, and he has the power to do that, and only he alone can save it, and we are at that point. But here’s the thing, if he does, there’s this God complex that he gets what he wants. He’s saved us, he gave us the money, and that’s just in the work that I’m doing. In seeing these global patterns, that is authoritarianism. When he is using these socialist policies, but in a god-like way. So, it’s not the will of the people, it’s his will. We’re at his will. We’re at his mercy. And we’re not there yet, but we could be. So that’s why everyone needs to stop working. Everyone needs to go on strike, and just… stop. Everyone needs to stop.

People are alarmed, and that’s good. That’s good. Look around, think about others. How are we helping our fellow humans? For me, I’m able to say this, just kind of my upbringing. People have been marginalized their whole life. I’m queer, I’m here, and I’m used to it, haha you know? And I think that’s what gives me passion. Queer people are going to be fine. We’ll be fine. We’ve survived, we’ve persevered, we’ve adapted. We exist in a system in which, we are not supposed to. That is political, that is defiant, that is radical. So, we’ll be fine. We’ll adapt. We’ll be sad, and right now, I’m here to talk about this cool party that I threw with my friends at a bar that’s closed. We’re working really hard to keep it open, we’re working really hard to keep the community together. But when we have to separate… we’re not going to come back the same. That’s the reality, I think, that people don’t want to face.
Last weekend, everyone was rightfully worried about the service industry, rightfully worried about artists, rightfully worried about the kids in school who weren’t going to get fed. So, we actively responded, and we canceled, and we were rescheduling. But we don’t know what we were scheduled for. Every day is something new, and I think so many of us are every day waking up, doing what we can to have normalcy, to make sure that we are sane, and that’s great. We need to keep doing that. But allow yourself that hour of rage and panic and see what you can do. Facebook is only for “funny memes” and “mutual aid” right now. So, it’s just like “If you are not here to make me laugh, or you’re not here to give me a resource, get out of here”. Like, we’re not looking at pictures of you having a good time. I don’t want to see you on your Zoom meetings like… no! This is communication. This is an emergency. Let’s not normalize some things, and I think that’s what kind of scares me, is just if we start normalizing this. We are socially distanced to be responsible now, right? But that means we need to do it strongly, and we need to have a leader that tells us that. A leader that tells us that “Everyone needs to stay home for two weeks. Here’s how you do it”. They’re not telling us! They could tell us like “Hey how about you… garden?” That’s not even something people are even trying to get the message out. There is this lack of access, lack of education. So, you keep buying, and so you keep working.

I’m a co-founder of Queer Nite. So Queer Nite is me, my friend Katie Hayes, my friend Marissa Nixon, and Zach Schmieder, over there. So, Katie started working at The Sydney, and she had Thursday nights, and The Sydney has always been a loving and great place, and they were like “Katie, whatever you want”. Katie’s queer, and I worked with Marissa at the time at Liberty elementary, and we were like “What if we just did a Queer night?” And so, on Thursday nights, and we made an Instagram, and we started just like posting memes and telling people that we were going to watch Drag Race. And it’s really awesome to see how far we’ve come, cus it was just some friends hanging out, and we put on drag race. I remember the first time we did that, there was someone in here that was like “What is this shit?”. I was like “Oh, it’s a show called RuPaul’s Drag race”. Like, I just told him. I didn’t have to be like “wtf?”. And he was perplexed. He didn’t know. He didn’t know how to communicate that he didn’t know. But that, for me, that was changing my world view about how to accept others. People may react in ways not out of malice, but just that they don’t know. Yeah, he gave me shit, I’m going to give him shit back. I’m just going to tell him “Yeah, it’s men in dresses”. Like, I had to tell him that and he was like “Oh.” And then he watched the whole thing. So, I think for me, that’s what made the Sydney the special place for where the project that I want to do, the flourish, because it was everyday people that were okay to talk to each other and weren’t afraid. I think a lot of the trouble we had, I don’t want to say “trouble”, some of the things we were doing when we were starting, the other, I don’t want to say “other”, the gay community at large, I’ll say, is mostly downtown. They didn’t want to come to Benson because they thought it was unsafe. So that has always been a challenge for us, is to be like “Hey, step outside of your comfort zone. Step outside of your neighborhood. It is safe here. People aren’t actually that scary, but also, know that if something happens, we’ve got your back”. And I think that’s why the Sydney and Queer Nite has had a really good alliance is because it’s like “Oh, we have each other’s back, and we’re here for the good of all people”. So yeah, we just started watching drag race, and then over the summer we were like “Let’s do drag shows!”. Then, I started doing art, and that kind of helped me realize some of my artistic skills, and my creativity flourished. It’s been a wild ride. We’ve done shows. Zach is really good at bringing really awesome into town.

We have bands that reach us because they find our presence on social media. So, we’ve had performers from Berlin, Toronto, Chicago, Brooklyn. So, we’re really just building this very vast network of queer artists. It’s just this amazing network, and I’m just really happy and… I think I’m kind of sad because I don’t know if the way I thought things were going to be will be the same. But I think for me, it’s more than the parties. Like “Oh, I’m sad! I canceled a couple of parties”. Like I’m disappointed, but I also feel propelled that… this is putting me in a different light, where I’m like “I see these issues. I see these problems, and I want to help more”. I want to help on a larger scale. How do I get this message out more? How do I tell about my community? Just the cool things that we’ve done here because I want everyone to know that it can disappear. You look at history, you look at the Tulsa race riots like that community was destroyed! And I think so many people have this privilege, that “Not to me”. It is happening here. Neighborhoods will crumble. The hospitals will fail. Systems will fail. If the hospitals fail, you think there’s not going to be a ripple effect of other things failing? You think the police are going to be able to do anything? That is what people don’t realize. People really think that everything is just out there. Like “They’ll give it to us”. Or they won’t? And what do you do when they don’t? What do you do when you start making exceptions?

I was a public-school teacher for ten years and I quit because the schools were failing. I had roaches, the lights didn’t work in my room, the tables were falling over. The janitors weren’t cleaning, they were drunk. That was my school in Omaha, Nebraska.

JOSH: You were a teacher?

Yeah, and I quit because that system is failing, and I will probably get some flak for saying that, but we’re in a pandemic right now. So, we can’t keep protecting these institutions that are failing us. And I really think we have an amazing community. The Omaha public schools are full of amazing, strong people that are good and want to do the right thing. But the powers that are above are strangling us. They will make it so that we fail people, and that’s what we need to realize is, no we are supposed to fail. Yeah, my public school in Omaha, Nebraska, 90% free and reduced lunch, immigrants, and refugees? You think that’s the one that they’re going to put the money in? No.
Here’s why we’ll survive people: because you have amazing artists and people that will adapt and they’ll make it work. We have people here now that are making it work, but when does that just become the new normal? When is it just “Schools are just cafeterias that are feeding children that go home, and work on their computers”? And then, the kids that don’t have computers, what are they doing? I think we are doing a really good job, but be scared, because that will get you to question the normalcy. I think if we get into a routine, if get into this idea that like “Well, every Wednesday, I go down to the former public school and I hand out lunches to the children”. It’s been two years now. That’s how it happens people. This pandemic is a perfect opportunity for that...to just stay. So, I don’t know. What are they gonna do?