An open letter to Bridget Zeigler, the newly outed queer who enjoys having sex with women

Dear Bridget Zeigler,

You’ve recently been outed, publicly humiliated, and criticized in headlines nationwide because of your threesomes with an unnamed woman and their seeming contradiction to the anti-LGBTQ+ policies pushed in public schools by the group you co-founded, Moms for Liberty.

Related:

Moms for Liberty is going to open a taxpayer-funded charter school

One critic said the school would create more little Moms for Liberty.

It seems terribly unfair to me anytime anyone — even you — is persecuted for their private consensual sex lives. With this in mind, I wanted to ask you some intensely personal questions about your sex with that woman — putting aside, for the moment, that she has since accused your husband of raping and non-consensually recording videos of her in your absence.

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My questions will likely come off as rude, possibly misogynist, and definitely none of my business, but please hear me out and withhold judgment, for I hope they may lead you (and others like you) to a greater realization.

Did you like that woman? Did you enjoy sex with her? Was it pleasurable? Fun? Were you attracted to her body, her personality? Did you like the fact that you could be naked, vulnerable, and try new things with her? Did it feel innocent, playful, loving, kind?

Did being with her make you feel adventurous, sexy and exhilarated, liberated and carefree? Did she make you feel differently about sex and yourself, about your own body, about the way you interact with other women? Did she change how you understood yourself, how you see the possibilities of life?

When you were with her, did it feel like you were doing something terrible, negative, harmful, or wrong? That you should be shamed, fired, or forced out of public life for it? That you were doing something so awful, that if you wrote about it in a book, it should be taken off of library shelves and hidden away from others?

Would you like to have sex with a woman again?

How old were you the first time you thought that you could be attracted to someone of the same gender? Back then, did you ever wish you could talk to someone your own age or older about those feelings without being judged or shamed? Did you wish you could talk to or read writing from someone knowledgeable, a caring adult or peer who might help you understand those feelings?

Did you feel like your attraction to women meant you were a child “predator” who wanted to harm kids in any way?

I’m asking all of these questions to help you realize something: That you yourself helped engineer the public shaming that you’re currently experiencing. Every day, you help create a world where people just like you are persecuted and hated for what they do, privately and consensually, behind closed doors — a world where queer people are killed and sometimes kill themselves because others hate and fear their public presence.

You claim you personally authored Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a bill that fueled a national movement to remove books, classroom discussions, and lessons that include LGBTQ+ people from public schools. Your group and its followers have said that queer people like you — yes, you are a queer now — are dangerous and “sexualizing” children. Your followers and allies have threatened to shoot educators and to bomb schools (killing hundreds of kids inside) if they even dare mention that queers like you exist.

Is this the world you actually want? Where queer kids and adults like you are taught that they’re a threat to other kids, that their lives are shameful and pornographic, that they’re mentally ill, and we need laws to prevent them from influencing other kids? Where a mom like you is treated like a sex freak who should be run out of her community just because she kissed a girl?

You don’t realize that the very things you’re trying to erase could have saved you: If people of all ages could see, read, and hear about LGBTQ+ people living their lives and loving each other — just as straight and cisgender people have been allowed to do in front of people of all ages for decades — that no one would particularly care about your sex life. In fact, some of them might even support your right not to be publicly shamed for it.

But no. Instead, you betrayed your own loving and lusty spirit and have built the bronze bull in which you currently find yourself being baked alive. The temperature is rising, and it is cruel, and those watching love to see you suffer — perhaps unaware that they may one day share a similar fate at the hands of those who you’ve taught to hate and fear them.

I hope one day you wake up and accept that there are young girls out there, just like you. One day I hope you help us create that world. It didn’t have to be this way. It still doesn’t, and that’s what makes me saddest about you and your kind.

Until then, I guess it’s true what they say about education, eh, Bridget? Some people never learn.

Sincerely,

Daniel Villarreal, a fellow queer (albeit a kinder one)