Touched
This is a love letter because you don't hear it often enough, especially
during the holidays. This is a love letter because even though you don't
believe it all the time, you belong in this world.
This is a love letter to every young lesbian who's been told she's not a
real girl until she has sex with a man. This is a love letter to every boy
who's been beaten for not being manly, and to every muscular gay guy who has
looked on in terrified silence. This is a love letter to the teenage drag
queens who get kicked out of their houses and end up tricking on the
streets. This is a love letter to all the gay kids who think about dying and
sometimes succeed because the world doesn't prize their lives.
This is a love letter to the queer students who live courageously in the
dorms, the ones who've told me the horror stories: the students whom certain
teachers trash in class, the students on whom pranks are played and whose
door decorations are ripped down, the students who risk bodily harm and the
disdain of the a homophobic, gender-policing world in order to claim their
birthright as human beings.
This is a love letter to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and Trans kids who are
growing up in families or religions that don't recognize and appreciate the
diversity of human life. This is a love letter to the LGBT adults like Mel
White who persist, knocking gently and not-so-gently on the doors of their
familial and spiritual homes, saying, "We know we have a place at this
table, under this roof; we belong in this synagogue, this mosque, this
church."
This is a love letter to butch lesbians and flaming gay men, a love letter
for every moment of your life when you've braved living with integrity,
looking the world in the eye. This is a love letter to dykes like Lea
Delaria who walk with that special swagger, and to gay boys like Jack on
"Will and Grace" who walk with the special swish.
This is a love letter to Brandon Teena, who lived his too-short life with
reckless abandon because he didn't know his own value and possibility. This
is a love letter to tell the female-to-male and male-to-female people out
there that your life matters, that your survival means a richer and better
world.
This is a love letter to the women and men, the drag queens and kings, who
risked arrest at Stonewall in 1969 when they fought against police. This is
a love letter to all those who frequented the small gay bars in Jackson;
Miss. in Bend, Ore; in Des Moines, Iowa, who survived police raids,
brutality and humiliation in order to find more of your own kind. This is a
love letter to the butch women and gay men raped by police over many long
years of oppression.
This is a love letter to those on the front lines of gender and sexuality,
especially Trans people I know and cherish: Jayson, Gunner, and the Gender
Puzzlers. I love your emotional, intellectual and physical selves. I love
your shy and bold voices. I love the lines of your faces,your cheekbones. I
love your eyes, full of fear and hope and honesty.
I love your mouths, above which hair might be cultivated or plucked. I love
your necks, graceful and taut or solid and protected. I love your shoulders,
thickened by testosterone or toned and thinned by training. I love your
chests, the scars of mastectomies, the proud new breasts, the fine, gentle
hearts that beat beneath.
I love your hands -- the hands that some claim show your former gender
assignment, the hands that work in factories and in hospitals, the hands
that carry my UPS packages, the hands that hold chalk, the hands that hold
babies. I love your pre-operative bodies, your post-operative bodies, your
glorious and beautiful, diverse and marvelous bodies.
I love you, my dear queer family, for giving the world your many gifts:
flexibility, understanding, complexity, beauty and courage. Stay warm this
holiday season. Stay alive. And stay proud.
From apsychosworld