Politics Are Personal/ Why I Fight
The Quilt
I was in 7th grade the first time I understood why I fight.
I didn’t have the words for it then. I just had tears, and a hallway full of kids who thought those tears were something to laugh at.
We were standing in front of a piece of the AIDS quilt. Just a small section — because that’s all you can ever see at once. The full quilt would swallow a city block. But even that small piece was enough to understand the size of what we had lost. Name after name after name, stitched by hands that were shaking with grief, for people the government had decided weren’t worth saving.
I knew one of those names. Not on the quilt that day. But in my bones.
His name was Johnny. He was my uncle. And he died in 1994 because the AIDS crisis was allowed to become a death sentence for people like him — while the people in power looked the other way, or worse, looked directly at them and decided they deserved it.
I was twelve years old and I already knew what it meant when a government decides your life is worth less.
That’s when I learned what government rhetoric actually costs. Not in theory. Not in history books. In a person. In my person. In Uncle Johnny.
When a government decides a group of people are less than — when they let the language of blame and shame do the work of policy — people die. I watched it happen. I was twelve years old and I already knew what that looked like.
So when I hear that rhetoric now — against immigrants, against the LGBTQ+ community, against the unhoused, against the disabled — I recognize it. Not because I studied it. Because I lived what comes after it.
Each panel of the quilt is the same size as a grave. Six feet long. Three feet wide. Every single one.
And every one is filled with the person. Their favorite cartoon character. The team they loved. Their name, their age, the year they were born and the year they were taken. Stitched by the hands of people who loved them and had nowhere else to put that love.
The section we saw fell from the ceiling to the floor and pooled there slightly, like it was too much for the wall to hold. It took up the whole hallway. And it was just a small piece.
I wanted to make one for Johnny. I even got the paperwork.
My mom said no.
We never had a funeral for Johnny either.
My family swept it under the rug. They say now that it wasn’t what he wanted. But funerals aren’t for the dead. They’re for the living. They’re for the twelve year old girl who needed somewhere to put her grief and never got one.
So I carried it. Into every paper I wrote on HIV/AIDS through middle school, high school, college. Every year while other kids wrote about the Black Plague or smallpox I wrote about Johnny’s disease, trying to understand what happened to him, who let it happen, and why.
The first time I truly cried for him was in that school hallway in front of the quilt.
The second time was in my mid twenties, sitting on a curb outside a party, after a movie described out loud what the disease does to a body at the end. The decay. The smell. The living rot of it. My friends came outside and found me there. They remembered. They knew. And they sat with me.
That was the funeral I never got to have.
Uncle Johnny taught me something without ever meaning to. He taught me what happens when the people in power decide you don’t matter. And once you see that — really see it — you can’t unsee it anywhere.
Flame On
I started seeing it in the hallways. The kids getting picked on. The art kids, the weird kids, the ones the world hadn’t made room for yet. I sat at what we jokingly called the gay pride table. We had our own salute. Nobody should have to hide who they are — and we made sure they knew that. When a kid called me a flamer in the hallway I struck a superhero pose and said “yeah, flame on!”
That seemed to piss him off more. Good.
Around that same time a friend came out to me late one night over AOL. He said “hey, I gotta tell you something.” My first thought was — he’s either gay or he likes me, there was never really an in between back then. I was what they used to call a ‘beard’ back then — or, more accurately, what my friends affectionately called a ‘fag hag.’ The terms feel dated now, but they meant something real: I was safe, I was theirs, I was in on it. For this specific friend eventually, he started calling me ‘the Grace to his Will’ — a nod to the show, and to the kind of friendship we’d become.
He said he was gay. I said I know. He said what? I said I know. He said “well why the hell didn’t you tell me!”
I still don’t have a good answer for that.
Bush Lied, People Died
On March 26, 2004 President George W. Bush visited Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan. I happened to go to school there. I found out that morning on the news.
I got dressed accordingly.
Floppy hippie hat. Peace sign pins. No war pin. Homemade bell bottoms. Tie dye shirt. I got into my little blue ‘91 Daytona, put on my burned CD of hippie music, and made sure Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” was blasting as I pulled onto campus past the rows of Bush supporters lining the driveway. My little wink and nod to a war we didn’t need to be in, built on lies, to finish daddy’s job.
Our anthropology class got moved last minute because of the visit. Me and a couple other students couldn’t find the new room so we figured — well. Let’s see what’s happening.
We couldn’t get in. It filled up.
But outside I saw something that needed fixing. On one side of the driveway, Bush supporters. Organized. Signs. Bullhorn. Chanting.
On the other side, Kerry supporters. Unprepared. Scattered. Just kind of yelling into the void.
I looked at my friend and said I gotta fix this.
I jumped in front of the Kerry crowd and started chanting “Bush lied, people died.”
And they followed.
I felt the tension rising not long after and we decided to dip out.
The next day in political science class — and it was a good year to be in political science, Bush, Kerry, and Nader all on the table — my teacher asked if anyone had heard about the confrontation between the two sides outside the visit.
My friend didn’t even let him finish. “I don’t know about that, but I know who started it.”
The teacher looked at me.
“What did you do?”
“I spoke the truth.”
For Maria
I watched Maria from afar before I ever found my nerve again.
She was a friend I’d known since 4th grade. A badass in the truest sense of the word. During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement she was out in Detroit with her bullhorn, pushing back against cops, her voice carrying over the crowd — “whose streets, our streets.” I watched her Facebook posts and photos from a distance, in awe of her. Some people gave her grief for it. But she showed up anyway.
Watching her gave me the courage to show up to my own local march. They closed down Hall Road in Macomb County and I marched with so many others. It was peaceful. It was powerful.
But that’s not what most people saw.
The media chose their narrative. Cities burning. Chaos. And yes, some of that happened. But what they didn’t show you — what they chose not to show you — is that when things got ugly it was usually because people got pushed. They took back their streets because nobody was listening any other way. The peaceful demonstrations, the marches, the vigils — those existed. You just didn’t see them because that wasn’t the story anyone was selling.
Maria kept showing up. Until covid took the streets away. Took the outreach away. Took the art installations and the community work and everything that kept her tethered and alive. And without all of that — without her purpose and her people and her bullhorn — she couldn’t find her way back.
She took her own life. And I lost a friend I’d had since 4th grade.
The only piece of her art I have is a vinyl record spray painted tie dye with a peace sign on it.
She knew me well.
I fight for Maria too. For every person the system grinds down in ways that don’t make the news. For everyone whose fire went out not because they stopped caring but because they ran out of road.
Don’t Give Them the Clip
Something shifted in how we show up after that. Not just for me — across the movement.
It started in Portland, outside a federal ICE facility. Protesters showed up in inflatable costumes and the whole country did a double take. You cannot write the “violent mob” chyron over a crowd of people in duck suits and dinosaur onesies. The media needs a villain. You can’t make content out of someone in an inflatable T-Rex costume demanding due process. We stopped giving them their villain.
The conversation started happening in activist spaces everywhere. How do we flip this narrative? How do we show up in a way they can’t use against us?
The answer was — show up joyful. Show up ridiculous. Show up impossible to demonize.
We ran with it for No Kings 2.
I showed up in my Espeon onesie. For the uninitiated — Espeon is a psychic cat Pokémon. My sign said “Gotta catch em all, release the files” written in the Pokémon font. The other side was the state of Michigan — shaped like a mitten — giving the middle finger. “Greetings from MI.”
I also developed my own personal counter-protest philosophy somewhere along the way. When they give you the finger, give them two back — the peace sign. When they scream “fuck you” I say “I love you” and blow them a kiss. They want the snippet. They want the thirty second clip of us screaming and losing our minds that they can post and say “see, look at them.”
Don’t give it to them.
You can’t get clicks off someone blowing you a kiss. You can’t make content out of someone smiling and holding up a peace sign. It’s the same play I ran in the hallway at sixteen when that kid called me a flamer. Kill them with humor and kindness. They don’t know what to do with it.
The Cane Signs
I hadn’t demonstrated in nearly two decades when I showed up outside John James’ office in early 2025.
A lot had changed. I was forty now. Disabled. About to lose my housing. The body that once jumped in front of crowds and started chants now needed a cane to get there.
But I remembered what it used to cost to show up. I remembered being manhandled. Corralled away from cameras and lenses under Bush Jr. because if the media didn’t see it, it didn’t happen. Back then we barely had phones. Social media was a whisper. They could just move you and it was like you were never there.
So I came prepared. Water to share. A first aid kit in my backpack. Comfy shoes. My hippie nerd battle jacket. And my signs.
My main sign said “About to be unhoused, not a paid protester.”
Because they were already running that line. Already calling us paid agitators, professional protesters, crisis actors. And I wanted to be very clear about exactly who was standing in that street and why.
My cane had its own signs. “Cutting Medicaid is murder.” “Disability rights are human rights.”
I brought extras to hand out. “Has anyone seen John James?” “Where in the world is John James?” — a nod to Where’s Waldo and Carmen San Diego, because humor is how you survive the unbearable. John James had gone full ghost. Too scared to hold a town hall. Too scared to face the people whose lives he was voting on.
For context — John James sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He has a seat on the Health subcommittee. He has voted on legislation that would cut Medicaid. And he would not come outside to face the people standing in the street with those facts written on their canes.
We even had a Where’s Waldo cutout with his face on it at every empty town hall.
Over 400 people showed up across all four corners of that intersection in front of his office.
And when someone stopped to read my sign — “About to be unhoused, not a paid protester” — I had to fight back tears.
Not because I was sad. Because nobody grabbed me. Nobody corralled me away from the cameras. Nobody erased me.
There were just people. Reading my words. Nodding. Understanding.
That was new. That was the phone in every pocket. That was the revolution finally being televised — by us, on our terms, because we learned the hard way what happens when it isn’t.
John James eventually had the cops called on us. Hired private security to keep us out of the public parking lot our own tax dollars pay for. Held not one town hall.
We held them for him. Invited him every time. He never came.
But we were there. We were seen. And nobody moved us.
Full Circle
And then Trump came to Macomb Community College.
My old campus. The same place I’d blasted Country Joe from my little blue Daytona twenty years earlier. Full circle doesn’t even begin to cover it.
This was the one I was most worried about. Because I remembered what happened in 2004 when Bush supporters couldn’t get in — their next target became us. I’d seen those mobs turn. I knew what that energy felt like when it had nowhere else to go.
So I prepared. I talked to people. I tried to get everyone ready.
Over 4,000 of us showed up outside.
He couldn’t fill the room. Around 2,000 inside. Photos leaked of them shuffling people around, removing chairs to hide the empty space.
The only real confrontation I saw was when a Trump supporter drove past and threw something at a friend of mine. I had to physically stop my friend from climbing into the guy’s car with his bullhorn.
I said — dude. Remember the new mantra. We’re in our forties. You have kids.
He listened.
Another guy got in an older woman’s face. The cops came and removed him.
And I got everyone singing.
“Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye.”
I got interviewed by the BBC and the CBC that day. I answered their questions and said my piece — and then I felt the need to thank them. Enormously. For coming. For bearing witness. And to apologize. For what my country is doing to the world. To our allies. To the relationships we spent decades building and are now watching get torched.
It felt important to say out loud. Someone had to.
True North
I went to the Bridging the Friendship demonstrations not long after — people lining the bridges of Michigan in solidarity with Canada. Especially after Trump started making noise about annexation.
I made a sign. One side said “True Friends, True North” with a compass. The other side had the Canadian flag.
Because some things are not political. Some things are just right.
Why I Fight
People ask me why I keep showing up. Why I keep writing. Why I can’t just disconnect and find my peace like some people suggest.
Here’s why.
I’m done having kids. But I have a niece who is like my daughter. I have other nieces too. And I want them to grow up with the right to vote without jumping through documentation hoops designed to silence them. I want them to have autonomy over their own bodies and their own choices. I want them to love who they love and be who they genuinely are — and if they grow up to be part of the LGBTQ+ community I want them to have every right and every protection that community fought and bled and died for.
I fight because I don’t want them to suffer the injustices I have. I don’t want them working five jobs until their body gives out. I don’t want them used up and discarded by workplaces that pay poverty wages and call it opportunity. I don’t want them disabled at thirty because the system decided their labor was worth more than their life.
I fight for Johnny, who deserved medicine and dignity and a long life and got none of it.
I fight for Maria, who pushed back cops with a bullhorn and made the streets beautiful with her art and whose tie dye peace sign vinyl record sat in my home and reminds me every day what we lose when we stop showing up for each other.
I fight because the revolution was once invisible. Corralled away from cameras. Swept under rugs. Buried without funerals.
Gil Scott-Heron told us the revolution will not be televised. And for a long time he was right. They moved us. They erased us. They made sure if you weren’t there you’d never know we were.
But that was before the phone in every pocket. Before the camera at every corner. Before we learned the hard way what disappearing costs.
The revolution WILL be televised now. By us. On our terms. Because we learned what happens when it isn’t.
Not anymore.
We have the power in our pockets and in our hands to show the world we will not go quietly. We will stand strong. And we will document every single moment of it.
Uncle Johnny. I hope I’m making you proud.
Happy Pride Month, everyone. We will keep fighting because those who came before us did not bleed in vain, and their memories will not be forgotten.
*Miss-Information is the pen name of a writer, activist, and Miss-Fit living life on her own terms.
This one was very personal, thank you fellow Miss-Fits for continuing this journey with me.
To see the original post with all the photos etc. or if you’d like to read more of my works you can follow my substack.