Queer Poetry: My Passive Defiance
“The Mortician in San Francisco” by Randall Mann is a narrative poem that details the repercussions of Dan White’s assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk from the unique perspective of White’s mortician. This poem holds many LGBTQ(Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer)+ themes, since the narrator himself is queer and the assassination of Milk who was the first openly gay elected official in America. Although Milk wasn’t killed because he was gay, as he was a friend of White’s before voting against him and lobbying against his reappointment, it’s suspected that homophobia in the legal system and jury was a part of why Dan White was sentenced to seven years in a state that gives sentences ranging from a minimum of 15 years to capital punishment. This idea is found in the poem in the lines, “If just the mayor had been shot, \ Dan might have had trouble on his hands— \ but the twelve who held his life in their
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As Pansy Division sings in their song “Deep Water”: “I hear the gays go to San Francisco”. Even the city itself, San Francisco, has a symbolic meaning to the LGBTQ+ community. Scanning through the poem, I immediately recognized the story and put this poem near the top of the list. However, upon further consideration, I realized my decision may have had another motivation behind it than just an enthusiasm for history. I impulsively choose a poem that I couldn’t even recite aloud in my own house. I spoke these words 5 times before the day we presented. Twice, I practiced, or, more accurately, rushed through, after seeing my dad’s car leave the driveway, even then they were whispered as if they were too sacred for these walls I live within. The three other recitations were not as poetic: I shoved a copy of the poem at one of my friends during lunch and they made sure I didn’t leave out any
This article is written in the first person's point of view. The style is informal, almost chatty in spite of the morbid topic it deals with. The author uses this style to tell the reader a story, like telling a friend an experience. The author's feelings and thoughts are freely expressed. This helps to put the reader into the author's shoes, to see through her eyes and feel through her heart.
In Vicki L. Eaklor’s Queer America, the experiences of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people in the years since the 1970s gay liberation movement are described as a time of transformation and growth. The antigay movement, threatened, now more than ever, created numerous challenges and obstacles that are still prevalent today. Many of the important changes made associated with the movement were introduced through queer and queer allied individuals and groups involved in politics. Small victories such as the revision of the anti discrimination statement to include “sexual orientation”, new propositions regarding the Equal Rights Amendment and legalized abortion, were met in turn with growing animosity and resistance from individuals and groups opposed to liberal and
In Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “The Story of My Body” Ortiz Cofer represents herself narrative story when she were young. Her autobiography has four headlines these parts are skin, color, size, and looks. Every headline has it is own stories underneath it. Ortiz Cofer’s is expressing her life story about her physical and psychological struggle with her body. Heilbrun’s narrative, “Writing a Woman’s Life” shows that, a woman’s does not have to be an ideal to write a self-autobiography to tell the world something about herself and her life. Ortiz Cofer’s facing a body struggle that is not made by herself, but by people around her. Therefore, every woman is able to write can write an autobiography with no exception.
The Mayor of Castro Street is an inspiring yet emotional and tragic story that takes a look at Harvey Milk’s life and the way it influenced the Gay Liberation Movement. The book goes into detail about Harvey as a person and how that affected his political campaign. In this review I’ll be going over what the book was about, the fear gay people felt and how unfair things were for people in the LGBT community in the 1970’s.
In her Fire in a Canebrake, Laura Wexler describes an important event in mid-twentieth century American race relations, long ago relegated to the closet of American consciousness. In so doing, Wexler not only skillfully describes the event—the Moore’s Ford lynching of 1946—but incorporates it into our understanding of the present world and past by retaining the complexities of doubt and deception that surrounded the event when it occurred, and which still confound it in historical records. By skillfully navigating these currents of deceit, too, Wexler is not only able to portray them to the reader in full form, but also historicize this muddled record in the context of certain larger historical truths. In this fashion, and by refusing to cede to a desire for closure by drawing easy but inherently flawed conclusions regarding the individuals directly responsible for the 1946 lynching, Wexler demonstrates that she is more interested in a larger historical picture than the single event to which she dedicates her text. And, in so doing, she rebukes the doubts of those who question the importance of “bringing up” the lynching, lending powerful motivation and purpose to her writing that sustains her narrative, and the audience’s attention to it.
In his work about gay life in New York City, George Chauncey seeks to dispel the various myths about the gay lifestyle before the Civil Rights era of the 60’s. He distills the misconceptions into three major myths: “…isolation, invisibility, and internalization” (Chauncey 1994, 2). He believes a certain image has taken in the public mind where gays did not openly exist until the 60’s, and that professional historians have largely ignored this era of sexual history. He posits such ideas are simply counterfactual. Using the city of New York, a metropolitan landscape where many types of people confluence together, he details a thriving gay community. Certainly it is a community by Chauncey’s reckoning; he shows gay men had a large network of bar, clubs, and various other cultural venues where not only gay men intermingled the larger public did as well. This dispels the first two principle myths that gay men were isolated internally from other gay men or invisible to the populace. As to the internalization of gay men, they were not by any degree self-loathing. In fact, Chauncey shows examples of gay pride such a drag queen arrested and detained in police car in a photo with a big smile (Chauncey 1994, 330). Using a series of personal interviews, primary archival material from city repositories, articles, police reports, and private watchdog groups, Chauncey details with a preponderance of evidence the existence of a gay culture in New York City, while at the same time using secondary scholarship to give context to larger events like the Depression and thereby tie changes to the gay community to larger changes in the society.
The first story centers on Gene Robinson, now the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, and the son of a loving, church-going couple from Kentucky. Next, we meet the Poteats, a Baptist family from North Carolina with a gay son and daughter. Then there are the Reitans, from Minnesota, whose son Jake comes from a long line of Lutheran pastors. When Jake came out of the closet, some of the locals threw a brick through their windshield and wrote “fag” in chalk outside the house. The mother’s description of immediately scrubbing the profanity off the driveway was very poignant. Perhaps the most heartbreaking story was that of Mary Lou Wallner, a Christian fundamentalist who rejected her lesbian daughter, which ...
Society needs to learn the moral boundaries and the respect that should be given to those who have been murdered. Those who are mourning for losing their loved ones through a homicide needs respect also. In doing so, society needs to give privacy to those who have passed and also to the ones who have lost. In Rankine’s essay, “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” addresses the side affects of frequent homicides and how the community is damaged. Sharing the images of not only black but people of color homicide victims through the media demonstrates that black and other people of color’s lives are perceived as less valuable when their bodies are shown lying on the streets.
Kahn was a writer and contribute editor of magazines for wired and national geographic. Stripped for parts appeared in wired in 2003. Kahn was awarded award in 2004 for a journalism fellowship from the American Academy of Neurology. She wrote this short essay describing how organs can be transplanted. The Stripped essay is an- eye opener. Though not many people tend to think of how a body should be maintained after death. Jennifer Kahn depicts a dramatic image for her audience. She uses the terminology “the dead man “though technically correct, the patient is brain dead, but his or her heart is still beating.
After her diagnosis of chronic kidney failure in 2004, psychiatrist Sally Satel lingered in the uncertainty of transplant lists for an entire year, until she finally fell into luck, and received her long-awaited kidney. “Death’s Waiting List”, published on the 5th of May 2006, was the aftermath of Satel’s dreadful experience. The article presents a crucial argument against the current transplant list systems and offers alternative solutions that may or may not be of practicality and reason. Satel’s text handles such a topic at a time where organ availability has never been more demanded, due to the continuous deterioration of the public health. With novel epidemics surfacing everyday, endless carcinogens closing in on our everyday lives, leaving no organ uninflected, and to that, many are suffering, and many more are in desperate request for a new organ, for a renewed chance. Overall, “Death’s Waiting List” follows a slightly bias line of reasoning, with several underlying presumptions that are not necessarily well substantiated.
In the past decades, the struggle for gay rights in the Unites States has taken many forms. Previously, homosexuality was viewed as immoral. Many people also viewed it as pathologic because the American Psychiatric Association classified it as a psychiatric disorder. As a result, many people remained in ‘the closet’ because they were afraid of losing their jobs or being discriminated against in the society. According to David Allyn, though most gays could pass in the heterosexual world, they tended to live in fear and lies because they could not look towards their families for support. At the same time, openly gay establishments were often shut down to keep openly gay people under close scrutiny (Allyn 146). But since the 1960s, people have dedicated themselves in fighting for
Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials, was assassinated in San Francisco by a former supervisor, Dan White, on the 27th of November, 1978. He was killed after a disagreement over White’s position in the government and White’s intolerance for homosexuals. White entered city hall and killed George Moscone, the mayor, and Harvey Milk. He later turned himself into the police station he used to work at. The assassination of Harvey Milk was unjustified because he was killed over an argument and his inspiration provided to the LGBT community was taken abruptly. His murder was unjustified because he was killed over a spot in government, his homosexuality, and his voice was taken from the very people he used it to help. Despite some people finding his views too ahead of their time, Harvey Milk was a good man who did not deserve to have his life ended in such a violent way.
Many young, radical gays and lesbians in the late 60’s joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) or a Black liberation organization, rather than NACHO (North American Conference of Homophile Organizations) which “struck them as hopelessly bourgeois.” Others may have steered clear of NACHO because of NACHO’s radical (for that time) stance that homosexuality was neither abnormal nor unnatural. Duberman points out the irony of the centrist organization, NACHO, being willing to take a more radical stance on gay liberation than the gay and lesbian activists themselves (Duberman, 1994).
Harvey Milk said, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”(Aretha 83). Harvey Milk was the first gay politician that moved people’s hearts. He changed the way people thought about gay people back in the 1970’s. Defending homosexuals from criticism, he civilized them with the people. Since the background of homosexuality was harsh which affected Harvey Milk’s early life, he took the action to process of becoming civilized as an officer, and he left many legacies.
Richard Brautigan’s short fiction stories incorporate protagonists that are recognizably fictionalized versions of the author himself. He writes in order to extract his own struggles of the past and the difficulties of discovering himself in the present. Through the characters in The Weather in San Francisco and Corporal, the portrayal of his optimistic view of life as a consequence of the rigors of daily life, and the use of symbols, Brautigan presents his personal story through the words on the paper.