My Government Means to Kill Me

by Rasheed Newson

I was taught there was no place on Earth that would accept me—a queer marked like Cain.

The vast majority of us are merely pawns in someone else’s game. Don’t get defensive over this point. Embrace it. Once you do, you can begin to manipulate the board. Positioned correctly, pawns can checkmate kings.

So I loved my sister, but held that love loosely in my arms, antici- pating its death and mourning it as it lived.

I lived in Manhattan, and AIDS was ravaging the gay community of New York City more quickly than fire had destroyed ancient Troy. Why was I so slow to smell the smoke?

“I seen enough evil in men to smell it on the ones tryin’ to hide it inside.”

Don’t reject the space you gravitate toward just because the windows aren’t stained glass and the congregation isn’t saved.

Not that I ever shared such observations with my grizzled, hetty coworkers, but I loved how the morning dew would turn into steam under the summer sun, making the crowded metropolis of jagged tombstones appear as if they were smoldering.

We tell ourselves daily that we aren’t free to do this or that because we are that or this. To escape such limited thinking, we don’t have to look far. The keys are in our pocket.

What wrecked the Black family was white oppression, white political choices, white violence, white men. The likes of you did more damage to us than crack rocks.

If we never meet our despicable adversaries, we’d never be forced to find out how brave, resilient, and cunning we can be.

“Success can take root and bloom out of manure. Or, at least, that’s what Martin told me once.”

“But it’s a lie.” “Not if you live up to it,” he said. “Not if you make it true.”

However, the most valuable thing he gave me was his personal assurance—built on a lifetime as a political radical—that all great activists start off as young people who don’t really know what the hell they’re doing.

You could see the unbridled boy inside the uptight man when he laughed.

Devils grow old, and the world around them eventually exceeds their understanding and control. Never forget that. Never let them forget it.

Winning rarely changes how people perceive us and almost never soothes our insecurities. Winning, as most of us conceive it, is external and public. I didn’t yet know that the most rewarding activities of my life would be those done in secret.

By dint of her family line, I believe Angie had a comfort with death that most people will never understand. She didn’t fear it. She didn’t curse it. She knew death could be a mercy, and Angie believed her calling was to comfort people before they reached their eternal rest.

‘I want to fight AIDS’ is a bullshit goal. It’s too big, too abstract. Besides, the metaphor is horrible. If we were in a fight against AIDS, our eyes would be swollen shut and all our teeth would be littered across the ring.”

Perhaps that was the strongest constant between me at eleven and me at eighteen: I was too drawn to wishful thinking.

Never underestimate a Midwesterner’s ability to live in a perpetual state of denial.

“Your life is what you make it,” I insisted. Gregory gave me the finger. “Maybe where you come from.”

I’d had one hundred ways of asking one thing: Why did I feel hunted in my homeland? Because my government means to kill me.

“If you’re going to sing,” Dorothy said, “sing loud.”

I can forgive his anger since I know where it comes from.

“The movement demands many sacrifices,” he said.

We were designed to be at odds: she was always clad in artifice, and I longed to strip naked.

What if I’m the villain?” She cupped my jaw in her hand. “Oh, honey, villains never stop to consider that they’ve done anything wrong.”