This is Not a Fairy Tale

This is not a fairy tale. The queens in this story are boys who like to ‘Dress Resembling A Girl’.

Their queendom is the centre of a well-lit stage and, if you ask them nicely, they will bequeath the secrets of their face beat to girls getting real about their glo up.

Fabulous rulers of everything the highlight touches, the queens watch over the princes.

Sometimes sensitive, often stylish, always boys who like other boys, the princes spend their days battling biblical monsters for the freedom to love whoever they please. And they are joined by their sisters.

Sometimes femme, other times butch, always girls who like other girls, the princesses are as diverse as the princes and face the same foes.

Mean, gum-flapping grotesqueries who, for all their ability to quote the Bible, forget the essence of John 8:7 – “let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

In all this glorious life beyond the closet, one cannot forget the shapeshifters.

The displaced spirits who were born one thing but feel like another and who often seek out medical men in desperate need of potions to help transition from the former to the fitting.

This is the story of one such shapeshifter.

A bubbly, buoyant, beautiful girl who is technically still a boy but has begun the physical journey to True Self.

Recently battered and bruised, she sits at Primi Piatti barely holding back tears. Dark glasses obscure a face softened by potions and a colourless elixir steadies her shaking hands as she tells a story of walking down a street.

That is all. But it is enough.

Simply being has angered some of the villagers and they beat her to the ground calling her terrible, troubling, terrifying things.

Nobody helps. Passersby join in.

Most of them not with fists but with weaponised words and when she finally makes her way home, she feels awfully alone.

Years later, some men will stage a play.

Productive princes, nay, creative creatures who have survived religious attempts to exorcise their demons, assaults with broken bottles and the invisible wounds that sting upon slurs like ‘m*ffie’, ‘d*ke’, ‘fairy’, ‘f*g’.

Through their story and the foregrounding of their faces and their feelings in the circulating stories, the shapeshifter sees that she is not alone. Not isolated in her experience of threats, warnings, assaults, attacks and her forceful removal from restrooms.

This feeling will only grow when she hears of Swakop Pride.

A solidarity march by the sea that battles the beasts of archaic laws and discrimination for people like her, for drag queens, the gay and the lesbian. Many who march are straights.

Not mean like the ones so offended by her being that they invade her space and assault her person but allies who believe she can be whoever she wants to be.

Friends who think that people should be able to love whoever they fall in love with without fear of verbal and physical assault.

Brain users who realise that nobody simply chooses a sexual orientation or a gender identity that will be beset with pain, abandonment, rejection, violence, intolerance and even murder so they make what will be a challenging road a little smoother with love and acceptance.

Contrary to the grossest of the grotesqueries, when faced with stories about the LGBTI community, these straights do not use their God-given hours to type hate speech in comment sections.

Instead they live and let live.

Quite sure that they were put on earth to do more than worry about what people are wearing, doing or who they are sleeping with, the straights mind their own business and encourage others to do the same.

Instead, like the shapeshifter, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and rise as fierce, fearless forms of humanity who wake up every day and do what the majority of us struggle to do on any given one…

Love, laugh, let be… and live tolerantly ever after.

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