“This is for my brothers who dare to love other
brothers in a revolutionary way.”
Writing to you is an exercise in self-love and holistic restoration.
I am called to reckon with the promise of my future, the depths of my own
greatness, accessed and denied. You are the world. It has been said that black
is the absence of light, ain’t it funny how they always get that wrong? The tea
is, blackness is the essence of creation, a potpourri of the creative
ingredients of existence. Blackness, unbought, unbossed and unrestrained is the
building block of color and from its presence, our presence, your presence,
derives all things.
“This is for the man-child, always man, sometimes
child, because duality is how we make it to tomorrow.”
My thoughts drift to you often, my BlaQueer brothers.
Flesh deep, varied and enduring as that of the earth on which we stand. Arms
strong and versatile enough to hold masculinities, femininities and the journey
of ancestors close. You are rhythmic, moving through the compounded obstacles
of society step-by-step, death-dropping over stigma, tossing shade to the
bright lights of white supremacy and sashaying truths of our over-comings
through your very existences.
“This is for limp wrist warriors, full of sugar,
dripping honey and snatching the creative energy of the cosmos.”
You are a soul ballad; stitching together the complex realities of
our fraught existences with an in-articulable presence that commands and
requires respect, resolve and r/evolution. You are a Cosmos; within you exists
a constellation of brilliant expressions of perfect imperfections.
“This is for the choir boys, ministers, and
ushers praying, hoping and calling for Heaven—here and now—who refuses to
divide black from queer, queer from male and Him into itty, bitty, homophobic
bite-size pieces..”
You are queer, trans, gay, bi, and same-gender-loving. You are
father, son, brother, uncle, cousin, and homie. You are truth-seeker, griot,
artist, scholar, activist, organizer, writer, singer, designer, athlete,
lawyer, educator, trend-setter, and him. You are him. He who is sensitive yet
indestructible, authentic yet ever-evolving, sexually breathtaking and intellectually
stupefying.
“This is for the Survivors, fighting a war
within, against cells unrelenting, brothers not-repenting and community to
afraid to love and live in the presence of HIV.”
Simultaneously existing within and outside imputed markers and
communities of race, gender, and sexuality, we trek on the path of our
forefathers. We speak with the urgency of Malcolm, the insight of Baldwin and
the truth Essex. We live with the fearlessness, strategic, acuity of Joseph
Beam and Bayard Rustin; navigating the world with our eyes on holistic,
comprehensive justice. We create and we love, with the fire and passion of Ru,
Langston and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. From their shoulders and their pathways we are
called and empowered to be all that we are; realizing and releasing the divine
nature of our BlaQueerness in honor of the crowns of our
lineage, the proof of present and the hope of our progeny. From transmisogyny
to police violence, from femme-phobia to HIV criminalization, from poverty to
sex-shaming.. we are all we need to thrive. Indeed, we are all we’ve ever had.
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