Storm Weaver

It’s Up To You, What’s Your Pleasure?

I want to reach deep inside myself and give you glitter.

I want to give you love is love t-shirts and love wins enamel pins and glossy blue and yellow HRC bumper stickers. I want to give you bachelorette parties at Discovery. I want to give you rainbow floodlights painting the Broadway Bridge. I want to give you fifty gay weddings on the steps of city hall and I want to give you a Facebook-sponsored float covered in rainbow balloons, “Celebration” drenching the shop fronts and townhomes down 7th and Main with LGBT (plus!; some restrictions may apply) Pride.

But I’m fresh out of gay as in happy. I have queer as in fuck you in ample supply.

What I can give you is a quilt spread across the National Mall, each patch a plot, lying in state shoulder to shoulder but still only an effigy, real plots filled with bodies untouched in their dying days, unclaimed by family, the dirt overtop overgrown with weeds. I have deadnames on headstones and eulogies where estranged parents sob for sons they never had and bury daughters in suit and tie. I have ancestors and elders I’ve never met and will never meet, Marsha and Sylvia and Storme.  Freddie and Oscar and Howard. I have Matthew and Gwen and Brandon and no patience for your blank stare and lack of recognition. Of course, you know Freddie. Of course, you know Oscar, sort of, and Howard—well, you knew his work, but had no clue he was gay.

What I have is Stonewall. What I have is Pulse. What I have is a governor who wants me dead. What I have is a president who wants me dead.

I want queer joy—not for you, but for me. I want you to spit ally in blood and I want you to scrub out your respectability politics with steel wool. I want you to protect, not profit. I want you to take your glitter, and leave me with my bricks.
 
Title taken from “Celebration” by Kool & The Gang, 1980