With the announcement that the Trump administration is banning the barbarous practice of transitioning children, I thought I would share another excerpt from my novel The Insurrectionist, out now from Freedom Letters press. Here, my journalist protagonist Ian Landquart, who has inadvertently ensnared his own daughter in an FBI probe of J6ers, attempts to repent at St. Origen’s Methodist Church in Chicago, where he meets the genderfluid Pastor Theo Wooster, AKA Sister Sparkle.
Above, X’s Grok tries valiantly to render Sister Sparkle based on my description below. Close, my digital friend, very close.
It had been years since he had prayed, not since his choirboy youth, before he rebelled against his parents’ religiosity. They’d been High Church Anglicans, all in for the smells and bells. He felt about under the pew ahead but found no kneeling rail. Should he cross himself?
He tried to remember the confession. We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness … provoking most justly Thy wrath and indignation.
Wrath and indignation.
“Ian, you shithead,” he murmured.
A hand with Crayola-blue nails rested gently on his shoulder, and he started. Looming over him was a busty, female-presenting individual in clown-white pancake makeup and a flamboyant outfit.
Sequined blue dress, violet beehive wig, a choker of sparkly silver beads the size of ping-pong balls. “Presenting” being the key word, given this person’s baritone voice, his physical height, the masculine structure of his face, and the business card he offered, with the name Rev. THEO WOOSTER, M.Div., D.Min., Children and Youth Ministries, he/him. The flip side of the card revealed the persona now addressing Ian: SISTER SPARKLE, she/her. Queen Mum, “Drag ’Em to Jesus” Podcast. Chicago Public Library Cross-Dress for Literacy Children’s Hour. She had plucked her eyebrows and redrawn them on her forehead in thick black arches underscored with white lines, her eyelids shadowed in purple. Her mask, matching her dress, was a glittery blue, and her earrings were silver crosses.
“Scoot.” She slid her wide arse into the pew beside Ian. “You in trouble, friend?”
Ian raised his good hand and let it fall to his lap in an inarticulate gesture of despair.
She muttered something, eyes twinkling, and tapped his arm. Masks are hell on comprehension for the hearing- impaired, and Ian asked the Rev. Wooster/Sister Sparkle to speak up. She removed her mask, revealing a lipsticked mouth and a gap between her two front teeth. (“I’m double vaxed,” she said, “so I can’t get it.” “Same,” Ian said.) In answer to his reporterly questions, she said that donning ladieswear had proven to be a powerful means of bringing the Christ to people “right where they are.” She had officiated in drag at a suicide victim’s funeral, preached a gospel of gender liberation from that very pulpit (There is neither … male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus), and comforted nonbinary community members in the aftermath of a school shooting. Ian would be amazed, she said, how people appreciated those old gospel vintages in sparkly new wineskins.
“Enough about me, friend,” she said kindly. “What sufferings bring you here?”
“Reckon I need to unburden myself.” Ian looked around the sanctuary. “Is there a confessional we can duck into?”
“We’re Methodists, we don’t whisper to priests in closets.” The parson remembered her wig and removed it. (“Getting hot.”) Her hair—or, wigless, was it now his hair?—was short- cropped and sweatily glued to her scalp. “Whatever you want to say, you can say it right here, looking me in the eye.”
Ian could not look into those fluttery lashes without feeling he was appearing in a burlesque staged by an impish Jehovah as a joke on himself. He recognized that it was narrow-minded to think this. He stared ahead at the stained-glass window behind the rainbow cross, striving to remember the words of the confession, for it felt less embarrassingly personal to follow the ancient ritual. He cleared his throat. “Bless me, Sister, for I have sinned.”
Ms. Sparkle patted Ian on the arm, and her fluttering eyes welled with love. “Oh, balderdash!”
“What?”
“No, you haven’t! Fiddle-faddle.”
“Haven’t sinned?” This astonished Ian. Gesturing at a pew Bible, he said, “Doesn’t it say ‘all have sinned’?”
“Oh, ho-ho, no, not in the way you’re thinking.”
“But I have!” Ian stammered. He was losing his footing on what he had thought was accepted Christian doctrine. “Bolloxed things hideously. I betrayed my daughter to the FBI. Accidentally, but still. See, I’m a journalist. I investigated a story that ended up ensnaring her and sending her to jail.”
“‘Accidentally’ being the key word, wouldn’t you say? Besides, you talk like you’re the first person ever to betray someone. Ol’ Judas Iscariot would like a word with you, mister!” She poked Ian in the bellybutton with her blue nail.
“But Judas went to hell.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” gentle Ms. Sparkle said. “Judas was remorseful in the end. Hanged himself, if you believe the Synoptics.”
Read more here.
The Elephant Box 