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 #12: Life in Stir

   -- By Tom Phillips

In 2011, a 59-year-old North Carolina man held up a bank, then waited for police to come and arrest him.  He was sick, uninsured, and wanted to go to prison to get health care.  Here in New York, many young black men say prison is the only place they've ever eaten regular meals.

Prison offers educational opportunities and a chance to make long-lasting friendships. It also gives you freedom to think and create.  Many authors have found inspiration behind bars -- from Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet to Eldridge Cleaver and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  And Martin Luther King  made his most profound and moving plea for racial justice in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."  

Not to romanticize incarceration; it's a drag at best, violent and life-threatening at worst.  Boredom and rumination are your worst enemies -- with little to do in present time, you can get hung upside down in the past.  It takes discipline to stay in the present, and not think about the future -- i.e. when will this be over?  It ain't over 'til it's over.

 But now that we're all under house arrest, those of us who have our own living space should count our blessings.

Plaque near Thoreau's cabin site, Concord MA  

Chief among them is the radical simplification of life.  Work has dried up, travel is out of the question, restaurants and bars are closed, meat is scarce, parties are banned, money sits in wallets with nowhere to go.

In a way our souls have transmigrated to an earlier America: e.g.Walden Pond in the 1850s.  Like Henry David Thoreau, we sit in our cabins, alone or with a lone companion, contemplating ourselves.  And like Thoreau's contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, we must rely on ourselves.