Life As Performance Art 90

I have left a lengthy message on my housing providers' voicemail. This simply for one little reason: Pride Week, nor anything else that relates to LGBTQ matters is ever acknowledged in my apartment building. There is not even one tiny little rainbow sticker on the door, nothing. It is as though we do not even exist. This is no surprise to me, Gentle Reader. More Than A Roof is run by evangelical Christians, and everyone knows that evangelical Christians are not friendly towards queers. They tend to take the Bible very literally, swallowing everything that St. Paul wrote in the New Testament, including all his nonsense about slavery, women and homosexuals. Now that same gender marriage has been legal in this country for the last fourteen years, this does place my housing providers in rather an awkward position. They are no longer allowed to openly discriminate against us. But they still pretend that we don't exist. I remember around six years ago or so, when Xtra West, the local LGBTQ newspaper, was still widely available, and someone would leave a stack of papers at our building door. Now sometimes the cover would push even my boundaries, occasionally bordering almost (but not quite) on soft porn, so I can appreciate the squeamishness that might be induced in some. Still, it was a legitimate paper with lots of interesting news relative to the LGBTQ community and people with open minds. One of the fundamentalists in my building, a tenant (I think), got in the habit of removing those papers from the foyer and dumping them in the recycling bin. I decided to fight. I would rescue the papers, bring them back and stack them neatly and prominently by the mail boxes. If someone tried to hide them, I would remove whatever was covering them, or put the papers right side up again. I even got support from our building manager, himself an evangelical who does not approve of same gender marriage. He even put up a notice in the elevator, remonstrating with tenants that they please respect those who are different. I was also having an email dialogue around that time with the editor of Xtra West. She was very supportive and her cheerleading sometimes helped make my day. I know that one more time, I am sticking my neck out, and taking a chance. I have basically come out to my building managers, telling them on the voice message that I am a queer asexual and androgynous man. I also told them that as a Christian with a strong relationship with God, that I also support and approve of monogamous marriage, including same gender marriage, even though, also as a Christian with a strong relationship with God, I might happen to disapprove of promiscuity and sexual licentiousness. I left them this message for the simple reason that, one more time, they had plastered the elevator with ads about every single summer event in this city, including the Celebration of Light fireworks competition, except for one very prominent and well-attended occasion. That's right. The Pride Parade. That celebration of the love that dare not speak its name, and that in my building anyway, goes on being silenced. So, this year I am addressing this. My guess is that both the young, presumably straight, but who only knows, men who manage this building are going to feel too embarrassed and squeamish to want to respond to my voice message. I also suspect that otherwise they are going to do nothing, that under the mandate of the Christian organization that signs their paycheque, they re going to go on acting as though people like me just don't exist, at least not here in their beloved island of evangelical sanctity. Time alone will tell. On the other hand, I just might get pleasantly surprised. For now, I am contemplating picking up a small rainbow sticker, and putting it in prominent place in the foyer, on the door or in the elevator, just to see what happens. It is decidedly uncomfortable, and rather boring, feeling treated where I live as though I don't even exist. Time will tell.