The first lesson I ever learned from my great aunt Charlotte is love won’t save me
On the tenth anniversary of Charlotte’s commitment to her one true love
Nazis knocked on her door
and dragged her away
Charlotte’s partner Toni spent the next year trying to save her
And Toni saved her
And Charlotte was deported rather than killed
And they never saw each other again
Charlotte died 20 years later all alone
My family pretended Charlotte never existed
My family pretended this love story never existed
And no wonder
Because the way my family remembers it
The only part of a love story that is important is how it ends
On my worst days I think
the only possible ending of Charlotte’s story
was horror was Nazis was time catching up
As Jews that’s what history has taught us to predict
As queer people that’s what our lives have too often taught us to expect
As both of these identities
I grew up learning a whole lot about disaster
About the inevitability of apocalypse
As a member of my bio family
I grew up learning nothing whatsoever about love
But let me tell you about my great aunt Charlotte and what she knew about love
Charlotte moved back to Germany in 1930
She worked at the Hirschfeld Institute and was one of the first women in Western civilization
to have gender affirming surgery
She met her love Toni
And Toni converted to Judaism
and they were happy
And then there were Nazis
I mean this woman crossed an ocean to find a place where she could be herself
And she found a home and she found her partner
And then they spent the next decade
Trying to find just one safe place
What I am saying is love won’t spare us
From the apocalypse
No matter how much we have been through
No matter how much we have earned it
Life will break us every time
Our love stories will be broken stories every time
I am learning to love broken
In myself and everyone else
That’s who I want to be from now on
I have a legacy to live up to
See I was taught Charlotte’s story backwards
I was told my own history all wrong
Charlotte lived courageously
Charlotte fell in love as courageously as she could
She built a refuge for her love
in the midst of the apocalypse of her time
And she fought for herself and her love
And she survived
And she was beautiful
And she was dignified
And love cannot defeat the apocalypse
True
But love can still do so much
Love can give us a reason to fight for life
Even when the doomsday clock has run out
The way the doomsday clock has run out right now
I believe the apocalypse we face now
Is what we have prepared for our whole lives
Many of us have lived through apocalypses
just to stand here today
I still wonder if anything I love can be spared
But our story is so much bigger than this
We are so much bigger than the worst thing to ever happen to us
And so my definition of love is changing
I am no longer willing to believe
I am too broken to ever be worthy
I will not sacrifice myself on the altar of martyrdom and call it redemption
I am giving up my fantasy that loving will ever be that easy
Instead I will make my love story a masterpiece and an example
My love story will be about why I am fighting so hard to stay alive
Knowing I am living to be broken again tomorrow and the next day and the next
So no
Charlotte’s story is not a tragedy
Neither is mine
I am not going to live in despair
Even though these are indeed desperate times
Charlotte’s story is a love story
All our stories are love stories
For ourselves and for our community
That’s what being queer means to me
We are the love story humanity is telling ourselves
And we are beautiful
And we are dignified
And we are here to teach each other
That we have always always been worthy
