Yesterday I grieved for my white friends, my mixed friends, my friends of color – any or all of us who have internalized the culture of violence and oppression we were raised with.

Because all of us – including those who have benefited from it – have been harmed by white supremacy, patriarchy and the capitalist values which have limited our vision, our humanity, our interconnectedness. All of us have reason to be angry and hurt, and every single one of us has the opportunity to direct those feelings towards our love and collective liberation.

Even if you’re not directly affected by daily acts of aggression and hate – wise up and pay attention – this is happening on your watch. Those of us who have been living with blinders on – it’s time to take those blinders off, and get real with ourselves about the kinds of people we want to be in this world moving forward.

Because the truth is we’ve ALL been fucked up our entire lives, for many generations by this point, by the crap we were taught to believe, made up by some pretty hypocritical people who had radically different values than the ones I consider humane. It has impacted each of us differently and some bodies (black and trans ones in particular) have received the worst of it, but the results are fairly devastating in aggregate. And it is a really treacherous process to purge all this garbage from our brains and our behaviors. It’s no wonder we are always arguing amongst ourselves about it.  I like to see that as a sign of change and progress.

Some gentle guidelines, written with love, to anyone who is working through it right now:

a) Pause.

b) #SayTheirNames

c) Listen to the voices of queer and trans Puerto Ricans.

d) Listen to the voices of Muslim queers and allies.

e) Listen to the voices of queer and trans black and brown people. especially women.

f) Listen to the voices of people who are differently abled.

g) Recognize that none of this is new. None of this is new. It may be new to you but this has been going on for hundreds of years in America, and these voices have rarely had access to the tools for self-determination or space to be heard. To be brown or black or Muslim or differently abled or queer or Latinx or Asian or indigenous or nonbinary or trans or poor or undocumented or homeless in America is to live defensively in your body, to experience a different sense of safety and rest, to filter reactions, to choose when and how to get angry or let things go. But don’t listen to me try to describe it – listen to them.

h) Remember that not all experiences are monolithic – there is variety within people who share cultures or traits. Remember that asking someone to share their experience with you can be a form of emotional labor that requires consent. Be gentle if they don’t want to process with you. You’ve got lots of other folks to process with.

i) Understand that you may have been complicit in perpetuating oppression outside of your consent. We have all been broken by white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalist values – homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, hatred in all of its forms. Once you become aware of it, and all the ways it plays out for people of various colors, genders and abilities – you cannot go back. It is up to you to call out the bullshit when you see it, because all of our lives are interconnected and if you’re not actively helping then you are indeed part of the problem. It is work to purge our minds and behaviors of these ideas. It is work to change. This work is urgent, immediate, and our future. Accept it and move forward with your work. Remember that every day is a new opportunity to practice radical love, and this work will bring you joy and life.

j) Listen to your heart. Check in with yourself. Rage, numbness, sadness, fear, bewilderment, nothing at all, empathy. Who do you love. What kind of a world do you want to live in. Where do you, yourself, in your own personal heart, stand. What do you still need to learn. Whose voices will you listen to for leadership.

k) Now, compare. What is your community saying? Where are your friends and your family and your co-workers and your people at? Hint: if they are not talking about this stuff they are actively complicit in its perpetuation. As perhaps you were once. As I was once, too.  (still am. It’s a lifelong learning process.)

l) Consider your sphere of influence. How can you help dismantle hate and other fucked up values? How can you speak to these people you love in a way that will help them understand and change? What larger groups are you connected to? What resources do you have (human, financial, spatial, emotional) that you can direct towards change? If all movements are an ecosystem and each of us has our part – what is yours?

m) Be gentle with yourself in your process. Be gentle with others in theirs. Listen with kindness and openness to the stories you are hearing from people of different experiences. Don’t jump to conclusions – let yourself be changed. Have patience with anger, even when it is directed towards people like you. Understand the continuum of emotions that come with working through generations of trauma. Model the person you would like to become.

Ultimately it is not the color of our skin that marks us – it is our empathy and our ability to change. I believe that each one of us has the ability to evolve, to practice radical love, to restitch our connections to each other and the earth. By doing so you and I can shift our culture to a place that reflects our values, our humanness, our love.

recurring thoughts re: orlando. bc I can’t get back to sleep.

five years ago, when I was learning how to handle violent ptsd flashbacks, my therapist had me close my eyes and picture the safest place I could imagine. “like an island beach,” she suggested. I immediately described the hey queen dance floor, 3am, arms around a circle of friends, singing loudly with love. there is no such thing as safety in this world – there are never guarantees. but a gunman opening fire on a queer dance floor, to me, is unimaginable.

photo by Cathy Opie from the article

An article made me mad so I wrote a letter.  It never got published.

Dear Editor,

I am a person who has taken sanctuary on the land called “the Commune” in “Out of the Woods,” which presents a regrettably limited portrait of a movement I hold dear to my heart.

My complaints about this article are less important than my need to state a few urgent facts it failed to mention: A trans woman named Amber Monroe was found murdered in Detroit yesterday. Eleven other trans women of color were murdered this year so far in the U.S. Their names were K.c. Haggard, India Clarke, Mercedes Williamson, London Chanel, Kristina Gomez Reinwald, Penny Proud, Taja Gabrielle DeJesus, Yazmin Vash Payne, Ty Underwood, Lamia Beard, and Lamar “Papi” Edwards. Every night at Sylvia’s Place, the emergency shelter for queer and trans young people in NYC that was founded as the legendary *Sylvia Rivera’s dying wish for her community, young people from across the region crash on a concrete floor because it’s better than being in the streets, and at least there is queer community there. We live in a country developed on stolen land, populated with slaves, ecologically damaged, deeply mismanaged, and — feel free to listen directly to the voices emerging through the Movement for Black Lives, which articulate quite clearly the ongoing impact of racism and patriarchy in our culture.

I mention these facts because they are essential to the bigger picture of queerness in America, and critical context for understanding the desire for queer separatism in 2015 beyond what was hinted at in the article.

Private queer spaces like “the Commune” and Sylvia’s Place are essential for those of us who are critical of the values of the “mainstream” culture we do not seek to join, but organize to change. Many of us who seek shelter in them are survivors of violence, oppression, misogyny, transmisogyny, homophobia and isolation — all direct results of a culture perpetuated by articles like “Out of the Woods.”

On the land, we do our best to create new paradigms for loving and protecting each other and the earth, honoring each other’s gifts, and holding ourselves accountable in community. Many of us are activists in a variety of movements – police brutality, sex worker’s rights, HIV prevention, queer youth homelessness – and we use our time in queer-only spaces to heal collectively from the culture we are surrounded by elsewhere.

These spaces are far from perfect — and this article, with its cis white class-privileged gay male lens, only furthers the minimizing of women, trans people, and people of color in some of those spaces. But at least within them we are doing our best to live out our values instead of just musing about them, and making progress through our differences.

To expose our community in an article that ignores these issues at large in the greater culture and simply “discovers” us like “Captain Cook getting his first glimpse of Kauai” misses the point and continues a long-held tradition in mass media of othering instead of listening. In the context of misogyny, murders and broken families outlined above, it was an act of journalistic irresponsibility.

It is also my understanding that the article breaks an agreement with stewards of “the Commune” about sharing its name and identifying details – as Femmy Rose said eloquently in their comment on the article on the NYT web site. And my understanding is that other land projects named in the article actively declined to be part of the article.

Thank you for reading these words.

Quito

*Incidentally, Sylvia Rivera was one of the leaders of the Stonewall riot in 1969 along with her best friend Marsha P. Johnson, that kicked off one story within the gay liberation movement but does not represent the experiences of all queers, as one story never could. Incidentally, Sylvia’s role in that movement as a co-founder of STAR was recently whitewashed in the trailer for an upcoming film which centers the experience of white gay men as a stand-in for a much more diverse movement – not unlike this article.

ps. WATCH THIS: