Unspoken Genocide

There’s a memorial out there

A collection of the names
of those who were murdered
by ignorance and denial.
It started back when
Harvey Milk was shot
five times in the head
for someone else’s crime
Years later
when they remembered the crime
they pasted names of the dead
on the Federal Building.
The names were patchworked together
covering all the walls and windows.
The first quilt of the dead.
From there it began

Most didn’t get funerals

The names, the people,
because their unsympathetic family
wouldn’t show up
and their sympathetic friends
were all dead already
Reduced to names on fabric

Even famous people

Rock Hudson
Keith Haring
Prince
all got panels on the quilt
Dozens of them
made by hundreds of distraught fans
Who looked up to them
Who wanted to be them
Who had their dreams shattered.
Even those at the top of society
with money and fame and power
Even those with a direct line
to the president of the United States
Could be killed by callousness.
A choir in San Francisco –
The Gay Men’s Chorus –
Has a separate section
The fifth section
That they fill with nothing but names
of those members
who died to the Epidemic.
That section has 282 members
More than the number of living.
Only five members who were alive
just thirty years ago
are still alive today.

We were almost extinct

An endangered species
hard as it is to believe.
Years ago you would be killed
for just owning a rainbow flag,
Now they sell them in Target.
The rate of infection was 50%
The death rate was still higher
not even counting the hate crimes
the murders
The boys like Matthew Shepard
who were quiet and kind
and just wanted to see their
twenty-second birthday.
Barely anyone got out alive
We were eradicated.

There are movies about it

Documentaries
songs and poems and books and musicals
But none of them can convey
that pervasive feeling
of inevitable death
A common cold was lethal
if not to you then to your friends
The gay bars were empty
The neighborhoods quiet.
Everyone was missing
whether it was their body or their soul
No one was left untouched.
People today
people who write magazines and articles about
How the “trend” of being gay is gaining ground
How there’s so many gay teens nowadays
How being queer is obviously a popularity stunt
Those people
they don’t realize
there would be hundreds of thousands more of us
If they hadn’t let us die
If they hadn’t let their government silence us
If they hadn’t sentenced us all
to a slow, torturous death
just for living.

Nancy Reagan asked once

What “those gays” have to be proud of
I’ve been asked before
I’ve been told we’re intolerant
of straight people
of cops
of politicians
When they were the ones
to let us disappear

I should ask
next time I get the chance
why they want to join now
when it’s a party
a celebration of life
But not when it was silent
full of tears and heavy hearts
When it was nothing more
than a funeral march.
I should ask
why we should allow the people
Who murdered us in cold blood
Who tied up Matthew Shepard and left him to die
Who raped and murdered and exposed Brandon Teena
Who killed 49 people in a club in Orlando
why we should open doors for them
give them access to give us more examples
of the cruelty of this world
or to murder us again and again
in droves
I should ask
why they feel the need to impose themselves
in everything that doesn’t involve them
The men protesting abortion
as if they have the right to a woman’s body
The whites claiming blue lives matter
as if to be “blue” is something innate
The straights telling us that we can marry
so what else is there to protest about now?

The Quilt,
That old worn memorial,
Won’t be back together again for decades
But the pieces remain
toted out again and again
so people can take pictures
and lament on Instagram
how Beautiful it is
As if the entire affair isn’t hideous.
As if the completely reprehensible actions
of a beloved president
could not have been avoided.
As if 600,000 deaths weren’t preventable
As if it was simply a fact of nature.

It’s not taught in history class

The entire affair mostly forgotten
Except when people wish to
feel sorry for themselves
to get off on our misery
to diminish our trials
But we know
each June and October
when the Quilts are taken out to be viewed
That it is a memorial
A collection of names
of soldiers
and protesters
and artists
and those who simply wanted to live
We know their sacrifice
And we know
If they were to ever threaten us again
we would repeat history
Following in the footsteps
of the very first pride
Which wasn’t a party
or a funeral march
but what the history books
call a Riot

or as we like to call it
A Revolution.