Who
Would Choose to be Queer?
Many of us and our supporters use the line "who
would choose to be gay or lesbian knowing that
you faced a life where people hated you?"
This
seems like a perfectly reasonable question - and the truth is, it
is. Who would choose to live a life where people hate you for
who you love? Where you would go through pain and suffering in discovering
who you are?
Having
walked that path of pain, we as queers would say "we would." This
pain is part of walking between worlds, part of who we are. Perhaps
the following essay will shed some light.
Because
I Am Queer
Because
I am queer, I walk between many worlds. I experience them all, yet
I belong in none of them. This gives me the opportunity to understand
the worlds, yet stand back and observe them as an outsider. I am
not part of these worlds, so I have nothing to gain by entering
into the games and the power struggles. Instead, I look at the games
and the power struggles and see how they affect the weakest and
most defenseless among us.
There
is pain in this walking, for I know what it feels like to be an
outcast. I know what it feels like to have people look at me and
disapprove of my very being. I know what it feels like to be treated
as if I have no feelings. I know what it feels like to have eggs
hurled at me and slanderous graffiti painted outside my home. I know what it
feels like to be told by a fundamentalist preacher with hate in
his eyes that “the Bible says I should kill you, you’re lucky I’m
not doing it right now.” And know that he means it.
In walking
between worlds, I choose to feel these things, for I could have stayed
in the closet and walked between the worlds of alienation and death. There is pain on the path, but there is pain in the world. Pain
can only be properly handled when it is understood. And when one
understands the pain, one is bound by their soul to help ease others
of this pain.
As I
child, I instinctively knew to reach out and speak to the kids that
everyone hated. The skinny kid with blond hair who wore khaki pants
and a blue cardigan every day. Whose eyes never met anyone else’s,
and who wore a windbreaker too small for him even on the coldest days.
We queers
know pain and we must learn to go through and transcend that pain. We need to feel that pain, and then forgive it.
Pain
is most often tied to self-worth. “How could he do that to me?”
“She said she loved me.” When someone hurts us, we take it as an
attack on our self-worth, but it actually speaks more about the
other person than it does about us.
We are
taught by the world to tie our self-worth to what others think of
us. What we wear. The car we drive, where we live, et cetera
and so forth. But this is not who we are. Who we are can be seen by
our actions and our beliefs, our words and our thoughts. By how
we treat others, by how we show respect.
Pain
must be grieved, but it must also be forgiven. To hold on to pain
hurts only ourselves, and to forgive is to be able to take back our
power that pain stole from us.
In walking
between worlds, we learn not to tie our self-worth to others, but
-- to bring us back to those immortal questions of Harry Hay -- our
sense of self comes from who we are as queers, where we’ve been
as queers and why we’re here as queers.
Osireion partner Teyboti is a mystic living in South Carolina, where
he is currently pursuing studies on the sacred androgyne.
Contact Teyboti at teyboti@osireion.com
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