Bleeding Love: LGBT Adversity Near and Far

I'm pissed off.

Correction:  I’m fucking pissed off.

As many of you are aware the Russian government is severely anti-LGBT. This has led to protests and riots throughout the country. In the course of such protests many LGBT people and allies have suffered physical and mental harm. This is a human rights issue and has reached audiences around the world. I know no country/nation-state is perfect in any regards but it sickens me to think an event such as The Olympics (which is meant to bring the countries of the world together) is being held in a place that is actively participating in the destruction of my LGBT brothers and sisters.

Recently Human Rights Watch has released a video (watch with caution please) that showcases many acts of violence which have happened in recent months in Russia to LGBT people. In it we are shown homosexual men who have been abducted, humiliation, tortured, raped, and (presumably) murdered. These acts were recorded by the perpetrators and posted on sites such as YouTube.

I hurts me deeply to watch this video where my brothers were treated with such disrespect and subjected to acts of violence such as, but not limited to: verbal assaults, abduction, humiliation via stripping and cohesion, and in one case, forced to rape himself with a glass bottle. The images were unforgettable, disturbing and distressing.

I am thankful I have the privilege of living in a country where being a homosexual does not lead to such treatment. Or does it…

Even as of a few days ago a student at Centennial High School in Circle Pines, Minnesota came out as gay on Facebook. The next day he received several death threats. What the fuck is wrong with people. Sure, in the USA we can come out of the closest and have bars and pride-parades and get married and have kids and lead normal lives but to receive death threats is inexcusable.

I am of two minds and they are equal. Part of me wants to find all people who commit acts of violence, physical or otherwise, a give to them what they have dished out. What kind of mind sends death threats? What kind of person forces someone to rape themselves with a glass bottle? Who is the god-damned coward to send anonymous messages of hate via social networking sites? It’s not just YouTubers or celebrities who are being threated. It’s kids in high-school who have Tumblrs, as in a friend of mine who started receiving hate mail when her Tumblr was getting popular… and she’s just a teen-age woman (and yet that too is other issue).

Why do people send hate mail? Do they believe it will change anything? Death threats are a form of domestic terrorism and is a punishable, in certain cases, as in the one mentioned above, as a hate crime. Why do we do this to each other? I just don’t understand the reasoning behind it. This upsets me and makes me angry to the point of wanting to harm those who harm others. I’m simply being honest here.

And that’s where the other side of me steps in. We can’t fight fire with fire. Violence only begets more violence. I can only affect those around me by being kind and loving and accepting of others. And yet I cannot be accepting of a lifestyle that berates and degrades others. I cannot support an ideology that sees others as sinful for loving who they love, who express their gender in whatever fashion they see fits them.

How do I show love to the person who wishes I kill myself?
How do I show compassion towards those who want nothing but my suffering?
What do I do with anger inside of me that wants to be unleashed in very harmful and destructive ways?

How do I heal hearts (the ones that are broken and the ones that do the breaking).

My own heart goes out to everyone who has faced adversity. My soul has cried last night for my brothers and sisters all over the world who stare death in the face every day… simply by being who they are, loving who they do, grasping at empowerment/self-expression/self-actualization.  My body wants to react, to protect, to exact vengeance in the name of the slain.

How do I honor these opposing and powerful desires for vengeance and peace?

Ultimately all I feel I can do right now is draw attention to the problem and illuminate (to bare light upon) the situation.

Pray for those in need. Support your children, your friends and family, your coworkers by accepting them and loving them and asking them how they are feeling? Tell them you love them. Tell them it will get better. Show to those still in the closet the world isn’t full of haters and rapists and cowards. My smallest wish there was that was more I could do to stop these atrocities.

Breakfast With Inanna

for those I miss

I sat with Inanna one morning,
and she bled red and black on to the table cloth.
I told her not to worry about it,
                ruined now from her trails.
And she said with a nail-gouged tongue
                clear as the sky
“What is there to worry about?”

Shamed, naked, I poured her more coffee.
“I called you to ask a question…
how do you live with your sister so far away?”

Her eyes burned bight as the sun
and she set her mug down,
                leaving a ring of brown.
Removed her crown and lapis earrings
                she cracked her knuckles
And with the surest and simplest of motions
She ripped out my heart.

She set it upon the table,
                more red, more brown, more black
and it still beats there
                this is a power of all Goddesses
                              to continue the human heart
Pumping away as if it has been there forever

I gasped. I flailed. I spilt coffee and blood.

I hurt and it was unbearable.
It was all hot tears and violent jack-knifing of limbs
I could see only Inanna,
I could see only Ereškigal.
I could feel only that space where she use to be.

“There.
That is how you live with your sister not next to you.
You breathe with shallow breaths.
Your limps will grasp at empty air to find her.
Your ears will only hear the blood
                that use to be where she was.
That is how you will live.”

I fell backward
                on to the floor, the earth.
Attempts were made to grasp at life
                my fingers holding only dirt

“And you will only be still until she puts your there 

Right under your fingernails; her dirt
Right through that space she made in your heart;
her hook; her nail; her spike.”

And finally I stopped
                it all stopped.
“Silence is your sister; is my sister.
She is a far away as we chose.”

[2011]