Here is Panti Bliss' now famous speech at the Abbey Theater in Dublin about that complicated relationship all of us gay folk (men, women, and whatever) have with our inner homophobe and the homophobia that still looms large in the world we live in despite so much progress over the last 10 years. She certainly speaks for me when she points out with exasperation that according to Respectable Opinion, the real victims of homophobia are homophobes, that it is wrong and impolite to call them haters, and what a boatload of bullshit that is. To which I can only reply, AMEN girl! Just ask Matthew Shepard, Fanny Ann Eddy, Daniel Zamudio, David Kato, and thousands of others like them who the real victims of homophobia are. While the haters climb up on their self-made crosses, thousands of us unwillingly walked that Via Dolorosa all the way to its fatal end.
You go girl!
We should be very grateful for our gender-benders and transgenders. They are the boldest and toughest activists of us all. They were the ones who first fired The Shot-Glass Heard Round the World at the Stonewall Bar in 1969. They are the living embodiment of just what it is that makes gays and lesbians so irreducibly distinct from the rest of humanity, our sexuality. They remind us of that part of ourselves that most stubbornly refuses to be assimilated into any cultural mainstream.
Just when I thought being gay in Post-Bloomberg New York was nothing more than loafers, khaki pants, and brunch after Episcopal/Lutheran/MCC church, along comes Qween Amor in the Union Square subway station to show us all what we sometimes forget in our quest to be accepted as soldiers, parents, and priests; just how sexy and how much disreputable unassimilable JOY being gay is.
Vive la difference!
I sometimes see Qween Amor performing in the Union Square station, usually after 10PM.
Please keep my sister (transgender MtoF) and I in your prayers --we are traveling to Thailand next week so that she can have surgery! I am so excited for her --and so thankful that she asked me to go with her to care for her after surgery.
ReplyDeleteHer name is Guin.
We leave Monday the 17th!
thank you!