When I was 17 the first boy that I ever slept with died.  He died as a result of suicide and the belief that he simply could not survive the world that we lived in.  He was the first person that I ever lost who was close to me, and at the time I was so scared that his life was just like my own.  What you have to understand about “H” (I’m not including his actual name because he was never out to his family) is that he represented to me all that was possible in life.  I was 15 when we got together.  I was eager, terrified, and desperate to feel connected to someone else.  He was older than me; he seemed to have a clue as to what I might end up being, and it was in his eyes that I saw desire for the very first time.  That desire was directed at me and my eager 15-year-old self didn’t just lose my virginity, I lost a good portion of my fear of being alone.
 
     When we returned to my very small, very conservative high school in Alabama after having been together, I was terrified of him.  So scared in fact that I did all I could to avoid he and I being in the same places.  For weeks after we returned I avoided his phone calls and spoke to him only in short curt conversations.   I just knew that he would give me away and I was certain at that young age that my life would come apart if someone found out about us.  When he died 2 years later all I could think about was how alone he must have felt and how many times I could have been there for him if I simply picked up a phone or walked up to him in the hall.  I remember thinking at his funeral that no one really knew him at all and that I would now carry two secrets with me for the rest of my life.  Now I am not narcissistic enough to believe that his decision to end his life had anything to do with me, but I carried guilt about my choice to ignore him for years.
 
     I thought that I had put all that behind me until this past year.  When my student and friend Blake died as a result of suicide it all came rushing back to me.  I was stuck by feelings of helplessness, feelings of failure, and the feeling that if only I had been more diligent then they might both be alive.  The guilt and shame hit me hard and I all but fell apart.  I have begun to realize (with the help of my very smart and compassionate therapist) that my whole career, all of my energy to build a better community started with the loss of "H" and that I was still holding myself responsible for something that simply was not my fault.   I had to forgive myself for choosing my own life over “H” and that if I let it eat me alive I would never be able to help anyone ever again.
 
     I know now that I am always trying to save that young, desperate 19-year-old boy who felt so alone when he died.  I know now that he lives inside me every day and that the world that I am trying so hard to create would have been one that he would have loved to have lived in.  I know now that I can’t save everyone (and it isn’t my job to do so) but I want to keep “H’s” memory alive and see him in the faces of all my students and friends.  I was able to place Blake’s name into the title of our local archive so that he will be remembered as the amazing person he was, forever and I want “H” to know that he lives on in me and in all the people I help, every day.

Greetings everyone from the American South!  I trust you all had a nice holiday season and are ready to get back into the business of anti-assimilation and radical Queer organizing.  In the spirit of the New Year, here is my first blog of 2016.  Enjoy!
 
 
I train a lot, like a lot a lot, during the course of an academic year.  Safe Zone trainings, language trainings, historical trainings, and conversations about social justice just to name a few.  The majority of the people that I train are adult folk over 35 who have some “interest” in the Queer community and its inner workings. The majority of these people are non-Queer and Trans folks.  Within the last year or so I have been questioning more and more the validity of these trainings and their purpose for Queer/Trans folks who are in theory benefiting from them.  The more I sit in rooms with people who have some passing interest in who and what we are I have to wonder if I am doing the right thing.
 
Do we really benefit as a community by taking the time out of our busy and often at risk lives to convince str8 people that we are worth supporting?  I am just not sure anymore.  The radical in me feels like we might be better off taking that energy and putting it into training our own community.  Teaching each other about the complexities of our own identities, teaching each other how to be activists and advocates for ourselves.  I for one would like to spend more time teaching younger Queer folks about how to organize, to work in communities that reject hierarchy, and how to take their anger and make it into change. 
 
Ultimately I think we have gotten too much into the habit of taking our “individual stories” and making them into universal examples of how the community works.  I think that it might be time to let str8 folks educate each other, and Queer/Trans folks need to get back to the business of making our own communities stronger.  That feels very much like my responsibility.

There are so many Gay wedding posts on my Facebook feed these days that I spend more time hiding posts than I do reading them.  It seems that the hysteria associated with being the next in line at the altar is not only is full effect, but is also picking up steam.  I became so enraged by a post (by a former Facebook acquaintance) that I had to take several days off from being online just to get the old blood pressure down.  Now you have read my rantings about Gay marriage several times now, but I have an honest question for you, does anyone remember when Gay marriage was supposed to be the “gateway” issue that got us working on other things?
 
I seem to recall (ohh I want to say 20 years worth of) people saying that we had to work on one issue at a time and that the “civil rights victory” that was Gay marriage would open up the G/L community to all sorts of new wins from employment to access to heath care.  What I see now is realization of the real aim of Gay marriage from its inception.  This was never a political bulldozer that would create new pathways for liberation; it was a scam to create new methods of access for Gay and Lesbian people who have desired acceptance more than anything else in the world.  This was the way in for the capitalist machine to get its nasty fingers into the lives of all Gays and not just the super rich ones.  As new same sex couples run down the aisle to get validated they spend more time talking about receptions than homeless Queer/Trans youth, more time on china patterns than the violence facing Queer/Trans women of color, and more time posting about their happy futures tucked away in Str8 middle class life than posting articles about politics.  I don’t know about you, but the promise of a liberated future for my community was a sham.
 
What is happening right now in America, in our states (North Carolina for me), and in our communities has us at the highest risk we have faced in 20 years.  Gay people are being attacked in Texas, Trans women of color are being killed at the highest rate in our modern times, and Queer/Trans homelessness continues to rise.  Are we still going to pretend that our post-Gay marriage era is the “better” future we spend decades and millions of dollars trying to realize?  I for one cannot read one more post about your upcoming marriage while so much of the community suffers.  If Love Wins, then who is the loser?

We spend so much time thinking about sadness in the lives of Queer young people that I think we have forgotten that there are actual people.  They have become an abstraction that we wring our hands over, have fundraisers for, or publish statistics about in our year end reports.  When did Queer young people become a t-shirt or a slogan instead of a vital part of our community?

I work with Queer and Trans young people all the time and what I see is a group that is so neglected, so absent from the table, that they are thrilled with just being invited into our spaces (even for the most ephemeral of reasons).   I watched a high school aged Queer young person get so excited about having “found” an HRC sticker and they were doubly shocked that the adult that gave it to them would part with such a symbol of the community.  Why is this young person so thrilled with this sticker you ask?  Because they do not see examples of how Queer and Trans adults exist and because of this they will latch on to any examples of Queerness they can find, even something as base as that damn “Equality” sign.  I wanted to run and snatch that sticker out of their hand and tell them that the HRC is not their community.  That this organization is not the future and that the HRC has no room for Queer and Trans young people outside of a fundraising pamphlet.  But how can I blame this young person for wanting something, anything that would mark them as part of the process or part of the community as an agent instead of a generalization.


When it comes to Queer youth we have settled for “shocked gasps” and tears instead of making real space for them.  We continue to reproduce the most basic narrative of their existence and can only see them as victims of abuse or suicide.  Do they really need us to keep crying for them?  We have missed the point over and over again.  The cycle of death and abuse doesn’t end when we “convince” Cis straight people that these young people need our help.  The cycle doesn’t end when LGB groups memorialize them one day a year.  The change comes when we STOP treating Queer and Trans young people like broken objects and starting treating them like part of the community.  Deaths and abuse are terrible things, but so is a system we neglect to change while we sit in large rooms crying and not doing much else.
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Queer and Trans young people don’t need our sympathy, what they need is our help.  Our help as mentors, our help to show them how they fit into the community.  The need our support in order to train them as leaders.  They don’t need our sadness, they need us to give them hope and to show them purpose.  They need us to dry our eyes and invite them to help us change a system, a world that works daily to destroy them and they need that help now.  

I’m terrified at how straight everything in my world has become.  It used to be that it was simply all the books, songs, movies, television, holiday cards, religions, t-shirts, posters, handbills, and assorted questions on standardized testing that propped up the straight hierarchy of our cultural norms.

 Having just returned from 4 days of talking about Queer history with college students from around the United States I am realizing that in addition to everything else that is imagined or created for straight people, now even Queer people are becoming straight.  Any who have known me for more than a few minutes know that I don’t take well to assimilation.  My Queer and Trans radical siblings have been fighting on the sidelines for years as the alternative voice to the mantra of “We are just like you”   but I don’t think I realized until this week that we are losing.

I don’t mind being a single voice or even the first voice of a radical alternative to many young people, but the creeping cold dead hand of assimilation has outpaced our efforts.  It’s not just that young people haven’t heard of folks fighting against marriage equality or for prison reform, it’s that they cannot imagine what a radical point of view looks like.  Have we gone so far that there is nothing left but the picket fence and the ultimate decay of capitalism?  Is there no way that what we are as Queer people can stand as an alternative both for young Gays AND young straight people? 

​ If you really want to tell your friends a tale of terror this October then tell them how close we are to becoming one homogeneous nation who is so asleep that we lumber into the future without a hope for something new or better than right now.   

I was not “born this way” and neither were you.  While this song and slogan make for great sound bites, it leaves a void in the space where each of us works very hard to become the people we are.  Why are we afraid of the choices we have, what happens if we choose, and how did an acronym suddenly become all we needed in order to “know who we are?”

Queer theorist Michael Warner says in his book The Trouble with Normal that language used to “classify one’s sex, these apparently neutral terms are of relatively recent vintage, and only make sense against a specific background.” This quote reminds us that while language might seem to be about the business of uncovering something “essential” about what it is describing, but in actuality it represents more the culture that created it than the thing it describes.  While we argue over the ever-expanding acronym for Queer community vs. going “without labels” we forget that language isn’t really telling us about our identity but rather telling the story of how identities are trying to be understood. 

The invention of “homosexual” was less about individual people and more about putting together a list of characteristics that would explain to straight people how and what these new “homosexuals” did together. It didn’t actually tell “homosexuals” anything about themselves.  Yet somewhere along the way “homosexual” became an identity that was applied to folks with and without their consent.  In this same way “gay,” “lesbian,” and “transgender” created shared concepts about groups in order to explain and connect and in a way became even more dangerous because their birth came out of the communities that used them.  Dangerous because once again they were used as markers for “identity” and without their historical background began to substitute for individual people. 

Words are born within a particular history. They say only what the society that created them allows them to say. There is nothing fundamentally "true" or "natural" in them and, as such, can only approximate rather than define. This is especially true of words like "gay" "lesbian" "heterosexual" or "transgender" in that they can only give a nod to the time period that created them and cannot really define a person; who exists as a subset of 1.

It was an historic summer and not because of the whole gay marriage business.  It was an historic summer because all summer long I was engaged in a project to study, preserve, and collect Southern Queer history.  I have been amazed at the fire that has been lit in people who are thrilled that their knowledge, accomplishments, and legacy are now a part of the future as well as the past.  I have seen an idea turn into the beginning of a new movement that will allow a merging of past and present with an eye on the future of the entire South.

In May the local Charlotte Queer history timeline traveled to Salisbury, NC for display in their Pride festival.  Salisbury Pride is one of the best small town Pride’s I have been too and the organizers really wanted to bring local history to their town.  We took the timeline and put it on display in the downtown business district of Salisbury where everyone could see it.  In a beautiful bit of irony the timeline was housed across the street from the mayor’s office (the mayor has refused to sign a proclamation supporting Pride for several years) and I like to think that each day he had to see it on his way to meetings.  By the end of their monthly celebration over 4100 people had seen the timeline and had the opportunity to talk about what Southern Queer history looked like. 

This is the power of keeping our history local and learning who we are and what we have done.  Those 4100 people got an opportunity to see the Queer South in a different way and we hope to inspire Salisbury to collect its own history so we can display it next year.  The fire of local Queer history is spreading even faster than I have imagined and having seen how it ignites passion in Queer people both old and young, I am even more inspired to see the project expand. 

I was so honored to have been given the Harvey Milk Award this year by Charlotte Pride for my work with the archive.  What means the most to me is having people come up to me and tell me how thrilled they are to know that it is here.  I had several young people ask me what was in it, with that same look of anticipation that people have on Christmas morning.  What I tell them is this; the archive holds our past and points to our future.  Now that we know what we have already done there is no limit to what we can accomplish together!