Escapism is dead
Because there is no escape
When the ones you’re running from
Are the ones who made
The very things you used to use
To take a break from the ugly truth.
Their filthy hands are always there,
All over my childhood, everywhere
From Andy’s room
To the home of a Smallville farmer.
Middle-Earth
To Xavier’s school.
A pirate ship
In uncharted water,
The Wizarding World,
Danny Ocean’s crew.
From Sunnydale
To Annie Hall,
Evil men behind it all,
Preying on the young and weak,
Those they think will never speak.
Propped up by willfull ignorance,
Fame, awards…at what expense.
A victim’s tears, a label, “liar,”
Or silence–that’s all they require
To get away with what they do…
Maybe send some good fortune your way, too.
But now, who will have to pay the price
For all those men who seemed “so nice?”

There’s nowhere left for you to hide
When you’ve let all the monsters come inside.

“Does everything have to be gay?”

He asks me, plaintive,

Clearly trying to appeal to my sense of

Proportion, propriety.

“Yes,” I say flatly. “I’m sorry,

(I’m not)

But everything has to be ‘gay’

From now on.”

Until it’s considered normal,

Unremarkable. Cliche.

As boring as the thousands of

Heteronormative rehashings

That make it to screens without fanfare

Or protest

Or pushback

Every goddamn year.

Until seeing a queer character

Is as commonplace as seeing

A white male protagonist

With no qualifications

Save the day just because.

Until I don’t light up

At the sight of each one.

Until it doesn’t feel like

A much-needed breath of fresh air.

Until I don’t cling to every one

With deep, real, instantaneous affection,

Because I’ve been starved for so long

That these crumbs are a feast by comparison.

Until the revelation that a character

Walks through the world like me

Is not a shocking plot twist

That no one saw coming.

Until no living person remembers a time

When queer characters

And people

Weren’t visible,

Open,

Proud,

Accepted.

Until you stop asking that stupid question,

Yes.

Everything.

Everything has to be gay.

Father said not to fly too high.
He made me wings of wax,
put a limit on the open sky.
I mean to listen, I meant
to stay low to the ground,
wings dragging in cool water,
stirring up dust in my wake.
But that was my Father’s mistake:
you cannot give your child wings
and expect them not to soar.
I couldn’t help it; I wanted more.
And oh, it was worth it!
The things I saw, so high above
everything I had ever known.
The new sense of perspective
got the better of me, I needed
to test the limits. See how high
I could go before I had to stop.
True, the fear was a bitter
stone in my throat on the way down.
But oh…the incomparable rush of joy
I felt on the way up.

You all want to whine about the
“tolerant left,”
when suddenly you get what you’ve been
begging to get.
You thought I was angry before?
Well hold onto your asses,
‘cause I’m in the mood to play
Lacerate the Fascist.

You might call that an act of intolerance.
I just call it a natural consequence.

All we wanted was to be left alone to live our lives in peace,
but you took your antiquated hate to our neighborhoods’ streets.
So now you can lie in the bed that you’ve made,
and keep digging the hole that’s your own shallow grave
while you bah and you bleat
that we should try to understand.
Eat the boots on my feet,
you don’t get a second chance.

We said tolerate each other,
You chose elimination.
So take it.
You wanted a culture war? Well,
Congratufuckinglations.
You’ve proven your point.
We cannot coexist,
so we’ll have to root you out
of our world like a sickness.
You get what you gave: judgment,
condemnation, scorn.
In a couple decades when you’re gone, we won’t mourn.

If there’s a god, you better hope
He’s a nicer man than me
and believes in forgiveness,
second chances, and mercy.
Because if it were left up to me to decide?

You’d all burn,
full stop. Maybe then you would learn.

My sex life
is a constant war
between
“I really want to do
some fun, sexy, kinky shit.”

and

“I don’t trust anyone
enough to get
plain old vanilla naked with them,
much less kinky naked.”

“You left me,” she yells at me, an accusation sharp as barbed wire. “You went off to have this great adventure and left me here, all alone!”

I’m seventeen.
I don’t have it in me yet to tell her I don’t regret it
That I didn’t think of her once all summer
That when faced with the decision to stay or go, she wasn’t even a minor factor.

I feel bad. I feel guilty. I feel like I’ve failed her,
robbed her of one of the few escapes she had,
made myself happy at her expense without ever stopping to think of the consequences.

I don’t understand yet that the happiness of others is not my burden to bear.
I don’t realize–and probably neither does she–how unfair it is for one kid to expect another to save them,
to make them feel selfish for failing to do so.

All she sees is her own misery, and I’m more than willing to sacrifice my happiness to alleviate it, even a little.

Later, I won’t even resent her for it.
Neither of us knew it would be the last truly happy summer of my childhood.

“Fuck happiness,” she says to me, an indictment of my choices, weighed and found lacking. “Whatever happened to greatness.”

I’m twenty-one.

I don’t have the words to answer, to explain–

That I’m still dumb enough to pray for miracles–
That I’ve looked into the face of a parent as they died–
That I’ve just escaped a lover who loved to hurt me–
That I lie awake nights riddled with guilt and regret like holes punched through me,
oozing black blood from infected wounds all over my nice, color-coordinated bedclothes.

That I’m about to finish the last piece of my life I had a plan for.
That I’m looking down the barrel of a lifetime of uncertainty and shaking like a leaf at the looming possibility of failing at something–
or everything–

That I’m twenty-fucking-one years old, so excuse the hell out of me if I haven’t plotted the path to my first Nobel Prize just yet.

I don’t have the words, so I say nothing.
I let her fade quietly out of my life, let the toxins seep from my pores,
A little more every year she’s gone.

You’ve heard the thing about your cells,
How they regenerate completely every seven years.
The same should be true for the pockets and rooms that store pain in the mind,
But I know that it isn’t.

The best I can say is I finally learned
That sometimes the best words are no words at all.
Just cut through the wound and let the poison out with the fresh wash of blood.
Leave it on the ground where it falls,
And walk away clean.