More than anything, I fear our own complacency

Every once in a while, I have my soapbox moments. This one has been brewing for a while now.

There is some poverty that we, as queers, cannot afford. As people, we live in a place in the world. We live here, in this place, in this time, giving this place and time meaning. But the here and now are not static, and there's a division happening, between the people who believe there is a place for everyone, and the ones who believe there is no place for people like us in their world. They are using our bodies, our lives to promote their view of the world, a view that we challenge with our simple existence. So they are fighting for a world view, a belief of how the world ought to be. And we, we are fighting for our lives, because they have come to value their values over our lives.

And for a while, it seemed enough just to exist, to be there as tacit proof that people like us do make it, do survive, and flourish. Beyond the strict little paper fences and fear, we live on, and always have. We are a part of this place, as much as the air, the water, and the sky.

But it is not enough just to survive. We must make progress. We must honor the sacrifices and indignities of our elders, of our younger selves, by being shepherds of a better future. It is not enough to just survive, because even today, so many of us do not survive, or survive tangled in a net of lies and heartache. We must weave ourselves together into a community that shares our ability to love honestly, openly, and frankly. Because love is no enemy.

It is not enough just to survive. Around the world I have seen a new era of backlash brewing, even in the places that seem the safest. There is nothing in our current safety that can be taken for granted. Simple existence is not enough because without something to hold us together, we can again be scattered. We cannot survive on simple existence alone. Ours is a history of expansiveness and backlash. Because this is our history, we cannot afford complacency. This is no time to let down our guard, to trust in the systems that have treated us so poorly, or stop fighting for inclusion in every family. We have so much tearing us apart, and so little in common. It is exhausting, and thankless, and humbling, but it is the work of our lives, and the same work that has brought us so far already.

Last summer I was running on Stinson Beach, a popular day beach just outside of San Francisco. I stopped to catch my breath and three men came up behind me, voicing alternating variations of the same thread:

"...If I *thought* he was a faggot, I would slit his fuckin' throat..."
"...if I thought he was a faggot, well, I would...I would cut off his balls..."
"...well, I would cut off his balls and stuff em down his throat, if I thought he was a faggot..."

I took my breath away. I don't think I've ever heard such a candid threat of violence from complete strangers. To this day I don't know if they felt threatened by me or by each other. I don't know if it matters.

A few weeks later, I was in Berlin and a group of queers I had gone to a party with were beaten up by 4 guys jumping out of a car to attack them with bats. They were hospitalized, and a couple of them were uninsured foreign nationals. The men were never identified. I walked home through that plaza 2 hours before they were assaulted.

This year, in San Francisco, someone torched the Pink Triangle on Twin Peaks the morning before the big pride parade. The person(s) also tore up the signs explaining the significance of the memorial. The signs explain that the history of the pink triangle originates with gay men being sent to die in German concentration camps during the second world war. In short, someone set fire to the display that is both the largest and most visible marker of the pride festival AND the memorial to all who have suffered violence as a result of their sexual orientation. It was an extraordinary act of cultural violence, and it didn't even make a headline in the weekend news. It wasn't until a couple of days later when citizen journalists started demanding answers that AP and Reuters actually picked it up as a headline story. The SF Chronicle had carried it as a sidenote several paragraphs deep in their report on the weekend's pride activities. Am I the only one who has deep misgivings about anyone willing to set fire to a memorial for holocaust victims and victims of hate crimes?

There is something going on here. A larger trend, a shift in attitudes, and we cannot continue the complacency of inactivity. Our future is not something we can buy, we have to work for it. This is not something we can afford to leave to others; it is not something we can entrust to corporate lobbyists. We must invest ourselves in our future, working to build a world where we can live in peace with some reasonable sense of dignity. Pretending that we are already there will only weaken the successes we have already achieved. Because as long as gay and transgendered teens are dying at the hands of their classmates, the reality is not there yet, and we cannot afford to rest on a false sense of security.

We must come together to build that better world, every single day, brick by brick, family member by family member, neighbor by neighbor, because we cannot be uprooted if our roots run as deep as the bedrock. We cannot do this alone, we cannot afford not to do this work, but we can help each other along.

movement

listening to the sounds of my heart
strangling itself
in the vines of
scraggly weeds
that came from seeds
of things that will never change.

How the west was won

Wisconsin was the first place that I encountered homophobic slurs in bathroom scrawl. I had encountered bathroom scrawl before, mostly in mens washrooms, but it was mostly of a more banal variety. I mean, some of it was sexist, most of it was idiotic, but it was rarely, if ever scary. At the med school in Davis, CA, I remember finding a note that said "I should have gone to Stanford instead," and after thinking about the long hours of thankless studying and demoralizing institutional culture, I sympathized with his feelings of learning later that an important choice was poorly met.

It's not what you're saying, it's what I'm hearing

One of the first times I was at the UW Milwaukee campus, a group of us were in the bathrooms in the Union, only to discover such uplifting commentary as "Die AIDS faggots". I was shocked. Somehow I just couldn't understand where the author was coming from. Was he a jilted lover, infected and left to suffer the consequences? Was he a right wing soapboxer? A closet case? Are we still trapped in the 1980's preconceptions of AIDS as a 'gay' disease? Does he somehow think a virus is going to morally differentiate between the virgin mary homo and the straight cum dumpster of tinsel town? What is he so afraid of, that he needs to share his opinions in this way?

Last week I had seen something in one of the stalls at work about somebody or other being a faggot. I didn't recognize the name, and it wasn't until today that I realized that all of the stalls in that bathroom were scrawled with "Nate Higgins is a faggot". And the more I sat and stared at the nondescript hand writing, the more I realized the less I knew. Who was this Nate? And did the author mean this literally, or was it some kind of slur against his masculinity? Is it fair to ask clarifying questions in this semipublic forum?

Ten minutes at the computer offered up the insight that this 'Nate' probably was not a co-worker or student in the building, but rather a hockey coach in the upper midwest college hockey circuit.

Which leads me to question of how to respond. Leaving it there seems to endorse the homophobia that it engenders. And yet removing it is censorship. After thinking about it for a while, I decided the best response was something that both calls this issue out into the open and obfuscates it by invoking other stereotypes of masculinity, colonialism and sexuality:

"Hey honey, there ain't nothing wrong with a little buttlove, it's how the west was won."

Heimkehr: In Between Berlin and the Great Plains

I'm already here,
on these Great Plains
that draw the storms of the summer
up like a great fit of temper
inside the body of a small child.
But I'm still feeling you inside me.

How can you be so far away,
when I can still taste the cool smoothness
of your water on my skin?
when the stink of your humanity
still clings to my clothes and burns my eyes?
How can you be so far away
when the beauty of your
damaged past still haunts me so?
when you've fed me so well
in my clumsy machinations
through your streets?

And I know,
that with every passing week,
the details of everything I adore about you
will begin to fade
and you'll become a dead caricature
of puppetry and mirrors
intangible at the edge of my vision
and fading evermore into the distance.

The adventures become episodes,
constrained by fences of time and space
until they finally fall under the realm of
"That was then, and this is now:
and it's time to move on."

Berlin: Long Days and Cool Nights

Alone in a city where everyone seems to be in love.
Where are you sleeping tonight?
My bed is so full of ghosts,
Nesting with my sleepless nights.
And yours is so full of hers.
Between the bruises and the teeth marks,
there's a silence that strangles
my frozen heart.
I find myself sleeping on the bus, in class.
Anywhere the noise is loud enough,
To keep the silence at bay.

Emigrant

(for U. Utah Phillips)

Not from here.
Just passing through
from nowhere in particular.
Some little town
that got plowed under
to make way for the latest
the greatest,
to make way for the bright lights
and the best conveniences
that money could buy
like we've never known before.

And we sold it all, even ourselves
with bright eyes and hopeful hearts
to the slick suits
who never once knew
the smell of the rain
falling through the trees

But I'm taking up too much
of your perfectly manicured space
with my torn clothes and my hobo stories.
I guess it's time I be moving on.

Pedestrian

Walking.
Walking nowhere in particular
Waiting to find
a place worth running to
waiting for something
to come to me
something more
than the dusty street signs
I've been reading
ever since I left the house.
but settling into a pace
where every step
carries me a little farther forward.