All Boys Aren't Blue

by George M. Johnson

Keep finding joy in the midst of this chaos.

You have the power to change things. Don’t use that power to oppress.

It’s okay that you were born this way. And it’s not your fault you were born into this oppression.

We are not as different as you think, and all our stories matter and deserve to be celebrated and told.

I think the majority fear becoming the minority, and so they will do anything and everything to protect their power.

I believe that the dominant society establishes an idea of what “normal” is simply to suppress differences, which means that any of us who fall outside of their “normal” will eventually be oppressed.

Toni Morrison states in my favorite quote of all time, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Oddly enough, many of us connect with each other through trauma and pain: broken people finding other broken people in the hopes of fixing one another.

Our community struggles to connect with joy in the way that we have with pain.

Like I stated earlier, gay lingo dominates language in this society now. I have watched the language once weaponized against me now being commercialized for millions to use, see, and enjoy.

We often talk about bullies in school, but rarely when they are in our own families.

Sometimes you just don’t have the strength to carry the burden and do the job.

Navigating in a space that questions your humanity isn’t really living at all. It’s existing. We all deserve more than just the ability to exist.

Do what you have to do to make you feel okay.

You sometimes don’t know you exist until you realize someone like you existed before.

“Peace” was often a survival tactic.

American history is truly the greatest fable ever written.

I’ve come to learn that symbolism is a threat to actual change—it’s a chance for those in power to say, “Look how far you have come” rather than admitting, “Look how long we’ve stopped you from getting here.”

Saying that something was “a norm” of the past is a way not to have to deal with its ripple effects in the present. It removes the fact that hate doesn’t just stop because a law or the time changed. Folks use this excuse because they are often unwilling to accept how full of phobias and -isms they are themselves—or at least how they benefit from social structures that privilege them.

When people ask me how I got into activism, I often say, “The first person you are ever an activist for is yourself.” If I wasn’t gonna fight for me, who else was?

Only you know how far you are willing to go for yourself.

If a story doesn’t add up, don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions. If those teaching the information are unwilling to give you the answer, you go and do the research yourself.

The greatest tool you have in fighting the oppression of your Blackness and queerness and anything else within your identity is to be fully educated on it.

Knowledge is truly your sharpest weapon in a world hell-bent on telling you stories that are simply not true.

Everything is connected, and it often requires someone breaking a stigma or pattern in order to change the trajectory of a family.

Something getting better doesn’t happen without action, and you have every right to ask for that.

Elevating a community viewed as below you to having the same equity and equality harms no one but the oppressor.

Some of us are pressured into acceptance of an identity before we are fully ready to accept it ourselves.

There is an old saying that talks about how “the thing you are trying to hide is usually what you give off the most.”

You don’t know what you like or who you are if you allow yourself to be fit into a box that society has made for you. Learn what you like and don’t like.

“You never truly get over death. It just gets easier to live with each day.”

That is the lesson of death, though—from death comes rebirth. A rebirth in thinking, in processing, in living.

Time and Death are much closer than many of us would ever like them to be.

Time waits for no one, and for Black queer people, there are too many trying to steal the little bit of time we have. So, live your life.