A short piece today. Thoughts?
I
realized that when others didn’t like gay people, it meant that they didn’t
like me. It took me years to come into my blackness, to own it, find a way to
identify with it that didn’t leave me feeling like the exception to a dirty but
steadfast rule. It took me even longer to embrace my woman-ness, to wear it as
proudly as anything, to learn to defend it against all of the malevolent forces
that challenged me. How was I now supposed to be a woman and black and queer at
the same time? This realization, this discovery, had temporarily turned me from
a proud black woman, into a faggot nigger bitch, and I didn’t know how to get
back.
They build on one another; they are inextricably
intertwined. I cannot be a black faggot, a lesbian bitch. The denunciation of a
single part of me ultimately led to the suffocation of my whole self. We are
not pieces; we cannot mix and match, pick two, or buy two and get one free. We
are all, and we are nothing without this amalgamation. In this way our
emotional selves mirror our physical anatomy.
Peace and Love and Bugs Named Doug,
GreyGirl
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