The Hanging Tree, a song sung by Jennifer Lawrence in Mockingjay, the newest Hunger Games installment, is now #12 on Billboard. There is righteous anger afoot I cant remember seeing before, in this way, at any point in my life. Im on Twitter much more than Facebook these days and I keep getting so much pushback from gay men especially who say that people need to go home, that rioting and all this protesting is a distraction. How can we as LGBT people forget the debt we owe to Stonewall, a RIOT during which we finally, after millenia, pushed back against police brutality and said were not going to take it anymore? Ever since, weve been commemorating that day once a year in Pride parades in most major cities around the country and even the world. The men and women who serve in the police force are often hard-working, sincere, caring people but they too often receive their paychecks from communities who didnt care about gay people in 1969 and dont necessarily care about black lives in 2014. I hope that as these protests mushroom across the country we can stand together in solidarity with our black brothers, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, daughters, and sons - a life taken from their community is a life taken from OUR community too. When our community and the black community converge in the person of, say, a black trans woman we are well aware of the weight that she carries on her shoulders - lets shoulder some of that weight, shall we? Her weight is our weight. Below, my very close friend and confidante Steven Thrasher, for the Guardian, in New York:
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 14:22:59 +0000
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