This past Friday, I had the honor of giving a homily about Queer truth at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York, before introducing the NYC Gay Men’s Chorus to sing my poem, Unmistakable Softness.
The NYCGMC’s Hear My Song concert was a profoundly beautiful and life-affirming moment. Imagine—a Gothic cathedral lit up in rainbow and trans colors, the rumble of 200 queer men, decked in black with colored hankies, marching down the giant hall to a massive audience. Then, the slow boom of their voices. A collision of queer history, present, and future. Folks in the audience were sobbing. I thought, We belong here. We belong everywhere.
Grateful for this historic organization and artistic director John J. Atorino for commissioning Unmistakable Softness and inviting me to speak. Music composed by Ash.
The following is the words I spoke.
Our Truth
We all have that photo of us as little kids, our tiny hands at our waist, limp-wristed, weight off to one foot, lookin’ like a little Gay statue. Maybe wearing our mother’s clothes.
Most of us grow up with that unmistakable softness and the world tries to whittle it down. It corrects our posture, changes our voice or just tries beat it out of us. This is done by people who hate us, and worst of all, people who love us.
So we spend our lives trying to get back to that softness, or we run away from it as fast and as far as we can, sometimes killing ourselves in the process. We either face that truth or we don’t.
That truth can be ugly, and tragic and sexy, but most of all, that truth is divine.
And that relationship with our truth is what makes all Queer people so powerful and threatening. We live in an era of lies and propaganda that can spread so fast. So embracing our truth gains a different meaning and momentum.
The Queer experience is all about alchemy, turning the most painful things into the most beautiful. Prisons into poems, funerals into parades, plagues into revolution.
In the language of our Queerness, “truth” transforms into another word for love. May we all learn to love our softness.
A video of the speech and performance will be available soon.
More poems and prayers in POST.
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