Who Gets a Seat on The Porch?
Updated: 3 days ago
We talk a lot about belonging. But who are we actually making room for?
By Jay Miller
Nothing particularly provocative. We weren’t debating politics. We weren’t picking a fight. We weren’t even asking anyone to agree with us.
We simply announced that The Porch was coming and invited businesses and organizations interested in supporting Minnesota’s LGBTQ+ community to become founding advertising partners.
Then the comments arrived.
Mental illness. School shootings. Political murder. Sin. Damnation. Fascism.
Apparently, we hadn’t even finished building the porch and someone was already yelling from the sidewalk.
It’s tempting to dismiss comments like these as trolls doing what trolls do. Hide. Block. Move on.
And sometimes that’s exactly what you should do.
But I couldn’t quite move on from these. Not because they hurt my feelings. I’ve been gay long enough to know that somebody somewhere has an opinion about it.
What stayed with me was how little it took to provoke them.
We simply said: We’re here.
And for some people, apparently, that’s still enough.
One commenter compared being LGBTQ+ with mental illness, violence, and school shootings. Another told us homosexuality and being transgender were sins and warned that time was running out for us to find salvation. He even thanked us for paying to promote the post because, as he saw it, our advertising dollars had helped spread his message.
There’s something almost funny about that.
We bought an ad looking for people who wanted to help build community.
The algorithm delivered a few people who wanted to tell us why that community shouldn’t exist.
Welcome to the internet.
But here’s the part I almost missed.
While I was reading those comments, 337 people had quietly liked the post.
A handful of voices were ugly enough to command my attention. Hundreds of others had simply said, in the smallest way Facebook allows, I see you. Keep going.
That’s the strange mathematics of social media.
One person screaming can occupy more space in our heads than hundreds of people standing beside us.
Maybe that’s worth remembering.
Hate is loud
We’ve made extraordinary progress as an LGBTQ+ community.
Some of us have lived long enough to remember when simply being out could cost you a job, a home, your family or sometimes much more.
Today, LGBTQ+ people are visible in ways earlier generations fought hard to make possible. We marry. We raise families. We own businesses. We lead organizations. We create art. We serve our communities. We disagree with one another. We live wonderfully ordinary lives. Progress is real.
But progress doesn’t mean prejudice packed its bags and left.
Sometimes it just changed addresses.
Now it can live behind a profile picture. In a comment section. Behind a username. It can appear beneath a completely ordinary announcement about a new LGBTQ+ community platform and remind you that simply saying we’re here can still make someone angry.
We shouldn’t exaggerate what that means.
But we shouldn’t pretend it means nothing either.
Community is something we do
Maybe this is the part I keep coming back to.
We talk about community as though it’s something we belong to. Something we can join simply by sharing an identity, living in the same place or checking the same box.
I’m not sure that’s enough.
Community is something we do, not something we join.
It happens when we show up for one another. When we support someone’s business. When we share someone’s work. When we make an introduction. When we tell somebody about an organization doing good work. When we listen to a story that isn’t ours. When we speak well of someone in a room they aren’t in.
And sometimes it happens when we simply refuse to let the loudest and ugliest voices determine who gets heard.
That’s part of why The Porch exists.
Not because Minnesota’s LGBTQ+ community needs another place where everyone thinks alike.
God, no.
We’re far too interesting for that.
There should be room here for different perspectives, generations, experiences, backgrounds, beliefs and ideas about what it means to be part of this community. We should be able to challenge one another, disagree with one another and occasionally make one another uncomfortable.
That’s part of community too.
But disagreement and dehumanization are not the same thing.
You don’t have to understand everything about another person’s life to recognize their humanity. You don’t have to share someone’s experience to believe they deserve dignity. And you certainly don’t have to agree with everyone sitting beside you.
That’s a pretty low bar.
But apparently, it’s still a bar worth defending.
I almost counted the wrong thing
Looking back at that Facebook post, I realized I had been counting the wrong thing.
I noticed the hateful comments.
I didn’t immediately notice the 337 people.
And isn’t that something we do far too often?
We remember the person who insulted us and forget the ten who encouraged us. We obsess over the person who didn’t show up and overlook everyone who did. We allow one ugly voice to become louder in our memory than hundreds of quieter ones saying, Keep going.
Maybe community requires us to get better at counting.
Not because the hate isn’t real. It is.
Not because there isn’t still work to do. There is.
But because the people trying to tear something down shouldn’t automatically get more of our attention than the people helping us build it.
Those comments are still sitting in my screenshots.
But they’re not what I remember most anymore.
I remember the people who liked the post. The people who shared it. The people who subscribed. The businesses that reached out. The friends who told friends. The people who saw something being built and decided, in one small way or another, to help build it.
That’s community.
Hate tends to arrive with a megaphone.
Community is usually built much more quietly.
One person shows up. Then another. Someone shares a story. Someone supports a business. Someone makes an introduction. Someone tells another person, You should know about this.
Someone pulls up a chair.
Someone turns on the light.
And eventually you look around and realize something wonderful has happened.
The porch is getting pretty full.
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