Take it on Faith (10)
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I felt physically sluggish, but my mind was racing. Maybe it was the water in our country’s crumbling infrastructure or minority stress. Either way, I felt quite powerless to address it. To calm myself down, I scrolled the vast archives of the Internet and picked up a book by my favorite author, Viktor Takahashi.
The man described himself as lazy, but every work he produced during his lifetime proved otherwise. As one of the few Renaissance men of his time, Viktor researched, illustrated, and crafted everything with a touch that only he had. Everything he produced seemed to take on a life of its own, even his own autobiography. That was one of my favorite works of his, but that’s not what I picked up for the night.
I picked up his dystopian novel Lavender Menace and began to read. I didn’t know how, but it seemed to get better every time I read it. In the book, the Lavenders were a high-ranking organization that terrorized other queers. They started as a queer rights group, but their vicious infighting got out of hand and they started kicking out queers that didn’t fit their standards.
As the world gets ravaged around them by corrupt politicians and worsening climate change, the Lavenders kept drawing lines until they effectively dissolved. In the end, only two Lavenders remained: Jax who only joined the Lavenders…
