Sleep to Dream

It's almost bedtime, and my thoughts are running wild and chaotic. What a strange last few days. I have much to say here, but neither the focus or the will to really do it. I'm determined to finish writing Number 9, but after the Saints defeat on Sunday, I simply haven't had the motivation. I tell myself tomorrow, but the truth is tomorrow doesn't seem to ever come.

A friend mentioned Written on the Body by Winterson this weekend, and the book seems to have gotten stuck in my head. It's been years and years since I read it, or really anything by her, though once upon a time she was my favorite author. I credit Written on the Body as a big part of my coming out process. The book is written from a first person perspective, though the protagonist has no defined sex/gender identity. At the time I read it, I wasn't comfortable with the idea of being sexual (or even romantic) with another woman. But reading the book forced me to explore my own feelings and thoughts about gender roles, sexuality, and sex in very mind-blowing ways. Granted, I was fifteen. But it was most definitely what I needed at the time. Ironic that this has all popped up around National Coming Out Day (today).

I cried this morning, when I woke up before my alarm and read the FB and twitter updates of many of my friends. I have some friends on FB I didn't even know where queer -- old camp friends, etc. -- and seeing these people who grew up in small town Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, proudly proclaim to 300+ people online that they're here and queer still blows my mind. I spoke with two close friends last week about the LGBTQ community in NOLA, in Louisiana, about the struggles we face and the challenges that hold back this community. On a microcosm, many are small and yet so pervasive -- one or two family members who hold someone back from being out, a boss that might or might not be accepting, a fear of the those who lurk in the French Quarter streets at night, etc. But the macrocosm is devastating in a different way -- the pay gap for women (and especially gender non-normative women), the racial and class divides in this town, the lack of a LGBTQ infrastructure through organizations and groups, the lack of venues for queer women, the lack of everything from healthcare to social support for trans people, pervasive (and often school-sanctioned) discrimination and bullying, etc.

I don't know why this year has hit hard -- I always wax poetic on LGBTQ holidays, but I guess the rash of suicides has just hit home. It's 2010, and groups like HRC and (our local) Forum For Equality and Gay, Inc, have put marriage and adoption at the top of the agenda, while teens are blowing their brains out. I get that it's not an either-or thing; nothing is that simple. But money is power, and the issues we choose to support with our time and money are the ones which get the most press and recognition. Thousands of people in California came out against Prop 8. In the last few weeks, five kids (that we know of) have committed suicide and where is outcry? It's coming, but it's not as well funded. This movement doesn't have the PR machine. But I'm grateful to see things like the "It Gets Better" Project. I'm glad people are reading, listening, hearing, and asking questions -- What can we do? What are we doing wrong? How can we give these kids hope?

I don't know. But we've got to start talking and listening. We've got to find a way to hear the stories of these kids, and not the post-mortem version. We've got to build a support system, an infrastructure, and we've got to start yesterday.

The suicides also brought up two of my own friends, both from high school, who've committed suicide. I'm certain neither of their deaths had anything to do with their sexual orientation or gender identity. But to think they both cut their lives off at 19. Argh. I wonder often who they would be if they were still here. If I'd still run into them from time to time. If they would find happiness. Death always leaves a hole, but suicide leaves a different kind of missing. It's been over three years, but damn, I still think about them. 19 is too young.

What are we doing? Not enough. Never enough, if this is still happening. Social change is slow, yes. But just as women found that Edna Pontillier's escape hatch was not the only one -- Nora Helmer was onto something -- LGBTQ teens have to discover the same. Death isn't a solution. There's so much more to find in Door #2.

Come out, come out, where ever you are. I'm grateful today, especially, for my "family." I'm grateful for my ex-boyfriend, Steven, the first person I came out to -- and a friend who gave me the support I really needed. I'm grateful to the psychiatrist who told me, contrary to my mother's wishes, that my being queer was just fine. I'm grateful to the straight allies, to groups like the ACLU and SPLC, to parents and family members of queers, to advocates, to those who love quietly and those who fight out loud. There's so much gold on this end of the rainbow.

Being Alive

Mist came first, then rain, so slow that the drops could be followed as they fell. The men and women continued their groping dance as the klezmer bands poured their music through the streets. Young girls captured fireflies in cheesecloth nets. They peeled open the bulbs and painted their eyelids with the phosphorescence. Boys squashed ants between fingers, not knowing why.

The rain intensified, and paraders drank themselves sick on homemade vodka and beer. People made wild, urgent love in the dark corners where houses met and under the handing canopies of weeping willows. Couples cut their backs on the shells, twigs, and pebbles of the Brod’s shallow waters. They pulled at one another in the grass: brassy young men driven with lust, jaded women less wet than breath on glass, virgin boys moving like blind boys, widows lifting their veils, spreading their legs, pleading - to whom?

From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistaken for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey though the darkness to the astronaut’s eyes.

In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - metropolises will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Shtetls will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples, invisible.

The glow is born from the sum of thousands of loves: newlyweds and teenagers who spark like lighters out of butane, pairs of men who burn fast and bright, pairs of women who illuminate for hours with soft multiple glows, orgies like rock and flint toys sold at festivals, couples trying unsuccessfully to have children who burn their frustrated image on the continent like the bloom a bright light leaves on the eye after you turn away from it.

Some nights, some places are a little brighter. It’s difficult to stare at New York City on Valentine’s Day, or Dublin on St. Patrick’s. The old walled city of Jerusalem lights up like a candle on each of Chanukah’s eight nights. Trachimday is the only time all year when the tiny village of Trachimbrod can be seen from space, when enough copulative voltage is generated to sex the Polish-Ukrainian skies electric. We’re here, the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We’re here, and we’re alive.

~ Jonathan Safran Froer, Everything Is Illuminated