Urban Icons as Cultural Projections

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/san-francisco/history

http://www.glbthistory.org/news/05_16_outranks.html

http://www.sfcenter.org/

a week and a day before I was born, 
november 27th, 1978,
a man was shot by a homophobic twinkie eating coward
in cold blood, 
the blood ran in the streets of san francisco.
the city marched for him, and for the mayor…

a revolution some say marked that day, 
but some years later, it’s still not right…
i ask myself is the fight worth all of this? 
retrospectively the good fight… it’s worth.
so now, the gloves are off…

But, are we just sentimental individuals?
are we yet secure in our skin, in our identities?

we are men and women spinning in the glory of what might have been in the 1980’s.
it started to mark the victory to overcome a fear, that instead of masks, we could wear 
more color.
But…

did the HIV slow us down?
did stonewalll shut us out?
did the men in blue and black uniforms flash too many toothy grins,
to get what they wanted, 
in their back seat gated lock up…… some faggot, some whore? 

But wait, baby… there’s more.

before we ring in the new year of 1994, 
we must declare war!
For a man inside a woman, who never gave up her bodily host,
who now lays as a perpetual ghost, on some rural nebraska farm.

So now let’s close up our american history books in prayer:
for our sister up there, who only needed one more day,
to say “i love you, i’m sorry that i’m not who or what you think i am.”
But, Teena?, we love you!

now it’s fall, some 4 years later, on some gray october day, in some colorado hospital, 
a boy, coming to his roots,
in higher education
his evacuation, yelled out, 
his death in hate.
at the time, he was a pawn, in some evolutional passion play….
he was a shepard, to us young ones… at the time




i heard a rumor from some loud man 
with a six string and some words, 
he said that teena and matthew shook hands up there,
they are planning to organize a resistance in heaven,
one that is true…. 
so believe it… it’s true.
that there will be a better heaven up there for me and you,
and while we’re on the subject,
i had a conversation with god the other day,
and is pretty pissed off about the capitalism marked on the hands of hate and the lack of
“common decency”. 
and then god asked me and wanted to know the actual definition of… “common 
decency”

the definition… of common decency

so…
I am just a boy in a tree, with a slingshot full of stones.
overlooking all the glass whore houses of those who used those actions to crack 
and break our bones.

and i never guessed harvey milk would be my dr. martin luther king
but there is this tingle in my soul and in my heart that pulls me to sing.
that our hearts should have never been an empty place,
and that we should love all of us and the life up in our face.
and that we have to remind ourselves, 
to transfer the thought of: safety in numbers must change into strength in numbers…

but now I’m a man with a slingshot full of memories
smelling up ill scented histories,of long lost forgotten centuries,
and never mind the ghosts
that haunt every avenue of my past,
it’s not how long the race is,
it’s how long the race lasts.
and it’s not about the media,
it’s not about tv,
it’s not about the the jesuses
it’s not about the mediocrity
it’s not about black
it’s not about red…
“it’s about the us’es”, man
and it only took a fucking gay man for it to be said.

-dedicated to the United States of A-fucking-merica


A piece of history in the Castro 8/4/2010. Two men kiss on Castro Street in unity. 

A poem dedicated to the gay people of California, and the United States of America.

Written: June 10th 2007