Oh What a Night: Healing, Faith, and Love

My Mama used to say to me, on days when I was especially high energy and bouncy, "Who put a quarter in you?"

Friday, if you'd walked into my office, you'd have thought that someone took an entire roll of quarters and had started plugging any staff they could find until their pupils came up dollar signs. The energy in our office was out of control.

At one point, during staff meeting, my colleague JT and I were being sassy with each other (ahhhhh sweet repository of intense tension), when Doyin and Reina push back from the table where Doyin starts to rock and Reina starts summoning up a safe zone to envelope him. We all fall out laughing, and in unison, Doyin and Reina spin around in their wheely chairs and pull back up to the table. They are basically those two crotchety old Muppets that are always talking smack during the Muppet Show.

Things calmed down a bit while we all shoved Cuban food into our faces like a bunch of wild hogs at a slop trough.

And then more volunteers descended on the space, including the indomitable Yejin Lee from the Anti-Violence Project, to begin prepping meals for QEJ's vigil in honor of our member, Yvonne McNeil, who was murdered by the police in early October. All that manic energy translated into packing sixty lunches in a time that would have made the winner of the NY City Marathon blush and clap. It was organized chaos with a PB&J heart.

With the office mostly empty, JT, Amber, and I were sitting waiting to catch any last minute folks that straggled in before leaving for the site of the vigil. At one point, we were all sitting near each other, and we had a Lefty Confessional and Rite of Absolution with Amber, and then we all headed across the island to a small park near New Providence Shelter.

The vigil was powerful. It was silent, and it was comprised largely of folks that work in the queer community and around issues of violence. At the last minute, residents of five different shelters decided not to attend the vigil. It was not unexpected. It's one thing to want to honor one of your own that has fallen to violence from the system, and it is another to face the reality of that violence and understand that it could have been anyone, including yourself. Therefore but by the Grace of God go all of us.

So, those of us that have the privilege to live outside of the shelter system, along with a few residents of New Providence, showed up to honor the memory of Yvonne McNeil. As Amber Hollibaugh, my colleague and friend, said, "Not a single one of us, including our homeless, will go unremembered." There are times when we show up because others simply can't. That's revolutionary and love.

The Audre Lorde Project showed up in force to act as our allies and our security for the vigil as did folks from the Sylvia River Law Project. And it was lovely to have lawyerly support from Streetwise and Safe! I can't say enough how much it meant to me and the rest of us at QEJ to see how our people show up for each other in a time of need. That, too, is revolutionary.

That night, I hung out with JT and his sister, and it was wonderful to sort of let some of the sadness go and enjoy time out and about in the world celebrating life in the face of violence. In fact, I think when we celebrate the ways in which we continue to grow despite the reality of living in a police state, we are doing the work of defiance and healing. And we can't heal alone...no matter what the wound. In fact, the systems that be would have us believe that isolation is the way to heal are in fact trying to keep us hurting...isolation is simply another way to keep us wounded and bleeding...slowly. I will gather my loves around me. That's good medicine.

This weekend has been about celebration, healing, getting back to self, cooking, reading, playing, loving, and being brave in the face of hurt and hope. Actually, I believe being brave in the face of hope is infinitely harder than just about any other act of courage....to believe that your hurt can be less than your healing and that the love that is offered and present is greater than your loss, is terrifying. But leaps of faith have always been the greatest and most frightening acts we have undertaken. And the greatest human achievements have always come from those that have opened their eyes wide and jumped. I believe I will be caught...I have been every time I have ever had the courage to leap.

Addiction, HIV, and the Healing that We Need: A Community Call to Action

Let me go on ahead and give a testimonial up in this piece for a minute. I am a recovering meth addict. And while there was an element early on, back in the late 90s, when I was bedazzled by the glam party boys at the club, my meth addiction had nothing to do with that. Meth came later, post HIV, and my meth addiction had everything to do with the mind blowing numbing power of the drug, the power of the drug to let me feel beautiful, wanted, loved, in control, powerful...for as long as the high lasted, I was Superman and all the bull shit of the world just bounced off of my chest.

Let me preach on this for a minute. I know you all are the choir but sometimes the choir needs to hear the sermon too. When you grow up a man of color in a country that is designed to shut you up and, if it can't, lock you away...when you come out in a queer community where, at least where I was from, you are told to your face, “Sorry...you're cute...but I don't do black/brown/not-white,”....when you are targeted and tokenized...when you are outside peeking in....any thing that resembles a key or a pathway to acceptance becomes very attractive and BECAUSE we did not then and still do not love each other deeply, fearlessly, strongly, toughly, wholly enough...we do not give ourselves nor those that are coming after us the spiritual or communal strength to love themselves despite what the world or anyone in it has to say about the matter.

If we want to see an end to the spread of HIV, if we want to see the end of addiction, if we want to see beautiful brown, black, red, and yellow men loving each other wholly, beautifully, powerfully, then we need find a way to build each other up spiritually and communally...all the prevention messages in the world don't mean SHIT without the work to heal the wounds that most of us are born with....I knew all about condoms and how to protect myself from HIV. But when faced with a moment (even illusory) of feeling whole, wanted, loved, and accepted....I was wiling to give up just about anything to have that moment.

This isn't about some "gay party and sex" ethos. That idea is dismissive and simplistic. It is also a shiny, pretty masquerade masking what's really going on beneath the surface. What's really going on underneath is a world, despite the GLAAD Media Awards, despite Ricky Martin coming out, despite Ugly Betty and Will & Grace, despite gay cruises and gay carnivals, despite the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, despite the right to mimic failed heterosexual relationship structures as evinced through state sponsored marriage, despite a welcoming church here and there, despite “It Gets Better,” and despite all the superficial bullshit where queer people, queer people of color and especially genderqueer and trans people of color are targeted, wounded, hurting, marginalized, isolated and struggling--at least for a good chunk of their first two decades of life. And, my friends, don't get it twisted, each and every one of us knows that what happens to us in the first 20 years of life is most likely what we are going to spend the last 60 years of our lives trying to heal...if we have the privilege to do so and if we live long enough.

So, when I read half-assed assertions about what is REALLY needed to curb meth addiction, when I read folks that have never struggled with addiction coming up with the same old tired solutions to dynamic issues of mental health and spiritual wounding, I really want to start screaming. The fact is that the solution to meth addiction is not MORE FEAR. It is not MORE JUDGMENT. It is not MORE SHAME. It is not simplistic answers to a complicated problem. And there is no single solution for an addiction and a wounding that is absolutely personal. When one goes into the emergency room with chest pains, the doctor doesn't apply the same diagnostic and healing plan that she gave to the patient just before you with chest pain. Your healing path is personal and specific to the nuances that are you. Some of the techniques applied may be universal, but the situations of each surgery are unique and require specialized care. The same is true of addiction, and don't let anyone tell you differently.

With all my heart, I wish that the moment any queer and/or trans person of color turned 18---before we send them out into the adult world--, they were whisked off to a magical queer camp where for a year they are given the tools and the love, and lots and lots and lots of therapy, to start undoing the hurt that they have already, inevitably, received.

So let me ask you to join me in figuring out a real solution. I am going to talk to my friend Maurice Jamal, the folks at the Audre Lorde Project and a couple of other folks and see if we can pull together a series of long term discussions in queer/trans communities of color, with queer/trans people of color, facilitated by queer/trans people of color, to try and find long term solutions not to addiction but to the root causes that lead to addiction. HIV and Addiction are symptoms. The symptoms need to be addressed but until the underlying wound is healed, no matter how much love and support is thrown at the symptoms, they are going to keep returning. I, for one, am tired of the symptoms. I am ready for healing---and I can't do it by myself.