For the next 50 minutes, or so, it is still May 22nd here in California. And, while many things of significance have likely happened on the 22nd of May, of particular note is that it is the birthday of Harvey Milk. He would have been 86 today.
Within the last 150 years, or so, there has been a lot of social change. For those of us involved in this work in current times, we can draw upon the thoughts, deeds and strategies of people like Mohandas Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Ceasar Chavez and Delores Huerta and Harvey Milk. There are many useful and thoughtful quotes from all of the above, but today we will focus on Milk. At the 1978 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade, he said:
On this anniversary of Stonewall, I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country ... We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets ... We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I'm going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives.
As the phrase goes, SS-DD. Exchange Transgender for Gay in the text and the ideas are still just as valid 38 years later as we continue to be the targets for lies, myths and distortions. In that same year, he also said:
I cannot prevent anyone from getting angry, or mad, or frustrated. I can only hope that they'll turn that anger and frustration and madness into something positive, so that two, three, four, five hundred will step forward, so the gay doctors will come out, the gay lawyers, the gay judges, gay bankers, gay architects ... I hope that every professional gay will say 'enough', come forward and tell everybody, wear a sign, let the world know. Maybe that will help.
In the same time frame, other activists were having similar thoughts. Audre Lorde was a Black lesbian poet who was taken from us well before her time. Her words have always resonated with me ever since I read the following passage close to 30 years ago.
When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Lorde died from cancer in 1992. Her illness, and her perceptions about it, was the source of inspiration of a body of work she called The Cancer Journals. In one part she said:
I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."
I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.
Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.
And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.
Anyway, items to consider...
RIP Harvey and Audre.
DeeAnn
