It is the Transgender Day of Visibility
It is 2023, The Year of the Cusp
It is the Transgender Day of Visibility. It is 2023, The Year of the Cusp.
And I want a new national anthem.
I want a new national anthem, an anthem for a future in which I exist, a future in which I am just another citizen, a future in which our lives are wholly defined by joy. In my future, this national anthem is Essex Hemphill’s poem, “American Wedding,” as performed by Justin Vivian Bond. It follows:
In america, I place my ring on your cock where it belongs.
No horsemen bearing terror, no soldiers of doom will swoop in and sweep us apart.
They’re too busy looting the land to watch us.
They don’t know we need each other critically.
They expect us to call in sick, watch television all night, die by our own hands.
They don’t know we are becoming powerful.
Every time we kiss we confirm the new world coming.
What the rose whispers before blooming I vow to you.
I give you my heart, a safe house.
I give you promises other than milk, honey, liberty.
I assume you will always be a free man with a dream.
In america, place your ring on my cock where it belongs.
Long may we live to free this dream.
* * * * *
Essex Hemphill died of complications from AIDS in 1995. He did not live to experience so many things we have come to take for granted, whether it’s the medical care that would have saved his life or the rights that LGBTQ+ people have received after hard fighting. He did not live to hear his words take flight.
His dream did not end with the death of his body.
Essex Hemphill did not live to see the birth of informed consent clinics, like the one I walked into, as Pestilence, astride his horse, pranced all around, and the streets went silent, and we grew to fear the air that sustains us from our first breath to our last, and I was asked one question, “Why?”
…and I answered, “I don’t want to die like this.”
I am living my dreams and my own dreams will live on, whether I am “eradicated,” or whether I die in a warm bed thirty or forty years from now. My dreams are my ancestors’ dreams and my ancestors have known eradication and concentration camps, and I live to free their dreams. In 1995, my own transition felt impossible, by 2017, when I was imploding from the pressure of being two people crammed into one weary body, it felt necessary.
It felt almost ordinary. In 2023, it feels extraordinary and we live and die at the cusp, our future knife-edged and already bloody.
Many of the dreams I now have for my people will not come to pass in what remains of this precious life I have been charged to live, but my dreams will not end with the death of my body, either. My dreams area fire that can never be put out.
When Essex Hemphill died, the notion that transgender singers like Justin Vivian Bond could fill great halls with their voices was only a dream. It was only a dream that people like me could stand in front of a classroom and do the work I do as an educator.
Dreams determine reality. We are living our dreams.
I want a national anthem that is a heart, a safe house. I want a national anthem that promises what the rose whispers before blooming.
We ARE becoming powerful.
Every time we kiss, we confirm the new world coming, so kiss often and kiss hard, my friends, lovers, and comrades.