Power Sissy Intervention #4: Subject Change

for Raquel Salas Rivera

We live in a homophobic culture, and even people who aren’t hateful per se assume they won’t get anything from a queer book.

--Michelle Tea

NOTE:  At the moment I am not interested in embarrassing anybody; at the moment I am only interested in making crystal fucking clear that I am getting pretty fucking tired of a certain behavior, which is the basis of this ritual and its resulting poem.

To preserve my friendships I have quietly – and for decades – occasionally allowed my heterosexual friends to change the subject when I would be furious about homophobic and transphobic laws.  It did not happen too often and I have always been aware that my queer actions and ideas are too radical for most lesbians and gays, let alone straight people in our culture.  For instance when president Obama signed the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell it was to me the end of any hope of a radical queer insertion into the demented white hetero power structure of the USA and the rise of total lesbian and gay assimilation into our nation’s racist, brutal military industrial complex.  When lesbians and gays were celebrating and cheering that day I considered it the darkest possible compromise and the most unforgivable one at that with multiple wars underway, killing children of color in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, on and on we marched.

In the past two years there have been over 200 anti-LGBTQ laws issued throughout the USA and the lack of outcry has enraged me!  These laws against our rights for medical attention, our rights for raising children, our rights for using the goddamned bathroom of our choice have been sanctioning the cancer of hate across the nation!  It was at this point when I assumed even straight people would finally see how breathtakingly unjust and vile these laws are, but sometimes they did not.  Sometimes they not only changed the subject, they did so by saying, “Other people have problems too you know!”  After having a few drag-out fights with heterosexual acquaintances I decided to do a ritual where I stared into their eyes and dug my fingernails into my palms.  I started clipping my nails on the long side to SLICE deeper into my palm’s lines representing life, heart, mind, intuition, and fate.

And I said NOTHING with words, saving that for now, in this ritual for all to read.  I was just SLICING my nails into my palms, a reflection of their thoughtless, stupid remarks.  SLICING my way into feeling it on my flesh.  I took notes for the poem while staring into the indentations, while tasting the blood that broke through, while closing my eyes and rubbing my cheek and chin into it.  I will desecrate the monotheistic tools of repression and I will do it without fear of reprisal because I give a damn, because I Love this world!