Mink Stole saw something nasty in the woodshed voting both in Pecker.

Many years ago, when this blog and I were young and didn’t have to slather ourselves in retinol cream every night to look less like our grandmother, I wrote a lot about politics—enough that a gay magazine offered me a spot as a political columnist. One of the many reasons I fervently wanted Obama to win was so that I could, at least temporarily, think less about politics. I did a one-off piece about the 2008 presidential election and left it at that.

This morning I walked through piles of leaves to my polling station and thought, as I always do on election days, of the dark and miserable morning of my first-ever presidential election as a voter. It was 2004 and the wind whipped at my face and numbed my hands as I stood outside for 90 minutes, hoping to vanquish an illegitimate incumbent prone to using my sexuality (at the behest of a vile and shameless gay traitor) as a wedge issue to increase Republican voter turnout. When George W. Bush was reelected, I wasn’t sure how I’d make it through the next four years.

To be gay, to be a woman, to be a non-Christian in America, is always fraught with a danger made more insidious by its relative invisibility. You accept this as a fact of life if you belong to any of those or other minority groups and possess even the slightest self-preservation instinct. These days I live in a liberal enclave, surrounded by elite academics with earnest yard signs assuring passersby that they believe in science and civility; signs testifying to their conviction that racism is wrong. In casual conversation, they reveal gaping blind spots: “Trump doesn’t really believe what he says,” was a common refrain, right up to the day of the insurrection.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election I sat before my rheumatologist, ashen-faced. My wedding was almost a year away and I’d discussed it occasionally with my doctor, who knew all the stresses of planning nuptials when one partner was still in training. She’d married in residency herself and sometimes offered advice while checking my knees for effusions. When I told her we were considering moving the wedding up due to political concerns, she tried to reassure me things would be fine. “We’ve come too far, we’re not going back,” she said. Her sincerity was poignant in unintended ways: I was an adult and had only been granted the right to marry one year earlier.

Five years into that marriage, having watched with ever-deepening dread as Trump blanketed the land in activist judges and Mitch McConnell stole Supreme Court appointments like cheap office pens, my wife and I remain unconvinced that marriage equality is here to stay. We’re always working on contingency plans about where to move if remaining in the States becomes untenable for that or other reasons. We’re deeply fortunate to have the means and opportunities to go nearly anywhere we please, but most people can’t—and moreover, no one should have to leave the United States in pursuit of the American Dream.

Despite the bleakness of my outlook for the future of this country, and all those lingering, bitter questions about my place in it, I was thrilled by a sense of hope this morning as I sat at a table with my ballot, surrounded by yawning neighbors who felt similarly obligated to show up and shape our shared future, even when doing so sometimes feels like screaming into the void. And, with a smile, I thought about the other, less painful thing that always comes to mind when voting, the civic advice filmmaker John Waters shared in his DVD audio commentary for Pecker.

I give, in my college lectures, I tell all the people, ‘When you vote this week’ — last week was the election — ‘you know, cruise people in the line.’ It makes it more interesting. Or think sexual thoughts. At least play with yourself a little in the voting booth. It will really perk up the dreary experience of voting. No one gets horny in a voting booth. It’s the most un-American thing you can possibly do. And they’re very much like peep shows, they’re just lacking glory holes.

john waters, pecker audio commentary