“Had Moses seen how my friend’s face blushes when he is drunk, and his beautiful curls and wonderful hands, he would not have written in his Torah: do not lie with a man.”
—
Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain; Jeffrey Gorsky (’Boys: Two Poems’ from The Tahkemoni by Yehuda Alharizi, c. 1220)
People put so much into seeing Stonewall as this symbol. And at the time we just thought, ‘Oh, I guess it’s just that time of the month when cops raid the bar, so they can make their numbers for arresting fags for the month of June.’ But people get so concerned about the details. I don’t know about all the crap I’ve heard all these years. Sometimes it’s ‘Oh, someone threw a high-heel shoe.’ Sometimes it’s ‘No, gurl, it was a Molotov cocktail,’ or ‘Somebody slugged a cop.’
All I know is that night, they came in, and nobody budged. I guess we were just sick of their shit. And suddenly we were fighting, and we were kicking their ass. The cops had to back up into the bar. We had them cornered. Next thing you knew, the riot squad was there, and baby, it was on. ‘The night of Stonewall’ is how people talk about it, but it was more like a week. People want to know the little details, but what I remember most is being scared as hell. We were fighting for our lives. They’re still killing us; they’re still not giving us the respect we’re due for putting up with their shit all these years. I’m giving you the facts about how shit’s been from the beginning, and what’s gone on, how the law was in our daily lives—the facts! And so with regard to that producer lady, the whole time I just thought to myself, ‘There’s gonna be so much of me on the cutting-room floor.’
—Miss Major, from Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary
“What’s the purpose of it? Capitalism would not collapse if Grenada remained revolutionary. And Reagan was right, it wasn’t a matter of direct resources that you needed from that country. He said, “Nutmeg is not the question.” I mean, that was Grenada’s biggest export, we could get perfectly good nutmeg from Africa, you don’t need Grenada’s nutmeg. So why did they invade Grenada? They invaded Grenada because they were serving notice to the people of the Caribbean, and to the people of Latin America, and to the people of the world, that you cannot drop out of your client-state free-market system. That if you tried to take an independent source, and that if you use your land, your labor, your resources, and your capital, and your markets in a different way, in a collectivist way, if you use them to benefit the needs of your people, rather than to be milked like a cow for foreign investors, if you do that, this is what’s going to happen to you.”
i would like a hug…. JUST KIDDING! i would like TWO hugs. (suddenly becomes cold and standoffish) i don’t need anything or anyone and i don’t want to talk about it.
