LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back

I’ve been thinking a lot about purpose lately—why I write, what I hope to become in this one brief life I have. So when I got wind of a planned action by Julia Serano for people to raise our collective voices today—to say as one we see the current and pending attack on trans rights, and by extension, LGBTQ+ rights (and by extension human rights, no?), and it is not OK—I wanted to join the chorus. (Read about the action here.) I hope you’ll consider the song.

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I want to sing you a song of joy. I want to tell you that this world we live in—with all its fuckery (and damn there is just so much of it)—also contains joy. I want to show you the joy of the beautiful person whose poetry I am sharing in today’s post (and have shared before). Alok Vaid-Menon comes by their joy through scalding fire into love. The light in their eyes, which comes from learning how to love a self they were taught to hate, is a guide. ALOK is funny and bright and fully themselves. They are somehow able to respond with love, only love, to even terrible trolling jabs, somehow able to see more clearly than the vast majority of us how we are all made up of the same particles, all stardust, all inextricably connected.

I want to ask you (and me) to embrace your/our beauty—and by that, I mean any parts of us we’ve been told are ugly, parts we’ve learned to hide—so you (and I) can see the beauty in everyone else being exactly who they are, even, especially if that’s out of the register we were taught to accept. So we can see “our tremendous beauty.”

our tremendous beauty

my beauty is so tremendous it has to be edited out of

magazines & movements

whitewashed from history

evacuated from sermons, schools,

& streets just to prove that it does not exist!

my beauty is so tremendous that they try to confine it

build health & science gates around it—

but my beauty, you can still peek through & see it!

my beauty is so tremendous there are no words for it, or

rather

the words—they are too ugly for my beauty

the men—they are too ugly for my beauty

my beauty is so tremendous they had me believe so long it

was not there—

so when i finally found it, here:

in all of the places I was taught to hate,

here:

in all of the curves & creases,

bulges & breaches, here:

in this body, not theirs

I finally figured out:

my beauty is so tremendous that the men

the men: they have to kill me for it

but my beauty, my beauty is so tremendous

that it will still be there when i am gone

it will still be here when i am gone.

—ALOK

A sticker I got at an ALOK show in Portland, Oregon, USA. If you have the chance to see them perform, I highly recommend it. So much love and joy was in the air it felt like we were all floating.

I want to sing you a song of love. Of the way we love our babies or pets or whoever we entwine deeply in our lives. I want to ask you (and me) to remember what it was to be wholly reliant on others for everything, whether that care was given to us well or poorly. I want us to try and access what it was to be without any messages about who is and who is not me/we, to only know the necessity of care, a state we’ll likely return to. I want us to remember that we’ll accept that care from or give that care to anyone whenever that state finds us. So shouldn’t we always?

I want us to hold in our hearts all of those whose hearts beat to care for people who are in danger emotionally, physically, and legally because who they are fully has been deemed unacceptable by systems that have nothing to do with our natural state—to care.

care is our natural state

once upon a time i was born (because of other people)

i was fed & taught how to live (because of other people)

i became “me” because of the love of strangers who

became my family

love: compassion that didn’t make “sense,” but made

“survival”

what if love, then, is the organizing force of the universe?

but the subject they conjure is a projection that they

not humanity

listen to the poets instead

they take greed & peddle it as human nature

they take selfishness & masquerade it as our original state.

but before language i was a baby crying out in need

being born is a natural disaster

& someone helped us make it out

james baldwin said once that he could never be a

pessimist because he was—in fact—alive.

i felt what he meant, do you?

i can’t get home safe alone & have to call a friend

i can’t get out of bed & have to call a friend

I found you there hidden there on the other side of

“i can’t”

i love & need you because i am honest:

care is our natural state

I want to sing you a song about power. I want to ask you (and me) to consider what systems of power have taught us to love ourselves only to the extent that we hate the parts of us that don’t fit what they consider acceptable. I want us to realize, if those systems ask us to fear, exclude, take freedom away, or otherwise hurt those who don’t fit that box, it’s the same. I wrote about this here. I want to ask you (and me) to not accept that. I want us to remember that there are times we can and must speak to power. I want us to understand doing so as our natural state of care.

In order to be understood you must have power. What this means is we could both launch the same words and they would still land in different places. What this means is that so often their words are prioritized more than our lives. What this means is that in order to understand us you must … wait. I don’t think I can express that here. Meet me somewhere else.

The body is three-dimensional language. Beauty is the harshest editor. I could spend the rest of my life articulating every detail, every grain, every follicle. And still they would not understand. Because of what I look like. No. Because of what they feel about what I look like.

A grammar lesson: if you were to scream in outer space no one would hear you. Sound waves can’t travel through an empty vacuum. Only you would be able to hear yourself because the sound waves would still travel through your body.

This is what it feels like to be brown, trans, femme,

and alive.

—ALOK

I want to thank you, as always, for your time and attention. I want to thank you for your love and joy and voices. I want to thank you for your beauty, for your becoming more and more fully you, for your care.

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Wanna keep abreast of trans news? Check out Erin In The Morning by

Erin Reed

.

Wanna read or listen to my favorite LGBTQ+ novel? Check out Lamb by

Mr. Troy Ford

.

Wanna discover LGBTQ+ voices? Qstack has you covered.

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