Queer Intifada
BIO
Josh Healey is an award-winning writer, performer, and creative activist. Fusing his distinct storytelling style with a subversive humor and fiery love for justice, Healey has been featured in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and is a regular performer on NPR’s Snap Judgment. He has performed and led workshops at UC-Berkeley, Harvard, and over 200 colleges, high schools, & conferences across the country.
I’m in DC
on my way to march
against Israeli occupation
I get off the Red Line at
Judiciary Square
and the first thing I see
are two middle-aged women
wearing matching black
tank tops
with pink letters across
the chest that read
Two Moms are Hotter than One
apparently
the Palestinian Solidarity
March
has been placed right
across the street from
the Gay Pride Parade
it’s clear as the
Dead Sea
who is going to which:
kaffiyehs and peace signs
to my left
leather boots and nipple
tassels to my right
four lanes divide the
crowds
but have no power to stop
the two sound systems
from becoming one
explosion of human noise
so on my left it sounds
like
FREE FREE PALESTINE!
and on my right it's
GAY LIBERATION NOW!
back and forth:
FREE FREE
PALESTINE!
and
GAY LIBERATION NOW!
and then
FREE PALESTINE... NOW!
GAY LIBERATION…PALESTINE!
and finally
FREE GAY PALESTINE!!
FREE GAY PALESTINE!!
FREE GAY PALESTINE!!
and I imagine
Mahmoud
Abbas
Prime Minister turned Minister
performing the first
marriage
in liberated Ramallah
and pronouncing the two
new citizens Husband and
Husband
while Ellen Degeneres
and the Human Rights
Campaign
stage a hunger strike
outside the UN
to demand the LGBT Right
of Return
and I wonder
if we can build a Queer
Intifada
what else is possible?
and I am here
straight and Jewish
white and American
solidarity is not just my
offering
at the movement
dinner table
it’s the first invitation
I got
to sit down and eat
but I remember that
time at Ellis Island
when I was hungry
myself
and I remember that the
same day
Hitler made my family wear
yellow triangles
he made my friends wear
pink ones
my friends,
Anne Frank is Matthew
Shepard
Guantanamo is Auschwitz
Gay Marriage is Palestine
and we are all still walking
on occupied land
the protestors are shouting their final chants now
I start making my way back
to the Metro
see a young woman walking
on the other side of the
street
she is wearing a hijab
body covered from the
knees up
except her face and hands
toned like olive trees
in her left palm waves a
small
but unmistakable rainbow
flag
it is June in DC
the moon is rising early
in the evening sky
not a crescent
not a rainbow
the moon is full tonight
full and bright and
marching
ever higher
Yuri Kochiyama and Amiri Baraka play 2-on-2 in Heaven
I had
this crazy dream last night.
Yuri
Kochiyama and Amiri Baraka were up in heaven…playing Ronald Reagan and Strom
Thurmond in a game of 2-on-2 basketball. And the only thing that didn't make
sense
about this situation was...what is Ronald Reagan doing in heaven?
The
stakes? Dismantling the segregated institutions of heaven. Why all the clouds
gotta
be white? Baraka asks. Why all the pale angels get the nice harps, and we
get these
hand-me-down purgatory ukeleles?
The
score is tied. 14 up. Next basket wins.
Yuri looks
at Baraka like, Don’t worry. I got this.
She
dribbles the ball slowly up the cloudy court. Then, quick as lightning, she
puts the
ball between her legs, flies over Reagan, karate chops Strom Thurmond
in the face with
one hand, wipes ups his tears with her other, does a triple
somersault in the air, and
dunks the ball so hard, the basket explodes – BOOM!
– like the echo of a Harlem
gunshot.
Baraka
looks over at Yuri, grinning like a well-fed cat, like Greg Popovoich, like
Newark
after his son got elected. That’s what I’m talking about, girl.
From the
sideline, Maya whistles her approval. Phenomenal, she says. Simply phenomenal.
Reagan
scrapes himself off the floor, tries to regain his composure. Whatever. Y’all
wanna run again?
Yuri
looks down to Earth. At her people, her nation of struggle and pain and
possibility,
still fighting the fight she fought for damn near a century. She
just got here, to this city
in the stars. Doesn’t she deserve some time to rest
her feet?
Maybe
later, but right now, she’s staring down the man who drove half her friends to
jail or drugs or a Cointel grave. And up here, he doesn’t have Secret Service
to defend
him in the paint. And if there's one thing Yuri Kochiyama loves, it's
to go hard in the
paint. Shit, she could do this forever.
She takes the rock from Reagan. Winner takes ball, she says. Game on.