One Day This Kid...

[Madspirit]

(This has been going around my community...lesbian, gay, bi, transgendered...for a long, long time. In a day and age when people, fundies, dive bomb buildings and protest soldier's funerals because of what I am and who I love, it still seems quite relevant...Lee)



One day this kid will get larger. One day this kid will come to know something that causes a sensation equivalent to the separation of the earth from its axis. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn't mathematical. One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth. One day this kid will find something in his mind and body and soul that makes him hungry. One day this kid will do something that causes men who wear uniforms of priests and rabbis, men who inhabit certain stone buildings, to call for his death. One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid. One day families will give false information to their children and each child will pass that information down generationally to their families and that information will be designed to make existence intolerable for this kid.

One day this kid will begin to experience all this activity in his environment and that activity and information will compel him to commit suicide or submit to danger in hopes of being murdered or submit to silence and invisibility. Or one day this kid will talk. When he begins to talk, men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation, drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving gangs, bottles, knives, religion, decapitation, and immolation by fire. Doctors will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus. This kid will lose his constitutional rights against the government's invasion of privacy. This kid will be faced with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies in laboratories. He will be subject to lose his home, civil rights, jobs and all conceivable freedoms. All this will begin to happen in ten or so years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Or

One day this kid is allowed to be himself. He is accepted by his parents, community, and brotherhood for the loving person he is. He will fondly remember when the late head of the Order his parents belonged to gave his blessing to people like him. One day, he will talk to some of the senior teachers and leaders in the Order, the ones who came to understand their true selves and who will help him along his way. He thinks on the words of Rumi, "Come, come, whoever you are" and knows it is true.

There are safe havens of love for all people.

[Madspirit]

2. Well

I'm talking about the way it really actually is for most of us. My mom threatened to commit suicide when she found out I'm a lesbian. ...and we are used to justify every act of terrorism and horror on the fucking planet.
Lee

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

6. All I am saying is that there are safe havens

and communities where gays and lesbians are loved and honored for who they are. I didn't know if people know of these places, or that the Sufi Ruhaniat and Sufi Order were welcoming, as are Dances of Universal Peace circles. If you wish to have this thread merely be about hopelessness and despair, then I apologize for posting.

[Madspirit]

9. Not about helplessness and despair

About reality. I don't want to live in a closed community. I want to marry the woman I have been with for 15 years. I want to be able to be on her insurance. If I end up in a hospital, unable to make my own decisions, I want those decisions to be made by the woman I am spending my life with, not some East Texas hick-assed relative. I want ALL my rights. ...but hey, thanks for being so dismissive and calling "reality" despair and hopelessness. I don't want to live with Sufis. I want to live in the world, out-loud, as myself. Sorry if that's too too for you.
Lee

[Madspirit]

4. Or the > 1200 of us per year killed in hate crimes...n/t

[Unreconstructed Lib]

3. It was written by David Wojnarowicz.

According to this site: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1446106&blobtype=pdf

[Madspirit]

5. Thank-you!

I couldn't find an author. You must be a better googler than I.

Lee

[Unreconstructed Lib]

7. It was a lucky Google.

:)

[Madspirit]

8. Welcome to DU!...n/t

[Unreconstructed Lib]

10. Thank you for the welcome.

If you're not familiar with Wojnarowicz' art (I didn't know about him), here's a link to a very powerful untitled image that he created not long before his death: http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0106/visions_wojnarowicz.htm

[Madspirit]

14. Thank-you!...n/t

[Madspirit]

11. This is not getting enough attention!...n/t

[dsc]

12. Great post

I had never seen it before. It really puts in stark relief.

[Madspirit]

13. I was hoping you would see it! It really is great....thanks...n/t

[AndyTiedye]

15. I Never Have Been Able To Understand The Hatred That Some People Feel Towards Gays

Love whom you will.

[slowry]

16. k&r nt

[Bluebear]

17. What a powerful essay. k/r!

[Madspirit]

18. One More Kick...n/t