five gems from the allied media conference

I plan to expand these into more full posts later but for right now I just need to get them down on the digital page in rough form.

1. Being at the Allied Media Conference filled me with such hope, with the knowledge that we can and are building another world because I saw it happen. I saw amazing fierce beautiful people come together across the differences the system tries to use to separate us and instead we built a space of love and radical possibility and deep dreaming and shared joy and power.

2. After leaving the AMC, a deep swell of sorrow swept over me. Some of that I’m sure is due to crashing after the high. But not all of it. I feel lonely because I’m not connected to that radical, beautiful, powerful movement in my day to day life or even in my weekly or monthly life. I want to live with the magic and music and fierce creative love and open dialogue and empowerment of marginalized voices and honesty about the super fucked up state of the world and inspiring courageous work for healing and liberation. I want that to be my life. But I feel scared that I’m not good enough or strong enough or cool enough or or or.

3. One of the obstacles which I have hardly named or spoken about is an invisible disability. I haven’t spoken of this partially because of my fear of the word “disabled” and what that means or implies about me. But the truth is this: for the past five years I have had difficulty walking and standing. I can walk and stand, but for much less time than most people.

I didn’t want to call myself disabled for multiple reasons: my own internalized ableism, not wanting to be defined by a weakness of problem, needing to believe that my condition was not permanent, the fact that I haven’t seen a doctor in about five years and so don’t have some official medical diagnosis, my sense that the concept of “disability” was all tied up with the Western medical perspective, the fact that I see the problem with my knees and hips as part of the wreckage caused by my father’s sexual abuse and not caused by something else.

At the opening to the AMC, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha shared some amazing and inspiring words about disability justice. Part of what she said (and I’m paraphrasing) was that people with disabilities carry the weight of legacies of violence and domination in their bodies. This resonates with my story, with my truth about the pain in my body: my father’s violation of my sexuality has caused my pelvis to be dislocated.

I still know and believe that I can become stronger and healthier. But right now I am dealing with limited mobility, with a disability. I do not have to be ashamed by that. I do not have to attempt to hide that, to be silent, to pass as an able-bodied person, to carry around this weight of shame. Doing so has exhausted me.

4. I also need to come out as genderqueer. I’m semi-out, but for a long time I’ve thought that I was comfortable enough in the assumed identity of male that people place me in but I’m not. I don’t really have models for people who are out about the fact that they are neither men nor women. But I need to find and cultivate and create spaces in which I can express the totality of my gender in all its complexity and shifting nature.

5. I’ve also been hiding my gifts, my own songs, my own fierce love, my own tears at the violence tearing apart the world, my own wild dreams. I have hidden these even from myself. Doing so has hurt me, but it has also hurt the world, the movement, the beautiful people I long to be connected with, who are also longing to be connected with me. These words are the beginning of a bridge, a road, which connects me to the world, the life, the movement we are dreaming and building together. So mote it be.

on denial

AP/Charles Dharapak

I found this image to be very powerful. (I first saw it here.)

It resonates with some things I’ve been thinking about recently. Denial, and the refusal to acknowledge the reality of suffering, are so widespread and so destructive. These twin forces enable the creation and continuation of so much violence. While there are important differences between the sexual abuse with which my father ripped and polluted my psyche and the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States, denial and distance abetted both of them. This dynamic is an inextricable part of oppression, domination, and abuse.

Denial and the lack of empathy also make the suffering caused by domination worse. In a way, the denial after the fact was worse (or at least as bad as) my father’s abuse itself. I had to live with him for years, secretly in anguish and in terror, and enraged. These feelings were buried and hidden from my conscious awareness; denial was necessary for my survival in that house. Denial was necessary for the survival of that house itself; if the abuse were acknowledged, the family unit would have disintegrated. My mother would have taken me and my sister and left. She has told me as much. “If I knew,” she says, “I would have left.” And yet she is still in her own dance with denial, not yet able to fully acknowledge the truth of what happened. “I can’t know for sure,” she says, “because you are both telling me different stories.” (My father’s first story was this: “I didn’t do that.” His story is now: “I don’t remember doing that.”)

It is crazymaking when my mother says this. Her denial still wounds me, because I am still suffering from the abuse; she is still abandoning me.

(The thing about denial, though, is that it is never a water tight container. On some level, both of my parents know the truth. You can see in Condoleezza’s face that, in spite of her refusal to see, she is pained by the responsibility she shares for so much needless death, for the bottomless well of anguish that she has helped open up in so many lives.)

As much pain and confusion and aching as denial has caused me, I also have to acknowledge that it saved my life, or at least my sanity. There is no way I could have lived with my father and the truth of the abuse at the same time, under the same roof. They would have been like two monstrous beasts engaged in an vicious, teeth-rending, limb-shattering fight, and my five year old self would have been crushed beneath them.

Lately, I have been aware of other ways that denial and distancing myself from suffering appear in my life. In relation to the war in Iraq, for example. I am embarassed to admit how little I allow myself to think and feel about it. Perhaps it is necessary for me to do so, to take care of myself. When I am already overwhelmed by my own suffering and trauma, perhaps I can do little to witness, prevent, and/or transform larger and broader forms of suffering. Perhaps, as is said, “the first duty of a revolutionary is to survive.” Perhaps human beings aren’t evolved to deal with the suffering of people so far away, and so constantly. If I truly processed every horrible thing that happened in this world, I would end up a burnt out, sobbing, suicidal mess. Constantly.

And yet distancing myself is inevitably tangled up with privilege. It also enables the destructive dynamics to continue unchallenged. It also prevents me from fully seeing how my own struggles and sufferings are interconnected with other struggles and sufferings, and thus from taking action to transform myself and my world.

I think, as is often the case, that the answer lives in taking a middle path. Obviously, if I am so aware of the suffering of the world that I am incapacitated, I won’t be doing anyone much good. And if I only pay attention to my own suffering, I will not be acting ethically. I need to find a balance; to be mindful of how much I can cope with; to be as open as possible; to let myself take breaks (media fasts!); to speak the truth as powerfully as the symbolic blood on the hands of the woman in the photograph does, and in so doing to allow my own painful and difficult feelings to flow and merge with other streams, to erode the harsh metallic structures of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in the world and in my own and others’ hearts, to gather force and momentum and to one day break down that final dam and melt into the ecstasy of the crashing ocean waves, sunlit and free at last.

healing as a form of activism

For a long time I’ve felt guilty because I’ve thought that I stopped participating in activism. When I was in college, I would go to meetings (for a while, a meeting almost every day of the week) and protests, walking in the streets and shouting chants. This felt powerful, like I was part of a mass movement for radical change. After I graduated, things changed. I stopped doing activism in that way. As with everything, there were several factors involved: disillusionment from being unable to prevent the invasion of Iraq, the dissolving of several activist groups I belonged to, having to focus on finding a job and navigating the “real world,” and a change in my physical health which makes it hard for me to walk or stand for lengthy periods of time. But the most important factor is this: I realized that I had been sexually abused by my father, and began to devote an enormous amount of time, energy, and head space to coping, healing, and transforming. Now, it has become clear to me that this work is activism itself, that I have not dropped out of struggles for change but shifted my focus to a different form of activism.

I have been thinking a lot lately about masculinity and “manhood,” which is, of course, deeply tangled up with my history with my father. I finally finished reading The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks, which I started to read months and months ago. Reading this today reaffirmed that the personal healing work that I have been doing is activism, and that it has the potential to benefit many more people than just myself, to be a ripple of change in the world. Here is some of what bell hooks writes:

[M]en must set the example by daring to heal, by daring to do the work of relational recovery. Irrespective of their sexual preferences, men in the process of self-recovery usually begin by returning to boyhood and evaluating what they learned about masculinity and how they learned it… Understanding the roots of male dis-ease helps many men begin to work repairing the damage. Progressive individual gay men in our nation, particularly those who have resisted patriarchal thinking (who are often labeled “feminine” for being emotionally aware), have been at the forefront of relational recovery. Straight men and patriarchal gay men can learn from them.

(Of course, gay men and straight men are not the only types of men that exist.) Lately, I have been longing for male role models, for images of men crying and being vulnerable and emotionally whole. Reading the above quote made me realize that I am one of the queer men that bell hooks mentions and that I can serve as a role model for other men. Once again, “we are the people we’ve been waiting for.” There is a loneliness in this, and an anger that I have to do it myself, but also a sense of liberation, and a promise of connection to community; if I become a mentor and am able to connect to and help men in the future then what I am longing for will be brought into existence.

There is also the promise, as bell hooks writes, of creating nurturing childhoods for future generations of boys:

If boys are raised to be empathic and strong; autonomous and connected; responsible to self, family, and friends, and to society; able to make community rooted in a recognition of interbeing, then the solid foundation is present and they will be able to love.

Currently, too many boys (and girls and children whose genders are complicated, queer, and/or currently nameless) are not raised in these ways. This is because, as bell hooks writes,

In dominator cultures most families are not safe places. Dysfunction, intimate terrorism, and violence make them breeding grounds for war. Since we have yet to end patriarchal culture, our struggles to end domination must begin where we live, in the communities we call home. It is there that we experience our power to create revolutions, to make life-transforming change. We already know that men do not have to remain wedded to patriarchy. Individual men have again and again staked a different claim, claiming their rights to life and love. They are beacons of hope embodying the truth that men can love.

These past few years, it is here that I have been making my revolution: in the painful reality of my dysfunctional family; in that dangerous and fruitful wilderness beyond the safe garden of denial; in the tangled, unspoken history of male suffering caused by patriarchy; in my heart, which is simultaneously broken and whole, full of poison and medicine, which I am learning to fill with more and more love.