“No Queer Teen Suicides, Queer Teen Murders:” learning from Jasmine

So said a post on my Bocage Garage tumblr page, via Mal Blum. Every outraged statement I have made about how cheaply our kids’ lives are treated is summed up and improved upon by the understanding that these beautiful children, just discovering who they are, what they want to become, what their potentials may be, don’t want to die. They want to live and be their authentic selves however that evolves, and to love the ones they choose. These kids are being crushed. They are the casualties of allowing heterosexism and policing gender norms. I don’t care if people identify as queer or gay or lesbian or trans or multigendered or if it’s changing or if it’s still a big question for that individual–when we allow sexual identities to be perceived as weaknesses we are letting those children be killed. I am sick that I didn’t support my daughter Jasmine when in second grade she began confronting every child on the playground who used “so gay” or “fag” disrepectfully. I want to fucking puke. I was in school, in turmoil, so overwhelmed, but it would have been the right thing to drop every other commitment and go all the way to bat for her. So those kids on that playground are now in their late teens and early twenties. Some of them have learned that it is acceptable to torment different sexualities to the point of negating their right to exist. Some of them have learned that no one, no teachers, no parents, no classmates will give a fuck that their identities are drowned in derision and laughter, heralding blows and blood to come. But maybe some will remember one fierce, beautiful, outspoken tiny Jewish girl screaming at the top of her lungs that it was WRONG. I am so sorry, girl. Can we agree, can even some of us agree, that we will call this shit out from this day forward for what it is?

One of my dearest friends writes me today about a disagreement we had: he said how he hates the way anarchists and other radicals wrangle over words. I said those whose lives are oppressed by [forces including] words MUST fight back. At times I can agree with his annoyance (though I think I can tell what’s good faith and what isn’t). At times. But this moment is not one where we can say, “semantics,” “meanings change,” “what about conservatives’ freedom of speech.” I’m sorry, I was a goddamn good law student, even if I hated learning what a soggy and shreddable tissue the Constitution had become. And the first thing you learn is that free speech has nuance, has time, place & manner restrictions–with many of which one may disagree–but that “free speech” does not apply in the proverbial crowded theater for the asshole who thinks it’s cute to yell “Fire” and watch the bodies getting crushed underfoot.

So, my dear friend, I am going to question the shit out of language that makes my people, the kids of our community, into dead kids. Because I am Jasmine’s mother, and because if we don’t we’re killing them as well.

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