I gotta talk to you for a minute about Andrea Gibson. I’ve got talk about her, because I don’t know if I have ever, ever been so moved by the work of a single individual.

Andrea Gibson is a master of spoken word, an award winning slam poet.

“Gibson is also among the nation’s most admired and emulated poets. Her verse is at once personal and political, concrete and abstract, feminist and universal, filled with incinerating verbs and metaphor and delivered with gut-punching urgency. You can hear the ache in her soul every time she utters God’s name, and even her inhales sound desperate. It’s not uncommon for audiences to gasp at some of her turns of phrase or rise to their feet when she finishes a poem.” MATT PEIKEN

She is a woman of uncommon passion, her performances lit by an internal fire that powers her through her poems with the force of a freight train, slicing through lines with the sharpness and precision of sword. She spits her words out like bullets – hitting me right in the gut, and in the next second changes course and breaths out her message with a gentle caress that makes her words drift to my ears like leaves falling softly to the ground. Every word carefully chosen, unflinchingly delivered, cutting through bullshit and convention with the energy of someone determined to create change but also with the tenderness of someone whose heart is so big she has to hurt more than most of us. She performs with ferocity and with compassion and with so much feeling that I am left raw and exposed by the power of her honesty.

I want you to watch these videos. I want you to close your eyes and absorb her words, her passion, her activism, her fire. I want you to feel her work with every fiber of your being. I want your toes to tingle and your heart to pound and for you to feel changed by what you hear. I don’t know exactly why I’m telling you this, why I think you need instructions or set expectations. I can’t quite imagine that you could listen to these words and not do all these things. I don’t know that it is possible to be fully present and aware and NOT be wholly moved by the spirit and soul of what this woman creates in the performance of her art.

Blue Blanket
I am moved by every single piece I have heard her read, but this one – this one more than any other – brings me to my knees. It slams into me and makes my breath feel tight in my lungs and my heart thud in my chest. If you have ever been violated, if you have ever sat and held a woman who has been violated while she cried or sat in horrified numbness, then you will feel this poem with every last cell in your body and the final line will remain a part of you long after you have finished listening.

I do.
Love poem and political statement all at once, this is just one the millions of reasons why it matters that love just be love, without restrictions, or inequality or limits on who and how and why.

“i never needed more
than the stars on your grin to lead me home
for fifty years you were my favorite poem
and i’d read you every night
knowing i might never understand every word
but that was okay cause the lines of you
were the closest thing to holy i’d ever heard
you’d say this kind of love has to be a verb”

Dive
Life dosesn’t rhyme. Paradox, irony, mirrored reflections - it’s all the beautiful grey between stark black and white, it’s the ambiguous spaces between absolutes where the brilliance of life resides.

“”it’s your worst sin saving your fucking life
it’s the devil’s knife carving holes into you soul
so angels will have a place to make their way inside
life doesn’t rhyme
still life is poetry — not math
all the world’s a stage
but the stage is a meditation mat
you tilt your head back
you breathe
when your heart is broken you plant seeds in the cracks
and you pray for rain
and you teach your sons and daughters
there are sharks in the water
but the only way to survive
is to breathe deep
and dive”

Say Yes
The world needs us right now more than it ever has before…this poem is hope - empowering, uplifting hope. This poem is the life I want to live.

For Eli
This is how I feel about war – not just the one we’re in now – but every last one of them.

““one third of the homeless men in this country are veterans
and we have the nerve to Support Our Troops
with pretty yellow ribbons
while giving nothing but dirty looks to their outstretched hands
tell me what land of the free
sets free its eighteen-year-old kids into greedy war zones
hones them like missiles
then returns their bones in the middle of the night
so no one can see”

Check out this link for a few more artists

Once again, thanks to the divine MLC for pointing me directly to brilliance and inspiration.

No words needed, these videos speak for themselves.

..

Like so many others, I was so deeply disappointed last week to learn that the Matthew Shepard Act had been dropped from the final version of the Defense Authorization Bill. 

I clearly remember learning about the brutal hate crime that resulted in Matthew’s death.  I was a year out of college, planning my wedding, and was feeling as if I had the world at my feet.  I was still deeply in denial about my own sexuality, but can recall following the news reports with a sense of horror and grief.  Reading the details of what this kind-eyed boy, just a year younger than me, had gone through…it was, and is, beyond my ability to comprehend.

If it had passed, “The Matthew Shepard Act would have expand the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.”*   Seems pretty straightforward right?

It has been nine years since Matthew’s death.  Nine years, and despite the efforts of Matthew’s family and other committed activists, we still do not have federal protection for crimes perpetrated against individuals or groups based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.  Why?

There are many reasons, some of which I can even wrap my brain around politically, that the Act was dropped from the defense bill.  But even if we can accept the reasons, it does not minimize the fact that this represents a loss (or at the very least a failure to achieve necessary and long deserved progress) for the entire LGBTQ community.

The news that this act was dropped from the bill, especially coming so close on the heels of the dropping of transgender protection from ENDA, is hard to accept.  So many people fought so hard for both of those pieces of legislation.  So many people needed the protection they would have and should have provided.  So many people are left vulnerable and legally and politically defenseless by the failure of our political system to move themselves beyond a process so entrenched in personal prejudice and theocratic ideology.

Locally, there have been some small, but not insignificant, steps forward lately.  It is hard to wholeheartedly celebrate these victories when they are followed closely in the news by the story of the third anti-gay attack this year in the city of Scottsdale, but celebrate we must.  We have to celebrate, to push forward, to sing the victories from our rooftops and to fight loudly and determinedly against the setbacks.

When we talk about activism, about working to create real and necessary change, it is easy to get fired up and energized by the cause.  It is also all too easy to get beaten down and to feel as if all the efforts are pointless and that real progress will always continue to elude us.   By their very nature, activism and burnout go hand in hand, but when a fight is worth fighting there will always be people to dust off the disappointment, pick up the pieces and keep moving forward. 

I cannot imagine how Matthew’s parents must have felt upon hearing the news that the legislation they had worked so long and hard for - the act that bore their son’s name - had been dropped from the bill.  But still, they refuse to give up.

“Make no mistake; this is a small triumph of process over principle.  We are dedicated to redoubling our efforts next year to achieve our vision of a hate-free America that truly includes everyone.  This has never simply been about Matthew Shepard and our family, this legislation is a gift delayed but never forgotten for all America’s families.” ~ Judy and Dennis Shepard.

Their efforts exemplify the belief that the only way to counter hatred, prejudice and ignorance is with passion and determination and by holding onto the belief that it is possible to create change. With their work, Judy and Denis Shepard are saying that the legacy of hatred must never be resignation, or disillusionment or cynicism.

Indeed, if there is to be hope of creating real change, the legacy of hatred must always be love.

* HR 1592, the House bill

Is all this doom and gloom getting to you guys? I think it’s getting to me. So, let’s take a break from my pity party for a moment– shall we? I’m feeling a rant coming on, and getting pissed at the world always seems to give me a little bit of a boost.

I wrote last week about my wedding day, about the joy and emotion of the experience. It was truly a transcendent day. It was transcendent because my beloved grandfather walked me down the aisle the way I had dreamed about since I was a young girl (he died only six months later, making that memory even more poignant). It was transcendent because I got married in the same spot that my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins exchanged vows. It was transcendent because the ceremony was performed by my own father. Mostly though, it was transcendent because of the significance of the commitment I was making to the person that I loved.

Not surprisingly, I don’t know how I personally feel about the concept of marriage right now. I don’t know if I’m quite in a place where I can believe in things like forever and ‘till death do us part’. I certainly don’t know how I feel about the wisdom of getting married young, as I did, before I really even had a clue who I was or who I would become. But I certainly don’t regret getting married, not for a fraction of a second. Regret the past eight years of committing my life to a man as fine as S.? Regret the partnership that created our two girls? Regret the family we built together? Not a chance.

If this journey continues as it has been, and if the eventual end of my marriage is inevitable (oh, how even typing that feels like repeatedly stabbing myself in the heart) I can’t really say if I would ever want to be married again. But it angers me that someone else has decided that I won’t even have the option. Because I will likely find love with someone of the same gender - that my life commitment would be to another woman - I have now become second class. And in embracing my true self, someone else gets to decide that I am no longer worthy of the privilege of marriage.

How fucking ridiculous is that?

Several years ago - around the time of the last election - I was a part of a local parenting email list, and a heated discussion broke out when we started to discuss politics. There was one participant in this discussion who tried to back up her homophobic beliefs with her religion, and I got mad. I posted a rant directed at her, and I clearly remember writing that I planned to raise my children to know that true equality can know no exception.

True equality can know NO exception.

It doesn’t matter if I decide I don’t believe in the concept of marriage as currently sanctioned by government and religion. It does not matter if I choose never to be married again. It doesn’t matter what your Bible says, or what you think is immoral or what makes you uncomfortable. If you take a group of people and tell them that they are not able to participate in society EXACTLY the same as the rest - that you want to withhold from them certain privileges available to most - then you are practicing discrimination. End of story. There is no rationalization, no argument, no way to validate inequality that does not come back to prejudice, to self-righteous judgment and to narrow-mindedness. None.

It is almost beyond my ability to fathom that we have almost reached the end of 2007 and that we can still be having the same arguments about equality. The campaign for suffrage, the struggle for racial equality, and now the battle the LGBTQ community is fighting – these are radically different conflicts, but they are also essentially the same. They are the crusade of a group of people (and their allies) who are willing to stand up and say “I am the same as you, I want the same as you, I deserve the same as you and I’m going to work until I get it”.

It seems so clear to me that everyone on this earth deserves the same rights and privileges. It seems so obvious to me that we are all equal. It seems utterly basic to me to believe that love is love – and that who we love is not near as important to the universe as the simple fact that we love fully and completely. It deeply saddens me that enough people feel differently about equality that we still have to be having this discussion.

I can only hope that I will see it change, not in the distant future, but very, very soon. Because, as I said in my very first blog entry, now this is personal.

I wanted to share the video that got me thinking about all this today, from an organization called “Let California Ring”.