no one has ever read, on the air, something I wrote. Until two nights ago.
I don't want to make more of this than it is, but my problem has always been that I make too little of things that are really important to me. So, I'll now commence overdoing it.
tuesday night I listened to gayBC.com, an Internet broadcaster —like a radio station only people listen via their computers, but unlike a radio station in that its broadcast area includes all of the Internet. Every place on earth.
Their studio has regular calls from the UK and northern Europe, all of the Pacific rim, South America, South Africa, Canada, Mexico, and all of the US; essentially, there are gayBC listeners occupying all of the English speaking world, and beyond. Wednesday night I was listening to "Hangin' Out," a talk show hosted by gayBC's founder, John McMullen. Afterward I wrote an e-mail to him.
From: <joe@burgwinkel.com>
To: <john@gaybc.com>
Subject: tonight's show, and a grain of sand
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 00:09:36 -0500
Hi John,
NOTE:
Lindsey is a legal
commentator for
gayBC.
I was unable to call-in tonight, but I really need to say how much your views moved me. I was able to listen to most of your discussion with Lindsey concerning sex-offender registration, incarceration, and the creation by legislative fiat of a 'lesser class' --people defined for life by arbitrary statute as sexual offenders.
"I'm very pleased with the decision. It keeps
in place a civil-commitment law that the
Legislature enacted to provide protection
to the public and to provide treatment for
people who need it," said Maureen Hart, an
assistant attorney general for the state of
Washington regarding the US Supreme Court
decision upholding that law in January.
-from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jan 18, 2001
"...to provide treatment for people who need it." What bullshit! Who else among us will be deemed 'in need of treatment', and summarily put-away? You noted that one of the chat room participants tonight, who had said he believed sexual predation was untreatable, had also said he hoped for the day when homophobia would be defined (by the legislature, perhaps?) as an illness and treated (by exile to another island like McNeil Island, perhaps?) And bless your soul, you disagreed with that.
NOTE:
McNeil Island, in Puget
Sound, is the site of
Washington's Special
Commitment Center,
where sex-offenders
remain incarcerated
even after wrapping-up
their criminal sentences.
NOTE:Then I listened as you expressed your (our) rage over the apparent hesitance to prosecute the murderer of Diane Whipple. "What are they waiting for?" you demanded. "This is not rocket science. That woman [Marjorie Knoller] should be awaiting trial behind bars, right now!"
Diane Whipple was a
lesbian killed in her
apt building by pit-
bulls owned by white-
supremicist Marjorie
Knoller, as Ms. Knoller
watched.
Sometimes I don't have enough time to cry --things like this happen so fast --and I have to sit with the pain for a while, sometimes for a long while, until I can finally accept that these things are real; that our world can tolerate so many dimensions of hate and so few versions of love. And then I inflict some innocent like you with an e-mail like this.
Sometimes when fear seems to proliferate in tides around me, I feel like I have but a grain of sand to contribute to our protection from it.
Too many people have let cowardly paternalists exploit them and teach them to fear the undefinable 'other', to fear the 'different ones'. Too many people have accepted those artificial distinctions as real, and they fear... they fear the queers who dare to love, they fear the blacks who dare to speak, they fear the liberals who dare be heard, they fear the women who dare be strong, and they fear the young. They fear the young who, with guns, scream out the terror, the despair, and the pain they feel in the face of their inheritance: a world of hate.
Our salvation from these consuming floods of hate begins --I hope it does not sound *too* Zen --begins with the grain of sand. I wanted to contribute my grain along with yours and many others tonight; together we can build mountains, even whole new worlds! I wanted to call-in, but I was crying.
Thank you John for leading a landslide. I promise I'll have my little grain ready next time.
Sincerely,
joe
PS: I hope your back is better soon.
i wrote it with lots of tears blurring my vision, but that is not unusual. Lately I start to cry over the least little things; the phone rings and I start crying —before answering it; my neighbor, cute young and considerate, moves quietly through the hall late at night, and I weep for his departure (or his arrival —whatever); TraQz (one of gayBC's music shows) plays a song (like right now they're playing 'Come To My Window' by the oh-so-desperate sounding Melissa Etheridge) and —you guessed it —gush. Maybe I'm pregnant. There is that possibility, except for a minor inadequacy on my part. And even that makes me cry.
After I wrote that e-mail to John, I imagined him opening his show with some part of it the next night. I fantasized him just launching into one of the better paragraphs, without introduction, and going from there. I pretended I would avoid listening —that's so, ...so egotistical, so infantile. But I knew there was no way I would not be right here, in front of my computer, between my speakers, listening intently when John started his show the next night.
I thought my egotism could safely subside after John got about twenty minutes into his show —without mentioning my sparkling prose. And then John came back from a break saying "I got an e-mail last night..." He said that he'd been touched by it (he said something like that). And then he read it. Every. Word.
you know the quiet that you 'hear' right after all the noise stops? Like the blatant silence of a placid lake after a day spent navigating roaring, rushing rapids? Or the dense quietness that you notice all at once on an isolated ski-trail in the stillness of solitude? It had been less than a day, measurable in minutes, since I crafted my words and already somebody heard —hell, an audience of hundreds of thousands heard. Wow. Fuckin' wow.
|
|
|
|
updated |