Pride in Torture

The lights in the conference room blinked into life. The horrible and ancient fluorescent lights lit up an aging table surrounded by office chairs, half of which were working. The wall was adorned with posters professing the department's values. Other posters advertised the utility of teamwork with photos of people who were clearly too happy to be government employees. Schedules for conferences that happened at least a decade ago were left to decay where they had been stuck on the wall. Lindsey walked in, sat in a chair at the head of the table, opened her notebook and started perusing the agenda. Slowly, the rest of the pride committee filled in. Xavier was first, the young bubbly gay man. He said hi and tried to make small talk with Lindsey, who promptly ignored him and kept going over her notes. Xen was next, with their short purple hair, septum piercing and large “they/them” badge pinned to their lanyard. The token enby on the committee. They were followed shortly by Beth, who had recently lost the election for chair of the committee to Lindsey. She sat at the maximum possible distance from Lindsey and gave her a foul gaze.

“Should we get started?” said Beth, trying to hold back their bitterness at Lindsey.

“In a sec, we’re just waiting on one more,” replied Lindsey.

The door cracked open, and a woman entered. “Hi,” she said, “Is this the Pride steering committee meeting?”

“Yes,” said Lindsey, projecting confidence across the table, “You must be Jenny, the new hire.”

“Well, no,” said Jenny, closing the door behind her, “I’m not new. And is this real? Is there really a pride group here?”

“Yes, why is that so weird to you?”

“Because this is the Department of Torture.”

“Why are you here?” interjected Xavier, who just wanted to get through this meeting and back to actual work.

“I’ve been transferred here from the Department of Health.”

“Health?”

“We’ve been merged with dentistry,” explained Lindsey, “Apparently, people were more likely to associate torture with them than us.”

“Oh, so you’re here to tell us how to do our job?” said Beth in an accusatory tone.

“No, I’m here trying to understand what the hell this pride committee is meant to do?”

“Well, I’d think that is obvious,” replied Lindsey, “We’re here to support the LGBTIQA+ members of staff and help build the department’s reputation as an ally to queer people.”

“But it’s the Department of Torture!” exclaimed Jenny, ”Your job is to torture the enemies of the regime! Who, mostly, seem to be queer people!”

“Well, exactly. Most of our clients are queer people, they need advocates.”

“Clients? You mean victims”

“We need to make sure we can help everyone equally.”

“You mean torture?”

Xavier rolled his eyes. “You seem kinda stuck on the basic function of this place, don’t you? Why is she in this meeting?”

“That’s the first item on the agenda. Jenny will be filling the space left on the committee by Mark,” explained Lindsey.

“What happened to Mark?” asked Jenny.

“He raised some of his concerns about the treatment of queer people by the regime with the Director of Torture and was never seen again.”

“What?”

“Let’s all give Jenny a warm welcome!” declared Lindsey.

The committee murmured various half greetings.

“Thanks,” said Jenny, now wary of the group, and slid into a free seat at the table.

Lindsey triumphantly crossed out the first item from their agenda. “Next, I just wanted to thank everyone for pulling together and making our event last month for Trans Day of Visibility a success!”

“They actually let you do that?” asked Jenny.

“Yes! They allowed us to have a morning tea.”

“With three cupcakes,” added Beth.

“In the basement, with the door locked and the lights out,” said Zen.

“Doesn’t sound very visible,” muttered Jenny.

“Do you know how much we had to lobby our higher-ups to get those cupcakes?” Lindsey snapped, “Months of effort and paperwork that was.”

“We only got one cupcake last year!” said Xen, “We’re making progress!”

“But you could have spent those months doing something about helping the record number of gender diverse people who have been disappeared into your cells here!”

Lindsey sighed, “How many times do I have to tell you? We don’t control government policy.”

“But you could be doing more meaningful things to try and educate the people here about queer people. That we’re human just like them, and torturing us is wrong.”

“We do try to do that!” Interjected Xen, “We ran diversity training for the staff just last month!”

“You did?”

“Yes, that is the next item on the agenda,” said Lindsey, annoyed that Xen had jumped ahead, “The diversity training we organised was well received and the senior executives sent us their thanks.”

“What was covered?”

“Oh, you know, the usual sort of things. Unconscious bias. The importance of pronouns and not using dead names. Microaggressions. The standard offering you would get from most providers.”

“People here actually responded positively to learning about that sort of thing?”

“Well, sort of. The head of the psychological torture division said they’re torture effectiveness against minorities has gone up seventy per cent.”

“Isn’t that bad?”

“Well, the executive was thrilled with the result and wanted more of the training. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to run it again, as the trainer was liquidated shortly after finishing.”

“I meant it doesn’t sound like the training succeeded in making the department see queer people as human.”

“Oh, I think it did,” said Xen, “Just the members of the torture application division are pre-screened for any signs of empathy. “

“Then what is the point of any of this?!”

“Look, we don’t need some high-minded idealist coming in here telling us how to do things. We’re not going to save the world by being on the pride committee here. We can’t change government policy from down here. The fact is that the department of torture is one of the last places that will still hire openly queer people in the regime. So what we can do it try to make it a nice place to work for the queer people who are here. It’s something.”

“But we’re torturing people!”

“Yes, you have stated this many times now. We are aware of the torture.”

Lindsey just ignored the ethical discussion and pushed forward with the meeting. “Okay, next up: Corporate Graphics has come back to us about our pride network logo. Apparently, the new policy for the regime says we can’t have any rainbows or any other commonly associated symbols of pride in our logo.”

“So the pride logo can’t have anything to do with pride?”

Lindsey rolled their eyes at Jenny’s continued anti-regime sentiments, “So we’ve compromised by removing the colours from the rainbow in the logo.”

“How do you have a rainbow without colours?”

Lindsey held up the new logo. It features a bunch of black and white stripes over the Department’s logo.

“It looks like a really sad wifi logo.”

“Well, it’s the best we can do,” Lindsey grabbed a plastic bag from beneath the desk. “Here’s the new pride lanyards with the logo on them,” she said as she emptied out the bag in the middle of the desk. The pride lanyards were enthusiastically snapped up by everyone, except for Jenny.

“This is madness,” said Jenny.

“Well,” said Beth, putting a lanyard over her head, “Some of us quite like showing our pride.”

Jenny snatched up a lanyard, “This isn’t pride! This is the worst kind of pinkwashing! So much pinkwashing that they’ve washed all the colour off!”

“We’re doing the best we can!” said Xandier.

“I’m quitting. The committee, my job, all of this. I should have stopped working for these people a long time ago.“

“Well, considering how disruptive you’ve been to this meeting, I think that’s probably for the best.”

Jenny folded her arms, “Yes. Imagine a queer person being disruptive.”

Lindsey decided to ignore her, “One last item on the agenda. The regime has declared all LGBTQIA+ people to be enemies of the state. We’re all scheduled to be arrested, tortured and executed.”

“What?!” The rest of the committee yelled at once.

“How was that not the first item on the agenda?” said Beth, thinking that none of this would have happened if she were still in charge.

“Well, I thought it might not go over very well, and I wanted to get the other business of the committee taken care of first.”

“We’ve got to do something!”

“Don’t worry. I’ve already drafted an email to our champion in the executive committee. Unfortunately, they were executed this morning, so I’m waiting for a replacement to be announced before I send it.”

“But they’re going to kill us!”

“I don’t think we should make a fuss.”

Before the meeting could go on any longer, Department of Enforcement officers knocked down the door and stormed into the room. The committee broke into choas. Jenny grabbed a pen off the desk, stabbed an enforcer in the leg and made a dash for the door before a taser took her down. Xavier cowered in a corner, crying. Xen was surrounded, but managed to down one officer with a swift kick to the balls before being overwhelmed by several others. Beth pleaded for mercy before an enforcer slammed her onto the meeting table and put a black bag over her head. Lindsey simply finished writing her notes for the meeting, closed her notebook and let the enforcers put on one of their black hoods over her.

“Ohhh,” said one of the enforcers, looking at the conference room table and picking something up, “Is this the new pride lanyard?”

“Yes,” one of the hooded people said, slightly muffled by the hood, “We just got them yesterday.”

“This is great! I’ve been meaning to get one to show that I’m an ally,” said the enforcer as he put the lanyard on his head.

“Thank you for your support,” the hooded person muffled as they were dragged out of the room.

After the last dissident was removed, a guard hit the switch, and the conference room returned to its dark and empty state.