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gender and decided they needed to give themselves space to figure it out. After a lot of questioning, and a deep depressive period, they came to the conclusion they were non-binary. It was freeing. In part because of its inclusivity. They can say they’re non-binary, and it doesn’t erase their life before that. They were a boy for a while, and that was fine, but it wasn’t working out. For John, the term “non-binary” felt like it acknowledged a connection to their past and made space for the fact that they sometimes don’t care if people call them “he.”
John now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, which has a population of several hundred thousand people. Very sprawling. Kansas City is very liberal, for the most part, despite the fact that it is in Kansas and also Missouri. If you go to the ’burbs, it gets a little bit more conservative. John doesn’t necessarily read as queer from the outside. They paint their nails and wear rings and have long hair. Over the last year they started using “Elizabeth” as their middle name, because a friend used to call them John Elizabeth, and Elizabeth is their mom’s middle name. But they still don’t come out to that many people in day-to-day life. They have trouble advocating for themselves, so they just accept what’s given to them. People say “sir” all the time.
John feels less comfortable whenever they go anywhere outside of Kansas City. Their partner’s family is from Oklahoma, so they’ll go down to Tulsa and they’ll keep their hands in their pockets when they’re fuelling up the car in Oklahoma or southern Missouri. Or sometimes they won’t paint their nails. It depends on where they’re going.
Going back home—that’s a different beast. John is the middle kid, and their brothers will kind of tease them. Their little brother can be mean. Seeing both of their brothers together can be bad. One on one, they’re fine. But if they’re together, it can be a nightmare.
John will paint their nails when they go home, but they’ve never sat down and explained their gender to their parents. They don’t know how much their parents have deduced. Recently, too, a friend of theirs from high school has started saying that they should hang out. John isn’t sure about it. They’d want to make sure their friend was aware of their identity beforehand. And maybe the friend wouldn’t care, or maybe he would be confused. It feels weird, like this other world trying to collide with their current world.
Whenever John tweets, they think, My mom might see this, because she follows about five people. She’s kind of like a mom on Facebook, just responding to everything. John will see her in a conversation with someone like writer Joshua Whitehead and be like, “All right. She’s doing her thing. It’s okay.”
2
LIVING WITH DEATH
IN 1993, WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives stormed Mount Carmel Center ranch. Located just outside Waco, Texas, the ranch was home to David Koresh and his Branch Davidian followers; the group believed that the second coming of Christ was imminent, and they’d begun to stockpile guns and ammunition against the coming chaos. Anthony Storr’s Feet of Clay, a book about gurus, compares Koresh’s “regime” on the ranch to Jonestown, the Guyana enclave where preacher Jim Jones psychologically and physically abused his followers, rationing their food and sleep and coercing more than 900 of them into drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. The siege on Mount Carmel lasted fifty-one days. In late February, after a brutal and fiery standoff that resulted in ten deaths, Koresh allowed a group of children to leave the ranch when the ATF arrived—but kept back at least twenty-five kids, many of whom he’d fathered with women and girls in the group. In mid-April, the FBI and the ATF initiated a final raid on the ranch using the kind of weaponry usually reserved for war. Seventy-six of the eighty-five Branch Davidians left inside the compound died, either by fire—three fires erupted in different areas of the ranch as government agents attempted to penetrate the buildings—or by gunshot wounds from fellow believers.
Koresh, Storr writes, was obsessed with the Book of Revelation. Before he’d joined the Branch Davidians and become a leader within the group, he’d flitted from religion to religion before landing for a while—before he was ousted for harassing the pastor’s daughter—in a Seventh-day Adventist congregation. The founders of that church originally believed that Christ’s second coming would occur by October 22, 1844—a date based on the prophecy of an influential Baptist preacher called William Miller. After that day came and went, a group of Millerites formed the Seventh-day Adventist Church, so named because they considered the seventh day of the week (and therefore the Sabbath) to be Saturday, and because they believed the apocalypse, though it hadn’t occurred exactly as originally predicted, was nonetheless still coming soon.
My memory of watching the Waco siege on TV is very clear; I also remember learning about Jonestown, which was cited as the predecessor, at least spiritually, of many of the end-times cults that crescendoed in the nineties. Less well-known than Waco was the Order of the Solar Temple, a small but geographically dispersed cult active in France, Switzerland, and Canada, which believed that a great “transition” was imminent and Christ would soon come again as a solar god-king. The OST was responsible for a rash of dozens of murders and suicides in 1994 and 1997, all grouped around equinoxes and solstices; founders believed the group was linked to the Knights Templar, and one founder claimed to be the third reincarnation of Jesus Christ. And Heaven’s Gate was a group whose beliefs married Christianity with science fiction—that God was an elite extraterrestrial and heaven was a physical place, the next evolutionary step above humanity. Heaven’s Gate believed that a UFO, which they would board to participate in the rapture, was to arrive after the passing of the incredibly bright comet Hale–Bopp. To join the UFO, thirty-nine members opted to leave their bodies by suicide in late March 1997—a tactic, they reasoned, that had more or less worked for Jesus.
I remember news clips about the OST, and I remember the laughing disbelief most North Americans had for Heaven’s Gate. My first exposure to it wasn’t The Simpsons’ episode “The Joy of Sect,” which aired the year after the suicides—a cult comes to Springfield and promises spaceship transport to the planet Blisstonia—but I remember watching that, too.
PERHAPS IT WAS COMING OF AGE IN THE NINETIES, when much of this was happening—in real time, and then digestible again through documentaries on HBO and A&E—that first sparked my interest in millenarian beliefs. The idea that the end of the world will someday come via the arrival, or re-arrival, of Christ is common to several different belief systems, but the idea that it is coming soon is particular to fewer: Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, several non-denominational protestant sects, including Endtime Ministries (handle @EndtimeInc), whose Twitter tagline reads, “Preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom to every person on earth … Because the Endtime is Now!” (The existence of these groups explains, in part, why a segment of the Christian right in North America is so obsessed with Israel—most millenarian-focused Christian denominations believe that a series of end-times-related events will unfold in Israel before the advent of the rapture, and some groups believe this so fiercely that they are working to hasten those events.)
The first thing I remember watching on television as a child was not Sesame Street or The Raccoons or Barney & Friends. It was aerial footage of Mount Carmel burning, reconstructed footage of the Oklahoma City bombings, one-hour specials devoted to murder and embezzlement and hit men narrated by men with deep, gravelly voices, establishing the early norms of the burgeoning genre of true crime.
I stayed up late watching these shows with my father because I could not sleep; I could not sleep because, at the age of seven or eight, I’d begun to wrestle with the existential truth that I would someday die. That my consciousness would be extinguished and I would cease to exist. In the beginning, I stared out the window and let my consciousness float past the ravine I could see from my room, down the paths I knew crept through the conservation area by my house, beyond hills and valleys and towns and cities, and out into the deep, deeply alone space of the universe. When I couldn’t take this expansion, or the idea of nothingness, anymore, I went to the basement and watched TV.
Nothing particularly terrible or traumatizing took place in my childhood, at least related to death; I had six living grandparents, never