17 Oct Writing: Melting Before the High Priestess

The world lost a legendary advocate for the freedom and dignity of all people this week with the passing of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy.

Terran was privileged in getting to speak alongside her this summer at a panel and screening of Dream Homes, the short film about queer collective living featuring both Lupinewood and Miss Major’s House of GG. Before the panel began he told Miss Major the story of the first time they’d met, almost a decade earlier. She surprised him by smiling and saying, “I remember.”

This is the story of that first encounter <3

RIP, Major. You will not be forgotten.

It was after a talk she gave at a community center in Vermont, the time I cried into Miss Major’s cleavage. I had attempted to play it cool and just ask her a question. But I stepped too close to the sun, melted, and she had to mop me up.

She was wearing a silver dress that shimmered under the fluorescent lights. It was zebra striped, or designed to look like it’d been swiped by a beast with giant claws — forgive my memory, this was a long time ago. She was in her early 70s then. I remember her long silver wig and big heels, and her boobs pushed up to the moon.

My father is also a trans woman, and I grew up losing her to alcohol, to her efforts to drown the dream of having been born a girl. At the moment I met Miss Major, I’d been watching this story from my childhood play on seeming repeat with the family I’d chosen to build as an adult. From drug benders to self-harm and attempts at suicide, many of the trans women I loved were chafing under the weight of the demons Miss Major had just described so intimately to this audience. I spent every day running around trying to help, denying my own needs and only dimly aware of my own dysfunctions, making things worse. At night, I dreamt I would wake up and find my friends dead.

Miss Major was sitting when I approached her after the talk, and I knelt down. I just wanted to ask her what I should do, but being on my knees made me feel like I was meeting a high priestess and it broke me open. My question came out in a blabbering rush, not a question after all but a dam release, and after she heard enough to get the gist she just took my head and gently pulled it into her chest.

Honey, she said, in a voice like honey, you just need to caaaalm down. And then she snapped her fingers and a beautiful guy, much younger, was standing at attention. She told him to fetch her business card and he dutifully did. I walked away with her card in my hand, horrified I’d snotted up her shiny dress, certain I wasn’t the first person to do so.

I’m still struck by the wisdom of her gesture. It wasn’t about the business card – she’d probably clocked that I was far too self-conscious to call and take up more of her time. She had answered my question, not with her words but with the very fact of her continued existence: pulling me into her the way she did, forcing me to experience her not as an icon but as flesh-and-blood, decades ahead of where me and my friends were in time, alive and well and frankly on fire. She offered me no road map, but when you’re trying to reach a destination uncharted, what you really need are guiding stars.

Story by Terran