Sis-Gendered

  -- By Tom Phillips 

Portrait of Thoreau attributed to his sister

Most men, wrote Henry David Thoreau, "lead lives of quiet desperation."  I read these words as a teenager, and immediately resolved not to be one of those men.  I was desperate, haunted, frustrated, insecure, confused, irrational and contradictory.  But quiet?  Not while I could draw a breath.  The world soon began to hear my complaints against injustices large and small, personal and political, real and imagined.  

There was just one subject that cowed me: sex and gender.  I participated gingerly in what was called the sexual revolution, but couldn't bring myself to speak out for sexual freedom.  Quickly and prematurely, I slid into a lifestyle of a heterosexual, cis-gendered, homophobic husband and father.  I opposed same-sex marriage on linguistic grounds, telling my children that you couldn't just change the meaning of a word that goes back to biblical times.  But of course, you can.  

Viral Spring #17: White Bodies Up Front!

Brooklyn,  6/4/2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Something turned in me over the span of a day last week, maybe because something is turning for America.  

On Thursday morning I opened the New York Times to the most gut-wrenching piece of arts criticism I've ever read. Wesley Morris, a young black man who is the paper's critic-at-large, wrote of  a song that came up on the radio and left him weeping at his kitchen sink. The 1985 song by Patti Labelle is about the end of a long, bad relationship.  If you don't know me by now, she wails, you'll never know me.

Morris's composure broke not over a failed romance but the police murder of George Floyd, and Morris's own feeling that another relationship is ending -- that if we whites still don't get it, after all these years, we never will.  

Here's what he heard in Patti Labelle's lament:    

I heard a woman declaring her value. George Floyd was suspected of having used a counterfeit bill at a corner store, which means his life was worth less than money. I heard her thinking through an ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country. You still think we’re monkeys, monsters, beasts, thugs, the living dead, minorities? If you don’t know that a black man, calling for his mother, his dead mother, is so desperate for somebody to hear him that he’s screaming for ghosts — or fears he’s in the process of becoming one; if you don’t know that we, too, can run for leisure and sleep for rest; if you don’t know that this skin is neither your emergency nor an excuse to invent one, that the emergency has tended to be you — by now? — you will never, never, never …

I finished the article shaken.  If black people give up on us -- who were raised to think of them in just these ways, who struggle daily to beat back our pre-conscious ideas, whose very perceptions are still twisted by a racist culture -- what is next?  Is there any hope?