Monday, May 20, 2024
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Via BeViral FB
"My three-and-a-half-year-old son likes to play trucks. He likes to do jigsaw puzzles. He likes to eat plums. And he likes to wear sparkly tutus. If asked, he will say the tutus make him feel beautiful and brave. If asked, he will say there are no rules about what boys can wear or what girls can wear.
My son has worn tutus to church. He has worn tutus to the grocery store. He has worn tutus on the train and in the sandbox. It has been, in our part of the world, a non-issue. We have been asked some well-intentioned questions; we've answered them; it has been fine. It WAS fine, until yesterday.
Yesterday, on our walk to the park, my son and I were accosted by someone who demanded to know why my son was wearing a skirt. We didn't know him, but he appeared to have been watching us for some time.
"I'm just curious," the man said. "Why do you keep doing this to your son?"
He wasn't curious. He didn't want answers. He wanted to make sure we both knew that what my son was doing---what I was ALLOWING him to do---was wrong.
"She shouldn't keep doing this to you," he said. He spoke directly to my son. "You're a boy. She's a bad mommy. It's child abuse."
He took pictures of us, although I asked him not to; he threatened me. "Now everyone will know," he said. "You'll see."
I called the police. They came, they took their report, they complimented the skirt. Still, my son does not feel safe today. He wants to know: "Is the man coming back? The bad man? Is he going to shout more unkind things about my skirt? Is he going to take more pictures?"
I can't say for sure. But I can say this: I will not be intimidated. I will not be made to feel vulnerable or afraid. I will not let angry strangers tell my son what he can or cannot wear.
The world may not love my son for who he is, but I do. I was put on this earth to make sure he knows it.
I will shout my love from street corners.
I will defend, shouting, his right to walk down the street in peace, wearing whatever items of clothing he wants to wear.
I will show him, in whatever way I can, that I value the person he is, trust in his vision for himself, and support his choices---no matter what anybody else says, no matter who tries to stop him or how often.
Our family has a motto. The motto is this:
We are loving.
We are kind.
We are determined and persistent.
We are beautiful and brave.
We know who we are. Angry strangers will not change who we are. The world will not change who we are---we will change the world."
Credit Jen Anderson Shattuck
[𝘋𝘔 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭]
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I did not write this, but it speaks..
Much love y’all ♥️
~~~
The way people view you.
Sometimes I think about the different characters I play in everybody’s story.
I’m a terrible person in some people's narratives and a Godsend in others.
And none of it has anything to do with the person I truly am.
The lens that others view you through is coloured by their upbringing, beliefs, and individual experiences.
Some people see your bright personality as endearing and others see it as annoying.
Some people think you’re weak and emotional and others feel safe to be themselves around you.
Some people think you’re rude and selfish and others respect the way you stand up for yourself.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Some people admire the way you take pride in the way you look and others think you’re conceited.
And none of it has to do with who you truly are as a person.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
What you have to understand is that you have no authority over how people view you so never try to control the way others see you because the only thing that truly matters when the dust settles down at the end of the day is what you genuinely see in yourself.
~Cody Bret
Via White Crane Institute \\ LORRAINE HANSBERRY
American playwright LORRAINE HANSBERRY was born on this date (d: 1965). She is best known for her play "A Raisin in the Sun." The play was a huge success. It was the first play written by an African-American woman produced on Broadway. It also received the New York Drama Critics Award making Hansberry the youngest and first African American to receive the Award. She married Robert Nemiroph, a Jewish literature student and songwriter, in 1953. They separated in 1957 and divorced in 1964. The marriage lasted only a few years because Hansberry soon began coming to terms with her Lesbianism.
Hansberry was a contributor to "The Ladder" the first Lesbian publication in the United States. Around 1957, Hansberry joined the Daughters of Bilitis, the pioneering lesbian organization based in San Francisco, and began receiving their journal, "The Ladder." In May 1957, Hansberry wrote the first of two thoughtful letters to the magazine. Since the editorial policy was to identify letter writers with initials, the printed letter was signed only, "L.H.N., New York, N.Y." - the writer's identity was disclosed only after her death. In her letter, Hansberry mused about everything from butch-femme culture to the gaps between lesbians and gay men, displaying a feminist awareness that would grow stronger over the next few years. In August of that same year, "L.H.N." once again wrote the The Ladder with more feminist commentary. The connections she drew between sexism and homophobia were ahead of her time: "Homosexual persecution has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma," she wrote. She died on January 12,1965 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.
TODAY'S GAY WISDOM
From Lorraine Hansberry:
"The oppressed are by their nature ... forever in ferment and agitation against their condition and what they understand to be their oppressors. If not by overt rebellion or revolution, then in the thousand and one ways they will devise with and without consciousness to alter their condition." Lorraine Hansberry
"I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and—I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations."
"We only revert back to mystical ideas - which includes most contemporary orthodox religious views, in my opinion - because we simply are confronted with some things we don't yet understand."
"There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he's been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning -- because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is. [from Raisin in the Sun]"
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Via White Crane Institute \\ PETE FISHER
Gay activist pioneer, PETE FISHER was born on this date (d: 2012) His groundbreaking 1972 book “The Gay Mystique” chronicled the early, vibrant post-Stonewall movement and explained homosexuality to straight people and to homosexually-oriented people still coming to terms with themselves. For this reporter, it was a seminal text as a college student coming out and, later, becoming an activist in 1974.
Describing his intense joy marching in the Christopher Street Liberation Day march in 1970 that commemorated the first anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, Fisher wrote, “There’s no going back after that. You can’t feel those things and take them back to the closet and nurse them. When you know what it really means to be free, you know that freedom is life. Do you know how it tastes to be alive for the first time? Oppression in any form requires the complicity of the oppressed. To come out is to refuse to oppress oneself, refuse to play the game.”
Fisher was writing and agitating at a time when sodomy was still a crime in most states including New York, psychiatry classified homosexuality as a mental illness, and civil rights protections on the basis of sexual orientation were non-existent. He led several of the most famous “zaps” for which GAA was known, taking over the offices of the Daily News when its editors derided gay people as “fairies, nances, and queers” and of Harper’s magazine when its Joseph Epstein wrote, “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth, because I consider it a curse.”
When City Councilman Saul Sharison refused to allow the New York Gay Rights bill to be heard in committee in 1971, Fisher was among those who led more than a thousand people from a dance at the GAA Firehouse at 99 Wooster Street to Sharison’s high rise at 70 East Tenth Street and got clubbed by the police. “It was the most nightmarish scene I had ever witnessed: long, brutal clubs smashing left and right, landing on people’s heads, the crowd panicking, pushing first to the barricades and then falling back,” he wrote. He and Rubin were arrested, but five days later the hearing was scheduled on the bill that GAA put forward as the first in the country to propose protections on the basis of “sexual orientation.”
Perry Brass, a veteran of the Gay Liberation Front, wrote in an e-mail, “I remember Pete as a very handsome, very charismatic, blonde young man. He was always dressed either in leather or a tight, beautifully fitting T-shirt, but he was totally devoted to GAA and the cause of real Gay Liberation, that is, leaving self-hatred, leaving oppression, and forging a new identity as a Gay man.”
With partner Marc Rubin, Fisher wrote the novel “Special Teachers/ Special Boys” based on Rubin’s experiences teaching troubled youth.
Fisher, coming to consciousness of being Gay pre-Stonewall, had a rough time. His father, an executive at the New York Times, strongly disapproved and sent him to a shrink to try to turn him heterosexual — partly by forbidding masturbation! Fisher’s counsel to parents in “Mystique”: “The rule with regard to sexuality is a simple one. Hands off — let your child be himself.”
Fisher took his own life by suffocation. Lynne Fisher said her brother “told me he spent 60 percent of his time thinking about suicide” and made several unsuccessful attempts over the years. This latest successful try was not unexpected. But she also remembers Pete as “exceptionally intelligent, a book writer and a songwriter,” and “a quiet but popular kid.” He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in her backyard in Springfield with Rubin’s.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation \\ Words of Wisdom - May 19, 2024 💌
“You go from sequential to simultaneous. There is nowhere where you aren’t. For that to happen, however, you’ve got to allow the converse: There is nowhere where you are. That’s why we’re in the business of becoming nobody special. Because the minute you’re somebody, you’re standing somewhere. And the minute you’re standing somewhere, you’re afraid, because you’re protecting your little space. What this dance is about is like jumping out of an airplane and you have no parachute, but there’s no earth. Okay? It’s all free form from here on.”
- Ram Dass-
Via Daily Dharma: Accepting Profound Sorrow
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