Five years ago, we were living in a world that seemed hard to recognize. So many people I cared about and respected, who had put up with poor treatment of various kinds throughout their lives just because of who they were or were not, were reacting to a culture that had declared open season on them. That declaration came all the way from the top.
I watched with horror and revulsion as that cancer emerged all over our beloved SCA. People I clearly hadn’t really known that well decided they now had permission to be the absolute worst version of themselves, and worse, assumed the rest of us were just going to have to take it. Because they were established. Because they had institutional power and rank in our game.
Among the communities who very noticeably suffered in that moment was the LGBTQ+ community, which comprises a lot of our friends and chosen family. From the outside it looked like a backlash, a well of contempt and loathing bursting out that had been largely kept from view previously. From what my friends had to say…it hadn’t been kept that much out of view, but people had understood that there were limits to what you could acceptably say and do. And, back in 2019, those limits had been lifted.
It was a fight those of us who were active in the SCA at the time still remember. The challenge of expelling people from our community who were actively, unapologetically, and with full intent, making others feel unsafe. It was ugly, and the hole it tore in the SCA, like the larger society around it, has not healed.
I’m a bard. The mission of a bard is to be the voice of the populace, to capture and express the values we hold most dear, and to supply the bite of conscience when it felt necessary. It felt necessary then. So I set myself the goal of trying to capture the struggle we were experiencing in song. To find…a story, a story that Scadians would want to listen to, where I could perhaps shine a new light on this struggle, and put into words and melody how it made me feel.
That song became “Hold the Door Open”. I tried to tell stories that were tied together in this struggle: of a woman whose voice was not heard, of a man of color stepping with care through a white space, of a member of the LGBTQ+ community hiding in plain sight to live a life of meaning, of a would-be ally slowly, fumblingly waking up to what was going on around him. And of a well-connected individual who delighted in stirring shit and stoking division for his own benefit, because those in a position to call him out kept making excuses for him. And of the damage that came of it.
We can debate how well I expressed it, depending on where you stand in the struggle. My attempts to capture it created something of an epic that wasn’t going to be a piece for every fire because of its length.
And in the years that followed, I had hoped that our society, and our Society, had moved on, and this was a piece that might have some richness, but had lost the urgency of the moment when it was composed. That the values the song tries to express had come back to the fore, and mattered enough to most people that we would not let the darkness overtake us again.
Yeah. So much for that. I really, really did not want this piece to be relevant again. But here we are.
As we come to the end of this vitally important Pride Month, I offer this tale once more, as a reminder of the stakes and what is at risk. The struggle has barely started. May those of us of good hearts and strong backs continue, with courage, to take it up, and apply what we have learned.
Drake Oranwood 