SlutWalk NYC Speech

Saturday, October 1, 2011

I am a slut. And I have always been a slut. Some of you may find this tongue-in-cheek, or even annoying coming from a male-identified person, right? Because when men call themselves sluts or ho’s, or players or whatever, it doesn’t carry the same social stigmas that it carries for women, particularly women of color. I understand that.

But I am not here to make fun of sexual violence, street harassment or any other form of nonconsensual behavior, often visited on the bodies of women. Nor am I here to try to displace the impact of gendered forms of violence against women, including transgender women, have to face, by doing what people with whatever relative form of privilege try to do when they want to justify being in spaces not deemed for them―to claim that they too, suffer forms of oppression. And then proceed to take over and displace the most impacted voices. But I am here because of this:

When I was 14 years old, as my body started to develop, and my particular kind of Black gay gendered body began to move through the world, I began to receive a lot of attention for older men. I was harassed on the street. I was, on 3 different occasions in one week when I was 15, followed by three different men, one of whom was in a car. When I was about 25 years old and living in New York City, I was once followed by a white van while walking to the train at 4am in the morning on my way home from clubbing in Chelsea, and had to run like hell to get away from it.

Most recently, in conversations about “men on the down low”– bisexual Black men who are not open about their relationships with men to their female partners–gay men are portrayed as the vectors of disease, particularly seen as the cause of HIV rates among Black women, though people are less likely to care that actually Black gay men have higher HIV rates than men who are not out, or so-called DL. And it is difficult to get people to care about the HIV epidemic where we’re concerned, because we cannot be seen as “innocent victims.” While most obviously an expression of the anxieties of bisexuality of Black men,  the “down low” framework also positions Black gay men as predatory, as competitors with straight Black women, as a threat to the success of the Black family, Black marriages, and Black progress in general. In other words, we are sluts.

So with this in mind, I want to challenge the way many straight men working against gender based violence have framed the debate– “Men don’t have to wake up in the morning and wonder if what I put on is going to make me the target of violence.” Unfortunately, many queer, gay, SGL, and transgender men and boys know this reality all too well. I am well aware of the ways in which I am marked, my gender, the sex I have (or am imagined to be having), and my physical body, as a problem―to be controlled and policed by the larger Black community in informal ways, the church, by the state policing apparatus, and by public health epidemiologists.

And like many of us, I have had to struggle with the anxiety that my body and sexuality, regardless of what I wear or how I butch or femme I behave, produces in other people. And that anxiety produces a range of responses from disgust, to titillation, to embarrassment. The weight of that is very real and it can be crushing.

Yet despite all the negativity, the stigma, the present and historical trauma I carry, all of the threats of violence, all the times I have been attacked verbally or physically, all the predatory acts of other people, I have come to embrace the fact that yes, I am a slut too.

I also have come to love my body (which I didn’t always), and often I like showing it off, and I know sometimes I dress like a faggot, even when it is sometimes dangerous for me to do so. I know the irony of the moments at which I feel my sexiest, are the same moments at which I am the most visible, legible as a faggot―which in many peoples’ eyes, is synonymous with slut.  I know stares of disgust I see from men, and sometimes women, and sometimes from other LGBT people who wish I would be less loud, less flamboyant, less exuberant, and less obvious in my own body and sexuality. And I don’t give a fuck!

So I chose to speak at SlutWalk because I believe playing the politics of respectability will get us no where. Being slutty and promiscuous is not incongruent with dignity, self esteem or consent!  I support all of us creating ourselves in the image that speaks most to us―even if that means not accepting the label of slut for oneself, for personal, historical and/or political reasons. But some of us have figured out that while we are both targeted for our gender or our sexuality, we also continue to embrace being utterly trashy and scandalous, and our desire to do so does not take anything away from you, and how you chose to be in the world.

In many ways The Color Purple, the book and film, were huge parts of my understanding of this dichotomy. When I was a kid, I most identified with young Celie. I felt ugly, skinny, and undesirable. But I knew that I wanted to be like Shug Avery―empowered, sexy, queer, creative, worldly, and someone who just didn’t take any shit. She was a Black woman who defied convention, and in the world of the novel, while she struggled with the gendered expectations of a preacher’s daughter and her estrangement from her family, she still chose to live the way she wanted, even being labeled a slut, and rumored to have “that nasty women’s disease!”

So I feel that Black queer, bi, gay, SGL men have had to struggle with our bodies at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, but there are maps toward liberation, even in the midst of what seems like unsurmountable oppression and violence.

But I also want to extend my slutty hand to straight Black men, too.  The recent campaigns targeting  Black youth in different cities to ban “pants sagging” to me represent the way in which even the Black male body, even when it is assumed to be cis-gendered and heterosexual, creates a sexualized anxiety in the eyes of the state, whites, and Black middle-class with “racial uplift” values. And while some Black people reject these forms of criminalization of Black youth, we have an opportunity to work with young straight Black men and boys to fight back against their own criminalization, but also use this a way to critically engage their own sexist and misogynist assumptions about women, queers and trans people. In other words, what would organizing poor and working class Black and Latino straight men look like who both denounced the criminalization and hyper surveillance of their bodies and clothes, at the same time were committed to end the ways they are privileged and encouraged to commit violence against trans people, women and queers, or to act as enforcers of gender standards through street harassment?

I hope that we are able to own the real legacies of trauma many of us face in terms of the ways in which we are sexualized and criminalized in communities and by the state, to say nothing of the acts of violence that have been committed against us.  But that does not negate nor render impossible the many of us who, despite those legacies,  own our overt sexuality or promiscuity, and see it as a liberatory process. So here’s to all of us who realize we’ve been victimized by racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and labeled perpetual sluts and the enemies of whiteness, respectability, patriarchal families, and the nation itself. And despite the pain it sometimes causes, we’ve made a path for ourselves where we still get to be in our bodies in the way we want―to dress slutty, behave scandalously, love fiercely, and fuck consensually.

On the Day of International Memorials for Troy Davis

Riverside Church, NYC.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

The most befitting thing I can say on this day comes from James Baldwin. “To be black and conscious in America is to live in a constant state of rage.”

I was enraged by the state sanctioned execution of Troy Davis. Not 24 hours later, my fire-hot rage would turn to stony indignation upon learning that the same set of bureaucrats who refused to stop this execution, removed the death penalty from the sentence of white man who professed to the guilt of the violence he was charged with. These two incidences, clearly linked to send a message to us, were an articulation of the obvious–black bodies, irrespective of facts, are always criminal. Public displays of violence against black bodies, in so far as it re-iterates the role that Black suffering plays in making white supremacy coherent in every day life, is the preferred method of articulating patriarchal white supremacist control.

So while we mourn his death and all of the things it raises for us―racism, the death penalty, the prison industrial complex, police brutality, the historic trauma of lynchings, etc., I want us to move beyond discourses of innocence, for while it may make us feel more righteous in our defense of Troy Davis, and the many like him who have been executed or who currently languish inside prison walls, we must come to accept that to be Black and “innocent” is an oxymoron in the world we live in.

Once in New Orleans in 2008, a city where I once lived, I was riding a bike in the French Quarter, slowly alongside some colleagues, none of which were Black, who were walking. We were in town for a conference, and I was showing them around when a white unmarked Crown Victoria pulled up, cut me off by stopping abruptly in front of me. Two, what I think were Blackwater private security officers, jumped out, pulled guns, demanding I drop to the ground. My friends stood to my right, and when one of them asked what was going on, the officers asked “Is he with you?” When they responded “yes,” they backed away, and said that there had been a number of robberies by “thugs on bikes.”

Blackness itself is criminal, and my having a college degree, how I was dressed, or any of the others thing Black folks intentionally do to avoid being seen as criminal by white people or the state at large, and none of these would protect me. I also know, had I not had non-Black people to “claim” me as “their” Black―what if I was just taking a slow bike ride down Dauphine through the French Quarter that night―I would have met with a very different fate.

Even the Left in the US engages in other forms of innocence frames outside of prison reform contexts, that still reference and reduce Blacks to criminality. Often the anti-war, or anti-globalization movements, including the current mobilizations on Wall Street explain acts of police violence or arrests as “just for exercising our right to protest.” These statements are an exercise in bad faith―they suggest that the police have some legitimate reasons for arrests, or that white bodies simply protesting the seat of American capital are innocents, not criminal. What would it mean to embrace criminality, as opposed to trying to rhetorically avoid it by notions of innocence or exercising “rights?”

So not only must we move past the politics of innocence, if we’re invested yes, in saving individuals from jaws of the death penalty, but also in radically altering the conditions that create its existence. We must also look critically at the symbolism of Black subjugation that exist in the death penalty and the prison, but also in everyday neighborhood policing and “stop and frisk” methods, and the communities that become disappeared through gentrification, and replaced by various markers of white dominance―the coffee shop, the dog shit, white babies with Black and brown nannies, or the soul food restaurants that lose all their Black customers. All of these, to me, are forms of terror that speak to the everyday and to the exceptional, and our politics have often failed to move beyond policy, to get to the core logics that make policies possible. For me that means we have to make sense out of Troy Davis’ death as symbol―that public displays of Black death and suffering are really necessary to making white supremacy coherent. From Rodney King, to Hurricane Katrina and the failed levies, to the earthquake in Haiti, to Troy Davis, episodic displays of Black suffering and subjugation are ever present.

Afro-Brazilian scholar João Costa Vargas, in an unpopular (yet no less eloquent) speech he delivered this spring at the Critical Ethnic Studies conference at UC Riverside noted “Why doesn’t Black suffering and death appeal and effectively mobilize beyond the seemingly unique catastrophic moments? Why is it that, when Black suffering and death are expressed, they are almost always forced into a conversation that focuses on the experiences of non-Blacks?”

Let us remember Troy Davis not only by calling attention to the need to end the death penalty. Let us not simply use it as a call to end imprisonment as a form of punishment. Both of these are necessary and critical. But if we are serious about ending state violence, we must also be willing to look to different set of political objectives―where the everyday and mundane, the episodic and extraordinary violence visited upon the Black body (symbolizing degradation, suffering, subjugation and death) does not exist as the thing to make all other life relevant.

Writing that influenced my thinking here:

Warfare in the American Homeland, edited by Joy James

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis

Never Meant To Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities by Joao Costa Vargas

On Black Men by David Marriott

That said, I am finding myself more interested in the manner in which people are using creative forms to express ideas for audiences. As a result, I am entertaining ideas of getting back on stage in some way, shape or form, or exploring other kinds of writing–more long form, narrative, nonfiction or even fiction, as a method of creativity, political protest, and artistic endeavor.

I’ve posted some of that work here–Yolo Akili’s video work, Brontez Purnell’s growing from punk kid to full fledged performance artist, Awkward Black Girl, and now, another friend, Desiree Marshall (Awkward Black Girl isn’t a friend. But the others are.)

I’ve known Des for many years as our work as organizers and trainers in activist spaces. I was always impressed by her intellect, and the charisma she brought to political work. I’ve known she was also a spoken word artist, and always liked her work, but seeing her here, delivering this poem, “F*ck Facebook” made me see the incredible power she brings to her work as a performer, and her ability to command the audience’s attention. In addition, the piece itself, took me to some internal places about my own uses and experiences of facebook, of failed relationships, and I guess she commanded me, cynical me, away from my critical eye, even my eye as a friend of Des’ into the world of the piece itself. She had me. I loveit when an artist/ performer makes me want to perform again, and inspires me to step my own game up.

I think Des should write a whole show and take it on the road. There’s a space for her in the world, and the gift she has.

Watch and see.

Let me first state that there is no pretense of objectivity or an emotional distance here for several reasons.

One, Brontez Purnell is a very close friend of mine.

Two, this issue cuts at the core of some thoughts and problems I have with existing frameworks of victim, and the demands made on victims of violence to behave (past or present behaviors) in a fashion acceptable to others in order to claim one has been victimized; the role of police and questions of political alignments and authenticity; and the demands on victims to recall and script every fact in exactly the right chronology in order to be seen as credible.

Last week, I received a phone call from Brontez—again, close friend and musician/dancer/writer who lives in Oakland, California. It was the day after he and friend/bandmate Adal had left the Paradiso nightclub when two Black men with some Caribbean accent began harassing them as they left the club. Adal is not queer, but the two men, according to Brontez, assumed that they were a couple, and began calling them “batty boy” and other epithets. Finally, they made the statement, “if we were at home you’d be dead by now.”

Brontez, clearly enraged, went the fuck off. After more words were exchanged, and Brontez says he spit at the car the men were in, and then he was punched in the face. Brontez says he then hit the man’s car with his bicycle lock and they assaulted Brontez and Adal (who’s face was broken in five places). The police were called but no arrests have been made.

After talking to Brontez about the attack—I read an article in the Bay Citizen, followed by a pretty vigorous debate in the comments section. The debate mostly sparked by comments made by Kevin Bynes, who is known for his work in HIV prevention for Black gay men. Bynes, a bay area resident said he witnessed the incident nearby (and I know of Bynes through my own work in HIV prevention), and that Brontez was lying about the details of the incident noting:

I’m sorry I have to tell the truth because I live in this area and saw the entire incident. The so called victim rode around on his bike yelling at the two guys in the black SUV repeatedly and it wasn’t until the so-called victim spit on the driver and tried to break his window with his bike lock that the two accused “gay bashers” reacted by chasing the guy away. This man TOTALLY provoked this situation and initiated the violence. He took the first swing, spit in the man’s face and tried to damage his car. I’m a gay man who lives in this area and the club they were leaving used to be a gay club that was there for 20 + years and the area is VERY safe for gay people. That was NOT a gay bashing and I think it is dangerous for us to suggest that everytime a gay person gets into a fight its a gay bashing. The guy that is being called a victim really harrassed these guys and they did not attack him because he was gay they acted in self defense. In fact the only gay slurs that I heard came from the victim. I’m so sorry that I didn’t speak to the police this morning.

To which Brontez responded:

Yo, this is Brontez. You SADDEN me Mr. Bynes (whoever you are). We we’re unlocking our bikes and these guys stared harassing us. How did you see “everything”? It was only us four outside in the beginning! You act like we just saw these dudes and went in on them and thats a lie. Ive attended the Paradiso since it was Cabel’s Reef and have NEVER had anything like this happen. Me cursing, and yelling at them is true like after someone threatens you with VIOLENCE who wouldn’t? Sorry im NOT the type of girl whos gonna cross her legs and act fucking nice after some jock tells me im “at the wrong club” two blocks from my own fucking house! FUCK YEAH I YELLED BACK AT THEM. If your such a sensible homosexual why didnt you HELP US when these guys were fucking with us? And also my bandmate who was sitting on the sidelines got his face broken and we did NOTHING to warrant that. WE WERE THE VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE, verbal and otherwise. I threw my bike lock AFTER they punched me and Adal (who wouldn’t?) I used this tactic to pause them long enough to get their plate number. You call someone a “batty boy” threaten them with violence and then hit someone that didnt provoke you YES THAT IS A HATE CRIME. I was REACTING to being fucked with. How dare you?

My problem here is not that Bynes disagrees with Purnell’s timeline of the events or that he was “disgusted and ashamed” by Brontez’ behavior.

First, Brontez and Adal both say that the men had been saying shit to them from jump, for which Bynes (in my opinion) was likely out of earshot or just didn’t hear. Brontez is just not the type, drunk or not, to start a fight with two other men for no reason, having been out in San Fran, Oakland, and all over NYC with Mr. Purnell over the years of our relationship—even where it is clear that Adal was trying to convince Brontez to let it slide. But as Brontez himself said, and I very much believe, he wasn’t going to just let that shit slide. Brontez actually states in the article what Bynes re-asserts in his comment—he didn’t expect to be threatened with violence at a place he’d frequented for years (both men live in the neighborhood where this incident took place), so I am not sure why Bynes re-states this point in his comment—unless he flat out does not believe anything at all transpired to make Brontez angry in the first place (The Bay Citizen published a second story where Adal corroborates Brontez’s assertion that the men started harassing them first). Bynes’ assertion that the club used to be a queer space but is still frequented by queers seems to ignore the realities many of us know from experience. Many of us have been at “the club” in any city USA that used to be a queer bar, and the straights who then take it over act brand fucking new and further marginalize queers who continue to go there. And since when did neighborhoods or establishments with lots of LGBT people mean they were free from homo/transphobic violence? That doesn’t make any kind of sense.

So the question for me here, and where I vehemently disagree with Bynes, is how one defines “provocation” and who judges what then is the socially acceptable response. I tend to agree with Brontez. Too often people who are targeted for violence have to have their motivations and their recollection of all the “facts” or chronology of all the events hyper-scrutinized beyond recognition if they at all do anything other than lay down and take the abuse (or in the case of sexual assault, you’re accused of lying if you don’t have any physical evidence that you fought back, or you choose to try to still (and steel) yourself to try to avoid further violence, or are simply in a state of shock). And what is more true than not, most of us, in some way, respond verbally or physically fight back.

I think Brontez was enraged by the situation and responded accordingly. But rage, as bell hooks once stated, is an appropriate response to oppression. I actually have never seen Brontez angry to the point of fighting the way he clearly must have been that night. But any of us, caught at the right place at the wrong time, may have responded similarly. People get tired of this bullshit. I am tired of it. I have had people hurl similar epithets and make threats to me. One day I may walk away. Another day, I walk right into that fire. Once, similar to what happened to Brontez—two Black men started with me, but when I didn’t run or back down, they punched my non-black friend instead—who once they engaged, thought was going to be an easier target. So I know what it means to reach that point where you say to yourself, Fuck it. I don’t give a fuck what happens today. I am not going to be disrespected and let you walk away from here thinking that shit is OK to do. Not now.

That’s what happened to Chrishaun McDonald, a Black transwoman in Minneapolis currently on trial for murder. She was outside one evening this past spring when she and some friends were approached by a white man who hurled both racist and transphobic remarks. I don’t know who threw the first blow, but that man was stabbed (many say not by Chrishaun) and is dead. I don’t celebrate his death and yes those trans women could have done a million things to try to get away from him. But maybe they were tired of running, or were so bold as to think they didn’t have a reason to run.

I am reminded of Sakia Gunn, when she told a man to leave her friends alone—they were lesbians. I don’t know if she kicked his car, or flipped him the finger. I don’t know if she told him he had a dick smaller than hers, called him a faggot or some other name to push his buttons. But he did what patriarchal men do—he assumed it was his right and Christian civic duty to accost them, and “check” them for being “out of hand.” He got out of the car. She, or one of her friends, may have punched him first. She may have spit in his face. But he killed her. Was that justified? Was she “at fault” for provoking him? Should she have collected her friends and run back into Newark Penn Station? She could have done any of those things, but maybe, even at 15 years old, she decided she was tired of running, or it never occurred to her to run.

I think of the New Jersey 4—originally the group of seven—young Black lesbians also from Newark who one night in a “gay friendly” part of town, NYC’s West Village, were walking and a man made a disparaging comment about them being lesbians, and a fight ensued, with the man being stabbed, which he later described as “a hate crime against a straight man.” They could have went to the other side of the street. They could have decided to leave the Village and go home. They could have quoted Bible passages at him. But they didn’t. I don’t know if one of them struck him first. Nor do I care.

I respect these young women for, despite the enormous consequences that none of them could forsee, making a choice to not live in a world where they could be denigrated for being lesbians, bisexuals, aggressives (AGs), queers or however they think of their identities. And they, like Brontez, don’t present as “victims” in the way our society constructs, because they didn’t just let that shit go. They didn’t run. They saw the danger, decided to move towards it and do what it was trying to do to them, even if it meant they might not win. The “behavior,” like Brontez’s was not befitting of any victim—most people in the moment are resisting being a passive victim (and this is not to also say that people who choose not to fight back in certain moments are less than heroic, nor am I glorifying violent retribution). But it is to say that I think anyone who tries to condemn someone for not allowing themselves to be intimidated by people, especially in this case who are saying if they were a few thousand miles away they’d just as soon kill you for simply existing. I don’t know how I’d react.

And if we’re going to claim that we don’t want to see more Black men going to prison potentially, I totally agree, but if that’s your position then it means that we have to find ways to help and de-escalate situations, even if you think someone is in the wrong and not wait till after cops are called to raise judgement about whether someone exhibited exemplary model citizen behavior in the midst of being threatened. Also, I think that those of us who think critically about calling the police (because of the nature of policing and the prison industrial complex as an anti-Black project) have to be clear that we do not begin to use this as a reason to excuse violence, or question a person’s Blackness or other racial/political authenticity against a person who, for whatever reason, calls the police in a particular moment. It’s not as though Brontez is someone the police don’t also target, threaten and violate. And while the fact that these men were likely Caribbean immigrants invokes racist narratives about Black criminality and homophobia in the Caribbean, clearly these men were quite willing to try to intimidate Brontez and his friend using those very same narratives when they declared “if we were at home you’d be dead by now.”

I think Bynes is making an assumption that even if Brontez had never responded, he and his friend would have been safe (on their bikes!!!!) from those men once they turned the corner, even if they were supposedly trying to avoid an altercation right then and there—maybe they were initially shocked that a Black gay man would have the audacity to even respond back to them. Maybe they were trying to impress the women they were with, and they clearly got a response they weren’t prepared for. I don’t know their motives, but I don’t believe Brontez decided to just pick a random fight with two dudes leaving a club he frequents regularly (as a musician this fucks with your ability to make money), two blocks from his own house, in a community he has to continue to live in.

I do hope that rather than starting a war of words (and I have to admit I was mad as hell when I first heard there was some backlash calling one of my best friends a liar), this can actually give us pause to think about what standards we’re holding people to who have been threatened, when one day, it might be you, for whatever reason, who decides not to take the high road.

And now…

LMAO!!!!

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I fucks with Adam Hochschild.

King Leopold’s Ghost is a brilliant book that traces how what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo became a “possession” of the Kings, the greed and profit made from its natural resources, the grotesque violence that resulted in 10 million deaths in 30 years, and the internal and external resistance movements that led to, in the short run, 50 years of colonization by the state of Belgium and not the King.

The book is a page turner, written in some respects like a novel more than a history text, with it’s detailed attention to the “facts” as much as character and narrative development. I also learned alot that not only deepened by knowledge of Africa during the colonial period, but also helped me understand the way contemporary racial politics are embedded in this history.

Part of the reason I say I fucks with Mr. Hochschild is because his analysis is so comprehensive. I often find with history books that while I learn a lot from the author in terms of historical fact, I often see through their political agenda and/or their political blindspots (willful or benign). And it’s not that Hochschild is without a politics here. What works for me about this book is I don’t think I have read another white male historian who is ambivalent about making white historical actors (and their notions of “progress” and “democracy”) look better than they are. As much as he criticizes King Leopold’s and his Congo “government’s” sadism and greed, he is also critical of the motivations and blindspots of many of the Europeans and American whites who were happy to place all of there energies in critiquing King Leopold, while their governments and corporations were involved in the very same acts of violence with genocidal proportions against Black people in Africa and in the diaspora.

This is a must read.
View all my reviews

From Alternet.com

Many people are celebrating what seems on the surface a huge win for gay rights, with the passage of a same-sex marriage bill in New York State last week, by a Republican-controlled state senate to boot. This marks a real sea change for LGBT equality in the US, and therefore a major win not only for LGBT people, but also because this has been a major cause for progressives.

But now that the pride parade is literally over, progressives should be asking themselves about the potential long-term impacts of this “win.”

What does it mean when so-called progressives celebrate a victory in large part won by GOP-supporting hedge fund managers, Tea Party funders and corporate conglomerates—the oft-spoken enemies of progressive causes? Furthermore, this new strategy could be the testing ground for Republicans to peel a gay base and donors away from the Democrats while keeping their Christian conservative base. Read the rest here.

Monday June 6^th, 2011

Kenyon Farrow

First I want to thank the Newark LGBTQQ Advisory Commission, Newark-Essex Pride Coalition, Liberation in Truth Social Justice Center, and the African American Office of Gay Concerns.

When I first moved to the east coast from my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio in 1999, I moved to Jersey City. And like many people living in Northern New Jersey, I would spend a lot of time traveling on the PATH train into New York City, in the hopes of finding some safe space for a young Black gay man like myself, something called community.

I spent a lot of time on the Christopher Street piers in the West Village. Listening to the latest hip-hop, R&B, or house beats blaring from boom boxes, watching the next generation of ballroom legends perfect their best duckwalk, or butch realness runway—the broken slabs of concrete slung over the dark river that once upon a time, nobody else wanted, transformed into red carpet worthy of a Hollywood award ceremony. I would head into Two-Potato, a hole-in-the-wall dive bar just up the way, and catch the drag queens dart in and out of the flimsy curtain keeping their latest fashion creation mostly hidden from the audience until time for the big reveal. From there, the night might take me to Chi-Chiz, the bar that stood right next door to the PATH train, where I would sit at the bar, mostly getting drinks bought for me that I was to broke to afford, and in between the Anita Baker or Stephanie Mills oldies playing where the bar would seem to be singing in unison, I’d be talking to whomever was sitting next to me.

After some time, of spending many nights riding the rails underneath the Hudson River, I began to notice how many of us, mostly Black and Latino lesbians, gays, bisexual, queer and transgender folks were coming to and fro from Jersey City, Newark, and all parts of New Jersey in between, in search of community, a good time, or some place that felt safer than the homes, apartments, shelters, or street corners from which we were fleeing. I thought back on the many conversations I’d had at the pier, or on bar stools dotted along Christopher Street, where so many people who I’d socialized with in the West Village, NYC, were actually from New Jersey.

It made me think a lot about home, and even in my own work as an activist with FIERCE!, why we were fighting the gentrification and displacement happening to Black and Brown queer youth in the West Village, but had not yet stepped up to the task of working in the places where many of us actually lived.

Being from a city like Cleveland, which is the butt of many national jokes in the same way that Newark is, in that people blame the condition of the city on the people itself, and coming from such a place, means that you carry that stigma or mark. People carry the blame for a city’s condition, instead of understanding the way deindustrialization, the undermining of organized labor, the gutting of welfare and other safety net programs, education systems dependent on property taxes and the bloated policing and prison budgets as more responsible for the ways in which people have to live. In cities and communities like these, in the national conversations and media about the “gay community” it is almost as if LGBT people do not come from places like this.

Our cities are not places where life—certainly not fabulously queer life—can flourish, or so goes the logic. Most of are are not wealthy. Most of us do not have expendable incomes. Many of us have children—either our own, children of other family members we’re raising, or other people’s LGBT kids who’ve been kicked out. We, like most people around us, are a no more than 3 paychecks away from utter ruin. It feels cliché to say it, but the television images and sometimes advocacy organizations claiming to be speaking for us, don’t not only look like us, but aren’t speaking to the realities of what it means to be gay, black or latino, in a place like Newark. Race, class, gender and the community in which you grow up or live, all impact the way in which your life, and life choices are shaped. It is not that there can be no LGBT community in cities like Newark, but that it looks different, and sometimes in ways that are illegible to the so-called mainstream. In may ways, when primarily Black and Brown cities like Newark are discussed, especially in their proximity to being “LGBT friendly” is similar to the ways in which African countries are discussed, as “backward” where there are no local activists or communities of LGBT folk in those places who are working hard to challenge homophobia and transphobia, and are not waiting to be rescued by an American or European NGO.

Whether or not we are on the radar of the national LGBT movement as a legitimate set of organizations and coalitions with expertise in organizing in cities like Newark, is not important. It would be nice to be recognized. It would be nice to have some of those many millions of dollars in support from LGBT foundations coming in to support the work here.

But sometimes the best work happens in the places where there isn’t tons of support. With abandonment can come freedom—some sense of radical possibility. It is a place where innovation can occur, and where our community, or base constituents we are organizing, have the most opportunity to hold us accountable for the work we’re claiming to do in their name. And it is also important to me, that we do this work not just in the gayborhoods of America like the West Village & Chelsea, but that the work happens in Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans, Bed-Stuy and East New York, Brooklyn, and Newark, NJ.

When the life of Sakia Gunn was taken in 2003, the question of where we do work became even more important to me. And although I knew there were organizations and activists already in place in Newark, like Liberation in Truth, AAOGC and longtime Newark activists like James Credle, I was impressed by the level of activism that took place here around her case, and a level of social justice work for the LGBT community here in Newark has only increased since. And Newark Pride Week, the possibility of public celebration of who we are, and our contributions to this city, is the fruit of all of the labor its taken since 2003 to build a better world for the LGBT community in Newark.

Though there have been other acts of violence, and other forms of targeting and bias that have occurred since, and sometimes challenging moments from members of the community who feel like having Pride Week or any LGBT recognition is an imposition, or a somehow in a city like Newark, separate from concerns about racial justice. To those people, I would offer that the work being done here by the coalition of grassroots organizations to make schools safe for students, to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic, to provide community activities locally for LGBT people is a benefit for any of us interested in reducing violence of any sort, of creating events and organizations that foster community and sense of belonging, and increasing the opportunities for supportive education environments for every student.

The fact that that we are here, celebrating PRIDE in Newark, because local organizations, local activists, decided to take care of home, is a testament to the strength, tenacity, intelligence and beauty of community organizing, the organizers who are here, many of whom have become close personal friends over the years. Struggle is never about arriving at some utopian destination, it is about the process of challenging what’s difficult, and continually building towards your vision of the world you want to live in.

So now the gentrification in NYC’s West Village is nearly complete—The Christopher Street Pier was redeveloped and privatized. The boom boxes have long been banned. A seemingly never-ending runway on which many a ballroom legendary icon trained, was paved over. With it, the numbers of yuppie baby carriages, joggers, and high-end retail shops have sprung from the ashes of Black and Latino LGBT bodies lost to concrete, their ghosts just visible in the shadows of the Hudson River. Some of their stories have been captured in history. On Christopher Street itself, Two Potato was shuttered around 2002, and that bar that sat right next to the PATH station, Chi-Chi’z, poured its last drink this past March. What stands in its place is a large fluorescent spotlight owned and operated by the New York Police Department, that probably cost several annual tuitions for a CUNY education, as a way to deter the young people from even stopping to hold a conversation.

So now that the NYC Christopher Street area has intentionally been made an inhospitable place for those of us who used to flock from Harlem, Bed-Stuy, East New York, Jersey City, and Newark night after night, I have to be thankful for the foresight of the LGBT community in Newark to be building community spaces right here, at home, for people to be able to organize, worship, receive needed services, and socialize.

So this year, we will celebrate Newark Pride with the usual mix of parties, marches, and festivities. We will raise this flag on Newark’s City Hall, which in many places is an act taken for granted. But I know that the celebrations are the result of struggle—a struggle that began long ago, has come along way, but has so very far to go!

Happy Pride, Newark!