Taking Steps

consummation

2009-06-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

This piece was debuted last night at the National Queer Arts Festival show, Girl Talk, in San Francisco. Thank you so much to Gina and Julia for putting the show together, to everyone who came together for an incredible set of performances, and to everyone who came out to support us. It was a pleasure and an honor.

The day they took the silver spoon out of my mouth and replaced it with a gun barrel, I learned a lot about hunger. And hunger taught me far too well.
I came out at nineteen and lost my family when I began transition, lost my way home, my plans, my everything. No small-town hometown, any more, no talking Family Business shop with Mom in the kitchen. In an instant an entire childhood with full cupboards changed, and I was a nineteen-year-old girl whose parents cut off her food supply, who couldn’t even get a job washing dishes, and at the same time as they started refusing to tell me they loved me without qualifiers and started with “you can never have a family,” I learned that the garbage is a pretty decent place to get a bite to eat.

Sometimes we are ghosts in orbit, too afraid of burning up on re-entry to ever go home, unwilling to abandon the sight of it for the cold vastness to which we turn our nervous backs. Circling around each other, stately, flash-frozen at the moment of grief, we wait for gravity to make the choices for us; we pretend we don’t know what else to do.
Bitterness is a waltz.
It’s easy to end up lost in the upper reaches of the air when the ground goes out from under you, you know? When the road you planned crumbles away and, brave Fool, you just walk off into the airy emptiness instead.
Sometimes that bridge you bought is under your feet after all. Sometimes you just join the wind-skating dusty dead, out at the edge of the atmosphere.
We’re all up here, the ghosts and strays, needlethroated, thirsty, waiting until we have mouths enough again for a meal. It’s easy to get lost in that moment of loss.

Family was where the food came from. It was where the love came from. And I lost both, and had to learn, in only the way someone who hasn’t already had to grow up without these things must, where to get nourishment on the fly. The poor little rich girl got an abrupt education in what she thought she was entitled to before, and what could be substituted when all that plenty went away.
In all the things I didn’t used to think were food, or love, that I could take because I suddenly discovered I needed them.

It is no mistake that I learned to eat the scraps from other people’s plates and make ugly compromises for handouts in the same season I entered a relationship where I lost count of the times I was raped. I learned what I was good enough for. I learned to settle for what I could get. What I could digest. What I could endure, in order to have someone touch me and say they wanted me, in order to get a full belly. Food poisoning and abusers both reach a fist into your guts and pull out what they want, after all, but you don’t see either one coming when you’re so hungry you can’t think.
The things we learn to survive are just that: survival. They keep us surviving, for better and for worse.

The thing is, if you go long enough scrounging, snapping and snarling at the edge of the lamplight, it becomes part of everything you do. You learn to hoard every little bit you can get right now, even if you don’t want it, because you don’t know where your next meal will come from. Better to gorge yourself on way too much discarded bread, half of a stranger’s sandwich, or enough abandoned bacon to make you sick, and store it up in case there’s nothing but a carrot, an egg, and hot water tomorrow. It doesn’t matter whether or not you like it, or whether or not it’s any good; it’s something, and the just-in-case justifies everything. Discriminating by quality or desire is a luxury, and when the emotional Dumpstering starts—when you start believing that solidarity’s scraps are enough to make it on, and give up on thriving—you start to packrat every touch you get, even the violent ones, you beg even the friends who degrade you to stay.

I have a steady paycheck now, enough to put food on the table without worry, with no kids to feed and tastes made simple by the school of make-do. I have a ring on my finger from the person I love most in all the world, and we have made a warm safe home where I sleep every night.
But I still eat every scrap in front of me and wipe the dish, even if I’m feeling sick, because part of me can’t look away from the shaky precipice of my life as a queer trans woman of color who’s making it. I’m the monster of the story, lurking at the margin, and it can all be taken away in a heartbeat: that’s what I learned. That it might be safer to be someone’s dog, and at least get the scrapings from the table, but I’d better beg. The ground is unsteady under my feet, and the job, the pantry, the door that locks, I can get pulled off it just as fast as I can be locked up for soliciting for walking down the street for groceries. My mismatched ID is only a sign of how quickly anyone can figure out that I’m a nonperson, a mismatched thing on the edges, the kind of thing that takes scraps or blood to survive. And no matter how steady things get, no matter what I build, I learned that lesson well and it’s just as hard to shake as any lesson about how you can’t eat dignity, about conditional love. Do you see? I’m still gorging on every abandoned plate I pass, just in case the next paycheck doesn’t come. I’m still begging for leftovers of closeness I can stitch into my monster heart. And somewhere, way past that fresh gorgeous produce and piping-hot pie in my kitchen, I still retain the terror that, like Lamia, all that I am will be seen through, and the real people will tear unacceptable me from the feast and my love, that even the woman who knows me all the way to the bottom will somehow someday discover the discarded skin of her selkie bride, and I will lose everything on my way back to the sea.
When I went off the map and up into the ionosphere, I stopped trusting anything good was real, was any more lasting than my breath, and a litany of loss taught me too well to heal right. When I went from scholar to scavenger, the precariousness of my position was a reasonable lesson to learn, but I’m not there any more, not still cobbling together a life from the bits I could sneak off everyone else’s plates.
My mistress with a monster is in love, and I am still learning to trust that she knows what she’s getting into with a fierce conviction and devotion I never thought possible, still learning that leaning on her, the first real family I ever had, is less shaky than I first supposed. When I didn’t know I could be taken care of, she insisted on reaching for my needs. When I was shivering sick she spoon-fed me medicine. At half my size she stood up for me against the whole world without hesitation, and loving her is the truest thing I could possibly know. We have done the work to be family—solid ground—for each other. So why is part of me still waiting for the other reality to drop? Why am I so unable to let go of the hunger, so ready to allow a starving status quo to dictate my life when I am filled daily with love and strength and hope? Where is the trust in a world that can change? In the possibility of feasts, so long as I let them spread out before me, and in a future that is more than a threat? What day will be the day I stop waiting to lose this miracle?
I am planning a wedding, planning motherhood, even as I hold tight to someone who finally told me that I don’t have to accept the leftovers, that I can ask for a brimful cup and watch it sometimes arrive, that I can be not just sated, but satisfied if I let go of believing I don’t deserve it. And at the end of the day, I still fight to remember that it’s not that she’s real and I’m in tenuous human guise, but that she’s cis and I’m trans and that love can be realer than any of those divides, that we can be back-to-back against a whole world full of loss and deprivation and feed each other every day and in the home we are for each other, there is nobody who can stop us now. I’ve come in from the cold and there’s soup waiting.
It is no mistake that when I learned I couldn’t have love, I learned that I couldn’t have a warm meal, either. It is no mistake that in our home, I cook as often as possible.

I’ve been up here in the cold upper air for a long time, with the ghosts and the strays. Needlethroated, thirsty, waiting until I had a mouth enough for a meal again. It’s easy to get lost in that moment of loss. But sometimes one of us can look down and see a soft place, a warm kitchen. And then, all alight in that hopeful embrace, we are shooting stars, rushing home, consumed.

like a hungry runaway*

2009-05-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

This morning my partner sent me down the street to pick up some things for breakfast, because neither of us was thinking about what would happen on the way.

I rounded the corner past the church, its bells pealing for Mass, kids running about, and promptly stumbled into a gauntlet of a solid dozen cafes and restaurants and lunch carts all packed kitchen to door, all their signs cheerfully chalked to announce their specials for Mothers' Day Brunch. It seemed like every storefront had something to say on the matter, or was closed so they could be home to say something else more personal.

I've been trying to avoid noticing today, to skip past all the greeting cards and helpful internet reminders and e-mail from Planned Parenthood telling me via cute video about how much I should appreciate my mother, the best in the world. Last night's crying jag made it clear that this was not a workable strategy. This is not a fun day for me. This is not about picturesque brunch.

When you're barren and motherless, Mothers' Day is a calendar mark to dread.

I will never carry a baby under my heart and above my hips. And the person who carried me, we don't talk any more. There's too much hurt. There's too much poison. Here we are at the day where I'm supposed to idealize that, where I used to call every year and pretend things were other than what they were. This time, it's different. This time I'm not pretending. The rest of my family probably had a lovely spread on the table this morning, but I wasn't there. I may never be again.

I've been trying to hide from this day as best I could, but, as when I was a child, there's nowhere to hide, is there? There's nowhere I can go that the people who made me aren't with me, in the end, nowhere that who they are and what they did isn't encoded in my bones and carved into my corneas. I already knew when I was little that even hidden in a closet or up a tree, nowhere was safe for long, if nothing else because I was there, and I brought it all with me. When it's in you, when it is you, when it's where you come from, you bring it everywhere, stinking in your hair like rancid cigarette smoke, like a red-eyed thing hanging behind your neck and reading everything over your shoulder. I don't know who I am without it. There has never been a version of me without it.

Last year in March I climbed a mountain alone, and sat at the peak trying to put away the whole human world for a while so I could see further, but I brought it with me. My veins and shoes and food wrappers and eardrums were all human, and all came into that place. When I tried to strip away everything and get to the bottom of myself, near the bottom was a terrible, paralyzing fear, infecting all my decisions. That fear spoke in a voice I recognized all too well. Sometimes it wore a face that I recognized, too. Always there. I couldn't get away from where I came from. I brought it with me.

You can't run from where you start. You can't hide from it. You can stop picking up the phone, change your address, change your name, but you'll find it chalked onto the sandwich boards of every cafe in your neighborhood, find it in your inbox as a reward for your volunteer service, and you will find yourself looking over your shoulder every minute, afraid to see in person the people who are always there anyway, but no longer made of smoke and mirrors and hurt but flesh and blood and audible voice, ready to dismantle every shrine you've built in yourself.

I am trying to come to terms with this day. Trying to find a way to make it positive for myself instead of a stab-wound. I think, well, I will never carry a child inside, but I may be a mother someday. I think, well, what about metaphors, about cultivation and vegetable gardens and art, about making new things and nurturing them? I think about the wonderful mothers in my life, who aren't my mothers but who surely count. I think about all the people who helped mother me even if we never shared blood, all the people who gave me somewhere to run to, who showed me a different way to be. I think about elders in my community worth honoring. I think about spiritual mothers, universal mothers even, trying to reach further out into something sacred and more wholesome.
I think of someone dear to me who reminded me that, as Audre Lorde said, we have to learn to mother ourselves. But it's hard to know the best way to mother yourself when your only model is so full of hurt, and is so full of hurt because her only model in turn hurt her. Learning to mother yourself in a new way, when you don't know what the safe and healthy way to do it even looks like, is a tall order.

Mothers' Day is no picnic when you're barren and you're motherless. But I'm not really either of these things. I am fertile, though I cannot give birth, as soil in which to grow things. And I have a mother. If I didn't, this would be a very different kind of hurt, but I do have a mother, one who shaped me, one who is integral to who I am and have become, who is never not looking over my shoulder whether I like it or not. The key is not in the fiction of being motherless. It's in learning to deal with the mother I have, or had, and what she is, now, in me. It's in healing the mother in me so I can mother myself, and so someday when there are children in my care I can do right by them. I don't know how to do these things, but maybe Mothers' Day is a good place to start. My Independence Day, or Dependence Day, or something, something about saying right here and now that even when you ran away, even when you changed your name and address and phone number, you cannot hide from what is written in your ribcage and seeping to fill your muddy footprints, sketched on your palms and wrapped around your throat. If you cannot hide, you have to figure out something better to do.

For all of us learning to mother ourselves, if not a happy Mothers' Day, a hopeful one, one where we give ourselves more chances. A day to remember the good days, the moments of respite. A day to learn to grow something new in ourselves, and start to be brave enough to loose its seeds on the wind. A day to support the mothers around us who are, as our own did, doing the best they can. A day to believe that they, and we, can do it differently.

Where we come from is always in us, and we take it everywhere. Maybe we can learn something from it better than what it wanted to teach us. Maybe someday we can go home.

*props to my friends Coyote Joe and Miss Grace, who you should know better

listening party!

2009-04-07T09:25:00.001-07:00

This Saturday the 11th, there will be a listening party for the release of the SPEAK! Radical Woman of Color Media Collective's spoken-word CD. The CD, a compilation of poetry, prose, story and song, is packed with the work of people you know, including Blackamazon, Brownfemipower, Cripchick, La Mamita Mala, Sylvia, me, and many more. We made this project with love and held hands and hard work, and we're proud to present it as a fundraiser to help get some radical mamis of color to the Allied Media Conference and support them in their activism.
At the listening party, you'll have a chance to come together and hear the album, discuss it, and take it home with you. We've put together a whole curriculum, written together, to help facilitate, and both I and Adele Nieves, producer and contributor, will be present to help get things shaking.

Excited yet? I know I am. Here's the details:
The It Is Better To SPEAK! listening party will be held Saturday, the 11th, at 7 to 9 pm at In Other Words Women's Books and Resources, 8 B NE Killingsworth St., Portland, OR, 97211. All are welcome. Bring a friend and spread the word! I'll see you there.

The press release for the album is below:
*******
*FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:*
*March 9, 2009*
*SPEAK! WOMEN OF COLOR MEDIA COLLECTIVE** RELEASING SELF-TITLED DEBUT
CD*
*UNITED STATES **– March 9, 2009*– SPEAK! Women of Color Media Collective, a netroots coalition of women of color bloggers and media-makers, is debuting March 7, 2009 with a performance art CD, accompanied by a collaborative zine and classroom curriculum for educators. Compiled and arranged by Liquid Words Productions, the spoken word CD weaves together the stories, poetry, music, and writings of women of color from across the United States. The 20 tracks, ranging from the explosive “Why Do You Speak?” to the reverent “For Those of Us,” grant a unique perspective into the minds of single mothers, arrested queer and trans activists, excited children, borderland dwellers, and exploring dreamers, among many others. “We want other women of color to know they are not alone in their experiences,” said writer and educator Alexis Pauline Gumbs, one of the contributors to the CD. “We want them to know that this CD will give sound, voice and space to the often silenced struggles and dreams of women of color.” The Speak! collective received grant assistance from the Allied Media Conference coordinators to release a zine complementing the works featured on the CD, as well as a teaching curriculum for educators to incorporate its tracks into the classroom environment. “*Speak!* is a testament of struggle, hope, and love,” said blogger Lisa Factora-Borchers of A Woman’s Ecdysis. ”Many of the contributors are in the Radical Women of Color blogosphere and will be familiar names… I can guarantee you will have the same reaction as to when I heard them speak, I was mesmerized.” To promote the initiative, the Speak! collective is coordinating listening parties in communities across America, creating short YouTube promotions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7tsdaYmvhE) illustrating the CD creation process, and collaborating with organizers and activists online and offline. The CD is available for online ordering at http://speakmedia.wordpress.com on a sliding scale beginning at $12.

All inquiries for review copies should be directed to us at speakcd@gmail.com. Proceeds of this album will go toward funding for mothers and/or financially restricted activists attending the 11th Annual *Allied Media Conference* in Detroit, MI from July 16-19.
*******

fair

2009-03-18T18:10:00.000-07:00

So I want you to imagine something. It's going to be pretty awful, and it's probably going to be a trigger for some people. If that's a risk you don't feel up for, take care of yourself and stop now.

The first thing you need to understand is that masculinity, maleness, is inculcated and enforced with violence. It's either actual violence, or the threat of violence, or the implied threat of violence. Constantly. It's how men and boys are taught to train each other into maleness. This is true even at a very, very young age; go to a kindergarten playground, and you will see little boys shaping each others' masculinity, according to the rules they're taught by older boys and by grown men, with violence. It starts very early.

Take a little girl and throw her into that group of boys. Leave her with them and only the instruction, "Do whatever you want with her. Shape her into whatever you want to. Your scalpel is violence." Just sit with that for a minute. The image of handing a little girl who doesn't understand the world yet to a group of boys who are given carte blanche to use violence to shape her into whatever they think is appropriate.

It's a horrifying image. It's hideous and disturbing and wrong and it makes my flesh crawl thinking about it. And that's the way we, as a society, ought to react; if something like this scenario went public, there would be newspaper headlines.

It happens every day. Every hour. But while decent people automatically find this scenario a yawning, shocking evil when the little girl we envision is cissexual, this is considered the normal and proper way to treat a little girl who's trans. I knew I was a girl that early; I was kicked out of preschool for refusing to admit that I was a boy. And then they handed that little girl to the boys for the next fifteen years and said, "Do what you want with her. We will look the other way or cheer you on as you turn her into whatever you want to. Your scalpel is violence. It's only proper if she screams."

This is a horrifying story. This is the kind of story that, when you really look at it, represents the kind of abuse that the average person would respond to with, "Lock that sick bastard away and throw away the key." If it's a cissexual little girl. If she's trans, it's things running as they ought to be. There is no censure. There is applause.

This is one of the revealed, naked faces of oppression: if it were done to the privileged person, it would be considered abuse. If it's done to the marginalized person, it's the status quo. But it's not only that. It's not only about oppression; it's about how and why we internalize oppression.

This is a horrifying story. It's the kind of story that threatens to break your mind if it's your story. And you have to protect yourself somehow. You have to hold yourself together. You have to make it make sense. Because a world where that can be done to a little child who never did anything to anyone, who's not even old enough to understand why she's being hurt this way even by her parents until nowhere is ever safe, that's not an okay world. That's not a world I think a lot of us, including me, are strong enough to hold as true. So we defend ourselves by believing what it tells us.

I let the world tell me lies. I let myself believe that I was so bad and wrong and monstrous that I deserved what I got, that I even let someone rape me just because I was so desperately craving to be touched at all, because even abuse was more closeness than I felt I deserved. I let myself absorb the idea that I was completely delusional, and that all my knowledge about myself was false twitchings of a sick mind, because the alternative to that painful lie, the lie that I was a monster living in a fantasy world who was inherently freakish and unlovable? The alternative was worse. The alternative was that I didn't deserve it, I wasn't disgusting and unworthy of love, that I was a child put in an abusive situation and forced to stay there for no good reason. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true, as a child. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true as a teenager who couldn't sleep, who worked out on a punching bag every day after school until her hands bled, who spent every day thinking of newer, cleaner exits from living. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true as a college student who was fetishized and mocked and treated as a contaminated, essentially pornographic animate sex toy unworthy of any kind of closeness that didn't have the tinge of "dirty" and "perverted" seeping into it, who couldn't hug people or say "I love you" without fear that it would be considered creepy.

I wasn't strong enough to accept the truth of how strong I was. Acknowledging and owning my vast strength meant acknowledging that I was holding up something very heavy all the time, that I had been through hardship and not just normal life, the natural order of things. What I wasn't strong enough to accept was that I was a good kid, a strong kid, a brave kid, because that meant admitting that I was going through something that required virtue, strength, and courage, something that would make an inspiring TV movie about human resilience if it were happening to a person considered real by her society. Accepting that I was okay, that I was even beautiful, meant admitting that what I went through at school and at home, rather than being normal and good, was a horrorshow.

So I bought the lie instead. I let them convince me for a large swath of my adolescence that I was, really, a boy. The idea disgusted and horrified me, but not as much as the truth, that I was right, that I was trustworthy to myself, that it wasn't my fault. It was better to live in a world where I was a boy--or even a boy who wanted to be a woman someday--and had lived a normal life, than a world where I was a girl who was systematically stripped of her sense of self, subjective reality, and personhood, subjected to near-constant violence or its threat, and treated as a contaminated, dirty thing. The lie--even the lie of "boy who wants to be a girl" or "woman in a man's body," as though my body was someone else's--as skin-crawlingly painful as it was, was nowhere near as painful as the truth of being a girl trying to find her way to womanhood and living through this on the way.

This is how we internalize the lies. This is how we accept the yoke of oppression. By living in a world where the truth that we are beautiful and worthy and lovable is even more painful to accept than the lie that we are none of these things, because all sense of fairness or order vanishes when you look the truth in the eye. If we are beautiful, we are in a world that does not care about our beauty, and even grinds it in the mud. If we are strong, we are living in a world so heavy that it saps our strength until we are tired all the time. If we are ourselves, we are living in a world that systematically strips away our selfhood like roast chicken scraped from the bone.

Until we are strong enough to look this in the eye and fight it, to stand up and fight and make the part of the world we stand on more okay no matter how hard it is or what it takes--until we are so very strong that we remember we are strong, and beautiful, and true, worthy of no end of love, no matter what--it's just too much to bear. So we accept false stories instead, about how we're dirty and ugly and weak and unlovable. We have to. I had to.

I am writing this down because I know that in an hour, or a day, or a week, I will be listening to the lies again for a while. How else do you live? How do you go on in the world without accepting that the injustice is just, or not your problem, just a little, just for now? How can you walk in a world where the truth is true instead of breaking down and crying? So we internalize the lies for a while in order to let things make enough sense to get through the day. Gravity pulls comfortingly down. The alternative, the raw, vulnerable, pulsing truth can only be taken in doses, even if they're bigger doses every day. It's so hard to just let it be real. How can you let it be real? How can you really pull off the lid and look down into that darkness and let the truth--that you live in a world where you're not considered fully real, fully human, and that if you were considered real, what was done to you would be considered unacceptable, retch-inducing, but you're not and it isn't?

You have to tell yourself the stories. Just for now. Just until you're strong enough to bear the weight of the truth and see with clear eyes, if you ever get that strong. Just until you are so full of overwhelming bravery and power that you can finally insist that you are lovable and loved, that you deserve it in every cell of you, that beauty shines through you as a conflagration of glory. When you stand there, blazing in your awful wonder, you can move the whole world. You just have to get through the pain of knowing that you are true, that you know, that you are everything you will ever need to be.

It hurts to say this and it hurts to hear: you are lovable. So am I. The chasm between that truth and the world we allow ourselves to live in every day is deep and dark, but it is still the truth and always will be.

You are everything you ever hoped you would be, and I love you. When you are strong enough, please, shine.

no regrets no looking back and no goodbyes

2009-03-09T17:07:00.000-07:00

I get so homesick.

I'm a country girl. We know this. And I ache sometimes for the hot breeze and tobacco-colored rimrock cliffs, sitting on my dusty car's hood looking up at a sky bigger than anything, somewhere on a potholed back road out at the edge of the big pines. For soaking in the river and baking on a boulder till dry, scrambling over the jumbled basalt with skinned elbows and a big pocketknife in sturdy jeans. For walking up logging roads and past split-rail ranch fences, sometimes with an eye to where I might park with a girl once the moon came up. I knew every flower by name, could tell you which bird just by its silhouette.

Back home, past the rusted-out stacks of the empty mill, you can see the Milky Way oozing glitter across the arch of everything. The train tracks go forever and so does the horizon, except where stretching calderas come up, a great cradling hand, to hold the boundaries of the knowable.

There's a soda fountain that makes its own chocolates and milkshakes, down there, and you can smell their caramel corn all the way down the street at the little restaurant we all went with our prom dates. Both of the old florists continued to not hire me every summer.

I don't get to go back. Maybe ever. I'm gone from there. I kicked the dust from my boots, packed everything in a station wagon, and ran. As far as most anyone knows, I might be dead.
And I might be, if I did go back. You never know. I did famously at cutting and running, and sometimes that cuts back.

The river cuts through everything there, and everything leads down to it. You just look for the green. We used to jump off a bridge in the summer , where two X's had been scratched into the rail to tell you where was deep enough, and crawl back up through the rocks and shady wild mint patches for another go. You just shucked your shoes and jeans and went, though I was always a big chicken about it.

Quaking aspen and knobby juniper tell you where you are, out there. We don't get those where I live now.

I say awful things about my hometown, bitter, narrow-eyed. Fair enough. It hurt me, bad. But some days, it's just to get away from loving it, from feeling rootless with my feet on all this cement, grasping at bluegrass music and "ain't" and typing inside to stay out of the weather.

I used to dangle my feet over a clifftop, rolled-up jacket for a pillow, and make sketches of every growing thing. I knew what time of year the dragonflies would have their highspeed aerial junctioned relations. Sitting up on my parents' roof in the snow, I'd watch the first melt sigh and plop off the branches. I'd shoo the deer from the summer garden, see if the coyote'd come by, and head down the road to town, singing.

They hurt me, and I ran, and I can never go back. But I can't honestly say there's nothing for me there.

I live in a city with art museums and film festivals and statuary. There's a queer community, and your choice of Thai restaurants, and roses everywhere. There are actual other Filipinas. There's opera. There's my little creaking house with its overstuffed bookshelves and ancient stove. There's the woman I'm marrying.

But I've never yet seen an osprey stoop for a steelhead trout here. It's been years since I've pulled off the road, sat up on the hood of my truck, and named constellations like old friends.

Maybe I'm just not a teenager any more, and don't notice these things. Maybe, in a world that seems a little grimmer and more complicated, I've just let my sense of wonder slip, let the sky get a little less big. But maybe I'm just homesick for a home that didn't want me, an old lover that'll never take me back.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous. I've made a new home and a new life, with plenty of joy in it. The riotous wealth of subcultures and body-mods, the sidewalks that don't roll up at seven, the new places to go that don't run out, the people, all matter. I get giddy at the press and smells and close-in messy human wonderfulness at Pike Place Market, grin affectionately at the ornate Victorian houses Southeast Portland has long since rented out for duplexes to college kids and station-wagon dykes raising kids. I can rent Bollywood movies, for Gods' sakes. There's colors here I never knew existed, before. Besides, nobody pretends that my hometown is still what it used to be, anyway.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous, and I have the scars to prove it. Life goes on, often into something richer, fuller, more honest, more whole. But a leopard can't change her spots sometimes, and for everything that's changed, some things never do, and I can't shake the feeling, some days, that I'm in exile.

(This post had a soundtrack, on the train when I wrote it. It's Kim Richey's "A Place Called Home," for the record.)

we are ready now

2009-02-18T07:42:00.000-08:00

Brownfemipower, once again, speaks truth.

The Allied Media Conference is life-changing. I know because I was lucky enough to go last summer. I was able to go, in part, thanks to the generous help of a couple of you out there who thought it was important enough to help me out. The dividends of that kindness have echoed through my entire life like a shockwave of affirmation, strength, hope, and new community. I left Detroit last June with a new way of looking at the world, a new courage to engage, and new hope for the greatness and potential of letting radical love be at the center of everything.

I never got around to posting about AMC last year because I couldn't find the words. I couldn't describe what it was like to walk into a dynamic community of people who all had been willing to sacrifice in order to come together and hope--without the constraint of always, always having to go back to square one, without the exhaustion, for just a little while, of an oppressive world--who had brought their dearest families, their secret joys, their history-battered strengths in order to dedicate themselves to evolving a new way to go forward. I saw five generations holding hands and supporting each other, across differences, due to deep and mutual respect. I saw children light up with possibility and bravery and laughter. I saw teenagers, arm in arm, teaching everyone in the room what it means to learn. I saw elders in a place of honor, leading the way toward change. And rolling around Detroit, watching as a city forced to its knees by the betrayal of industry continues to provide incredible examples of growth and innovation and faith in the power of community to the rest of the world, I saw a new kind of community that I'd never had before. It was about making not what we're paid to make, not what we're told to make, but what we need, for each other.

At AMC I made connections I had never dreamed I could have--not just as an aspiring writer and media-maker (though I found those and then some) or as a radical activist (we got amazing work done and started projects that blow me away every day) but as a queer woman of color, a sister, a partner, moving through the world and trying to figure out where I fit in it. I went from quietly saying "I'm a woman of color" with my head hung awkwardly to standing up proud and saying "I'm a woman of color" in a clear voice full of certainty. It was the best reminder I could imagine of the idea that that identity is fundamentally about claiming yourself as part of a greater whole, of defining your own identity by your choice of solidarity with others. It's not a "my name is"--it's an "I belong to." It's not a "here's what I'm called"--it's a "here's who my family is." It says you've chosen to prioritize your connection to community, the shared struggle across different iterations of oppression, and the irresistible truth that together we are far more than any one of us.

The Allied Media Conference gave me new tools as a media activist, but it also reminded me where I belong, and to whom I am connected. The people I stood with, sat around a kitchen table with, traded stories and skills and dreams with, re-taught me not just how to do the work, but who I am. They gave me more to stand for, more to love, and more to value within myself. I could integrate all those identities--trans, queer, rural, brown, religious--and nobody tried to force me to take myself apart and just be parts of me. I came away more aware of myself and my context than ever before, ready to keep growing.

On the plane to Michigan, my bag lost, my flight delayed and rescheduled, sandwiched between a dental hygenist and a yuppie who wouldn't turn off his fancy phone, I told people I was on my way to a professional conference of media-makers, and that was true.
On the plane home to Oregon, weeping openly with the joy of discovery and the pangs of distance from a new world of wonders, I told people I'd been in Detroit visiting family, and that was true, too.

I'm ready for more of that. Are you?

same as the old boss

2009-02-18T06:27:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry, you were making a point about online feminists reproducing historical patterns of marginalization and privilege?

I couldn't hear you over the deafening roar of "I'll tell you what you're going to be called, and you're going to sit down and like it."

Lesson, kids: when someone you have privilege over says, "Excuse me, but I would appreciate if you didn't use that word to describe me, it makes me really uncomfortable," what is the proper response?
A: "I'm sorry you feel that way, but I'm going to keep doing it."
B: "Some of my best friends are (insert somebody here), and they told me it was okay."
C: "I'm reclaiming that language for you, as a show of alliance. It shows I'm comfortable with your kind."
D: "You're wrong about the context of that word. It's not offensive and I didn't mean it to be."
E: "I guess I'll try to consider not saying it in front of you people in the future."
F: "Why are you so oversensitive?"
G: "Oh, okay, I didn't realize that. Sorry, I'll knock it off, because I respect your ability to know what is and is not hurtful to you."

Because only one of those is going to get me saying, "Oh, cool, I'm glad you understand, thanks. Shall we move on?" And the others? That's your greater inclusion? Let me tell you where to stick it.

(And all blogs are businesses? What about all the people who never attempt to profit from blogging, not because they can't, but because their aim isn't their own individual career success, but to build widely-accessible community connection? You know, like most of the women of color you reference?)

Seriously, as a smalltime woman of color blogger I really, really wanted to like this post and the ensuing conversation. And you just let me know that as a trans woman of color, it's okay to "colonize" me.

going around in (Venn-diagram) circles

2009-02-08T12:28:00.000-08:00

I keep saying I'm going to write about this, and I keep not doing so.

So here's a question I've been asking myself:

Why is it that I feel much safer in women-of-color spaces that are mostly cissexual and straight than I do in queer-and-trans spaces that are mostly white? Why is it that I've gotten so much more understanding from one than another?

I've been trying to suss this one out, because it confuses the hell out of me, and I've come at it from multiple angles. Is it just a coincidence of which circles I run in? Is is because the (white) queer spaces I've run in are far more clueless about white privilege and than the (straight) women-of-color spaces are about straight-and-cissexual privilege? Why is that? Is it because oppression-by-race is somehow a better beginning education in privilege than oppression-by-gender-or-orientation? I'm really not sure.

I've considered, too, that even a lot of the queer spaces I've run in are cissexual-dominated, so, to wit: I'm a trans dyke of color. Maybe it's a matter of cissexual (white) queer spaces and cissexual (straight) WoC spaces, really, dealing with me as two kinds of Other and fitting them together in different ways. So why is it?

I'd really like to have a discussion about these issues, because it's counter to a lot of what I was told as a baby activist--for instance, that communities of color have more of a problem with queer issues than white communities do. In my experience, that hasn't been true. Is it an economic-class thing, where some groups are just forced to live near the disadvantaged trans members of their group and thus have more familiarity through shared disadvantage? Is it a cultural-imperialism thing, where those of us with roots in more trans-and-queer-inclusive cultures are at an advantage compared to those whose ancestral cultures were not so understanding? Is it just an American thing?

I just can't figure out what it is, and it's not only an interesting question to me, it's a matter of safety. I've left a whole lot of primarily-white queer and even exclusively-trans spaces because they were not safe spaces for me as a woman of color or because there was simply a poor understanding of intersectional privilege and related ideas. Too much "Is Gay The New Black?" and not enough Gloria Anzaldua. Too many deeply transphobic LGb(t?) spaces, even ones labeled "trans-inclusive" that only really mean female-assigned genderqueer and transmasculine folks, you know? And I've found warm shelter over and over in women-of-color spaces that were by-and-large straight and other than me exclusively cissexual, with people who surprised me by considering it their own job to do their homework, understand my situation, and make me welcome--to really acknowledge the patterns of intersectional oppression. Why is that? Do I just run in the wrong trans and queer circles? Have I just been lucky in my POC circles? I honestly don't know.

What are your experiences with these dynamics? Are they vastly different from mine? Why do you think things are the way you've experienced them? I think there's something valuable to be picked out of these discrepancies, if we chip at them for a bit.

inauguration doubletakes

2009-01-20T09:40:00.001-08:00

Did anyone else catch Rick Warren dropping in the Shema and then, immediately after, breezing over a quote from the Holy Qur'an? (I'd chapter-and-verse it, but it's in there 114 times, last I checked.) Thoughts about the supposed inclusivity of simply saying "Jesus" in English, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic and then still identifying Him as, y'know, the one source of true teaching--plus tacking on the Lord's Prayer for no apparent reason?

How about Feinstein's dis of Malcolm X? I gasped, I admit.

And, for that matter--who else fell over laughing at Warren's...exotic...enunciation of "Malia and Sasha"? Was anyone else tempted to periodically hold up a sign that said "EXCEPT THE QUEERS" during his invocation?

...how many times can white newscasters breathlessly expound on how racism is over?

And Obama, well...hell of a speech, sir. Some nice shoutouts, some truly elegantly brutal digs at the outgoing administration, and some interesting reference choices. And a conscious avoidance of gendered language--"Our forebears," "All are equal"--through variation of traditionally epicene-masculine phrases. Nicely done and much appreciated. For that matter? I actually thought it was sweet, that he was nervous enough to stumble on the oath of office. Michelle gave him a great look when he did.

On the other other hand? Get we please, please stop with the notion that every American came from immigrants, settling this untamed land, bravely marching toward the horizon and striking out into unmapped territory to make new homes and hopes? I know it's a great image to work with, y'all, but some people were here already. For Pete's sake, can we stop erasing everyone whose ancestors managed to handle this continent just fine for a good 12,000 years before--how shall I put this--colonialist genocide reared its head? 'Cause they're still here, y'all. And some had to sit in that amazing crowd and listen, once again, and they got conveniently cut out of the picture.

Anyway. That said, I'm glad I got to see most of it, adorably-snappily-dressed Obama kids and all.

schoolyard on fire

2008-12-29T23:54:00.000-08:00

I just don't know what to say, but, crying over it tonight, I decided it was sinful not to say something.
That's part of the trouble--I always bought into just enough of the propaganda that I could shake my head and say, well, it's just so sad. It's just a shame. If only the cycle of violence could stop. If only they'd put down those weapons. Hey, you kids, you two, knock it off.
The stories I listened to only worked if I put away the numbers, put away the proportions. And now, I just...what do you say? What do you say to this?

Nothing is not an option, when it comes to the carnage and massacre in Gaza right now.

I just want to say, to all the people demonizing Palestinians right now, saying that this was all a sinister plan to get a bunch of their children killed to make Israel look bad, that this would all just stop if they'd put down the rocks and handmade mortars and listen to reason, they're all terrorists anyhow, they'll push every Jew into the sea--how? How? What is all this "self-defense" defending against?

How could they manage? Gazans live in an open-air prison. They are literally walled-in to one of the most densely populated places in the world. Walled in. No food coming in, no medicine, no fuel, unless they break an unjust law. No leaving, not without humiliation, harassment, assault, and death. There is nobody in there who hasn't lost someone. How many of those women have not been raped? How many of those children have parents? How many Gazans had a meal this week?
They are mostly fighting with old rifles, handmade short-range explosives, rocks and slings, against one of the best-equipped militaries in the world. Don't put that fact aside. Are people in Gaza committing acts of violence that have killed innocent people? Yes. They're hurling a handful of rickety rockets over the wall. In response, they're up against fighter jets, tanks, a navy, and a well-outfitted corps of the best-trained soldiers in the world, well-fed and sharp and with access to nuclear weapons. And this military they're fighting already has them walled in and starving, their neighborhoods smoking rubble, too many of them missing limbs. Tell me this is just an eye for an eye, what a shame. It's not an eye for an eye. It's a fingernail for a torso, at best. Tell me which Gazans have fighter jets. Tell me who in Hamas, even, has a nuclear-capable military unit that could wipe out their enemy at the press of a button. Show me one Palestinian tank.

Knock it off, you kids. Just put down the weapons, no, I don't care who started it. Ahmad, put down your slingshot. Avi, put down your F-15. You're both equally responsible here.

What the hell is this? How are we saying these things? An eye for an eye? In the last eight years, 15 Israelis killed by Hamas in Gaza--real people who mattered. In the last eight years, five thousand Palestinians killed by the Israeli military. Real people who mattered. This is not an eye for an eye. This is nothing resembling an eye for an eye.

But, you keep saying, those Gazans are harboring Hamas, hiding terrorists among them! Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth, with a million people who are not allowed to leave and have nowhere to run. And they deserve death if their apartment--if they still have one--is within shrapnel range of some guy who works for Hamas or his office or the school he went to? If their neighborhood mosque has a couple members who own a gun? If they have the audacity to be on the street trying to feed their families? They're not harboring anyone. They're pressed up against them in prison.

But, but, they voted for Hamas. Tell me what you would do! Tell me! Who do you believe, who do you listen to, who do you rely on? You are walled into a prison with guns pointed at you all the time. Food is not allowed in, fuel is not allowed in, medical supplies are not allowed in. You lose count of family members violently dead or maimed. Your schools and hospitals and places of worship are destroyed, your neighborhood is full of rubble with few buildings intact, and you cannot expect to live to thirty. And you don't know any of the people on the other side of that wall.
Who do you listen to as a reliable source? The guys with the guns pointed at you, who took the food away and tell you you deserve to have nothing, but who the outside world tells you are decent folks acting justly? Or the people you're told are evil scumbags, but who provide you food, medicine, a little pride, a little order, and the promise to fight for you? Who among you, looking at your hungry, sick child, is going to listen to the person telling you that you shouldn't be allowed to care for them over the person handing you bread and antibiotics and a little civil infrastructure? Do you listen to the asshole who gives you food, or the asshole who takes it away? When you have nothing, no dignity, no hope, when you've got nothing to lose, who do you listen to? What do you think you would do differently? Do you honestly think that, with a gun pointed at your family, you wouldn't be grateful for even a vile human being who tells you you don't deserve it and points a weapon right back?
I don't think I'm that saint. I don't think you're that saint. You want to say you'd know better?

How? Who's in charge? Because in the last three days, in the name of exterminating Hamas, Israeli military bombardments have destroyed the university and the tunnels for getting food and medicine and fuel, have destroyed mosques, and have obliterated the police station. After all, if the people voted for Hamas, then any infrastructure that allows them any order or human dignity is technically a Hamas target, right? Those civilians, by having universities, police stations, and post offices, are harboring terrorists. Those people trying to smuggle in heating oil and grain are terrorists. Hell, who doesn't count as a military target? Especially when your own society conscripts every citizen into the military, and the only civilians are the ones not serving right now?

What do you expect? What do you expect them to do? You take away education, government, hospitals, civil police, anyone who can provide information or order but the gang you're supposedly trying to weaken. You take away food and water and electricity and bandages and set their homes on fire, because setting a crowd on fire to get one criminal or ten is something any reasonable person would do. You wall people in, deny them any basic order beyond your tanks, cut them off and take away any hope of a future, any way to invest themselves in building something different, the basic elements of survival--and you expect them to greet you as the reasonable person here? You expect them not to fight back, ever? You make them live like animals, and you expect them to sit down and talk about it over tea? This is not just a surgical strike on Hamas government and military installations, not packed in like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population for voting in a way that, frankly, was hardly optional. It's teaching them a lesson, with explosions. What do you expect those people to do?

Wouldn't you fight back? If it was you? Your family? Your surgically-struck future? Your bombed-out hopes? Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you look at the deaths of 5000 against the deaths of 15 and justify some things that, on a good day in a decent place where life made sense, you would never consider? Because in the last three days they just lost four hundred more, and these were not just military targets. Without medical aid, most of those 1500-so-far wounded will die, too. What would you do? How can you just say, well, it's so sad, but if only they'd stop with those rockets. If only they'd stop fighting back and respect this situation. Everyone's lost someone over there, Israeli and Palestinian alike, but how superhuman do you expect these human beings to be? How can you pretend that nobody has a breaking point, and nobody makes ugly choices when they have nothing, and the person who enforces their having nothing is right in front of them? It's not polite. It's not pretty. And if it was my family, you are goddamn right that little old violence-hating people-loving me would have a gun in her hands, too, or at least a goddamn slingshot.

How superhuman do you expect them to be? is one question. The other is, to believe these things about these people--that this bombardment was all part of a sinister Hamas plot to sacrifice lives to make Israel look bad, that Palestinians are turning out the lights and inducing their children to cry on camera and faking injuries to pretend to the outside world that they're suffering--how subhuman do you believe these people are? How far do you have to go to believe that these people are so alien to you, all sociopathic monsters, to believe these things? That they asked for it?

Why? Because they voted for bad guys? Do Americans deserve to be walled into open-air prisons and have everything taken away, ground into the rubble and broken glass and starving because too many of us voted for George W. Bush and we put genocidal jackass Andrew Jackson on our money? French people? Plenty of them voted for Le Pen, and he's a brownshirt-wearing fascist. Italians? Berlusconi and his Roma purges were hardly a bright spot. What makes you different?
Now take away the options and stop making Palestinians so alien. What would you do? If it were Atlanta walled in and crushed like this? San Francisco? Cincinnati? Manhattan? Would you care that the people bombing your police stations and highrises and shopping centers were doing it because your elected leader killed some people? When do you draw the line? When they blow up the fire department? The tunnel where you sneak in food? Would you decide that you shouldn't fight back, with the tanks at your doorstep and the bombers overhead?

Hey, you two, knock it off. You kids knock it off. It's just so sad, it's just a shame. Ahmad, put down your slingshot and your hand grenade. Avi, put down your gunboat and your nuclear-armed fighter-bomber. An eye for an eye, is what it is. It's just self-defense.

This is being done in my name, by a state that says that anyone who questions its actions is an anti-Semite--that anyone who finds their state actions unacceptable is threatening me. It's funded with the taxes I pay to my own government, on the other side of the world. This is being done to the families of people I love. When it was my ancestors, fighting back and sometimes doing awful things in the Warsaw Ghetto, at Masada, it wasn't "terrorism," it was self-preservation. I just celebrated a holiday commemorating an outnumbered, outgunned guerrilla war against an overwhelmingly-better-armed occupier who said, hey, look, don't mind our elephants, just put your slingshot down and we'll stop setting everything on fire. We don't call Judah Maccabee a terrorist, either, but what's the difference? Tell me the difference. Because this is genocide. This is genocide in my name, in the name of a people who have always considered ourselves underdogs and who, in this one place and time, suddenly have the overwhelmingly upper hand. How have we not learned better? How does our history of suffering and extermination justify committing these crimes? How are we not the first to step up and stand against this?

I still don't know what to say. But it's unacceptable to say nothing.

To my Palestinian brothers and sisters, I am so sorry. I can never, ever be sorry enough, and my crying for your people doesn't make it better, and I'm this American girl who went to Torah school once, with a roof over her head and a full pantry, and I don't know what to say or do but to stand with you in saying this is unacceptable, and in naming it genocide.

Saying nothing is unacceptable.

shall not perish

2008-11-20T13:01:00.000-08:00

Today is the tenth annual International Trans Day of Remembrance.
Yesterday was the one hundred and forty-fifth anniversary of some of the most influential five minutes I know of, five minutes and ten sentences that mattered and continue to matter and, I think, apply on this dark day, as well.
They came from a depressed, disabled person who was probably queer and certainly haunted, looking out over a community in mourning, crushed by loss, divided by rage and blood-grudges and barely holding back from another round of vengeance. They came from a hated, mocked leader who looked out on a people undergoing tumultuous change, some free for the first time in memory, some having to deal with it. They came from bereavement and fear and the understanding that sometimes, there's just nothing you can say that will make it better, make it go away, but there is always--always--the kind of hope that says, what we can do? We can work to keep this from ever happening again. We can't do this loss and these lives honor by anything else: we just need to put our shoulders to the wheel and do the hard work of hope.
I'd change the gendered pronouns, myself, were it my speech, but they were the conventions of the time, and it is not.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government, of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." --A. Lincoln in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., 19 November, 1863

the quick and the dead

2008-11-18T17:16:00.000-08:00

EDITED TO ADD--IMPORTANT: It has come further to my attention that HRC is not in fact doing any of the planning for Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance, which is, of course, a glaring error. I am retaining the current text to preserve my inaccuracy rather than pretend it never happened.
Having checked with one of this year's organizers--someone who did work I admired a great deal for last year's event--I had it confirmed to me that while HRC lobbied hard to have involvement and control over Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance and in fact announced to their listserv and on their website that they were so involved, the organizers from Portland State University took a stand and chose to limit HRC's involvement to a display table.
I find this news both heartening and reassuring. At the same time, I also think it remains important and disturbing that HRC tried to run the Day of Remembrance, and is doing so in many other cities and towns across the country. Additionally, I think it remains important that HRC continues to claim their heavy involvement in Portland's commemoration even though they were not invited to do so--they are supposedly presenting the commemoration "in conjunction" with the people who have actually put it together.
This information indicates that while my point regarding Portland specifically can be set in part aside, to my great comfort, it still stands in all the places where organizers were not able to stand up to HRC as Portland's did. I commend PSU's organizers and chosen speakers, and again apologize for repeating HRC's inaccurate publicity in this piece.

It has come to my attention that the Human Rights Campaign has got its hands on Portland's Trans Day of Remembrance.
Yes, that Human Rights Campaign.

It's being touted, along with many events across the U.S. this year, as a change of emphasis from "Trans Day of Remembrance" to "Trans Awareness Day," something much more upbeat, much more focused on feel-good celebration of the community, something much more acceptable to upper-class, culturally-normative assimilationists you can put in the newspaper without making anyone feel threatened.

Last year's Day of Remembrance in Portland featured a young, poor, politically-radical trans woman of color (hi!) as an invited speaker and was organized, grassroots, by a multiracial, cross-class, cross-generational group of locals, largely students. This year it's HRC, a Democratic Party flack, a local therapist, and the executive director of an advocacy organization, two of the three white, all binary-identified, middle-class, and middle-aged--all acceptably-photogenic Spokespeople For The Community. This is not to disparage those speakers, some of whom I've worked alongside personally--I just find the choices telling. They may all be good people who do good work, but the diversity seems to have gone away in who we're presenting as our community's face, at the same time that we're supposed to be de-emphasizing commemoration of the dead and trying to re-focus on the sunshiny bits. I cannot imagine that has nothing to do with our inviting a national GLb organization in, one whose goals have largely been assimilationist, white, middle-class, and yes, anti-trans--to "present" us.

The Day of Remembrance is not about being photogenic. It is not about fundraising or lobbying or recruitment. It does not need the HRC.

The Day of Remembrance is ours, and it is sacred. It is the one day we set aside to honor those in our community, overwhelmingly poor trans women of color, who were killed due to bigotry and hatred. It is a single day in the year where we make certain that the names of the murdered are heard and held up, so we can all remember that these people mattered, were real, were loved, and are missed. It's a day to gather the community together and call attention to the violence directed against us and the caring we have for each other. It came from us. It was built by us. It was never supposed to be flashy or glitzy. It is a solemn mourning for the dead, a place to hold hands, and a promise to those who violence took away from us that we who are still living will hold together, take care of each other, and push forward together into a world where that violence is only a painful memory.

We can do better than this, for our sacred dead. We can do better for ourselves.
We need better than this.

Our community is constantly looking down a gun-barrel, and organizations that don't honor or support us continually ask for more of our money, our time, our hope, and now, even our events so they can push their own agenda--one that often leaves us behind. It doesn't just leave us behind deliberately, as in the ENDA fiasco. It also leaves us behind by prioritizing goals that many of us simply don't have on the radar because we're too busy surviving. An inclusive ENDA would have helped guarantee jobs and homes for the most marginalized in the queer community, a bare chance to just have a table to put food on, let alone the food. Instead, we're focusing all of the queer community's resources on what, marriage equality? That's a worthy goal. It's just not on the docket for many of us--working-class queers, queer people of color, trans people--who're often more worried about keeping our families alive than having full legal equality for those families. That equality would be wonderful, as would the public affirmation of us as full citizens. But those of us who aren't even considered citizens--those of us who aren't even considered human, or important enough for an organization that purports to speak for us to advocate for--those of us who are denied votes, livelihoods, and more--we have a much more basic agenda. Make it till tomorrow. Make it till next week. We're dying out here, this year at a rate of more-than-twice monthly, and we are not such a large community we can afford that. This month alone, as many as six trans people--again, almost exclusively poor trans women of color--were reported murdered, and the month isn't even over.

Where are our priorities? Where are the priorities of our so-called allies? You were all out on the street, in the hundreds of thousands, protesting Proposition 8. Where will you be on Thursday night?

HRC just recently put out a new line of designer wear. (Hey, look, it's Christian Siriano, who made his fame spitting on trans people and encouraging the public to use bigoted slurs!) As a young, queer trans woman of color with a white-collar education and a blue-collar job, I can't afford new shoes, and I'm one of the more privileged in my community. Do you get it yet? Do you get why this is such an obscenity?

I am all for marriage equality, believe me. I proudly wear the ring that displays my engagement to my partner, another queer woman, and I look forward to our wedding, whether or not it's legalized. I want those legal protections for my family, and I want the security of knowing that my society places equal responsibility, honor, obligation, and sacred meaning on my marriage as anyone else's. As the law currently stands--and until we achieve marriage equality in the United States--as a trans person with mismatched government ID, I can't legally marry anyone.
But I have to live long enough to get married, and I have to know that my partner won't come to harm for loving me, and I would like to no longer have to carry the knowledge that as marriage is for people, until my society considers me fully human, it will never consider me "marriage material."

Listen, I know marriage is important, but it is not the only issue, here, okay? Because, per the studies even HRC cites, as a trans woman I have a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered. 1 in 12. To put that in perspective, as a member of the general population I have an approximately 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car crash. I am almost ten times likelier to die of murder than a car crash! How many people do you know who've been in traffic accidents? How many of you know someone who's lost someone to a car wreck? Because they're extraordinarily common. And they're accidents. Murder is not. A population ten times likelier to be victim to violent crime as the general population, with a more than fifty percent sexual assault rate and a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered, is not an accident. It is a pattern. It is an epidemic. It is an all-out war. And marriage won't protect us from that. Neither will cocktail-party fundraisers.

You know what else won't protect us from that? Mainstream queer organizations. Not "GLBTQ" newspapers that purport to serve a whole community but list themselves, when not being called out, as "Gay and Lesbian News"--and give the Trans Day of Remembrance an almost two-inch blurb, a whole page to a gay men's drag show, and half a page to a gardening column. Not the Human Rights Campaign with its consistent pattern of taking trans people's money, time, and hope only to cut the legs out from under us when they think it'll make them a buck, who're keen on replacing our in-community, vital Day of Remembrance with an upbeat "Trans Awareness Day" that's easier for cissexual and straight people to swallow without feeling guilty about that long, long list of names, easier to organize parties with keynote speakers around, easier to pass the collection plate during. We need more of that, after all; the greater community only has Pride Festivals and a couple of TV channels to work with, right? All those dead people are such a downer. We should focus on our accomplishments and what makes us feel good, not dwell so much on the overwhelming epidemic of violence directed at our community and what to do about it, not take a whole two hours of a whole day in the autumn to solemnly commemorate the passing of hundreds of people who often never even got a decent funeral, to honor those so disparaged and degraded as sacred, missed, and important--
Where's the champagne in that?

You know what else won't keep you and you and me off that crack-of-doom, heartbreaking list? Hiding the freaks, sweeping the genderqueers under the rug, putting only our most privileged out front, bowing and scraping, and constantly apologizing for existing in a way that might make someone uncomfortable. That won't save my life. That won't save the lives of my friends. Trusting cissexual organizations to represent us and choose who represent us because they have money--that won't save our lives. Considering ourselves less than the cissexual people around us--that won't save our lives.

This isn't a matter of "reasonable people can disagree" or "it's just politics."
This is life and death.
This is whether or not you and I find a world where my fiancée has a 1 in 12 chance of being a widow due to murder alone acceptable, and whether or not watering down the one chance to honor those our community has lost to violent crime, the one chance to call attention to the constant violence aimed at my trans family and especially young, poor trans women of color, is the way to change such a world.
This is a matter of "allies" who turn out in the hundreds of thousands to protest for civil marriage equality staying home and dead silent, a week later, when it comes to advocating for and honoring murdered trans people and the great loss to all of us now that those beautiful people are gone. You want us on the street for your "Day Without Gays" or cheering for a group screening of "Milk"? Show up. Just once. For us. We're not just getting made fun of out here, and it's not just our relationships being invalidated--it's our basic humanity and right to live another day. Hundreds of thousands were in the street for marriage equality last week. Last year, at the Day of Remembrance in Portland, I saw fewer than forty attendees.

I would love to get married. As a trans woman, especially a queer trans woman in a same-sex relationship, I have just as much hurt and yearning about marriage equality as anyone. I plan on living that long, and I plan on living long enough to grow old with my partner and, heaven willing, children. Whether or not that happens may just be up to you.

My right to stay alive is more of a priority than my right to get legally married. And right now, as this society and its culture and its legal system stand, I'm one of many people who don't have either right. You want to fight for my right to marry? Wonderful. Thank you. But those hours protesting, those donations, all that outrage and community support and work--I'd prefer they went, for a start, to keeping me alive out here. And I think the "GLBTQ" community in the United States, such as it is, needs to take a long, hard look at why they have money and time to fight Measure 8, but nothing to give but silence, co-opting, and more requests for us to pipe down and lighten up when it comes to the more than monthly murder of trans people. Show us our lives and deaths matter to you. Show us you acknowledge that the violence against us is worth paying attention to, that our dead were real people who deserved far better, and that our living shouldn't have to live in fear.

See you in the street.

wake the dead

2008-11-01T02:40:00.000-07:00

We're coming up on the Day of Remembrance, but I'm old-fashioned: I prefer to start honoring the bygone dead here, at the sundown of the year.

It's a time of straddling and blurring lines, of the constant presence of mortality. Fertility crosses into decay, and we gather a harvest, of sunlight, of sustenance, of memory. Identity blurs and stretches and we take our false faces on and off, swirled all around by falling leaves made remarkable as they flash sunset colors in their dying moments. We take stock of a summer and autumn gasping their last and prepare for the season of cold and dark and deprivation, unpacking the quilts and sweaters in the top of the closet, drawing thick curtains, looking inward. We take a long, lonesome stairway down into the anterooms of the Land of the Dead, lighting lanterns, wary of whispering spirits long ignored. Some of us erect altars to those we've lost, offering them some of the food and memories we've gathered, celebrating them in steady flames and bright colors against the increasing outdoor gray.

There's a magic to it, here as the curtains go down on the twilit remains of the day. Looking over what's ripe and what's rotten, we take in what will keep us warm and full as best we can. We look back because looking back is a necessary step in going forward. Without that harvest, we will never leave the time of masks, the place of skulls. We will never be able to move through the hallways of the living until we look at what is dying, what is dead. Without this pause at the moment of gathering darkness, when we gather our own close to us, we remain forever in that place of whispers and illusions.
There is plenty in this hour of the dead to appreciate, plenty to live for. We can put on faces that are often truer than the ones we had before, even in their transparency, be other than what we were, explode into behavior we would never feel free to enact in the sunlight. We can embrace mystery, letting shadows and bright decoration go dancing arm-in-arm. Nonetheless, it's simply not human to live forever in the liminal. It's not a place: it's the blurred line between here and there, now and then, alive and dead.

There's only one sort of creature who can live long in that borderland. Monsters are alive and well here, half-obscured, given their only chance to roam the streets unmolested. This hour of the dead is the only time we welcome monsters into our homes and neighborhoods. For once, they're celebrated, and their uncanny presence causes forbidden thrills.
It's the end of the evening, the moment of the dead, when the lines between worlds grow blurry. And monsters run free.
In order to move on into the night, we have to look them in the eye. We have to hold our monsters close. We have to acknowledge our dead. We have to look back.

There's an old story you've probably heard, but let's look back at it. Once upon a time, a God made a new being, split it into halves, and called them Lilith and Adam. That God insisted that they follow an order: that, though equals made of the same substance, one submit beneath the other. And she refused. The dialogue is simple:
"But I made you. Do what I say."
"No."
And she refused to participate in a system that marked her as less, and moved away to another place, there to couple in unthinkable ways with forbidden partners, there to set up her own way of being, there to become a mother of monsters. But there was a price, because that God had already replaced her with a newer, less proud woman, there to be a mother, too. And all Lilith's children would be taking a world they were not promised from Eve's children, you see, by simply living. The monsters would be taking human land and human food and human work away. They would suck the very blood from human infants. Teeming and multitudinous, they could not be trusted simply to thrive harmlessly, and so they were condemned. The children of the outside, of the otherworld, of pride and wrong attractions and unacceptable sex, the children part this and part that, were condemned to death. No matter how many came to this world each day, hundreds of Lilith's monster children were condemned to die daily so that the children of Eve, the planned children, the race that behaved and stayed in the lines, could thrive instead. And their mother, the defiant first woman , was doomed to an infinite and never-ending bereavement, screeching cold vengeance in the wilderness.

Generations have heard this story told as a warning, that the Mother of Monsters and her children were out there to take anyone who stepped outside the lines, outside the city, outside the rules. This is their time, the place of outsiders and border-riders, the hour of the dead. The monsters have their dead, too, after all. They loom close at our shoulders in this one moment of the year we invite them in. Some of us, given that warning as we stand on the brink of the dark, look out on our history and our dead, and we recognize that when we are systematically stamped out for competing with real people, when we are pushed out and starved and hunted for living unavoidably outside those lines, when our place at the blurring between here and there, us and them, merits a death sentence over and over...maybe we didn't have the mother we thought we did. Maybe we were simply listening to an unreliable authority who told us we belonged underneath, and needlessly complied. Maybe when the Mother of Monsters comes to breathe down our necks, the right response is take me.

It's time to look back. It's time to embrace the monster as a lineage of the defiant oppressed made powerful, suffering heavy losses but never, ever backing down.
It's time to remember our dead. And it's long past time to refuse their place, and our place, underneath. The authority that condemns us to die for our defiance of rules we never made is not an authority worth listening to, and we do not honor those who fell before us by rolling over below our so-called betters and taking it.
Once a year, the dead rise from below and speak. We ought to learn from their example.

2008-10-31T18:32:00.000-07:00

Best wishes for your All Hallow's Eve, y'all. Pour one out for those no longer with us. And then go make trouble.

make a call (phone booths, 0)

2008-10-26T11:43:00.000-07:00

A phone booth is a place of change, and a place to use change to send a message, to make a call. The phone booth is the place behind the magician's waving hand, where Clark Kent can become Superman, can peel off the quavering mundane and transform into something extraordinary and inhuman. It is the modern dovecote, a home for all the heartbeats to which we will attach slips of paper saying, Here I am. Hear this. Here: this. Hear: I am.
The phone booth is fundamentally a non-location, an unplace. It's a negative space we briefly occupy in order to be, on a basic level, somewhere else: in the room we wish to call, in the place with which we need to communicate, with a loved one, with a business associate, with someone who can help. It's a space to overcome Here and There being separate by being There in voice while Here in body. You don't call a phone booth; it's not a place. You only call from a booth, in order to bilocate, in order to traverse distance and be somewhere else for the time a quarter or two will buy you.
Phone booths are always, always in-between, in that moment of transformation, transubstantiation, telephony, teleportation, all these functions across, through, beyond. It's not a place, it's a motion, a lacuna, full of longing for something and somewhere else.
The phone booth is, was, and always will be a monster's place, adrift in that conjunctive space, a liminal twilit between where distance and difference collapse for the moments that change will purchase and connect unconnected things. The phone booth always reaches out toward the real and concrete, the legitimate world, but it remains its own, mythicized, while we spin and spin in them until our brightly-dyed insignia and alien heritage flash into view, just for a moment, just for a moment.
Phone booths are tenuous, transitory, reaching. Phone booths are a monster's space. They are a place in which we can isolate the moment of change, make it an eternity, and can put that change into the hole of our location and reach out to speak.

Make a call. Where aren't you? To where and what do you reach out? And most importantly of all: if they pick up over there, what are you saying?

(Previous Phone Booths installments here, here, and here.)

pieces of holes (TRIGGER WARNING)

2008-10-17T03:43:00.000-07:00

I was raped.

I can't really make that flowery. I can't pretty it up or find some more eloquent way of saying it. I've tried so hard to turn it into the piles of words I paint everything with that I've failed to just say it.
I know I'm not alone in it. It's something more than a third of women in general, and more than half of trans women specifically, can say. It took me a long time to admit that I, too, can say it.
I was repeatedly sexually assaulted a few years ago. There's not any way to put that that I can really come up with that doesn't amount to protecting you and me from the simple fact that a while ago, I was repeatedly fucked without my consent.
But my getting fucked didn't stop there, and that's why I'm finally fighting down the nausea and saying something about it in public and exposing myself to even more of the kind of nastiness that I find the Internet is happy to deliver. So I won't make this pretty either:

After I was raped, I was re-victimized by transphobia and transmisogyny.

It was in all the people who said I was "really" a man, and therefore couldn't have been sexually assaulted, and therefore didn't offer support and resources I needed to recover.
It was also in the people who saw that the person who did it, female-assigned and genderqueer, as "really" a woman and therefore unable to perpetrate sexual assault in the first place.
It was in the administrators and healthcare professionals who were told that I was dosed with hard liquor I didn't know I was drinking and then thrown down behind a locked door after I got back from the ER for alcohol poisoning, and decided the important thing to address about that situation is that I clearly must have had a drinking problem.
It was in the people who saw I was trans and therefore decided that I must have invited what happened to me. After all, you know how they are. They're into that kind of kinky stuff. Hell, I hear trans women get raped on purpose, and that's one of the reasons they're so especially suited to prostitution, which they do in order to get off on victimizing female bodies they can control. Hell, I hear they're dangerous and mostly rapists themselves, and that's why they can't be allowed into public bathrooms or rape crisis centers.
It was in all the messages I absorbed about how nobody would ever love me or consider me desirable again, about my freakish and unacceptable body that was good only as a revolting punchline, and how someone pinning me down and not taking "no" for an answer was the best I could ever hope for, so why not lie back and pretend that hey, it's at least someone willing to look at me without clothes on and call me "she," and that makes it okay.
It was in knowing that I certainly couldn't ask for help, because everyone around me was still having a hard enough time with my coming out in the first place.
It was in all the people who wouldn't believe me anyway, because being trans meant I was obviously unstable and an unreliable narrator of my own experiences.
It was in the missing support from birth family, who rejected me when I came out a few months before by telling me I would never find anyone to understand or love me, that I was making up a sick lie to hurt them, that children shouldn't be exposed to people like me and I could never have a family of my own. It was in all the threats to disown me if I didn't knock it the hell off, which certainly didn't help make me vulnerable to the sort of person who looks for lonely, isolated, desperate people who have a hard time fighting back or standing up for themselves.
It was in the missing support from many of my friends, many of whom quietly vanished from my life as soon as I came out, many more of whom trickled away in the months following, often without even bothering to make excuses.
It was in the vulnerability caused by my sharp and steep downward economic mobility as my family's support dried up to a coercive trickle and I found myself suddenly and mysteriously unable to get so much as a job interview to wash dishes, which left me unable to afford healthcare or therapy or, for that matter, basic nutrition. It was in the constant indignity of eating out of the garbage and the messages that reinforced about what I deserved from other people. It was in being too busy surviving to look after my recovery or even stop for a few minutes to deal with what happened to me.
It was in all the voices telling me I was demanding so much of society by asking it to accept me as a woman that I didn't dare ask for anything else, like help.
It was in all the voices telling me that someone showing up in my bedroom at all was the best I could ever hope for, and if beggars can't be choosers then monsters can't either, and what's regular sexual abuse as a price to pay for someone, anyone, willing to be seen with you in public or touch you at all?
It was in all the people who let me know my place and that I should be grateful for being allowed to live at all, and shouldn't be complaining, and why couldn't I just be a man anyway and move on?

You know what else it was in? It was in my not talking about it until now.
It was in all the fears I had about saying anything because of the ways that would reflect on my whole community. It was in all the ways I could be afraid that my talking about my rape would reinforce stereotypes about trans women of color as tragic, agency-stripped victims, as sex fiends, as people who invite rape on themselves. It was in all the conversations I swallowed about the subject because I didn't want to make the community look bad by saying I'd been assaulted by another trans person. It was in every stereotype of deceptive trans people that told me that I wouldn't be believed if I spoke up. It was in the ways I knew that victim-blaming that would be unacceptable to my supposed political comrades about a cissexual woman would rear its head and ask why I didn't fight back harder--why let this person come back again and again and let it happen more than once--why I covered it up by making jokes about it for five years as a buffer against letting it take me apart--because it wouldn't be asking, it'd be telling, and the answer would be because you're trans. It was in my dread that even this, even this could be interrupted by someone asking me to justify my transition instead of letting me be a human being with a story.
It was in an awful, hollow truth: that I even had some fond memories of the person who did it, that there was ambivalence, because they were the first person I'd ever been involved with who would at least call me their girlfriend and didn't recoil from the reality of my transition. Even though they used it and its accompanying vulnerability to do unacceptable things to me. And that that ambivalence, not uncommon for survivors of sexual assault especially by intimate partners, would damn me as a trans woman and make a thousand vicious stereotypes more convincing. How much hate are you supposed to have for the person who raped you? What's the acceptable cutoff before people start believing you asked for it? What about when you're trans?
It was in knowing something even worse: that if the rape had turned into murder, still, I'd have been "asking for it" as soon as it hit the courts and newspapers.

I was re-victimized by transphobia, and transphobia helped make me vulnerable in the first place. It isolated me and set me up to be frightened, desperate, and unwilling or unable to stand up for myself. It made unacceptable acts invisible or falsified my consent. It cut me off from resources and recovery in the aftermath. And it even kept me from talking about it for a matter of years, even kept me from admitting to myself that even when it's me, there's a word for nonconsensual sex, that saying "no" counts as not consenting, and that maybe, just maybe, I ought to wake up and call a spade a spade even though I wasn't supposed to have the right.

Tell me again that because of what I am, I'm a danger to other women. Tell me I shouldn't have access to resources for survivors of sexual assault. Tell me that I should expect to be vulnerable as the price for what I am, and that my public safety is begging for special treatment. Tell me I asked for it.
Tell me again about my fucking privilege.

You know what? Here's a word that didn't mean anything to the person who sexually assaulted me, and didn't mean anything to the people and institutions that made it worse, so much that I'd almost convinced myself it didn't mean anything when I was the one saying it:

No.

the sky is falling

2008-09-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

It is time for us to acknowledge that our love is an act of war.

It seems distasteful to say. It feels wrong. Our love, our lives, our nurtured gardens and families, we say, these are not weapons. These are not acts of violence. To us, they are not.
Nonetheless, there are those who insist breathlessly, endlessly, that they are. That our families are destroying their way of life. That our existing in public shocks and harms them. That attending school, sitting in a restaurant, having to hear at all that we exist is an affront that threatens to annihilate them. And they gather their stormclouds over and over, they teach their children, they shout from the pedestals and rooftops and radio waves that we are, by virtue of drawing breath, destroying them. That we are at war, and that our heartbeats are a sword at their throats.
I think it is time to admit that they are right. Whoever started this, however much those of us who abhor war and all it means cannot go near the word, there it is: there are people, many, many people, who believe that by existing alone we wage war on them. And in response, they gather arms and preach daily that our threat must be removed by any means necessary. By their believing it, it is made so; bloodless though it may be for them, we are at war. And each of our acts of war, each exposed inch of brown skin, each held hand, each public footstep of an unacceptable body and each child raised in a home they abominate, each of our acts is met with a salvo of invective and violence, and our people die and die and die.

There is a war on, and the stakes are infinite, because the only outcome acceptable to the mustering many who believe that your breath or mine is an act of war is for us to be forever wiped clean from the face of the earth. We have to stop speaking where any of them can hear us. We have to stop being seen. We have to stop loving and conceiving and using precious resources stolen from their mouths. And in this world, as perhaps there has always been, there is the destructive power to achieve this. In this struggle, we have only two options: to prevail, or to find none of us in a position to care any more. Those who would annihilate will eventually find that they cannot exist much longer than we do, but it doesn't matter. They won't be in a position to care any more either.

There is a war on. All we can do is succeed, or find ourselves no longer in a position to care. Daring to continue living, let alone daring to speak, will be considered an act of war until there are no more battles to fight, and no one to fight them.

So let's admit it. Our lives? Our lives are an act of war. They are open defiance. They are invasion. They are insistent violation of the borders of a world that desperately pretends we do not exist. They are rude gestures and thrown rocks at the rumbling war machines of systems who choose to write us out of history, beginning only a moment ago and stretching back to the beginning of all things. By standing here and living, we defy the notion that we have no right to, and we scream out that no world where we are torn apart into nothingness can continue. Every seed we plant, lover we kiss, drum we beat is indeed a grave and mortal threat to the entire world as they know it, because our reality forces it to crash against us over and over only to find us still here. Even when we die of it, we are dead, but we are still here, we still are, we still were.

We can call it linking arms. We can call it embraces. We can call it a garden plot or a home or a marriage. We cannot concede that it is war. We cannot look at the arrows fired by our adoration of our loved ones and the mortars launched by our still-real, still-abhorrent bodies. We look into the furtive, fervent trenches dug by those who call our lives war and shake our heads, wondering what they're on about.

Here's what they're on about: they live in a world where we are monsters. They live in a world that trembles daily, because we snake our faultlines through its foundations and each time we move more crumbles and falls over the yawning edge of the flattened sea. In their world, once near us, their children can be lost to them, and just seeing us represented fills them with the rage of people struck in the face and deprived of their birthrights.
That world needs to end, and we know it. That world will end, and they know it.

There's a war on. Either we succeed, and their world ends; or they succeed, and ours does. Does it matter that we want them to go on living in our world, that our world has room for them to build cities and parks and futures? Not really. The very act of not getting to define everything for the rest of us is the end, for them. The fact that none of them would actually die, that their children would be fine and their blood unshed, is irrelevant. We can abhor and condemn violence and torture, and this too is an act of war. We can love them depthlessly as people and wish them no harm, but we cannot avoid the implications. If we are considered equals, their world is over. Our lives are the explosives that end it.

So, okay. Let's sit that knowledge down on our kitchen tables and give it a good look. There are two possible worlds: one where we prevail, and get to live side-by-side, and one where we do not, and are annihilated. And side-by-side looks like annihilation to the folks who have to live next door. There goes the neighborhood. We might think it's a really nice neighborhood to raise our kids; doesn't stop the neighbors from thinking their lives are over because we continue to exist yards away.

I say let's call down the thunders, then. Let's stand and fight. Let's own that our love is a matter of artillery, and fire salvo after salvo. Let's hold hands and kiss and fuck and dance while all over, rock shears from the cliff-faces of their shuddering world and it frays at the seams. Let's defiantly exist, exist hard, right next to them, public, brazen, beautiful. Let's drill and march and right on their doorsteps let's have unacceptable bodies and loud music and food whose aromas they find foreign and offensive. Let's fucking sing.

We can call it jubilation. They can call it war. Either way, the results are the same. We succeed, and walk hand in hand into a new world where our very existence is not considered a violation, or we do not--and are no longer in a position to care.

"I was crying...why were they doing this to me?"

2008-09-07T13:18:00.000-07:00

I got more updates from RNC today. And this is at least as serious as anything I've already posted.

There has been a lot of talk about prisoner abuse in Minneapolis-St. Paul directed at arrested protesters. Indymedia's open publishing wire is reporting multiple instances confirming these accounts, and if verified, they do constitute actual, honest-to-gods torture.

(video transcript: a young white American man, badly bruised and with many stitches above his eye, speaking at a press conference and describing extensive beatings and torture while in custody after his arrest at the RNC protests. His experiences also included verbal abuse, denial of food, and being forced to keep his head in a bag full of his own vomit.)
This? This is torture of a civilian citizen on US soil for expressing political views and without being charged with a crime. He fell off his bicycle and bumped into a cop, who said there was no harm done before the guy was rushed and arrested. You can't make excuses now that it's just for foreigners, or immigrants of dubious documentation, or criminal terrorist types that we just know did something. This here is a grade-A white cissexual able-bodied male citizen who fell off his bike and got nabbed, with enough evidence to press charges regarding his allegations. And those of you who have been saying that torture won't be directed at you, it's okay, it's excusable, it might even be a good idea when it's thrown at brown people from other countries? Queers you don't know? Trans women of color who're probably whores anyway? "Enemy combatants?" Now you're seeing its fruition. Now you're seeing what the rest of us already know: they test what they do on us, and when they think they've got it down and nobody's complaining, they'll aim it right at you the moment you step out of line.

There is a direct connection with the use of Raytheon maser weapons in US occupations overseas and their deployment on domestic crowds considered to be trouble. There is a direct connection between use of Tasers in covert torture in other countries and their overzealous, sometimes lethal application in the States. You cannot sensibly separate the same technique being used by the same government in two different places. You say sonic crowd-control weapons are only going to show up in Iraq and whammo, they're making folks vomit uncontrollably right here at home.

And we keep pretending! We keep arguing that we can sanction our government to train and deploy torturers unapologetically on some people, and then we express shock that the techniques bleed right on back into our domestic law enforcement. And once we're putting military personnel into the equation, too--including units fresh back from military occupation in Iraq, primed to see a civilian population as a crowd of strangers full of possible threats, always to be suspected and controlled and if necessary taken out--how are we expecting the violence we export not to land on our doorsteps? How are we deluding ourselves into believing we can tell our soldiers and police that torture is okay when the prisoner's someone we don't like--say, a suspected terrorist--and not expect that the same techniques won't be used on someone they don't like--like an unarmed, handcuffed, helpless protester in custody who dared to call them a name? How can we continue to pretend that our willingness to dehumanize and abuse our supposed enemies has nothing to do with authorizing the dehumanization and abuse of people a little closer to home? How can we continue to pretend that this infection of inhumanity and wanton cruelty doesn't spread when we feed it, no matter where we think we're pointing it at first?

Some of us see this treatment every day. Some of us see it at routine traffic stops. And we've tried to warn you that every chip you cut away from our civil rights is eroding the base of yours. But some of you didn't want to listen, did you? It's just gonna be bad guys. It's just gonna be criminals. Well, it sure isn't gonna be American citizens, we've got rights.

You allow the rights to be taken from other human beings, sanction or look the other way when it happens because they must have done something to deserve it, you're contributing to a wider trend, a deep current eroding away at human dignity and the rule of law. And then we're all shocked when it comes right on home and hits people usually exempt. "But he didn't do anything!" Of course he didn't. That's the point. Guess who else hasn't.

We've got people in charge of this country right now who think this is perfectly acceptable, that someone arguing with their ideas is an enemy just as much as the guy shooting a gun, and that anyone marked an enemy forfeits all human rights. They've spit on the Geneva Conventions and even the US military manuals of conduct. Here they are, asking for another four years, another eight, another sixteen. Except it's not "asking." It's jailing and torturing anyone brave enough to be in the street to argue about it.

This is only the beginning. The guy in the clip above didn't die, praise be, nor did the detainees allegedly beaten, teargassed, burned, harassed, and raped. If we let this go on, it is only a matter of time. If we don't fight back at this madness with all we have, this is only the beginning. They have a whole new world planned out for us to live in. Someone else has already described it far better than I can:

"...imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever."

more breaking medic news

2008-09-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

This is a press release from one of our Portland Street Medics, now released from custody. Please read all of it, and understand exactly what's going on here. This is evidence of medics--medics in negotiations with police who know who they are and what they do--being specifically targeted and abused. Please consider donating to the medics' legal fund. --ll.

Press Release
by R. Westlund

Portland Street Medics Victims of Police Brutality and Unjustified Arrests at RNC

Four members of the Portland Street Medic Collective who had travelled to the RNC to provide medical care to the radical community were arrested on 9-1-2008. All are now released pending court dates in October.

Before the arrest, the medics were following an unpermitted march around the outskirts of the boundaries of the Excel Center. The march stayed mostly to sidewalks and utilized several pedestrian trails.

After heading nearly a mile down a bike trail with a river on one side and an unpassable bank on the other side of the road, protesters found themselves under fire from police chemical weapons, having never received an order to disperse. The protestors and the medics fled back up the bike path while the onslaught of chemical weapons and differently-lethal weapons continued behind and next to the fleeing crowd. Police in riot gear ran past the tail end of the running group, continuing to launch weapons into the crowd, forcing those at the back to run through the already dispensed weapons.

The four medics helped with the evacuation of at least five patients, including one with a broken hand from being hit with police weaponry, one with an injured ankle from being hit with police weaponry who needed physical support to walk, and one who was blinded by pepper spray. This assistance left the medics at the very back of the crowd and among the worst victims of chemical weapons as they fled the scene.

At the corner of Ontario and Shepard the crowd was trapped in a park by lines of riot police and all people in the park, including those holding tickets to a concert and attempting to utilize the pedestrian bridges to get to the concert, were arrested. Those with misdemeanors were released later that night, while those being held on felonies were in jail for 48 hours.

Three of the Portland Medics, David Drew, Jr, Tracy Maier, and R. Westlund are charged with Misdemeanors in the 1st degree of "presence at an unlawful assembly and refusing to leave." They face 90 days in jail and fines up to $1,000. The fourth, A. Oliver Hayes, is charged with a Gross Misdemeanor in the 3rd degree of rioting, and faces one year in jail and a fine of $1,000.

Later in the week, a group of six medics, three of them from Portland, were again the targets of police misconduct. A group of 350 people were being detained and preparing to be arrested on a bridge. The group included some legal observers from the NLG and 12 Street Medics. Medic Dispatch received news that the legal observers in the group had been released prior to the arrest, so the six medics headed out to see if they could negotiate with the police for the release of the medics.

Upon arrival at the scene one of the Portland Medics spoke with an officer and received a phone number for "Watch Command" to begin negotiations. On the first phone call, the medic explained the job of the medics and explained that they were asking for the release of the medics detained on the bridge. The medic gave WC their full legal name and offered to provide proof of credentials as an EMT. WC offered to give the request to the commander at the scene and then call the medics back.

After a reasonable amount of time, the medic called WC back to check on the status. WC questioned the location of the medics, and the medic confirmed that they were at the scene of the arrest before ending the phone call to wait for further news.

The medic attempted to speak with two officers on scene, but neither would produce a supervisor to do the negotiations. Moments after the second attempt, while the Medic Liaison was making another call to WC, one of the Portland Medics was pulled out of the crowd of observers and drug into the street by four police officers. The medic's pockets were searched while the medic stated, "I do not consent to this search." While still searching this medic, the commanding officer led four more officers into the crowd and pulled out the Medic Liaison, who had been on the phone moments before. The first medic was released back into the crowd after their pockets were searched.

The second medic was questioned as to why they were carrying a backpack and hip pack. The medic explained their status as an EMT and allowed officers to take their registration card as proof. Officers explained, "You reached your hands in your pockets, and that makes us nervous, so now we have to check what you're up to." The medic repeatedly denied consent for the search but officers began opening the medic kits regardless. An officer asked, "Where did you get all this stuff? Did you steal it off the ambulance?" The medic responded, "I'm not going to answer any more of your questions until I speak to my lawyer." The officer replied, "In that case, you can pick your own shit up off the ground," and began opening ziplock bags and dumping medical supplies on the ground.

During the search, officers repeatedly made threats about possible criminal charges against the medic, including "medical terrorism." Officers dumped the entire contents of both medical kits on the ground, purposefully stepped on the equipment, read all the aftercare flyers and made threats about "testing the pepper spray" on this medic, and searched the medic's body and clothing three separate times in an extremely rough and inappropriate manner. After running the medic's ID through the system, the officers ordered to medic to clean up all the supplies, and accused the medic of littering when a small packet of vitamins was overlooked on the ground. Once the supplies were repacked, the medic was free to go.

These police actions were not based on any reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. The police were targeting the medics who were attempting to liaise with commanding officers and harassing them in order to reduce their power and prevent further negotiating tactics.

R. Westlund
Friday, September 5, 2008

and now some nourishment

2008-09-05T20:12:00.000-07:00

I believe very firmly in balancing the microcosm with the macrocosm, in calling out support to good people doing good work just as much as standing up against injustice. And that means backing up people who're building a better world and coming at it from new angles.

Amapola is doing work I've never seen before that I think is vital, and is now blogging about it at Imperfect Patient Syndrome. She's a queer femme of color who's been through the treatment system for anorexia and is now examining it from the outside, as an academic, with cutting insight. Her research is digging into ways that data on eating disorder patients--and the methods of treatment applied to them--leave out the narratives and concerns of working-class women, queer women, and women of color. It pulls open how privileging a "model" eating-disorder patient who is middle-to-upper-class, straight, and white, as has been standard in both theory and practice, not only neglects the voices of those outside that paradigm; it also harms their ability to get proper medical care. Amapola also works in her own personal narrative, bringing it all home to people you love and know and avoiding the sterility of a lot of academic work.

It's sharp analysis that keeps alternately making my jaw drop and making me wonder why there's so little material working with this perspective. This is an area of research with too few people working on it, and longtime readers here will know they're issues close to my heart. I think Amapola's work is, one of these days, going to save lives.

Imperfect Patient Syndrome. Go check it out.

street medics, update

2008-09-05T14:37:00.000-07:00

I have a few updates on the street medic situation.
Word is that all of the Portland street medics have been released, though other medics, as well as journalists and many others, are still incarcerated. They're nominally okay, but facing the theft of their equipment and possessions, including medical supplies, plus a mound of legal and travel expenses.
It isn't pretty over there. Report is they actually have mercenaries on the streets--even making raids. That's Blackwater--the same mercenary company under fire for their war crimes and murder of unarmed civilians in Iraq, the same mercenary company deployed after Hurricane Katrina and caught playing target practice with civilians.
Add Blackwater to the National Guard deployed in Minneapolis-St. Paul this week, and what you have is a government deploying military personnel--including mercenaries with little to no legal oversight and a history of brutal, trigger-happy tactics--against their own citizens.
If you've been accepting this as normal, as a status quo you weren't thinking about, please sit back and drink that up for a moment. Think of the more than 300 citizens dragged off by these soldiers on their own streets, for participating in a largely peaceful, nonviolent political protest. And if you're an American, think about how you feel when you read stories of that sort of thing happening somewhere else, and what you're willing to say about those countries, those governments, those people.
Now let's add more into the mix. They're by all accounts specifically targeting journalists--even journalists with high-level credentials--people who are paying attention to what they're doing and reporting on it. They're targeting medics--nonviolent volunteers out there to deliver medical aid to people and keep the crowds safe. They're raiding community centers, community kitchens, homes. They're pressuring independent media to shut down. They are kicking the legs out from under people's ability to know what's going on, stay safe, and protect themselves.
Are you seeing it on the news? Are you seeing it in your local paper? My paper ran a story on the dangerous, destructive protesters, with a picture of a beleaguered lone policeman firing pepper spray at frightening masked anarchists. That was their coverage. And then they went back to stories about a baby elephant at the zoo.
Military personnel performing police actions on US soil and arresting nonviolent protesters. No, not just that--preemptively arresting people they think might be protesters in a few days. And going directly after nonviolent people providing food, medicine, and information.
It looks like this. And this. And this.
Pay attention.

Street medics are trying to keep everyone safe in all this, trying to make sure as many as possible make it out in one piece. Many of them have traveled hundreds of miles on their own dime to do so, and are putting themselves in direct physical danger to serve others.
They're being thanked for it with violence, brutal arrests, incarceration, theft of equipment, felony charges, homophobic and transphobic abuse, and massive expenses both for legal support, new first aid gear to get back out there and keep helping, and to cover their travel.
Please, if you can, donate.
They're out there doing first aid for democracy, and now they're bleeding for it. Return the favor.

street medics targeted and arrested at RNC

2008-09-04T01:49:00.000-07:00

REPOSTED IN FULL. PLEASE DISTRIBUTE AND DO WHAT YOU CAN. I know I haven't covered street medic stuff lately, but a bunch of street medic folks are operating at the Twin Cities RNC, and have been specifically targeted. I believe arrestees include this awesome activist you've met before, and there are some very ugly rumors going around about mistreatment of trans and queer people currently detained which worry the hell out of me. Keep it in mind: it's not just journalists being targeted and arrested--it's those braving those dangerous streets as volunteers to provide medical care. --ll.

Update - Portland Street Medics Arrested at the Republican National Convention
by street.medix@portland-or.net
Weds, Sep. 3rd, 2008

In between explosions of concussion grenades and teargas clouds in
Minneapolis-St. Paul, volunteer Street Medics from all over the country
who have assembled there are continuing to provide much needed first aid
and medical care to injured and frightened people everywhere in the city
where lawful and peaceful assemblies, passersby, journalists and
bystanders are getting attacked indiscriminately and without provocation
by Police, National Guard and teams of unidentified Federal Agencies
without badges or numbers.

Two raw, unedited video items that were just published provide an
excellent documentation of the level of unprovoked and indiscriminate
violence targeted against peaceful non-violent assemblies, against
Street Medics, against legal observers and journalists:

o- Rubber bullets fired directly into a small crowd of peaceful people;
Street Medics attacked:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OnnUTK7QjI

o- Independent journalist caught in the middle of panic and mayhem
during an attack with concussion grenades and teargas against a peaceful
march:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6L8J3L-2Kw


Starting at dawn on Tuesday, Portland Street Medics who were arrested
while treating injured people at the RNC were being released one by one
by the illegitimate authorities who had seized them. One of our
colleagues is still in jail and has not yet been charged with anything.
All of the arrests of Portland Street Medics are entirely illegal.

We have confirmed information that additional unidentified Street Medics
have been seen in jail by other people, but no details about who they
are or why they are being held.

The Portland Street Medics who were released are well, except for
tiredness. We are not able to communicate with the one of our members
who is still in jail to ascertain wellness - our colleague is being held
in a situation where legal observers have repeatedly confirmed that
people are being denied access to medical care and targeted with
selective abuse. {Please see the statement from our lawyers below,
titled "Over 300 Protesters, Bystanders, Medics and Media Arrested:
Update from Coldsnap Legal Collective".}


All of the arrested Street Medics' personal items, money, medical
supplies and tools were confiscated and are still not being released by
Police despite repeated requests, even though the items in question are
not relevant to any legal proceedings (they are not being held as
evidence, nor are they proscribed materials). Seizure of these materials
is an illegal tactic to prevent our members from providing first aid and
medical care to the people who are now in the streets and parks in
Minneapolis-St. Paul. This is in direct violation of the US Constitution
which in the Fourth Amendment provides protection against unreasonable
searches and seizures. {Please see the Constitutional reference from the
Cornell Law School below.}


We are still in need of funds for bail, and for replacing lost medical
supplies and tools for our volunteers. If you are able to give, please
consider donating through this page (every little bit counts!):
http://www.portland-or.net/street-medics/Donations-Portland-Street-Medics.html
or, please write to us about making alternative donation arrangements here:
street.medix@portland-or.net

Some details
The Portland Street Medics who were arrested include a long-time Queer
liberation and radical performance artist; two trained Emergency Medical
Technicians (EMTs), one of whom is also a Wilderness First Responder;
and a Nurse Practitioner in training, who is also an Herbalist with more
than fifteen years clinical experience.

It's plainly obvious to everyone that our members, sworn to the primary
directive of all healthcare workers to "First, Do No Harm", should have
never been arrested and must be allowed and supported to return to their
duties immediately without any interference whatsoever.

Contacting the authorities
..has proven to be very difficult. As one of our supporters reports here,
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/09/379093.shtml#315129
phonecalls to the Ramsey County Jail, the Sheriff, and Mayor Coleman,
are being redirected through a maze of sometimes incompetent, sometimes
purposefully dysfunctional routes and individuals who are making the
process of leaving messages and official complaints nearly impossible.

Still, we are asking people to please call these (new) numbers and to
politely ask that:
o- all Street Medics be released immediately and allowed to resume duties;
o- all people who were arrested and are not being charged, to be
released immediately;
o- all personal items and medical supplies and tools that were
confiscated from Street Medics to be returned immediately so that our
teams can provide much needed care for injured and ill people in the
streets and first aid stations all over Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Please call these numbers:
St. Paul Police chief:
651-266-5588

Help line:
651-266-9333

Please send letters to:
St. Paul Police Department
Chief John Harrington
367 Grove Street
St. Paul, Minnesota 55101

Ramsey County Jail
Sheriff Bob Fletcher
425 Grove Street
St. Paul, Minnesota 55101


Please keep distributing and re-publishing our updates

We really are grateful for all of your letters and phonecalls of
support. Without your love and care, none of our work would have been
possible.

Portland Street Medics
http://portland-or.net/street-medics/


Resources and Related Materials

"Over 300 Protesters, Bystanders, Medics and Media Arrested: Update from
Coldsnap Legal Collective"
http://twincities.indymedia.org/2008/sep/over-300-protesters-bystanders-medics-and-media-arrested-update-coldsnap-legal-collective

" US Constitution - Amendment IV:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html

Our previous Communique:
http://seattle.indymedia.org/en/2008/09/268617.shtml

essential analysis

2008-09-04T01:47:00.001-07:00

Go and read this post. Right now. Trust me, you need to hear it.
Thank God for you, BFP.

did someone whistle? I couldn't hear it.

2008-09-04T00:03:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how many layers of meaning you can pack into a little sermon if you know what you're doing. I know: sermons are my stock in trade. And they're also the primary arsenal for aw-shucks just-plain-folks evangelical Republican Mike Huckabee, who stumped for John McCain at the Republican National Convention with a speech that made my jaw drop.

Let me explain why. Excerpts of Huckabee's homily follow, in fine sermon style; toward the end of his speech, he pulled out a seemingly-unrelated story, then called forth a moral and a theme, and then wove that theme back into his prior subject matter, the imperative to vote for the McCain-Palin ticket. The first parts of his oration are basically irrelevant boilerplate about how Barack Obama hugs terrorists and blushingly gives them boxes of candy. And then he gets into the oft-told tale of McCain's capture and torture, following with remarks about McCain's efforts to lift his arms and how he gave for us, so we should all be grateful. That's when Huckabee slides smoothly into Sermontown:

Allow me to tell you about someone who understands this type of sacrifice better than anyone.

McCain? No, not yet: a schoolteacher who is in no way a stand-in for Sarah Palin, a young woman who overcomes doubt and skepticism to teach people about how we ought to be more grateful to veterans like a certain J.M.

On the first day of school in 2005, Martha Cothren, a teacher at Joe T. Robinson High School in Little Rock, was determined that her students would not take their education or their privilege as Americans for granted. With the principal's permission, she removed all the desks from her classroom. The students entered the empty room and asked, "Mrs. Cothren, where are our desks?" "You get a desk when you tell me how you earn it," she replied.

And this is where, reading this aloud, I said suddenly to my partner, Oh, I hope this doesn't go where I think it's about to go. If you've spent much time in evangelical circles or surrounded by them, you'll know what I'm talking about any moment. The golden question of the moment is: how, Teacher? How do we earn our place in...the classroom?

"Making good grades?" asked one student.
"You ought to make good grades, but that won't get you a desk," Martha responded.
"I guess we have to behave," offered another.
"You WILL behave in my class," Mrs. Cothren retorted, "but that won't get you a desk either."

Being good won't earn it for you, see. You're required to work hard and succeed and follow the rules in order to show you're among the people who have a right to a desk, but there's nothing you can do--no action, no works--that can earn the desk for you. Listen to the Teacher--there's a price for the desks you can't pay. They'll be apportioned according to some other criterion. Getting warmer?

No one in first period guessed right. Same for second period. By lunch, the buzz was all over campus... Mrs. Cothren had flipped out ....wouldn't let her students have a desk. Kids had used their cell phones and called their parents. By early afternoon, all 4 of the local network TV affiliates had camera crews at the school to report on the teacher who wouldn't let her students have a desk unless they could tell her how they earned it. By the final period, no one had guessed correctly. As the students filed in, Martha Cothren said, "Well, I didn't think you would figure it out, so I'll have to tell you."

Now, this is sermon-ese for "I am about to use this character as a stand-in for a moment while she (I) hammers home the big arrow-shaped sign toward my point--her point--you know." I'm a preacher at heart, you may have noticed, and I know these things. It helps that the character is beleaguered by parents and media who don't understand, sort of like teachers who push Creationism in schools, or like unpopular political leaders we know are really misunderstood maverick heroes doing what they have to to get a message across. She'll try novel things, that teacher who isn't Sarah Palin, in order to show you the light. Nobody can comprehend the answer on their own, after all. They need someone to spell it out for them, because there's no way any of these lowly mortal students can think their way to a desk, either. It's almost like those desks stand for something all metaphor-like.

Martha opened the door of her classroom. In walked 27 veterans, some wearing uniforms from years gone by, but each one carrying a school desk. As they carefully and quietly arranged the desks in neat rows, Martha said, "You don't have to earn your desks...these guys already did. They went halfway around the world, giving up their education and interrupting their careers and families so you could have the freedom you have. No one charged you for your desk. But it wasn't really free. These guys bought it for you. And I hope you never forget it. " I wish we all would remember that being American is not just about the freedom we have. It's about those who gave it to us.

Okay, so this seems pretty straightforward, a repeat of the earlier message: freedom is dearly bought, and everything you will ever have in this country is due to our military, and you should be grateful to them for all of it. And hey! One's running for President!

Ladies and Gentlemen, John McCain is one of those people who helped buy the freedom that we enjoy and the school desks we had.

Wait, wait, hold the phone, though. That was the theme before. What were all those metaphors and allegories? Let's back up and review. Why should we be grateful to these military veterans?

"You don't have to earn your desks...these guys already did."

Your desk, your place in the room, can't be earned. You can't behave well enough to get one, work enough to get one, think enough to get one. It is impossible for you to deserve a place to sit before your teacher, see. Looks pretty hopeless, doesn't it? But wait! You don't have to earn Grace--I mean, a desk--someone else has already earned it for you. And you can have it, for free! Someone else bought the desks by sacrifice, by spilling their blood on foreign soil, so that even though you can't earn a desk, it can be given to you by your benevolent authority figure because a heroic intermediary bled to provide it for you.
Are we getting some clarity yet? Shall we break it down? Good sermons come in layers, and Huckabee is good at sermons. Here's the first layer of the story:

An innovative teacher chooses an offbeat way to illustrate to her young students that everything they have is owed to soldiers, who should be honored for their sacrifice and given deference.

Okay. Check. Here's the second layer:

Standing in front of you is a military veteran John McCain, who is like the soldiers in this story. He sacrificed a lot to provide to you, the people, your luxuries and your very way of life. He, like these soldiers, is being presented to you by a younger woman who wants to use innovative methods to showcase his worth. Honor his service by voting for him.

But we're still missing a layer. Let's back it up--who else are these soldiers like? Allow me, gentle reader, to sum up:

There's something you need, a right to be in a particular place, that you can't earn by any kind of exertion, virtue, or intelligence. It has to be given to you, but you don't actually deserve it, and left alone, you will never figure out how to get it. Luckily, someone's showed up to tell you how to get it for free. It's already been purchased by someone else, someone better, who spilled their blood in order to secure the blessing of this thing for you even though you don't deserve and can't earn it. And all you need to do is honor them in order to benefit.

Sound familiar yet? Please tell me it does. This is the doctrine of "Grace, Not Works" or "Grace Alone," a theological position expounded during the Reformation, cuddled by Calvin, and popular among evangelical Christians. It's not a desk, it's a place in Heaven. And it's not soldiers we're talking about, it's Jesus Christ. Don't buy the connection of this story as an allegory for the doctrine of Grace Alone? Here's a few ways to put it. And the guy talking is clergy in a denomination that holds this doctrine dear, so he knows what he's doing and who his audience is. Let's plug this little revelation back in to Huckabee's sermon at RNC and see what happens:

Let me tell you about a guy who can't lift his arms because he was tortured by enemy soldiers and sacrificed for your freedom. Think about it like desks in a classroom, where you can't earn or deserve a place to sit--but someone better than you or me went out there and sacrificed himself, spilled his own blood in order to dearly purchase for you your place at the table. His sacrifice redeems you when you wouldn't have been able to make it there on your own, and now you can have a desk, a place, a spot in Heaven if you just believe in and honor him.

Who's that man who sacrificed for you, who could have bought his own freedom by simply renouncing his creed, but stayed to be tortured in order to free you?

Allow me to tell you about someone who understands this type of sacrifice better than anyone.

Ladies and Gentlemen, John McCain is one of those people who helped buy the freedom that we enjoy and the school desks we had.

Has your jaw dropped to where mine was yet? Because I'm pretty sure, in this campaign where they're already painted the opposition as the Antichrist, they just labeled their candidate Jesus Christ.

fly away home

2008-07-16T22:43:00.000-07:00

"To whom shall I speak today?
One lacks an intimate,
One resorts to an unknown to complain.

To whom shall I speak today?
I am burdened with grief
For lack of an intimate."

When I was little, my Aunt Liz lived with us, and she represented a mode of kindness and open intimacy that I could not learn from anyone else involved in my upbringing. There was a sort of standing welcome with her, a ready smile, a basic and whimsical sweetness.
Aunt Liz taught me about how things can smell purple or green, about fish and rivers, about laughter, and about believing in your own kind of beauty. She had red hair and an interesting nose and wore a lot of purple. She loved fishing and art and wondering about things, and she was my favorite, I think, of all my extended family, because I think she was one of very few who got me, and I never forgot that. She was a good woman, and brave, and nurtured and protected beauty in this world.
We haven't spoken in years, because of this circumstance or that, and I haven't seen her in even more.

She died yesterday of a broken heart.

Aunt Liz, I'm sorry I didn't know how much you were hurting, and I'm sorry I wasn't there. I'm sorry you had to know so much pain. I'm sorry things never worked out like you planned. I never met anyone who knew you and didn't adore you. Whatever distance happened, you were always family to me, and I was looking forward to seeing you at my wedding, and catching up someday.
I hope it's okay now. I hope you make it where you're going and it's better than anything you ever had here.
You will be missed by a lot of people, and one of them is a loving niece who will always be grateful she had you in her life, even just for a little while. Rest well.

"Death is before me today,
Like a sick one's recovery,
Like going outdoors after confinement.

...

Death is before me today,
Like the clearing of the sky,
As when a person discovers what she ignored.

Death is before me today,
Like someone's longing to see her home
When she has spent many years in captivity."
--The Dispute of the Man With His Ba, unknown Middle Kingdom Egyptian author, tr. Lichtheim with a couple of pronoun edits.