After a pandemic year, it felt like nothing had changed. But I had.
Unmasked and hyper-aware of the midnight crowd swelling around me, I felt my heart suddenly beating too fast. Partly, I was still getting used to breathing indoor air, to being around people at all. But being back inside one of my frequent gay haunts also felt somehow sour-sweet, like the Cuervo and soda I gripped too tight. My head seemed to float above me like a helium balloon; I imagined a smiley face scrawled across it in magic marker. I was happy, after all — wasn’t I?
Two drinks in and my back was still glued to the wall. I watched the mostly white men flowing in both directions and wondered if they’d noticed me, my dense black beard and almond skin, and what they saw. This time last year, I’d been cutting my hair over the bathroom sink; I’d forgotten the unmoored feeling of being assessed, or worse, overlooked. After the third drink, I was wedged tight into a steamy stampede of bodies, dislodging myself into a familiar blur. I kissed a guy I had kissed many times before, and another I had met for just 10 minutes, unimaginable only weeks prior.
I fumbled conversations with strangers, felt the cold trickle of a drink spilled down my back, and waited my turn to pee. By the time I burst into the early morning air to bike the 20 blocks home, I was relieved to be alone again — and aware that I had already taken a night out for granted.
It’s Pride month after a devastating year of isolation and loss. The pandemic has wreaked disproportionate havoc on LGBTQ+ people, who have been more likely to face bad health outcomes, economic hardship, and mental health strain as a result of Covid-19 and the preventive measures that forced us apart.
Now, we’re meant to be making up for lost time, and June being our prescribed month for social and political unity, it’s supposed to mean something. Some people continued clandestine gatherings all along, as style pages whispered, while others were dragged on social media for doing so openly. But secrets and shame are the opposite of Pride. This month was going to be different.
But lonely, and sometimes desperate, as lockdown and quarantine had been, I had also felt a secret measure of relief, escaping the microscope that can hover over many queer spaces. In the absence of social pressures — about my skin color, my body, my clothes, or whether I was having the best possible time — I leaned into everything underneath all that and asked myself who I am and what I actually want.
It’s thrilling to feel too-loud beats thunder through my Converse soles again, to fill my senses with other men. But I know now that what I once went out in search of isn’t just around the next corner, crouched in the blue-tinted dark. I wasn’t going to feel any less alone in a crush of people until I could sit with myself and accept what I found.
There’s a reason the movement for queer liberation was galvanized at San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria and the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan. Gays, lesbians, and particularly Black and brown trans women, couldn’t find refuge, livelihood, or each other, outside all-night diners and basement bars. Their identities and behavior criminalized, some pursued survival sex work. They flocked to the only spaces where they could be themselves, meet acceptance, and escape violence. Until violence was thrust upon them by police, and they fought, fiercely, for themselves, their right to be together, and, whether or not they knew it at the time, for us.
I recognize how fortunate I’ve been not to have faced fear for my well-being, harassment, or worse beyond playground bullying. I first stumbled onto Pride, on the last Sunday in June nearly two decades ago, and felt the euphoria of diving into a sea of queer revelers; I didn’t come to outrun any physical threat to my safety. Still, I had never felt such a sprawling connection to other queer people than I did that day, despite being too young to follow any of them into a bar.
When I eventually found my way onto the dance floor, the joy of camaraderie fused with a need to feel desired. It was a hunger young and eager enough not to recognize that the attention I craved and received was mostly from white men. I valued my otherness only insofar as they demonstrated its worth, with an approving look, touch, or invitation. I understood Pride in concept, but needed physical proof, however false, that I shouldn’t feel ashamed of not resembling the men culture taught me to idealize, chiseled and white like carved stone.
Considering the significance of watering holes to queer liberation, what I’ve looked for inside them all these years can feel comparably shallow, even if it’s partly what they’ve always been for: to feel seen, perhaps even admired. To drink and dance and escape. To touch and connect and actually feel connected. To seek sex and maybe, impossibly, intimacy.
In the months (and months) when no such experiences were possible, I would often submerge as deep as possible into my too-small, bath-bombed tub, heat curving around my body. Turned-up beats echoed off the tiled walls, flooding my dim-lit bathroom with the ache and defiance of SZA, Rihanna, and Fiona.
I thought about how absurd it was that I had ever sought such a thoroughly cocooned feeling in a club, looking to others as a source of warmth and assurance, one I couldn’t control down to the degree. I wondered what all of those people were doing at that moment, and if they felt as alone at the end of their ropes as I did. I cried more than once, curled up and dripping on the toilet lid to phone a friend.
On nights when I was forced to think about what I missed most about being out, I began to realize that I had been searching, sometimes frantically and with a misguided exuberance, for not just community but the sort of love and validation that only I can give myself. I wanted men to assure me that I deserve attention and pleasure and respect. I wanted to seem like I already knew as much, but the fact is I often didn’t.
The scrutinies that cis gay men pile onto each other have for some surpassed discrimination from outside the community as the main drivers of anxiety and depression. As we’ve gained greater social acceptance from the dominant culture, the pressures that gay and bi men, in particular, aim at our own — including racism and a fixation on body image, status, and sex — are making many of us quietly miserable. Black, Asian, and other men of color, as well as those who don’t fit masculine body ideals or are disabled, are disproportionately impacted by poor mental health outcomes.
What started as essential safe havens for acceptance and connection have also become fertile ground for posturing and exclusion, sown by our own shame. But if we’ve learned anything over the past year, I hope it is to question, at every opportunity, who is included in the “we” that is meant to express community among LGBTQ+ people. The impossible standards that gay and bi men foist on each other have never felt more privileged and myopic. Their psychological impacts, like the alienation I’ve felt pressed against the perspiring wall of a mostly white club, are real.
But the past year has also renewed my gratitude for all of life’s basic needs — health, safety, employment, shelter — everything our movement was founded on fighting for, from within those very bars. Those of us who are fortunate enough to enjoy all of those essentials have a responsibility to stand up and fight for those who don’t.
Having witnessed how the least advantaged among us suffered most from the pandemic, and having woken up, god willing, to the pervasiveness of white supremacy and anti-Black racism in every aspect of culture and society, I hope we’re ready to treat each other with more kindness and compassion. To put our wallets and our necks and our livelihoods on the line to demand justice for Black trans lives. To embrace and uplift anyone who has shown up at Pride, in a big city or rural town, and felt safety and acceptance for the first time.
On a closed-off avenue the following weekend, a half dozen queer girls no older than I was at my first Pride gingerly shook their limbs into a mini dance circle. On a side street, aspiring music acts took the stage in front of a diffuse and diverse crowd. Brooklyn Pride brought an afternoon street fair to Park Slope, skateboards rattling against the pavement, vibrant, fresh dye jobs glinting in the sun. A group of friends stood around grazing pizza from the box, each in a different-colored cowboy hat from Party City, the paper bag still in tow.
Later that night I ducked into the nearby bar Good Judy, where a Black femme in a color-block jumpsuit checked my vaccination status. Just inside, two girls were selling beaded bracelets with phrases like “bb dyke” and “she/them” strung together in blue and pink. A dance floor beyond the bar teemed with a mix of 20-somethings going wild for music released when I was their age, already tinged with nostalgia. I snaked my way into the middle intending to join them, but kept going through the back door when I felt the cool air of the courtyard.
I had already befriended a boyish Southerner, who towered above me in heels and produced for me a beer from his backpack (“I adore you,” he said). An older woman with cropped hair asked to borrow his tiara and turned to pose with no fewer than 15 of her friends. She looked like the spitting image of Olivia Coleman. He stooped down to take their picture, a flash illuminating the night air. I smiled up at the dark and wondered how I was ever going to get home.
Naveen Kumar is a culture critic and journalist whose recent work appears on Them and the Daily Beast. Follow him on Twitter @Mr_NaveenKumar.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Axios interview is another example of this worrying trend.
As the world increasingly speaks out against China’s genocide of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, the quietest voices continue to belong to the leaders of Muslim-majority countries.
Look no further than Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s interview this week with Axios’s Jonathan Swan. Swan asked why the premier, who often speaks out on Islamophobia in the West, has been noticeably silent on the human rights atrocities happening just across his country’s border.
Khan parroted China’s denial that it has placed roughly 2 million Uyghurs in internment camps and then evaded the issue over and over again. “This is not the case, according to them,” Khan said, adding that any disagreements between Pakistan and China are hashed out privately.
That’s a jarring statement. Instead of offering a pro forma “Yes, of course we’re concerned by this” before moving on, Khan chose instead to minimize the problem altogether.
Why would Khan do such a thing during a high-profile interview, with his self-enhanced image as a defender of Muslims on the line? The prime minister gave the game away later in the interview: “China has been one of the greatest friends to us in our most difficult times, when we were really struggling,” Khan told Swan. “When our economy was struggling, China came to our rescue.”
China has given Pakistan billions in loans to prop up its economy, allowing the country to improve transit systems and a failing electrical grid, among other things. China didn’t do that out of the goodness of its heart; it did so partly to make Pakistan dependent on China, thus strong-arming it into a closer bilateral relationship.
It’s a play China has run over and over through its “Belt and Road Initiative.” China aims to build a large land-and-sea trading network connecting much of Asia to Europe, Africa, and beyond. To do that, it makes investment and loan deals with nations on that “road” — like Pakistan — so that they form part of the network. The trade, in effect, is that China increases its power and influence while other countries get the economic assistance they need.
That relationship has helped Pakistan avoid economic calamity. But as of right now, it doesn’t have the funds to pay China back. That could spell trouble for Pakistan, as China has a history of taking a nation’s assets when it doesn’t pay its debts, like when it took over a Sri Lankan port in 2018.
To avoid a similar fate, and perhaps keep the money flowing, Khan likely didn’t want to badmouth China in public. “China is Pakistan’s only lifeline out of debt,” said Sameer Lalwani, director of the South Asia program at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC.
Look elsewhere in the world and the story is essentially the same. Even the leaders of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — who often portray themselves as the defenders of Islam and of the ummah, the global Muslim community — are choosing to prioritize their economic relationship with China over standing up for the Uyghurs.
In the short term, they may get more funds from the relationship with China, but in the long run, the price they pay is in their reputation.
China is buying Muslim leaders’ silence on the Uyghurs
George Mason University’s Jonathan Hoffman, who studies Middle Eastern politics and geopolitical competition, told me Khan’s statements are in line with the trend of Muslim leaders turning away from China’s gross human rights abuses.
They “represent a broader pattern in the region where the plight of the Uyghurs is sidelined as China has quickly become the largest oil consumer, trade partner, and investor,” he told me.
That helps explain some of the actions by Muslim-majority nations and their leaders in recent years, which Hoffman wrote about in May for the Washington Post:
In 2019, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt were among 37 countries that signed a letter to the U.N. Human Rights Council praising China’s “contribution to the international human rights cause” — with claims that China restored “safety and security” after facing “terrorism, separatism and extremism” in Xinjiang…
When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited China in 2019, he declared that “China has the right to take anti‐terrorism and de‐extremism measures to safeguard national security.” And a March 2019 statement by the Saudi‐based Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) praised China for “providing care to its Muslim citizens.”
The most egregious example of how China has bought loyalty, compliance, and silence, though, may be Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
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Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images
In 2009 — as Chinese authorities cracked down on Uyghurs amid ethnic violence in Xinjiang, and long before there were credible reports of arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and forced labor — the Turkish leader spoke out about what was happening.
“The incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide. There’s no point in interpreting this otherwise,” Erdoğan said.
But now his tune has changed. In January, Turkish police broke up a protest led by local Uyghurs outside China’s consulate in Istanbul, and the government stands accused of extraditing Uyghurs to China in exchange for Covid-19 vaccines.
Why such a shift? You guessed it: Money.
The Turkish economy was in a downturn well before the coronavirus pandemic, but China has come to the rescue. Erdoğan and his team have sought billions from China in recent years, and China became the largest importer of Turkish goods in 2020. Saying anything negative about the Chinese government — especially on the Uyghur issue — could sever the financial lifeline China provides.
That said, the pressure from the pro-Uyghur public in Turkey has forced a slight shift in the Erdoğan regime’s rhetoric in recent months. In March, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said his administration has brought up the plight of the Uyghurs in private discussions with Chinese officials.
Still, that falls far short of what the world should expect from Muslim leaders.
The IOC estimates that well above 80 percent of athletes will have their shots. But with unequal vaccination access globally, the preparations are raising yet another debate.
Some 15,000 Olympians and Paralympians from more than 200 countries, along with thousands of coaches and support staff, are heading to Japan for the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, which kick off in July.
And it’s looking like the games will be a pretty vaccinated place, according to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
In a statement to Vox, an IOC spokesperson said that “well above” 80 percent of residents of the Olympic and Paralympic Village in Tokyo will be vaccinated, and somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of the media.
Yet those figures are a reminder of the risks and realities of holding an Olympics when a pandemic is very much still raging and vaccine access is so severely limited in many parts of the world.
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Only about 22 percent of the globe’s population has received their first shot, the vast majority in higher-income countries. Japan’s vaccination campaign, after a sluggish start, is now inoculating about 1 million people a day. But that won’t be even close enough to get everyone under 65 jabbed by the time the Olympic ceremonies start in late July.
Given the scale of the vaccination need globally and the world’s race against the clock to stave off new variants, the effort invested in the Olympics can seem a bit misplaced. Then again, despite calls for the games to be canceled, the Olympics are going ahead, and vaccination is the best tool available to reduce the Covid-19 risks for participants, staff, and volunteers, and the people in Japan.
Which is why it makes sense to make sure everyone going to the Tokyo Olympics has their shot at, well, a shot.
What’s at stake in Tokyo
A lot is riding on the Tokyo Games.
They’re already the most expensive Olympic Games on record at more than $25 billion, with a couple extra billion added on due to the one-year pandemic delay. Business and media interests have huge stakes in these games going ahead as planned. Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide’s ability to successfully host the Olympics is seen as a political test of his handling of the pandemic. And this is really the last chance to host the 2020 Games: There will be no postponing it another year.
For all of these reasons, the Japanese government and the IOC are heavily invested in making sure the games happen, and they’ve promised the games will be “safe and secure.”
Foreign fans are banned from attending, but officials on Monday said local spectators will be allowed, with venues limited to 50 percent capacity, or up to 10,000 fans — all of whom must follow Covid-19 protocols including mask-wearing and, somehow, no loud cheering. The decision to let fans attend may change if Japan sees another coronavirus spike, although cases have declined since a peak in May.
Athletes and other participants must also follow strict protocols — mask-wearing, social distancing, avoiding public transport — as officials attempt to create a version of a “bubble.” Athletes will have to detail their daily activities and get tested regularly (including follow-up testing in case of false positives). Breaking these rules could potentially lead to disqualification or deportation, much in the same way a positive Covid-19 test might.
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Yet many Japanese people and public health experts are still concerned that the games will become a “superspreader” event, with people bringing variants from all corners of the world or taking the virus with them when they leave. The risks are not just to the attendees, but to those in Tokyo and the rest of Japan, whose health care systems may be left dealing with a surge in the wake of the Olympics.
To further mitigate that risk — and save the games — the IOC in January launched an effort to work with the World Health Organization to get all Olympic athletes vaccinated in time, though they’re not going so far as to mandate vaccinations before the competitors arrive in Tokyo. As the Telegraph reported, part of that plan involved accelerating Covid-19 shots for athletes in countries that had yet to roll out their vaccination campaigns.
In May, the IOC announced an agreement with Pfizer/BioNTech to distribute vaccine doses to athletes and delegates from participating countries. In an emailed statement, Pfizer’s Keanna Ghazvini, a senior associate for global media relations, said Pfizer/BioNTech and the IOC have made “meaningful progress” and anticipate that “more than 20 countries, where the necessary regulatory and legal conditions exist, will commit to the vaccination program.” In addition, there are efforts “to establish central locations where delegations from countries where the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine is not yet available can go to be vaccinated ahead of traveling to Japan.”
Tokyo officials have also begun to inoculate local staff and members of the media who will be covering the Olympics, with the goal of vaccinating about 2,500 people per day. Earlier in June, Tokyo 2020 President Seiko Hashimoto said about 70,000 of Tokyo’s volunteers and staff would be able to start getting vaccinated, though thousands of volunteers have already quit over Covid-19 safety concerns. In a statement, the IOC said Japan had secured an additional 40,000 doses from Pfizer/BioNTech to vaccinate Olympic workers. Japan also started vaccinating its athletes at the beginning of June, with the goal of vaccinating 95 percent of people on its teams.
Of course, athletes in places such as the United States can easily get a shot, though the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) didn’t require vaccinations for its delegation either. The USOPC, which did not return a request for comment, previously said it wouldn’t track vaccination rates among athletes. But in some sports, vaccination rates are quite high: USA Swimming, for example, said at least 90 percent of its team is vaccinated.
Elsewhere, some countries committed to vaccinating their Olympic athletes in the early days of their rollouts. Hungary began inoculating its Tokyo 2020 (and Beijing 2022) athletes in January. Israel, which launched one of the fastest vaccination campaigns in the world, promised all competitors would have a shot by May. Even Mexico, whose vaccine campaign has been less than stellar, still put Olympians among its priority groups. And as of early this month, India — which is emerging from a brutal coronavirus wave — said dozens of its Olympic athletes and other attendees had been fully vaccinated, with many more having received their first dose.
So, is it all worth it?
If the IOC estimates are correct, it looks like vaccination rates among Olympic participants will be high.
That’s certainly a good thing for the Olympics — but zoom out, and the rest of the world is still very much dealing with the pandemic. Vaccine access around the world is deeply unequal, particularly when it comes to high-income versus low-income countries. About 85 percent of the world’s shots have gone to people in high- or upper-middle-income countries, compared to 0.3 percent of doses in low-income countries, according to the New York Times.
It can feel disjointed to devote all of these efforts to vaccinate Olympic athletes and their entourages just so the games can go on.
But barring something extraordinary, the Olympics are happening. And experts said it makes more sense to adapt to this reality and ensure they’re as safe as possible — and that means prioritizing vaccinations.
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Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University, said that, overall, the number of Olympic athletes and volunteers is relatively tiny when viewed on a global scale, and doesn’t amount to a huge diversion of vaccine supply. But there are going to be vulnerable people present in Tokyo, and that’s why he said all involved — from coaches to staff to food handlers — should get vaccinated immediately, especially as the time window for a two-dose regiment is about to close.
Maybe Olympic athletes don’t fit squarely into our definition of essential workers. But if we see the Olympics as having cultural and international significance — and surely someone does if we’re trying to pull them off in a pandemic — then investing equitably in all Olympians and attendees is the best option. It would be far more glaringly unequal if teams from the US or Europe showed up fully vaccinated while teams from Africa or Latin America did not.
“These athletes that come from poor countries are citizens of the world,” Caplan said. “And that’s what we’re promoting — world citizenship. And that’s why they’re getting vaccinated.”
I reached out to a few US Olympic and Paralympic athletes, and some athletes said getting the vaccine was the best way to protect themselves, and the best hope to compete in Tokyo. But some saw it in bigger terms, too — viewing it as their responsibility as both travelers and public figures.
“As a global citizen, it’s the best way that I can help to make the pandemic end sooner,” Kyra Condie, a climber who’ll be representing the US in Tokyo, told me via voice memo. High-profile Olympians getting vaccines and winning gold medals after they do so could also ease some vaccine hesitancy, especially among young and healthy people.
Inevitably, Covid-19 will still cause some disruptions to the games. Not all competitors will be vaccinated, and that includes some who are publicly skeptical and who also have a big platform. And as the New York Yankees could tell you, vaccines aren’t a perfect barrier against Covid-19, and they aren’t designed to be. Just this week, a member of the Ugandan Olympic team tested positive for Covid-19 after arriving in Japan. He, like the rest of his Olympic team, was fully vaccinated.
The pandemic isn’t over, and these strange, year-late Olympics will remind us of that. But they could also offer a bit of a break from it. As Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and an Olympic medalist, put it, the Olympics can be seen as a “beacon of hope.”
“I think that it shows us where we’re headed,” she said, “and how we can come together as a global community.”