When you beat a man for being gay you tell him
“this is how we treat our women”.
You show him what male privilege means, how respect exits
once you are entered.
Good girls are virgins. Good girls are men.
Hymens are not the delicate sheaths of skin within we once believed them to be.
They appear in your demeanour, your tone and pitch, your hands and your hips. You switch
privilege.
We weave new binaries. You choose between a clean life with your dirty laundry confined to your
sheets and your mind, or a rabbit-hole world,
a tiny door through which you compress into a caricature of yourself, an LGBT poster girl.
Checked shirts, clipped nails and ponytails. One day
I’ll take a clipper to my hair. One day
I’ll be gay enough to take my place here, among the glitter
and the adolescent dreams of what attraction means I need to be for you to read me.
One day I’ll find my label and my tribe will welcome me.
Like finding the colour that speaks the tongue in which you dream, or
the rhythm working in your step before you knew what music meant.
Where are the words for this. I knew them
when you came against my lips, but they dissipate amongst the politics.
