If You've Helped to Make Pride Unsafe For Me, I Hate You

We’re mixing up a little bit this week, so you’ll be getting your Gilmore Girly fix later on. Instead today I wanna share something a little more intimate. This will be my third consecutive year mostly working through Pride month. It used to be a time of year that I yearned for the other eleven months of the year. Lately, I wish people would just stop talking about it. 

It really should be one of the most exciting Prides of my life. It’ll be my last Pride in my twenties, in a body and with a voice that makes me not hate to be inside it, and it’ll be the first Pride I’d get to spend not enmeshed in an abusive relationship. But not only has COVID made Pride unsafe for me, so has my ex-abuser. 

For those less familiar with my history, this has been the first year in my adult life that I haven’t been in an abusive relationship. I met my first abuser when I was 18, just coming up on the end of my first year in university where undiagnosed ADHD and autism, combined with a minimum 3 hour commute, spina bifida and living in a home I couldn’t be myself in, I had begun to have my first real experiences of failure. And not just a little failure, gigantic I might get kicked out of school and prove everybody’s worst fears about me true kinda failure. 

I was desperate to be loved and I was trapped in a lifestyle that made it difficult to get to know anyone, spending most of my time commuting or falling asleep in class or too depressed to make it to class and getting into fights with my family. Which is how I ended up trapped in an abusive relationship for nearly eight years, six of them living together. 

I got out of that relationship in a very traumatic fashion December 16, 2019. I went on my first date with the man who’d become my next abuser on January 2, 2020. And as many of you should remember, March 14, 2020 is when Ontario went into a state of emergency. 

I have pretty much only really known isolation. 

If you’re not aware of the data, you may be wondering: What are the chances of getting into back to back abusive relationships? Actually, pretty high. 72% of survivors of childhood abuse go on to experience intimate partner violence (IPV). Disabled women are also twice as likely to experience IPV—and more specifically are more likely to experience sexual and physical violence—while 71% of queer disabled women reported having experienced IPV. And 69% of women with three or four types of disabilities reported experiencing IPV. And a UK study recently found that 90% of autistic women have been sexually assaulted. And of course if you’re trans, you’re also more likely to experience all kinds of violence.

So yeah, the deck has been a little stacked against me. 

My ex was supposed to be a little bit of a revenge/rebound combo fling to jump start my new life post-abuse. He’d been someone my previous abuser had admired from afar and we’d connected briefly with him at a queer event shortly before I got out of that relationship. So when I posted about being newly single and he slid into my DMs, it felt like one of those two birds kinda wins (especially on a belly full of wine), so I agreed to a date.

But when we met for our date, there was something about him that felt comfortable, even though I still hadn’t yet figured out how to feel comfortable living inside my own body again. I liked him, I might actually want to be his friend. So I told him I “got out of a bad relationship” and I liked him but I wasn’t sure what I wanted and he reassured me that he’d be happy being friends and anything else would be a bonus. 

And for a while, it was just a fun and casual friends with benefits kinda thing. Every time he left, there was never a certainty that there’d be a next time. There were always hints—he was gonna be busy for a while, the mention of a girlfriend (but his face had popped up in a non-monogamy group), but then shortly after, he was engaged. But he’d continue to show up in my inbox and I continued to accept the advances. Then he began to initiate moments of affection and began to help with things around my place and he even gifted me a notebook on one of his visits.

But I also started a new contract and fell into a deep depression, so the next two months I didn’t do much to get to know anybody else. When March rolled around, I began to reach out to friends and make plans, and it was gonna be time for my slut era. You see where this is going?

When the lockdown began, I lived alone. There were still piles and boxes of my previous abuser’s things haunting me from every corner of my apartment. I went at least six weeks without experiencing human touch. 

Now our near-daily flirtations were a lifeline to human connection, to a reminder that I was desirable. Between his engagement and COVID, I was always waiting for the messages to drop off or to have an uncomfortable conversation about not having room in his bubble, especially when it became clear that we were gonna be in this for the long haul. Instead, about a month in, that he was making housecalls. I wasn’t going to say no. 

We’d only seen each other a couple of times, though the last time had felt different, when I made the discovery that he’d been cheating on his fiance and they were closing off their relationship. I was furious and devastated. 

Which is how I spent my first pandemic Pride and the majority of that summer. I tried to walk away but he’d reappear, then a few days later I’d be walking away again. We tried to hang out and it was clear that being friends wasn’t going to be sustainable so we said our goodbyes.

I tried to focus on myself, I tried to focus on finding work, I tried to focus on dating other people. But I was hooked on the roller coaster, even though I knew to stay the hell away from it. That is until, about a month or so later, when I got a message that things were over with his fiance—she’d kicked him out. 

By the next Pride, I was moving in with him after chaos that ended with the flight of a confusing roommate-turned-nesting partner that I was still trying to understand. It was also around the first time that he turned explosive on me as we’d began slowly transitioning my life from my formerly rent-controlled, affordable though inaccessible apartment. I had a part-time job and shitty credit. 

Fuck.

Then stories about the previous “roommate” stopped lining up and I started to ask questions. And boy howdy did I discover that despite being what I thought was so careful, I had in fact actually been triangulated into believing he’d just been “trapped” in a toxic cycle.

I tried to believe that things were okay in our relationship. That the collective trauma of the pandemic was just bringing out the worst in each other. I started to even think that maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly. 

Then I spent the following Trans Day of Remembrance sobbing and crying and sending texts to him not to throw me out for thinking it was transphobic to tell me that he didn’t want to have sex with me because I didn’t have the right genitals while he was out on a date with a trans woman. Just weeks after I’d come back from the last time he’d kicked me out over trying to set COVID boundaries so I could invite my friends over for Halloween. 

By that third pandemic Pride, he’d given me COVID twice in a six week period, and ended up moving out when I went public about him going to raves unmasked after spending all day taking care of me the first time I’d contracted it. As I’d begged him not to potentially expose big groups of people to COVID, that if any of them went home to somebody high-risk that they could die, he screamed at me that he didn’t care what happened to disabled people. 

 But I was still recovering from COVID and I needed help, so he agreed to offer me transitional support while I worked out a new routine, taking a box of KN95s to at least mask at events if he’d come over, promising he really did want to protect my health. Before he left, he promised me that he was taking a break from dating, taking time to be alone and figure out his shit before getting involved with anyone else, and promising not to get involved with anyone disabled or survivors of abuse until he figured out why he’d begun to act the way that he was. 

Less than two weeks later he told me that he was going to start dating, okay well, actually he already had some dates planned. I told him that I didn’t want to see him then; that if he was going to put someone else through what he did to me, I wasn’t going to watch. He didn’t think that was reasonable, but a few days later he called to tell me that he’d decided not to go through with the dates (which I later discovered were cancelled from the other end), and then began to post videos of him unmasked at parties that night. 

I was livid. I was gutted. I felt like nothing as queer community returned to reveling while I dropped to my lowest weight in my adult life without that transitional care. 

Which is why it was pretty disheartening to discover that Toronto Pride had booked him on a prominent stage. A trusted connection reached out to Pride decisionmakers for me, who returned with a paltry, “We don’t have a vetting process for the talent we book.” He performed the gig. 

A week later I reached out to someone on the line-up who identified as a non-binary disabled survivor, intending to give them warning. They’d already been on a date and were lined up to have another. Appalled to hear that he’d been abusive, they said that they were going to stop seeing him. 

A month later, during a mediation session where he continued to try to convince me that if I hadn’t been so controlling and manipulative, he’d never have abused me, he lets slip that he’d convinced them to give him another chance. I told him if he didn’t want to be accountable to me, I bet they were going to want accountability from him, just like I had when he came to me after cheating on his ex-fiance. 

I reached back out and, what do you know, they’d asked him to come clean about everything that happened and that he’d be accountable for it all. I asked if he told them about any of the abuse I hadn’t shared online. He hadn’t. He knew they wouldn’t tolerate lying. As I began to describe the accountability process he was supposed to be in with me and the ways he’d begun to insert himself into my support system, they remarked how they’d noticed all the same things I had that first time. 

Between trying to avoid contracting COVID for a third time, while already still feeling the possible impacts of long COVID on my body, and trying to avoid my abuser, it’s been pretty difficult to feel empowered and celebratory, or even just sexy, for this fourth pandemic Pride. 

Especially after hearing from friends around me that he was starting to pop up on community Pride comedy line-ups again. And then, despite telling me that he was definitely sure he was a cis man, is showing up at every sapphic event that’s been thrown so far. And worse yet, at these events, despite being in his thirties, was seen grinding his way through mostly queer and trans femmes under the age of 25—which is pretty alarming since women under 25 are more likely to experience IPV than those who are older. 

This last year has been harder than ever to leave the house between the post-COVID fatigue and the panic attacks I’d get at the possibility of running into him somewhere accidentally. Sometimes I see someone with a hoodie that looks like one of his from my balcony and I forget how to breathe. 

I’m extremely grateful to have a system of support that believes and tries to protect me. But if you heard about the abuse and still helped give my abuser access to platforms and pools of potential victims, then I hope you know that I will hate you for letting him get away with not just harming me, but anyone else that falls into his trap because you believed that I must be crazy before he could be abusive. That’s not a kind of hate that may ever go away.