A Queer Pilgrim

As my friend Mark McCurry wrote to a news report I posted on Facebook: "Erasure.  A necessary step in cultural eradication." In the state of Florida they are trying to erase the presence of LGBTQIA+ people in the Don't Say Gay Education Bill, which recently advanced in the Florida House of Representatives. In other words, members of the state legislature of Florida are trying to erase the presence of LGBTQIA+ people, and pretend we simply don't exist. And if we do exist, you can't read about us, see films about us, dance to music and perform in plays written and performed by us, talk about us, be friends with us, or hang around with us,  Reporter Brody Levesque of the Washington Blade (as reported on Jan. 21, 2022 on the website joemygod.com), broke the story of Florida House Education and Employment Committee passed HB1557, written by State Rep. Joe Harding (R), called the Parental Rights in Education bill, the "Don't Say Gay Education Bill." Its co

In my last semester of teaching a course on Ethics at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) in Durham, NC, an HBCU, I gave my students--who were 99% Black or people of color--a chance to get a grade higher in the course if they did one extracurricular activity: voted. The year? 2014. It was a mid-term election. And the Republican legislature and Governor of NC was doing everything in its power to make voting in the state more difficult, especially for students, people with disabilities, those who are elderly, Black Americans, and people of color. Why? Because they tended to vote for Democrats. All the students had to do was go to the poll and take a selfie of themselves at the poll, and I recorded it in my grade book. A lot of students did better than they normally would in this course because of the extra credit assignment.  Voting matters. This is how democracy works. Functions. Lives. Breathes. Dies. By the people voting. All the people. And all the votes. Every, single, one of t

  It is an amazing feat, being "the first" in most categories of life for honorable and good events or experiences of life. We celebrate the first woman pastor in our various denominations, as well as the first person of color or first person who is of the LGBTQIA+ community who is elected a bishop in various church denominations. We shout "huzzah" when people of color are now on US currency, and the first to be an astronaut and fly into space.We are still waiting for our first Black woman to take her seat on the Supreme Court of the US, along with celebrating the first woman as US President. These are all moments in which stereotypes and "this is the way we've always done it" has been broken, the glass ceiling cracked and busted open, and diversity and multiple experiences from non-traditional backgrounds are given a chance to shine and shake the status quo up, for the good of us all. For example, the importance of "first-ness" as I'll c

While working out at the gym right before Christmas, I watched and heard gay writer Andrew Tobias (who wrote The Best Little Boy)  being interviewed on one of MSNBC's shows, talking about the latest purge of LGBTQIA+ books, along with other banned books, that are not only being taken out of libraries in Texas, but libraries are also being shut down recently because of this purge of banned books. Tobias took it as a "badge of honor" that one of his books was selected, but was furious at this act of censorship as well. Then there was this report from Trudy Ring on advocate.com on Dec. 21, 2021: "T he public library in Llano County, Texas, is closed for three days this week as librarians sort through  books   for children and young adults to see if they have supposedly objectionable content, including LGBTQ+ topics. The closure is one consequence of challenges to library books in several Texas locales. Several public officials have expressed concern about certain books,