Queens, Fools, And Ladies In Waiting - The Biden White House In Exile

Belinda Long was a queen - a lovely, transcendent woman, diva of the Desiree club in South Beach, formerly Bruce Adams, unhappy closeted man who had his sexual epiphany on a Delaware beach, coincidentally the very same beach where former President Joe Biden had his summer home. 

Bruce was looking up at the stars one night, imagining himself in the flouncy, gay, silk-and-crimson outfit of a Forties showgirl, wondering where the image had come from, so unexpected but tempting.

What did it mean? What did it all mean? and that night he tossed and turned until he faced the uncomfortable but vital truth - he was unhappy in e-boots and dungarees, driving long-haul from Philly to Frisco, and knew in his heart of heart that he was a woman, and a bejeweled, sashaying one at that. 

The literature - now scotched and removed by the Trump Administration from all public archives but still available at Duke, Harvard, and a number of other sympathetic universities - tracks the transgender evolution of men and women.  While the transition is certainly varied, the epiphanic moment is by no means uncommon.  It is the eureka, ah-ha! moment of sexual discovery which comes on suddenly and unexpectedly but is welcomed nonetheless. 

It is the spark that Aristotle noted in his treatise on hermaphroditism, Artemis And Agamemnon

Ah, divinity, so close in the firmament but so far, obscured by jealousy, ambition, and perennial lust; yet so desirous, so existentially complete that it is sought by all.  What is the human nature of divinity? What unity, what meeting of parallel lines, what complete, absolute, and total harmony can exist within the dimensions of the human spirit to bring it closer to the heavens? It is the hermaphrodite, that miraculous, unique confection of the gods that makes one from two but keeps the integrity of both.  The awakening hermaphrodite looks up at a star and sees two, both brilliant, sharp-edged, but essential.  The world has changed and become limitless. 

 

And so it was that Belinda Long, aka Bruce Parsons, made her way down the off ramp of I-95 to the welcoming arms of  Club Desiree, to be seen there by President Biden's Senior Adviser, Home Affairs, a man working out his own doubts and insecurities and feeling quite at home in the sexually raucous atmosphere of the club.

He was particularly attracted to Belinda, arranged to meet her after the show, and began an unusual but accommodating friendship. 

After a short courtship, the  Senior Adviser invited Belinda to come to Washington.  The Biden Administration was filling its positions with a promised diverse array of race, gender, and ethnicity, and the President would be delighted to have Belinda on his staff.  Not to worry about credentials, he assured her, the President is focused on 'essence'. 

The four years of the Biden presidency have been well chronicled, everything from executive orders to dementia, and Belinda's tenure there was pleasant, rewarding, but far more ordinary than she had ever thought. Official Washington, no matter how gay a place it might have become, was still a sodden bureaucratic tedium and she was glad to be done with it. Although uncertain about her future - 'essence' had really prepared her for nothing for there was no revolving door for image and identity - she had enough confidence to make a go of whatever came her way. 

At first she quite naturally joined the other-gendered exiles - a cabal of every possible niche on the gender spectrum.  One had to give old Joe credit for making good on his call for diversity.  What she found was a disconsolate, crying, sobbing lot.  They had been so coddled and milked for so long that they had were at loose ends, booted out by Trump's thugs with only their handbags and hankies, and looking at a very uncertain future. 

At the same time it was like a court in waiting, all singing the same hymns of peaceful solidarity in sexual union.  They needed a leader, and Belinda - tall, imperious, beautiful, regal, and as close to the President as any - became their queen, ironically of course since she had made a very good living as a drag queen back in South Beach, but a regent nonetheless, and recognized as such, her innate leadership, so long subsumed as an obedient aide to the President, emerged in full flower.

Washington being the power center it was, Belinda's transgender group was not the only one primed to retake the city.  There were the dyed-in-the-wool political progressives like Bernie Sanders' acolytes, who yammered away about capitalism, Wall Street, and the predatory rich.  

There were the ankle-biters, young women of color who championed diversity ad infinitum ad nauseam; latter day Black Panthers who channeled Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, howling racial injustice, systemic racism, Black Lives Matter, and the restoration of the black man to the pinnacle of society, and a potluck covered dinner of hangers on, political hopefuls, and progressive groupies. 

'This will not stand', they all said in one caviling, belittling bellow about the usurper in the White House, the bullying fool, the idiot, disassembling monarch, and insurrectionist autocrat; but the first hundred days of the Trump presidency had sent them scattering, fighting for traction, and held together only by filament. 

They were being routed by legions of storm troopers.  Black men, Latinos, gays, and transgenders were being sent to gulags in North Dakota, horrible cold, windswept places worse than Wounded Knee and the Lakota reservations.   The whole progressive lot of them were on the run, scattering for shelter and looking for some place to regroup. 

'Sweetheart, don't cry', Belinda said to 'Lady Fanny from Omaha', a sweet thing in her retinue, disconsolate and inconsolable.  'Everything will turn out all right'; but she could only think of her farm, her lover from Chillicothe, the chickens and the goats, an idyll, their own quiet gender spectrum.  How she agreed to come to Washington befuddled her. What was she thinking? But they all were like this, seduced like any other American by power and influence. 

Belinda held court on a regular basis, and although she had not intended it, its configuration mirrored the royal courts of Europe.  Human nature, she concluded, an instinctive impulse to group, divide, and arrange.  So there were courtiers, ladies in waiting, knights and fools - a menagerie to any outsider who happened on them - but an institution with integrity to its members.

Of course with such artifact and fantastical illusion, the group became a caricature of itself and lost all sight of political interest and social restoration.  It became no more than a catty tea party, a bitchy, rumoring lot of old ladies who were never happy. 

The same was true of all the other groups - the downside of camaraderie and needy intimacy - and members all fell out eventually, choosing to go their own way until they found another adhesive (climate, welfare, the African diaspora, wealth distribution); and find succor and welcome they did, and progressivism, although fractured and unsure, was alive and well in many quarters. 

All this of course went unnoticed by Trumpists who had their own agenda, a new world of their own making, a return to the originalist principles of the Founding Fathers, and the reestablishment of a white, Christian, European nation. 

So be it, as the world turns, what goes around comes around; but this particular episode of absolutely wildly improbable progressive postures would be remembered as seminal.  America was always one crazy fucking place, but never like this.