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.