I Hate Queers

A quick exposition:
Fifteen years ago a flier went out entitled
Queers read this
I hate straights
And so began the queer movement
The unnaming
The reclaiming of a humanity that denied normativity in order to redefine itself as honesty
Queer lay a place on the horizon, a place beating blindly beneath sheets into the silent forgetfulness between your thighs
Hoping that there lay salvation
But LGBT meant that QIA meant MIA and queer would be its posterchild
And queer would call itself all but would turn on the light and expose the wads of kleenex on the nightstand and the silence of my desire for a little more than acceptance
You see queer became somebody’s brand name
Somebody white and muscular and oh so secular
And buying out the competition he forgot to give good notice
And queer became rotten in my hands



Fourteen plus years ago
I saw your name on a street lamp
I read your name in a backroom stall
I heard it cried from angry lips
And in a moment that knew you better than I alone could
I called you home

I called you home
As an admission that the future could never be here
I called you home
As an admission that you were not here (nor was I)
That refractory raindrops of papers carrying your name
Would never be birds of peace
But tunneling ants of forgetfulness
Blind and dumb but on their way to something deeper

You see fourteen plus,
Queer read like candied clouds
And like blinded red ants that couldn’t name your fingertips or your hair I knew your scent for a polar wind
Leading me to a horizon whereupon
There were hearts that spoke names that no one could pronounce and no one needs pronounce for in hearts of such depth there was room for silence
A self-imposed silence of queerness and the reclaimed voice of existence
For in the heart and voice of queer was the heart and voice of my own two hands beating the drum of my desire to the muddied faintness of your softening face
And your dumb reply, a whispered I love you

With you
I inhaled queer so deeply
That often I forgot to let breathe
And let dissipate to others
The freshened air of my own exhaled queer
To let flow my forgetfulness, my identity, my own symmetry
To contribute my own memory in pursuit of something better
For often its said that whats good is whats good for the most
And the part means that something’s in need of revision and revision breathes honest redemption of spaces forgotten, ommissions left rotten and tears stagnated

But
You forgot to exhale
You forgot to breathe freely
To let the air flow from each to each
Swooping, shimmering showers of song and of silence
You inhaled our collective air and became queer unto yourself
And there is something in me that doesn’t love such a wall
But that knows its roots
And ingested breathes swallowed are gas
And force up only half digested truths of other half digested creeds
And queer read LGBT means MIA, means QIA unqualified
And tired
And queer is not a mask, nor a name but a place and a hope
An everextending theory of beginnings
An unwritten mo(u)rning song for things and times unconceived
and illconcieved
To find their birth
Unforgiveness, as unapologetic as newness and leavings

And now you look to me as unfamiliar hands look upon a typewriter
Expecting it to spell out to you a story
But queer is only keys for your experience
And hands make bloody paper and clog the feeder
For queer is nothing of truth but everything of possibility
And everything of possibility is everything to uncreated
And clay is all that I am
And I cannot forgive you
Queer in blurred letters on mangled hands
I cannot forgive you
Queer deflected from futures and spaces
I cannot forgive you
Queer on t-shirts and business cards, on seventeen and HBO
With neat edges and riotous origins
Queer with hands and feet and arms and legs
Queer with an s scrawled upon its tail to bound in its future
And cement it to your given name
I cannot forgive you

Bisexual, intersexed, gay person of faith, transgendered, heteroflexible, mariposa, transvestite, pedarist, prostitute, porn star
Hear this
Read this
I hate queers

And everyday you wake up a living, breathing, functioning human being you commit an act of rebellion

You take one step closer to a place with a name so sacred it cannot be co-opted

Stand firmly, speak slowly, breathe deeply, live honestly
and create the possibility of home.