Sunday Intentions

We are here.

The American government has erased scores of web pages about LGBTQ issues and lives. Guess what? We’re still here!

Here we are, U.S. government.

We are all here and we aren’t going anywhere.

Lesbians exist. Gay men exist. Bisexuals exist. Trans people exist and nonbinary people exist.

We all exist. We are here, queer, and we are sitting at the American table.

Today’s Intentions

For American service members, transgender human beings, who are being denied their humanity and the opportunity to serve their country with pride and love.

For those who suffer from intolerance because those who have power like to step on necks, because they are angry that any of us are sitting at the table, angry that we exist.

For those whose suffering becomes unbearable and who harm themselves because those with power are angry that we exist, are angry that we are at the table, and their reaction is to step on our necks.

For all of us who are being erased from the public record, government websites, and the public square.

Trans people exist. Nonbinary people exist. Bisexuals exist. Gay men exist. Lesbians exist.

We all exist in our queer glory and we will continue to exist until every course is served to every American.

We are not getting up from the table.

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A Few More Intentions

For kids who feel different and only need the reassurance: Yes, we see you.

For kids who see others being erased, harmed, damaged, destroyed, and who burrow deeper into their isolation and despair.

And for writers and illustrators and editors and designers and publishers and booksellers and librarians who create books that show these kids:

You exist.

You are a human being.

You are not alone.

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Here’s a story.

When I was a freshman in high school, 1971, I didn’t have many friends. I was in a big all-boys Catholic school. There were a lot of guys from my neighborhood, but they all found their own groups, so I was pretty much alone. I felt it, too, not able to figure out how to be one of them. They had gone one way and I had gone another. I didn’t understand how it happened, I just knew we were different now.

One day after school I went to the library in Fresh Meadows to look up homosexuality. My mother had recently hissed at me “are you a homosexual?” I didn’t know what she meant. So I went to the library.

I looked up homosexual in the card catalog. Didn’t find much. There was one book, The Boys of Boise¹, on the shelf. At a secluded table, I read about the police roundup of homosexual men in the 1950s in Boise, Idaho. Lives were ruined, jobs were lost, there were life prison sentences. I don’t remember what all. (From Wikipedia: “The scandal highlighted the tension between the perception of homosexuality as a mental illness requiring treatment and homosexual sex as a criminal act mandating punishment.”)

Huh. So that’s homosexual.

I reshelved the book, left the library, and walked to the busstop to get the Q17 home. On the way I saw my grandmother window shopping on 188th Street; she lived nearby. Instead of rushing up to her and saying hi and maybe getting a soda out of her at the Woolworths on the corner, I hung back. I watched her reflection in the shop windows as I hid.

I had just learned: I’m a homosexual and I will be arrested and thrown in jail because I’m sick.

I’m 67 now. I still remember the title of that book! I still feel the discomfort, the shame, of that kid, me, learning what his life had in store for him because that’s what he deserved. It took a long time, wrong turns and false starts and some damage and a lot of tragedy, to realize that no, that wasn’t what my life would always be like. I have a magnificent, beloved partner of decades, a loving family, loving friends.

Kids today don’t need to read about sickness and arrest and ruined lives, unless new chapters of those stories are written by angry, powerful people.

Today’s kids can read and write better books, more hopeful stories, kinder stories — that is, if their library hasn’t been raided by people who are so angry that we are at the table that they try to erase the truth and deny that we all exist.

We’re here.

1. John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice, and Folly in an American City (New York: Macmillan, 1966).