Before the gods
You need no divine precedent
Queer people do not have to find themselves in a statue before they are allowed to exist, or to pray.
There is a hunger, understandable and sometimes tender, to find a god who already knew your name. The hunger becomes a trap when your right to transition, to love, to opt out of romance, or to simply be left alone is treated as a case you must win with citations.
Ancient evidence of same-sex desire and of gender variance is real. It is also uneven, often elite, often about age and status, and often silent about the people who had the least power to be written down. A library can tell that truth and still refuse to make the truth a ticket booth.
What precedent cannot do
- It cannot make a living teenager safe. Their safety is a present-tense obligation of the adults around them.
- It cannot prove that a modern identity is ‘natural’ in a way that should matter more than a person’s account of their own life.
- It cannot be required of asexual people, who are sometimes handed a myth and told to try harder.
- It cannot oblige you to worship the figure who vaguely resembles a hashtag.
What study can do
It can keep you company. It can complicate a bully’s claim that ‘this never existed.’ It can give devotion a grammar. Company is not permission. Permission was not the bully’s to withhold.
I do not file an appeal with the past. I light a candle because I am alive, which is an adequate credential.