To you, my Lovers:
You know who you are: The Queers. The Faggots, the Brown, the Black, the Trans, the Femmes, the Womxn, The Asian, the Indigenous, and the Two-Spirit. To you: the Fat, the Small, the Red-in-the-Face, Shaken, Imbalanced, Tired, Weary, Fearful, Fearless. To you: The Refugees – the Fearless Refugees – the Migrant, Disabled, Deaf, Displaced. The Forgotten, the Ugly, the Scarred, Scared, and Sacred, the Tortured, the Lost, and the Found.
This is for you.
Again, this week we wake up to the news of our lovers losing their lives solely for being who they are – who we are – for the identities they were cast into and the identities they wore themselves like their favorite skins.
With one breath, we’re told, ‘I don’t see race, I don’t see gay, I don’t see skin’ then punished for these same markers with the next.
All I’m hearing is “I don’t see.”
I know you’re weary, I’m weary too.
Sara Hegazy's death hit too close. I'm mourning her photo at the Mashrou’ Leila concert: a smile embracing her face, carelessly waving the colors of the rainbow over her back – We are all familiar with that moment of queer joy, of queer emancipation, of queer surrender. It is relentlessly courageous in a homophobic world. We're also familiar with family and nation raising pitch forks to exorcise false demons out of our spirits.
We are all familiar with that moment of queer joy, of queer emancipation, of queer surrender. It is relentlessly courageous in a homophobic world.
In the end, the world proved too cruel for Sara.
The world proved too cruel for George and Rayshard and Regis and Rem’Mie and Riah and Iyad.
Actually, all of it always hits too close.
But I’m reminded that exhaustion is a tool of the oppressor. Driving us to the brink of collapse is a war tactic. I cannot stay sitting on a bedrock of rage.
Eventually I have to let myself fall.
Submit and surrender.
I have to cave into the tears, as I have the past two nights, and let myself be baptized by the smallness of my life in light of the oceanic and incomprehensible universe.
If all I can do today is tread water, then I’ll just tread.
But eventually, I have to locate my hope.
In these times of incisive and radical decay, the most appropriate response is an even more incisive and radical hope. Let them take our words, take our bodies, take our language, take our swords and shields, and let us endure in the ecstasy of being.
Because for all their efforts, we still manage to celebrate in all the rhapsody of life.
Because for all their efforts, we still manage to celebrate in all the rhapsody of life.
I’m not original in these words; I stand under the illuminating lanterns of giants. The Edward Saids, the Marsha P. Johnsons, the Rev. angel Kyodo williams’, the Ta-Nehisi Coates, the bell hooks’, the Kimberle Crenshaws, the Cornell Wests - who remind us that radical hope is always the necessary antidote.
So have hope my Lovers: have heart, listen to the laughter and the ramblings of our youth, watch the wide eyed artists with their imaginations make magic, listen to chanting of womxn, to the dancing of queers and queens, the wisdom of our elders, the raising of rainbows, to the ululating of Palestinians, and the resolve and resilience of Jews, to the Black-is-Beautiful! Black-is-Brilliant! Black-is-Knowledge! Black-is-Power! and the long-sighted multi-generational tenacity of Indigenous peoples of all kind. To the silenced, broken, beaten, abused, erased, decried, and outcast, to all of us who build songs and celebrations out of our injuries not despite, but in spite, of a small yet powerful enemy who is corrupt and rapacious in their desperation to maintain supremacy.
Find hope in your anger, find hope in your wrath, for it can only be from a hopeful posture which these spirited moments are lit.
Find hope in your anger, find hope in your wrath, for it can only be from a hopeful posture which these spirited moments are lit.
It’s neither esoteric nor speculative to say we are ushering in a new era. We will be marked as the epoch dividing time before and after our pandemic. Those who have dominated are watching their ways of supremacy fracture and dissolve. Many of them are stepping into this new landscape with humility. Many will resist. But rest assured, history tells us these unfettered displays of brutality are the beast’s final efforts of clinging onto what power they have left.
Make no mistake, the work is hard, the path is far.
But I have no doubt: the future is ours. All of ours. Our reality is pluralistic, our nature is dynamic, we are forever in process. We will move toward this transformation – we will move towards systems and communities that reflect our goodwill and bend in the favor of love.
What I’m attempting to do here is remind us of our spiritual impetus - the faith necessary to carry on. Perhaps I’m simply trying to remind myself.
I don’t know why, but I believe in people. Overwhelmingly, I believe in people.
I know all evidence is against this belief: But if the serpent’s head is too much evidence, then the serpent’s tail is a lack of it. One meets where the other begins and the snake ends up eating itself. To break this cycle, eventually, we have to stop looking for the evidence and we are all tasked with placing our faith somewhere.
This is where my faith lies: in all of us.
I am still here.
You are still here.
We are always here.
Like Sara: raise your flags, celebrate, smile wide, and fight on for those who can’t.
I love you all.
Happy Pride.
