We Are Love

Where do we exist? Where can we just be? As we are pushed out of your world we must craft new ones for ourselves. You enter those spaces, hearts filled to the brim with hate, polished bullets, homemade pipe bombs. You sit as we worship, you here our laughter in theatre's, you watch as we walk the halls to our classrooms, you feel our music pounding as our bodies move across the dance floor.

I am dying with all of them. Every second I feel another one and every day another story, another person, another nation, another excuse. You say these incidents aren’t connected. That they are somehow isolated. That they can somehow be distanced from one another. Your white supremacist, heteronormative, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, islamophobia are all wrapped up together crushing our windpipes as we continue to fight for our liberation, as we struggle to break free. These fears and ideals are widely accepted, utilized daily to alienate and terrorize us. You superficially come to our aid in times you see to be a crisis. Yet you ignore our screams, our pleas, our beating hearts - until they are no longer beating. And by the time you decide that my life mattered it will be too late. You will have been too late.

You cannot claim to love the LGBTQ community and to hate Muslims in the same breath. You cannot mask your homophobia with islamophobia. We see through you. We know you. Your fear of trans people in bathrooms, your fear of black bodies on sidewalks, your fear of gay people in nightclubs, your fear of Muslims on planes, your fear of our very existence, is yours. And while you stand there and refuse to acknowledge our pain, when you condone the jokes, aggression, and violence, as you watch us live under the force of systemic oppression we will continue to fight. We will continue to breathe. We will continue to stand together against you. Our anger, outrage, pain and sorrow will not break us. We are strong. We are love in the face of all your hate.