It is a hard thing to name yourself.

My mom picked a name for me when she was young, before she was even married, she says. But for 21 years, the name she picked for me was in the Top Five for the gender she picked for me. It was the Number One name for fifteen of those years. I don’t mean to be an asshole, but that is some kind of unoriginal. You couldn’t swing a dead cat for a quarter century without hitting someone with my dead name.

I disliked the name my mom gave me, even when I was more or less fine with the gender she assigned. I like the nickname I gave myself, but she didn’t use it. My older brother poisoned the nickname I liked by repeating it again and again from a book we read as kids. The line from the book called that name a donkey, and I finally changed the spelling of the nickname of my dead name to make him stop. There’s a copy of Richard Adams’ book Watership Down that I’ve had for so long and read so many times that the front cover is taped onto the book. The original spelling of the nickname I liked of the dead name I hated is written on it in my old writing.

The best version of my dead name was when I eventually shortened the nickname I liked that my mom wouldn’t use of the name she gave me. After I came out (again) I would have kept the best version of that name if folks would have let me. But folks wouldn’t let that name alone. Folks want to formalize and lengthen names. Or folks will ask if the part of the name I liked of the name I hated was short for the name I hated. I remember one of the last times I had a conversation like this. I was in seminary.

Is your name Dead Name?

No, my name is Name.

But your real name is Dead Name?

No. It’s Name.

Yes, but were you called Dead Name?

No… … … Yes, my mother gave me the name Dead Name.

I don’t know why I didn’t yet know then that I could name myself and call it real. That I could deny the name I hated without it being a lie. I don’t know why he kept asking when I said no. It seems like a harmless question, I think, to a lot of people who ask it. But it killed my soul a little each time they asked. So I began to think about what I would call myself. It’s a hard thing to name yourself. I tried a different longer version of the name my mom gave me. I liked it in theory. I worked at a place with people who started to use the new name immediately. Thank God. I hated it. How cool is it that these people right away used the name I asked them to use so that I could discover that I hated it? (Thanks, Lambda.)

I started looking at baby names and I started making a list of all the names I liked. I think I may still have this list. Maybe it’s downstairs in an unorganized box of papers I want to keep, with Broadway playbills and concert tickets and friends’ family Christmas photos. I made a list on post-it notes, which means I probably was doing this at work. (Thanks, Lambda.) I had a bunch of names stuck together in a long list, like Santa’s, and I gave it to my girlfriend. She crossed off all the names she hated. I let her cross off names she hated because I appreciate her opinion. Also I hoped (I hope) that she would use the name, too, for a long time. I really liked one or two of the names she crossed off. We have a running gag to this day about Enoch. A lot of the names that survived were old English trade names. They were names that were usually last names. Cooper, Potter, Porter, Thatcher, Sawyer, Miller.

I loved these names. It was easier to let go of the names my girlfriend crossed off the list, I don’t even remember which they are, because these old trade names are so strong, so evocative. I still love them all. I wish I could be named them all. I wish I could switch back and forth between them. I ruled out one or two for various reasons of association. I picked one.

The people I worked with started using it right away, and I liked it right away. (Thanks, Lambda.) I’ve been using it ever since. I changed my name legally five years later, eleven years ago, and I told the judge truthfully that the reason for the change was, “I have been using this name personally and professionally for some time.” But that wasn’t the whole truth. The lawyers suggested that I think carefully about whether to out myself (again) to the judge. Two other people who changed their names the same year with the same judge told the whole truth. They outed themselves. They were denied their name change petitions. One of them gave up, and I don’t know what became of him. The other fought the decision and eventually won. She told me last year that she is going to change her name back. She told me she is going to change her gender back. I believe that people get to name and rename ourselves and (re)decide who we are, whoever we are; it still made me sad.

It’s a hard thing to name yourself.

I grew up on a river, and my girlfriend grew up on a river that feeds into my river, and the name I chose is an old trade name that needs rivers. The name I chose sounds like my grandfather’s first name, and my grandfather was a faith leader, too, and a teacher, too. The name I chose sounds like my baby brother’s middle name. I might have chosen my brother’s name for myself if it wasn’t already his. (I don’t know, though, if I love his name because of the name or if I love his name because of him.) My mom loves the name I chose, and though it wouldn’t have mattered, it matters. In the end, I kept the best version of the nickname I liked but Mom didn’t use of the dead name I hated. It is my middle name. I would have kept that name if people would have just let me keep it.

Stephens writes about the Blasey Ford-Kavanaugh allegations in a seemingly impartial and dispassionate way, and I appreciate several of his points. The nature of sexual assault, however, is one that doesn’t conform well to his arguments or, frankly, to our system of justice. Sexual assault is overwhelmingly committed by people we know, in places we are supposed to feel safe, in ways that don’t leave behind definitive evidence of a crime. The only difference — the only one — between sex and assault is consent, and the people who claim that they did have consent are supported by our cultural assumptions of who does and doesn’t get to say no, and when, and how often. For these reasons, a tiny fraction of what is already a vastly underreported crime results in arrest, let alone prosecution, let alone conviction. Stephens believes that Blasey Ford should be able to provide “specific,” “definitive evidence” that can be “corroborated independently,” and that, if she doesn’t, “she will have smeared Kavanaugh.” And so even in his attempt to write evenly and impartially, he exposes the difficulties faced by victims of sexual assault and, perhaps unintentionally, perpetuates them.

“Frenzy”
Rev. Miller Hoffman
MCCNY

September 9, 2018

Here is a parable.

From there he arose and went away to the region of East Harlem at Harlem River Park. And he wore Ray Bans and pulled his ball cap down and tried to hide out in the back of the Savoy Bakery, but a woman whose girl had been picked up for solicitation heard and came and threw herself at him. Now the woman was trans, Puerto Rican by birth, and she begged him to post bail for her girl. And he said to her, “Let the white trans teenagers first pee safely at school, for the t-girl hookers ask too much.” She answered, “Yes. And my girl wasn’t hooking, just walking home, and we’re tired.” He said, “That was a messed up thing I just said.” And when she went home, he had rallied the neighborhood and the charges were dropped.

Jesus told parables, story fable koans. Probably. He recited poetry. He probably asked questions. Which of these three was a neighbor to the man? Whose face is on the coin? What do you do with a lighted lamp? Did not the one who made the outside make the inside? If salt isn’t, what will make it so? To what shall we compare God’s Presidency?

Telling stories and asking questions maybe is to unlearn, unknow, reinterpret.

Last week, Jesus had already begun to talk in radical and subversive ways about what and who is clean or not clean. It’s important to realize that in this parable about Jesus meeting a Syro-Phoenician woman, we move directly from ritual hand washing to physical geography. We are pressed into Gentile territory from the opening words: “And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon.” In case that isn’t plain enough, the first character is described in the literary equivalent of a cartoon mouse holding a giant mallet: “Now the woman was a Greek, a Syro-Phoenician by birth.” (Hello! Hello! Do you get it now? We are in “Other”land, two doors past Outsider House on Gentile Street.)

There was probably an argument about religious and cultural group differences going around within the Jesus Movement communities when Mark’s gospel was written. Paul gave his answer when he wrote in his letters about circumcision being optional, when he wrote about food sacrificed to pagan gods being okay to eat, and when he said “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Mark’s answer is to tell a parable about uncleanness coming from inside, not out, and then to tell a parable about Jesus in Gentile territory, and name the character by both her religion and her nationality as Idolator McHeretic and have her receive a blessing. Kind of.

That’s why what happens next is critical.

Part of me wishes it didn’t happen. Part of me wishes that Jesus says decisively here, “Come one and all! Whether or not you wash your hands, come in! Of course I will heal your child like so many others I have already, there are no restrictions, because the gifts of God are for all the people!” I hate it that Jesus says what he does. Why doesn’t Jesus just heal that woman’s daughter? Or if somebody had to say this awful thing, why couldn’t it have been Peter, or Judas, or any one of the disciples, frankly, who seem constantly to be getting things wrong? Why not one of those idiot disciples fighting over who would be at Jesus’ right and left hand in heaven? Why not one of those dimwits arguing over who was greatest? Why does Jesus call her that derogatory slur? There’s no exact modern equivalent, but it’s like he called her a gutter rat, or a pigeon. Something we think of as dirty that lives in the street and eats garbage and rotten dead things.

It’s awful. I like Jesus a lot. He’s a great person. He’s a hero. He says the right things, he does the right things. He teaches by word and deed. He seems to never get a moment to himself without somebody running after him, pressing against him, touching him with their sick, oozing bodies or carrying people up to him or lowering them down on him through the roof, and they never think to pack a lunch and most of them don’t say thank you, and still he takes the time. Still he honors and touches and heals and feeds and is with them.

Except now. “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

I hate this story. I hate this parable about Jesus. I love this parable about Jesus. It may be one of the most important stories in the gospels, partly because of what we learn from the ways people respond to it. Here are some of the ways people respond to it.

Some people soften the name he called her. Like, no, no, no, it’s okay, because he didn’t call her the n-word-dash -ER, he called her the n-word-dash-A, like he’s Larry Wilmore and she’s Obama. Like he’s YG and Jeezy. Or some people say he never said it, he didn’t actually say this hateful thing to this woman, coming to him asking for help for her tormented daughter. Because it’s just a parable, so nobody really got hurt. As though representation doesn’t matter. As though the rhetorical dehumanization of a woman in order to make a point about her determination or to make a point about God’s expansive and unbounded love for us all doesn’t hurt real women, doesn’t harm real people who look like her.

Here’s a parable.

From there he arose and went away to the region of Gold’s Gym at the Life Fitness strength machines. Someone was using the triceps press minding their own business, listening to Code Switch with Gene Demby and Shereen Marisole Meraji on an iPod. Now he thought the person was a woman, assigned female gender at birth. And he said to her, “You should smile more.” She answered, “Do you need this machine?” He said, “No, I just see you here a lot and I think you should smile more.” And she put the earbud back in her ear and went back to her tricep sets, and as he walked away he said, “uppity dyke snatch.”

Some people try to justify it, explain why it would have made sense to the original readers. Because this Syro-Phoenician woman was cheeky. Because she barges in. Because she has no business there; she was not invited. Because she threw herself at Jesus’ feet, not in a decorous way like Jairus back in chapter 5, not in a controlled and civilized way like him. The language doesn’t register in the English translation, heavy sigh, which is one more reason we really need to probe our bibles and dig into translations and research contexts. I did it for us today, don’t worry. Jairus’s verb is pipto, to lower oneself before, to humble or prostrate oneself before. This woman’s verb is prospipto and it means a rushing forward, beating against, like a winds-beating-upon-a-house kind of falling before. It’s a frenzied verb, it’s hysterical, not in a good way. Some commentators say that, not only is it not surprising that Jesus responded like he did, it would have been expected.

This is important, because we know how this works. Women are hysterical when they are angry. Women are emotional and menstrual and angry when they speak their mind. Lesbians are angry. Feminists hate men. Women who don’t smile are angry and ugly. Black women are angry. Black people who talk about their experiences of indignity and oppression are “playing the race card” and “carrying a chip on their shoulder.” When trans people talk about our experiences of indignity and oppression, we are crazy and “a hot mess.” Language is used to emotionally distance, to abandon, to discredit and disparage the Other. Jairus piptos. This woman prospiptos. He is dignified. She is frenzied.

Some people say politically correct, I say language has consequences.

Let’s pretend she was hysterical. Let’s say for the sake of argument she came running in that house, scratched at the eyes of men in the door, tore off her clothes, and gnawed on Jesus’ ankles. Jesus still has no business talking to her like that. Since when does Jesus talk to desperate people like that?! Go back and read the description of that guy in the Geresenes catacombs who was naked and snapped chains and smashed shackles and shrieked at Jesus; Jesus asks for his name. Go back and read about the boy convulsing and foaming at the mouth; Jesus asks how long has he been tortured. Why does this woman’s emotion and desperation disqualify her from help? Why doesn’t her desperation justify her, instead of Jesus? Why doesn’t his callousness invalidate him?

This woman was not hysterical. That prospipto business is a linguistic trick, a lie of the devil, trying to distance us from her. She isn’t frenzied. She isn’t hysterical or shrill. This is clear, because Jesus says this awful thing – “Let our own children first be glutted, for it is not right to take from people we like and waste it on people who disgust us” – and this is her response: “Yes, Sir.” Calm, respectful, deliberate.

“Yes, Sir, and yet even the mangy strays eat the crumbs.”

Here is a parable.

From there he arose and went away to the region of Staten Island at Bay Street in Tompkinsville. A man selling loose cigarettes was there, selling loose cigarettes. Now the man was Black, a former horticulturalist for the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, husband and father of six, generous and congenial by birth, and he was selling loose cigarettes. And he put him in an illegal chokehold from behind without provocation. He answered, “I can’t breathe.” He said, “All lives matter. I can breathe thanks to the NYPD.” He died. And when he went home, people who kneeled during the national anthem were Unamerican.

I hate this story. I love this story. It may be one of the most important stories in the gospel. And not because it teaches us to reach out to and include the people we think of as disease-carrying street animals. Think about that. The parable I started with feels offensive to me. It’s a brilliant inversion to say love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. It is a first-rate subversion to say you can only be the captain of all the people if you will scrub all the floors. It is radical and transformative to say that no one is free until we are all free. And it is becoming more and more distasteful to me to tell these stories about human beings on the margins, folks that people disregard and ignore and actively harm, as if they/we are some special case, as if they are unfortunate, as if they are the ones who need to be fixed, as if Jesus is saying love even them, include even them, which I’ve done before, maybe every other time I’ve preached on this passage. And it’s offensive, it’s obnoxious to me that I have tried to redeem these stories in this way.

I don’t want to think about these anymore as feel-good stories of including social castaways. I want to reframe them as chastening stories of arrogance. I want to understand this parable of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman as a story that exposes Jesus’ self-importance and bigotry as much or more than one about her value and perseverance. I want to condemn conceit and contempt, and nevermind who says I am angry. Nevermind who calls me hysterical. I want this parable to compel us to consider complexity and contradiction and nuance and paradox.

Jesus isn’t always good. I hate this story. I love this story. This story may be one of the most important stories in the gospels, because Jesus is bad in it and Jesus is usually not anywhere else ever bad. Sometimes things are important because they happen a million times, like Jesus and meals. He’s like a hobbit with meals. And sometimes things are important when they almost never happen. Jesus is absolutely not almost ever bad, and yet the gospels tell this story. They tell it twice. This story may be one of the most important parables in the gospels, because Jesus is bad in it. And because Jesus is bad in it, and lots of people try to make him good. And because people try to make him good and try to make her bad. And it exposes our tendency to a particular kind of Christianity. That kind of liberal-whatever, well-meaning (maybe), wet-bread neither hot nor cold, insubstantial words without action, as long as it doesn’t cost anything Christianity. There is something important, I think, that we are supposed to learn from a story like this.

If Jesus is bad sometimes when it is hard to comprehend Jesus being bad, when so much depends on Jesus not, in fact, being bad, then what else that we always thought was right is actually left? What else is not up but down? If the gospels do not tell a monolithic, uniform story of Jesus (the messiah) as always good, but tell a rare story about Jesus (the Christ) as bad, then maybe a small crack might appear in the massive blue monument. Perhaps we could imagine that sometimes police are corrupt. We might conceive that what makes it harder for good police isn’t Black Lives Matter, or investigating and indicting and convicting bad police, but that bad police are what make it harder for good police. That good police acting like there’s no such thing as bad police are what make it harder for good police, and harder for a lot of us.

If a woman abused by Jesus is discredited and dismissed in order to save his reputation and salvage his potential, maybe a small crack might appear in the monumental phalanx of rape culture. There is no piece of art, no film, no sport worth more than the life and well-being of even a single, anonymous victim, hysterical or not. Drunk or not. Dressed however. But most sexual assaults are committed by people we know, people we are supposed to trust, who use that trust to abuse. Victims are targeted who are available and vulnerable. And people are vulnerable when we discredit them. When we dismiss them. When we don’t like them. Everybody really, really liked Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino and Annabella Sciorra until we didn’t anymore. Remember how much we all really liked Annabella Sciorra? Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Lawrence were our best friends. Then they weren’t. We bestow favor and discard favor, and we act like it means something. We act like it is evidence. Who do we like better, Jesus or this crazy, unnamed woman? And that’s how we decide who is right, that equals who is good. Who do we like better, Polansky or some 13-year-old who never made a movie? Kobe Bryant or some woman we don’t know who can’t play basketball? We take sides, and so often that is how we decide who we will side with.

But sometimes Jesus is bad. Sometimes the ultimate good guy is bad. We need to make sense of that. And it’s not a one-off. This is not the only time this happens ever in the bible. God told Abraham to kill his son, for pity’s sake, and we turn it into a story about great faith. There are a dozen stories about killing the enemies’ children, swinging their heads against rocks. So we skip that part. Pharaoh and Herod are evil for killing children, but God kills every firstborn kid for holy reasons? I guess they had that coming. The bible says both that money is corrupt and also that it is God’s reward for righteousness. The bible says welcome the immigrant and also kill them. The bible literally says beat your swords into plowshares and also beat your plowshares into swords. The bible is a mercenary. The bible is a minion. It will back us up, no matter what we say. It has all our backs. It will support whatever you decide you already believe, and I’m only exaggerating a tiny bit. I’m almost not exaggerating. And what is Christianity? What does that mean, to you? Hitler was a Christian. Jim Jones was a Christian. Fred Phelps is a Christian. Pat Robertson is a Christian. And Pat Bumgardner and Boon Lin Ngeo and Yvette Flunder and William Barber and Gene Robinson and Troy Perry.

I really like the bible. I hope we all keep reading it deeply. It holds so many truths that are dear to me. But we have to figure it out, maybe without just the bible, maybe with other stuff, too. Because sometimes God hates fags, but we don’t want to. Sometimes Jesus is racist, but we don’t have to. We may have to just decide first who we are and what we want – and that means we have to pay attention to our impulses to simplify, our impulses to automatically side with the one we put a white hat on, the one who siding with will most benefit us, the one we like better. We have to pay attention to our impulses to blame the one we’re not siding with, to call them hysterical, frenzied, ugly, untrustworthy, we have to notice our impulses to believe that our desire, that our friendship is evidence, is fact. It’s not.

We have to recognize that we can still love the person who is wrong, we can love the person who is bad, if you will. That feels weird; it feels dissonant. And we have to pay attention to our impulse, whether as punishment or defense, to act like holding ourselves to account amounts to shame and self-loathing. We can be screw-ups, and own it, and hold ourselves to accountability, and still love ourselves, and even like ourselves. We can love our abusers and love abusers of others, and still hold them accountable; we can still support and defend the person they hurt. That will feel weird; it will feel dissonant. It is really hard. We can love them and stick with them and hold them accountable: Breaking bread with them doesn’t have to mean collusion. And alternatively we can love them and depart from them: Breaking ties doesn’t have to mean contempt. But these are hard. It’s much easier to pick sides.

Complexity. Incongruity. Paradox. Is any of this good news? Is it good news that Jesus was bad? Is it good news when there is no clear absolute, no simple, obvious right and wrong? I think it is immensely good news. Definite and certain and finished is what frightens me. Decided scares me. Closed scares me. Uncertainty is wonderful. Open is holy. And it’s hard. It’s really hard and uncomfortable. It’s discordant; it rankles. But Rilke famously wrote,

…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and learn to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions…

There surely is right and wrong, though they are not simple and easily defined. The bible gives us hints. Some of my favorite hints from Jesus are to look down when we have been taught to look up. To look to the east when we have been assured that good will come from the west. Our hearts give us hints. We surely will find our way when our compass is love, though we should expect there to be as many variations on love and what that means and to live those questions as much as any of the others.

Jesus probably told parables and recited poetry. He probably asked questions. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Who is my mother and who are my brothers? Which is greater, the gift or the altar which makes the gift sacred? Can Satan drive out Satan? What is the White House of God like? To what shall I compare it?

Telling stories and asking questions maybe is to unlearn, unknow, reinterpret.

Jesus was almost always good. He did so much good and transformed so many lives. But not every time; now we know. It’s hard to find good in Jesus in the lesson today. To find anything redemptive or healing in his actions feels to me like a betrayal of the Syro-Phoenician woman he abused. And. It’s possible that Jesus getting this so utterly wrong and so completely (I hope) screwing up our essential notions of Goodness may actually open up for us new avenues, open for us hard, uncomfortable ways, open to us possibilities to discover unanticipated goodness for one another and in ourselves.

Peace.

Most people have a story about being rejected unfairly, being shot down arbitrarily for a reason that wasn’t properly tied to merit or qualifications, some story about being rejected not for what they did or didn’t do, but for who they were. There are as many varieties of these stories as there are eye colors. More. What is much more rare are the folks who will tell you a story about how they got ahead for no good reason, how they were given a leg up for God Knows Why. Those stories are uncommon, because when we get a leg up it’s because we earned it.

Right?

Recently I was invited to sit on a panel in response to the documentary film, The Rape of Recy Taylor. The invitation came from a Black woman who was organizing the event. The other two panelists were a Black woman and a genderqueer Latinx person. The moderator was white, and I am white and genderqueer. It matters what race and ethnicity we are; that this doesn’t go without saying is a testament to a number of things, probably particularly liberal white denial of difference. When we don’t acknowledge racial difference, idealistic white folks will say things like “The rape of Recy Taylor is a universal story.” Someone at the film panel may have said that. But there are no universal stories; anyone who says differently is probably not a person of color.

We were to be given a couple of minutes after being introduced to give a general response to the film. I crafted my response as much as possible to try to hold and promote the integrity of the story of Recy Taylor specifically as a Black woman. Specifically as not a universal story; specifically as a story about someone caught in the crosshairs of being both a woman and also Black. I tried to connect what happened to her then to the experiences today of other women of color – trans women assaulted and killed in public spaces, Black women not protected by Stand Your Ground protections – and of other Black people – those reported to the police in recent months for sitting and eating and hailing a car in public space.

After the film, but before the moderator or I or anyone else on on the panel spoke, the genderqueer Latinx person spoke for a minute and made a statement that the full panel should have been comprised only of Black women. This was generally well-received by people in the room, and throughout the remaining hour of panel discussion folks repeated that statement, both audience members and the Latinx panelist repeated it. They lamented the absence of an all-female, all-Black panel event.

I felt awkward and uncertain about my place and about what to do. Should I leave the stage? Would that come across as dramatic and attention-seeking? Should I read the statement I had crafted and honor the Black woman who invited me and the Black panelist who introduced my remarks? Should I not speak at all and honor the Black audience members who wished for an all Black, female panel? When the white moderator, for one thing, introduced me first and then, for another, disregarded the Black panelist who created an opening for me to speak, I didn’t know to which woman to defer.

It felt bad. It continues to feel bad. I wanted to be good. To this day, weeks later, I still want people to think of me as One of the Good Ones. I keep feeling a need to be assured that I did okay, that I made good choices, or to be assured that all of my choices were fucked before they were made, regardless of how they were made.

Every one of these feelings and needs is attached to my whiteness and to white supremacy, because being assessed or judged for what one does as an individual is an opportunity uniquely accorded to whiteness. And every one of these feelings and needs is attached to my whiteness and to white supremacy, because I am white and because racism and white supremacy are elemental to what I say and do, to every decision and circumstance that led me to that film screening at the Governor’s Art Gallery in Harrisburg on a Thursday night in August. I can’t extricate myself from it, and saying I have is as good as pretending that I don’t see race, as good as pretending that Recy Taylor’s rape is a universal story.

1. It feels true to me that the decisions I made that night were with an understanding of and with the intention of interrupting racism and white supremacy and my role in it. 2. Without question that doesn’t mean those decisions did actually understand anything or interrupt anything.

3. It’s possible that, for some folks in the room, there was nothing I could have done or not done right; I may simply have been wrong for being there and being white. 4. Unquestionably, in nearly every other circumstance of my life, being wherever I am and white benefits me.

It felt terrible to think that, whatever decision I made, I would be contradicting one or another woman, and in most cases one or another Black woman. It felt and it still does feel awful to have been so unwanted by Black folks in the room when I had taken such care to say challenging things to white folks in the room. It feels lousy that some people saw me as That White Person Who Took Up Space Where He Was Asked (Not) To, in a relatively small community of anti-racism colleagues in a relatively small city.

At one time I thought the takeaway from this experience was those four things named above, but I’ve realized that I had more to learn: This may keep happening any time I try to do white anti-racism. I may not ever do it right. There may not be a right way to be white in the middle of white supremacy. Somebody may always (justifiably or unfairly) resent me. Someone may always (justifiably or unfairly) leave with a lower opinion of me than I hoped for. Any expectation or thought that Black folks will or should agree about my role in the work or in the world is fundamentally part of racism. And if I’m doing any of this for thanks or praise or to be considered one of the good ones, I’ll probably always be disappointed and feel awful. And if I’m doing any of this to be thanked or praised or considered one of the good ones, in that very extra way I am, in fact, part of the problem.

I told a lot of people after that night that I didn’t want anyone to reassure me or expend any energy in defending me. When I talked afterward to Black women about what happened, I kept prefacing our conversation by saying I didn’t expect or want them to put any energy into reassuring me. And I meant it.

And yet by saying it, then, by saying it here, even meaning it, I’m still trying to convey that I’m good. That I’m a Good One. I am still vying for that recognition.

That may be a deep thing that needs to come to the surface for me and other white folks. It’s not that I’m being disingenuous. It’s not that I need to be filled with shame and self-loathing for wanting to be known as good. But my goodness doesn’t matter, because, at a basic level, trust in a system of merit or qualifications is an assumption of white supremacy. My desire to be liked and to have good deeds be recognized and appreciated is a human need and makes me human. But, fundamentally, wanting credit for not being racist is thoroughly disordered. And I think racist.

I would like to raise some issues specifically about coming to this story as white folks, myself as a white person. Coming from a position of whiteness and racial privilege, I’m thinking about the tendency we have as white folks to want people like Recy to be like us, to assume that her story and experience will be what we expect it to be, and to understand her experiences and truths in terms of our own experiences of and truths about violence and sexual violence.

It’s important I think to try to hold the integrity of her story as, among other things, a black woman. To recognize that violence and sexual violence is a tool of white supremacy as well as a tool of male supremacy and that all of that is in play for her in a way that white folks can’t assume is the same for us. To hold the integrity of her story as both patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity and also racism and this country’s history of slavery and Jim Crow (and now mass incarceration) intersect on her body — not abstractly or in an academic way, the way some folks talk about intersectionality — but how Kimberle Crenshaw meant it in terms of how these assorted, multiple systems of power and systems of violence actually, bodily and physically and viscerally, cut into and land on and crush Recy Taylor. [Added: The way black women have higher mortality rates for breast and cervical cancer. The way disproportionate numbers of black women are dying while giving birth.]

Similarly, or along that same trajectory, I want to encourage white folks who watch this story to think about active and meaningful engagement with it and with creating change specifically around the rape of black women. Whiteness and those of us who (even passively, even accidentally, even unknowingly or unintentionally) benefit from white supremacy sometimes think that our absence of overt racial harm or our attempts to be non-racist or to claim an ally identity for ourselves is sufficient. I want to encourage white folks to, first, recognize and name the privileges of whiteness that we are ashamed of and want to disavow, and also I want to encourage white people to think in much more active ways about racial justice. We need to think in anti-racist terms that interrupt racism and white supremacy. It’s not enough to watch a documentary about the rape of Recy Taylor and attend a panel discussion, it’s not enough to wear a safety pin, it’s not enough to march in a knitted hat (regardless of the color yarn, but maybe especially pink), it’s not enough to not be overtly racist. These things are fine, and they are not enough. We, white folks, need to be willing to lose stuff we are accustomed to having — to lose cache and lose friends and lose jobs sometimes and lose football maybe, if we think of that as a loss, and lose comfort.

We need to realize that the rape of Recy Taylor was a historical moment but that The Rape of Recy Taylor is ongoing. For example to recognize the ways that she was assumed to be and called a prostitute (as though sex workers are somehow not entitled to give or withhold consent, or entitled to physical safety and bodily integrity), that she was called a prostitute and assaulted because she existed in public space. That she was deprived of her humanity and ownership of her body in ways that we can find happening in similar ways today to transgender women of color [Added: Janell Crosby and Tyra Woods] who are assaulted and stripped on the Atlanta transit, with people videotaping the assault and laughing, nobody helping, trans women of color who are assaulted and arrested and assumed to be and called prostitutes, who are deprived of their humanity and bodily integrity, like Recy Taylor, because they are existing in and occupying public space.

I hope we will take that to the next level of connection and the next, to Jacqueline Dixon and Marissa Alexander in Florida and Alabama, both of which are Stand Your Ground states, black women who used force to protect themselves from abusive partners, black women who are not being protected under that law when that law has been used repeatedly to protect non-black men who are shooting and killing black men. And at the next level to connect all of these black women and black men and black children who are being stopped daily and surveilled and interrogated by white neighbors and white dorm mates and the police simply for existing in and occupying public space, and sometimes private space, and sometimes their own private property. I hope we connect the rape of Recy Taylor to our own assumptions and our sense of entitlement about owning and controlling public space.

This is not only a story about rape, it is importantly a story about rape against a black woman. I realize that I’m speaking primarily to white folks, and I want to be clear that this is not in order to center whiteness but hopefully quite the contrary, to call on us to de-center whiteness and the assumption that white experience is a better framework or the only framework from which to understand violence and sexual violence. Again, I urge anti-racist-minded and well-intentioned white folks in the room to actively and meaningfully engage in dismantling and de-centering whiteness and create change specifically for black survivors of assault and sexual assault in our country.

In April, David used gasoline to set himself on fire in a public act of protest to symbolize our destruction of the planet with fossil fuels.

I worked with David Buckel at Lambda Legal during some of the years he was arguing the significant cases named in the reports of his death. Lambda’s work is in impact litigation which addresses and changes lives strategically and often at the level of critical mass. David’s work at Lambda Legal created access to the hundreds of rights and privileges associated with marriage to LGB folks. It held local authorities responsible for the safety of their students and crime victims in ways that affected entire states and judicial circuits. Each case was designed so that the benefit of its plaintiff would translate to the benefit of a class of people.

David Buckel was so soft spoken, so patient explaining the case, the project. He’s the one who talked about the importance of names, whether “mom,” “dad,” or “marriage.” He was a beautiful, truly a gentle man. Often smiled, seldom laughed, always always kind.

David was a story teller. He litigated the marriage case in Iowa when few expected the heartland to care about queer and genderqueer families. David made the heartland care. He litigated a case called Nabozny, about a gay teen who was relentlessly and mercilessly beaten at school, where the school administrators sort of threw up their hands and said, “Well, what do you expect?” And he made the school care and made the government care about gay kids having a safe place to learn. He litigated the Brandon case, the young trans man who was raped and murdered by his friends for not being who they expected him to be. David made the state of Nebraska care and made the Sheriff’s Department care about Brandon and about his mom‘s experience of his loss.

David was a deeply thoughtful man and he was essentially efficient and meticulous. When Lambda changed its email system, I remember David telling me that it took him twice as long afterward to file his mail. He used to be able to file it with two clicks, say, and now it took four. The inefficiency mattered to him; it was time he could be spending on substantive work. His reading glasses were often noticeably smudged and bleary, and I assume that he had done a similar cost analysis on the time to clean them and determined that it was not the best use of those minutes. He never stopped reading and typing even to wipe his glasses clean.

I always knew David to care about the environment and recycling. And he came to it with the same thoroughness and urgency as his litigation. It was from David that I learned to recycle even the small paper tab from my tea bag. I still do it. Anyone who has taken time to watch David’s Red Hook Community Garden instructional video of walk turning a windrow will have experienced a visual poem. It is a master class, not just on composting but also on efficiency, organizing, and volunteer appreciation. This is how David approached his work. He was sensible and well-reasoned, soft-spoken and forceful. He wanted to change the minds of the decision-makers, but he also wanted to encourage the people doing the work.

David chose his death with purpose. His end game was always to be persuasive: his thoughtfulness, his story telling, his meticulousness served the bigger goal of being compelling and convincing. In that light, his self-immolation as a last act does with his body in death what he had done in life with litigation and education. But self-immolation is designed to evoke horror, not sympathy. Not encouragement. By design, this act is meant to capture and hold attention. I believe the decision to destroy his body was intended to horrify us and to demand our notice.

He’s gotten my attention. I hadn’t spoken to David in fifteen years, and I am now preoccupied by, haunted by his absence. I am determined to reenergize my practices and up my conservation game and that of my colleagues and workplaces. To support the organizations dedicated to protecting and restoring the environment. To tell people what David did and try to persuade them, too. I am determined to do what I can to give David’s death the impact he hoped for.

Companion photos can be found here.

I get loud from time to time, but it tends to be more in the context of in-the-car at people-who-don’t-pull-into-the-intersection-to-turn-left. I did both marches in New York City this weekend, and Sunday’s event was hell. Possibly literally. And the Dyke March, though not heaven even if there was such a thing which there isn’t, was pretty great. But don’t everyone go. You’ll ruin it.

Not really. Go.

The Dyke March has never applied for a permit. Never asked permission. I imagine the city knows it’s coming by now, but the beauty of it is that they know the same way as anyone else. People have shown up at the same time, at the same place, every year for twenty-six years. It starts on the sidewalk, then we step off. And there’s something in that of the rebellion and maybe the rage of Stonewall.

There are no companies. I don’t love how corporate Pride has become, but the problem isn’t Sunday’s commodification of queer and genderqueer energy per se. The part of me that votes with my dollars and supports local business and companies that pay a living wage and use ecologically sound practices, that part of me is fine with MLB and HSBC sucking up to the homos. The part of me that wants a shorter, more impactful Pride procession wishes they would sponsor a Port O Potty, though, instead of fielding twenty-three blocks of corporate floats with AED bass beats so loud they are resetting my heart rhythm. I wish I could hear the live performances of MCCNY singing “Believer” and “You’re Beautiful, Dammit.” I wish I could hear the chants from the Sylvia Rivera Project and the Resistance Contingent.

At the Dyke March, you could hear every syllable of “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re fabulous, don’t fuck with us.” Every word of “When the dykes go marching in.” Each line of the Church Ladies for Choice again singing, “God is a lesbian, she is a lesbian. God is a dyke, send her victoria.” Every beat of the drum corps, calling, leading, announcing, drawing and driving us forward. Except for that corner where the Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps was, but I’m not complaining.

The banners:

Burn in the hellfires of my dyke rage.

Deport Jeff Sessions to hell.

Lesbians are miracles.

Love thy neighbor, no exceptions.

Dykes against borders: Welcome to my cuntry.

Support queer sex workers.

Queer as in abolish prisons.

LGBTs against border walls and family separations.

Trans dykes against ICE.

The patriarchy isn’t going to smash itself.

Justice and liberation, not capitalist assimilation.

How dare you assume I’m straight.

Lesbians against white supremacy.

President Gaslight, there’s a baby jail ready for you!

The first Pride was a riot.

No cops at Pride.

They tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.

It’s not possible to get behind every sign. Banning police from Pride forgets that cops are queer, too, on the street with “us” in and out of uniform. As exciting as it is to imagine a queer, female New York State governor, I’m more excited by the idea of people discussing ideas and policies and what is the most best for the most marginalized people than polarizing into candidate constituencies. Mocking Trump’s body plays into the same framework of beauty and value that is used against masculine women and trans women and leather bears, that promotes passing, that promotes rape. Even if Trump’s only value of women is their sexual utility, measuring him by his own yardstick still serves on some level to validate that warped, violent yardstick.

I don’t agree with every sign or every dyke in the march, but that’s part of the beauty of it. There were a lot of us in all the ways we do and look and dress. I was representing, for example, the earnest, square portion of genderbent soft-masculine tranny dykes. That happens at Sunday’s thing, too, maybe more so. I love that salacious, sordid, half-naked, tatted and studded and body-painted part of us. (It’s okay if kids find out we have bodies. Jesus, it’s okay if kids find out that bodies feel good. They already know. Take the opportunity to talk about consent instead of covering their eyes. Or don’t. Don’t listen to me; I don’t have kids.)

I watched small group of homophobes travel south with us for 34 blocks carrying signs with surprisingly bland verses about God and the bible. I watched a dyke doggedly follow them block after block to stand next to them with her sign, “Closeted Homosexuals” and an arrow. And somewhere around 14th Street, I saw her talking to the God-bible sign guy, listening to him make his argument about our salvation. It’s not that Sunday’s event doesn’t have room for that, probably, in the sense of heart and generosity. It just doesn’t have room for that. It’s a press of people jammed together, more this year maybe than ever with that bogus horseshoe route that quarantined us to Chelsea and the West Village. I have so many swears about that.

And you couldn’t count all the signs protesting ICE and immigration policy, white supremacy and patriarchy. The collection from this year’s march was to benefit RAICES, that provides legal services to immigrants and refugees in Texas.

Bottom line, it probably comes down to ratios. Sunday is a celebration with some dabs of protest. It’s a party, a parade. And that’s fine. A bunch of people like to crowd together for a party in Times Square every year, too, and dance and watch the ball drop.

The Dyke March I think, still, is a protest. It’s still a march. And that is the celebration.

Binghamton NY, People of Blessing
Rev. Miller Hoffman

June 13, 2018

All week and all month Binghamton has been celebrating Pride and what it means for us as a diverse community, straight and LGBQ, cis and trans and genderqueer, women, men, and nonbinary folks, monogamous, nonmonogamous, serial, hooking up, in all the ways we are bi and pan and poly, in all the ways we are different. Pride is peculiar and unsettling and odd in our bent- and fluid- and fabulous-ness. We celebrate our strangers and our strangeness, all of us connecting with and celebrating one another during this month of heightened awareness of our differences and what they mean for hope and justice.

Pride is fun and celebrative and sometimes silly. There’s a but coming, but let’s just sit with that for another few seconds, because we need it these days. Pride is fun and celebrative and sometimes silly. It is in some ways redemptive in its silliness, in some ways its foolishness is salvific. But, Pride is also more than a parade, also more than the floats that usually get air play on the local news, more than the salacious and provocative dancers on those floats. I say “more than” the salacious and provocative only because there is more of us than that, not because in any way it is shameful or scandalous. The salacious and provocative, in fact, is critical to who we are as a people and where we come from. The salacious and provocative is another way of reclaiming and proclaiming our identities and our life “styles” from those who would call us pervert, threat, danger. From those who have called us illegal, immoral, insane. Rather than being a danger to our children, children can in fact benefit by learning the liberative and nourishing lessons of our salacious and provocative history. Two weeks ago we honored Harvey Milk’s birthday; his response to this sort of accusation was to embrace and invert it, and he would begin speeches by saying, “My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you.”

These salacious and provocative edges are important because we need to be honest about where our line is and that we have one. We must acknowledge who it is that we struggle to celebrate, who we wouldn’t bake a cake for. Maybe those folks are bi or poly. Maybe they are BDSM and kink and fetish folks. Or like Alok Vaid-Menon, a tall, hairy, brownskinned femme genderqueer wearing bright, low cut, above the knee, flouncy pastel hot pink and three-inch easy pumps. It goes for all of us. Allies and LGBTQ folks alike who think Alok and the queens and the body stocking wearing body painted naked go go-boys in hot pants and little else and leather men in leather chaps and little else who are ruining “it” for the rest of us. “It” being however we determine value or respectability or proper or just the right amount of weird-strange-odd-freakish and no more, not like “them” who are ruining our children’s innocence, and proving the haters right, and crossing the line that “we” had moved just enough to get ourselves in.

Being able to support and celebrate that level of difference is critical to our communities, because we are a mash-up of L and G and B and T and Q, and any one of those initials has its own incredible breadth and depth of difference. It’s critical to our own wholeness. Thich Nhat Hahn calls the connection between all things interbeing; and he asserts that, no matter how incredibly different we are, or how much we disagree about morals and mores and politics and promiscuity, no matter how much we may even really confuse our dislike for each other’s ideologies with dislike for each other, Thich Nhat Hahn says we are congenitally part of each other. We are existentially connected. There is no part of you that is not part of me. The flower cannot exist without the soil, wind, sun, rain, cloud, ant, bee. We cannot exist without each other, we are each other.

Harvey Milk’s anniversary is a reminder that, more than the parade and the floats and the titillating that makes for good news, Pride critically is still a movement, also a march, still a protest. If we doubted it, if we thought we had reached some kind of post-gay utopia of marriage and adoption and military service and hospital visitation, some kind of “why can’t you people just be happy with how much you have?,” all we need to do is turn on the television or open a newspaper and realize how much we are losing what we had, how much many of us didn’t receive in the first place, how many of us are still in peril.

Between Orlando and the dozens of dozens of trans women of color murdered in the United States alone in the last few years, between the 31 states with no laws protecting from discrimination in employment or housing and the introduction of state and federal policies actively hostile to queer and trans servicemembers, students, parents, patients, partners, and pee-ers, many of us are still in honest-to-God peril. Yesterday was the 51st anniversary of the Supreme Court Loving decision that eliminated race-based marriage discrimination, and it was the second anniversary of the Pulse shooting, when 49 mostly Latinx LGB, trans, and queer people were murdered.

We’ve known the danger for maybe always. So many people across all sexualities and genders have been working so hard for so long to address the danger. Our history and timeline is a greatest hits of action and protest, from Mattachine to Daughters of Bilitis, to Bayard Rustin and Langston Hughes, to Barbara Gittings and amendments to the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel, to all the queer and straight women who nursed gay men throughout the AIDS crisis, to Marsha P. Johnson and STAR, to ACT UP and GMHC and the Lesbian Avengers and the Lavender Menace, to Harvey Milk and Barney Frank, to Troy Perry and Gene Robinson, to Lambda Legal and the Sylvia Rivera Law project and GLAD and GLAAD, and Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, to allies like PFLAG and Judith Light and Elizabeth Taylor and Cyndie Lauper, and, as always, that’s just off the top of my head. Imagine what list we could come up with if we sat down with Google and caffeine?

It’s important to talk about what queer and gender queer folks have done for ourselves – because folks need to know that we’re fierce and resilient and empowered and powerful and strategic and smart – and it’s critical to discuss how our straight and non-trans allies and advocates have pitched in and carried the torch and taken the baton – because it’s important, during Pride and during all the times, to understand how much we have to offer one another, to really understand how much we all need each other. How much we are one another.

Homophobia and transphobia hurts every one of us. Some of those folks killed and wounded in Pulse were queer and trans, and some were friends and family. Brenda Lee Marquez McCool was killed protecting her son, Isaiah. She raised 12 children and beat cancer twice. Lisa Lambert and Phillip Levine were killed alongside Brandon, back in 1993, because he was their friend and they were in the house together. Lisa was a straight, cis single mother who didn’t have an enemy in the world. In 2001, Willie Houston was guiding a blind friend and holding his girlfriend’s purse when he was called gay slurs and shot. Michael Hunt and Private First Class Barry Winchell were murdered for loving trans women. The Sucuzhanay men were attacked and Jose was killed because they were thought to be gay, two brothers walking home arm in arm after a church party.

And homophobia and transphobia hurt us as well, all of us, because they assume narrow definitions of “real manhood” and “real femininity.” They paint everyone with a single brush, and they paint everyone into a gender corner, and if you don’t conform to the rigid expectations, if you dare to do masculinity softly and gently, or dare to be a woman with hard tips or sharp corners, then homophobia and transphobia try you, convict you, dehumanize you, place you in peril. Or they force you to conform. Or they force you to reject your queer and trans and gender nonconforming loved ones. Or they try to make you doubt yourself and hate yourself and wear you down and take all the joy and all the delight away from being alive and different.

I’m thinking of that scene in The Birdcage, when Nathan Lane has already been shamed and forced to conform, and he comes down the stairs in the right clothes and the right hair and the right walk, and he sits down and reveals just the one thing he kept for himself, pink socks, and they clearly give him such immense joy. And everything in the room closes in with more shame and more judgment and disappointment, and his face falls and you can see his spirit crushed.

I know something happened in the movie after that, I think it even had a happy ending, but I never saw it. I walked out of the theater because crushing his spirit broke my heart.

It’s not just about gay guys who like pink and swish. It’s about all of us, being told who can and can’t play with trucks or dolls, who can and can’t be hairy and wear skirts or makeup and be swarthy and femme or should or must and shan’t and what color and which emotions and what jobs in what uniforms…

It hurts all of us who beg to differ, and it hurts everyone who fits in but will never be allowed to stray, and it is embedded in the culture. It’s in the air. It’s in the water. And it will take all of us to change it. It takes the whole culture to change the culture. All of us will need to contribute, to pitch in and carry the torch and pass the baton. We all need to care and be invested and believe that it is our concern. Which it is.

Basically, we all kind of need to be Elisha.

So, this is the People of Blessing service, so I feel compelled to bring in a tinge of scripture and a dab of religious philosophy and a scooge of faith. I’m going to talk about some Hebrew bible, and full disclosure I’m even less Jewish than I am Buddhist, and I’m as much atheist as Christian, so if you think anything I say on this front is bogus, fair enough. Also, get in line.

This is what I think is true of Elisha: he was determined. When Elijah called him to be a disciple and a junior prophet, he slaughtered his oxen and bade farewell to his parents, destroyed his livelihood and his family ties, burned every bridge behind him and went all in. And knowing intimately and firsthand what Elijah had been through, Elisha in the end wanted only to carry on that work. Elijah was hunted, banished, starved, he prayed for death, he felt persecuted and alone, he was in a near-constant state of crisis. And three times at the end, Elijah tells Elisha to quit, to stay behind, to go back home, maybe have a family, maybe take up golf and cigars, maybe play dominoes with the other retirees on park benches on a shady street. And three times Elisha says, No way, like a latter-day Ruth. “Do not ask me to leave you. Where you go I will go, where you lodge I will lodge. As long as God is alive, and as long as you are, I’m staying.” That’s a paraphrase.

This feels exactly so much like the history of Pride and what its legacy of activism is about. The passion of one being handed down to the next. The generations that follow taking up the mantle and carrying on the passion for setting things right and making things even. Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis laying the groundwork so that Stonewall could happen. Oscar Wilde laying groundwork for Langston Hughes laying groundwork for Allen Ginsberg laying groundwork for Richard Blanco. Christine Jorgensen breaking the sod for Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. and Kate Bornstein breaking the sod for Laverne Cox and Janet Mock and Chas Bono and Alok. Without Elaine Nobel and Harvey Milk, maybe we wouldn’t have Tammy Baldwin and Barney Frank.

The trailblazers are rock stars – if you read these stories closely, Elijah is like an Avenger or a Marvel superhero or something. Elijah built an altar with 12 boulders and slaughtered a bull single-handed in one day. He outran the king’s chariot for 17 miles from Mt. Carmel to Jezreel. He lived for forty days and nights on a single meal. Elijah doesn’t get a seat at every seder table for nothing.

But as important as the folks who who break the ground are the folks who pick up the mantle. For every Elijah, there must be an Elisha. Because if the work dies with the trail blazers, the work dies, unfulfilled, unfinished. We know that now as much as ever. We can’t stop at marriage equality when we don’t get to celebrate it with cake. We can’t stop at marriage equality when so many still lack basic housing and employment protections. We can’t stop at federal marriage equality when there is a religious exemptions movement to eliminate federal marriage equality. And that’s not all. There’s now a national monument at the Stonewall Inn, which is a lovely thing, and “Stonewall was an uprising against police brutality by QTPOC” (Annalise Ophelian), and we still need accountability for police brutality. We need accountability for mass incarceration. We need reparations for the federally-created racial wealth gap. Flint still needs clean water. Parts of Puerto Rico still doesn’t have power. And we need safe places to pee. And I am bone-weary of us having to die in brutal massacres and in horrifying numbers before anyone notices or cares.

We can’t quit pushing and advocating just because our group got a little of what it needs. When it comes to LGBTQ and allied communities and history and activism, our people sit at all the intersections of race, class, body size, gender, gender identity, sexuality. We are one another. Black Lives Matter is our issue. Trans justice is our issue. Immigration is our issue. Deportation at the highest rates of any administration is our issue, and that was under Obama. No one is free until we are all free. There is no equality until we all have a seat at the table.

It’s a good thing that Elisha got a double portion of Elijah’s spirit. We’re going to need a double share of the spirit of our fierce ancestors and forebears. We’re going to need it for the work still ahead. Celebrating each other is hard work. Take up your mantle folks. Gird up your loins while you’re at it. Roll up your sleeves. Or as Emily Saliers writes, “You take your prospects and your pickaxe and you trudge down to the stream, and you bloody your hands digging for your dream.” We have work to carry on, with all its blessing and all its agony. We have work to do for one another, for our edges, for ourselves.

Happy Pride. Peace.