The Power of Community

This is a love letter to community—mine, yours, all of ours. Last night, I went with my wife and friends to a Seattle Town Hall event that featured Alison Bechdel. If you don’t know her work, you have a wonderful surprise awaiting you! In the early 1980s, she created the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” which ran serially in lesbian, gay, and alternative publications from 1983-2008. Since then, she has published three graphic memoirs (one of which, Fun Home, inspired a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical) and her new comic novel, Spent. DTWOF, as it was known, depicted the lives of feisty, diverse, dedicated, sexy, funny, sometimes neurotic lesbian feminists living and loving in a complex community at a time when realistic images and stories of lesbians were nowhere to be found. To our collective joy, Bechdel checks back in with her fictional friends from DTWOF in Spent.

At the Town Hall event, I and other aging members of Seattle’s dyke community sat together in two beautiful old church pews near the front of the Great Hall. Most of us have known each other for 45-50 years. If I tried to draw a picture of our connections over five decades, it would take pages: who worked in activist groups with whom; who had the same ex-lovers as whom; who raised children together, lived together, played and traveled together, grieved losses together. Despite vicious attacks on queer communities during those five decades, intensified today, we are still here, still fighting for change. Many aspects of our lives have dramatically improved as a result of past fights.

Earlier this month, another community I’m part of experienced a sudden, shocking death. In December 2019, just months before the COVID pandemic shut down Seattle and the rest of the world, we bonded together to obtain and provide housing for a man we all cared for who was living in his van with his beloved cat. We all got to know Don through long, erudite conversations as he sold Real Change papers in front of our local natural food store, PCC. Don loved books and owned hundreds, if not thousands, of rare treasures, stashed away in storage. Lately, he had been having some health challenges. Early in the morning on Mother’s Day, a neighbor pushed his toddler daughter in a stroller past Don’s building on his way to buy coffee for his wife. He saw Don lying motionless on his back in the yard and called 911. He and the medics were unable to resuscitate Don. I got a call from another group member at 8:15 am and rushed to the apartment two blocks away. For the next three hours, while medics, police, and the medical examiner did what they had to do, members of our group, neighbors, and Don’s brother and sister-in-law gathered in the grassy parking strip between two young redbud trees. On this unusually sunny and warm Mother’s Day, we said our goodbyes to Don, hugged and comforted each other, shared stories, cried and laughed. My wife and I dashed home and brought back chairs, sunscreen and snacks so that we would be more comfortable. The neighbor who had found Don returned with his wife and daughter. We did our best to provide solace for him as well.

Communities are messy. When times are tough, it’s often easier to fight with each other than to direct our frustration and fury at those who oppress us. Sometimes, despite our best intentions, we are unable to be there for each other in times of need. But in the end, we are still here, loving and supporting each other, doing what needs to be done, holding in our hearts and minds a vision of a better world. Fascists underestimate the staying power of community, and sometimes we do too. Right now, in our current crisis, it’s our strongest asset.