Before Anyone Messes With Her Family, She Has This to Say About Homophobia

To the gun: Whatever you do, do not take your safety off. Do not let them hold you in their small confused hands, their only children.

They only turn to you because they’re tired of the taunting. If they curl their finger around your trigger, act dumb. Act like you don’t know what they’re doing. Act like you don’t know who they’re aiming for. Do not let them pull.

To the rope: Google says that there are 182,000 results for how to tie a noose, and 2.7 million results for how to tie a noose for hanging yourself, so the odds of this working out for them are in full swing.

From a branch that will not crack at its neck, someone on the Internet is teaching them how to die from shame. If they are looking for you, jump.

To the bridge: If they are looking for you, do not let them jump.

To the kids who will pick on my kids for having a gay mom: When you ask your parents about the monsters in your closet, did they tell you that there was nothing to be ashamed of, that even those in closets have monsters of their own?

Or did they teach you how to kill them in the night, yell “Burn in hell, faggot” at the door so the wood catches fire from your tongue, ’til the heat of the inferno warms up the entire house, ’til the third-degree burns begin to look a lot like the skin on my children, the scabs that you pick at for bullying them, for trying to love me in public.

Have the teach save the Neosporin for wounds that are much more worthy than these ones.

To the school that will not stand up for my kids in defense of our family.

To the families that will teach their kids how to hate me, my partner, and our children because the Bible tells you to.
To the church that we can’t go to any more for salvation or prayer.

I stand before you as a woman with a fearful womb, someone who’s too afraid to imagine the faces of her kin if it means that they’ll be borne in front of a firing squad.

Or on the perimeter of a God Hates Gays protest, or in the hospital of a community that would rather me die and take my firstborn to hell with me.

You see, you’ve confused the value of family with the idea of family values. 

As if family never meant mother or father only, as if family was never raised by single mothers with the force of spines running down their backs, as if families were never raised by single fathers who paid the rents with the sweat from their hands.

The village is raising the child so that the child does not burn down the village, so that the child learns how to play with toys and not the edges of bridges or the branches of trees or the noose-knot in the rope, or the trigger of a gun.

May the child never value hate over love, fear over acceptance, self over God, so that the child can find the God in themselves.

To my unborn children: Whatever you do, do not take your safety off. If they’re looking for you, do not jump.

When they attempt to burn you alive, open the window, unlock the closet door for me, and warn them that they’ll be so sorry that they ever messed with the wrong family.