buggery | the 'On Homophobia' meme, with one important addition

I first encountered this meme in a post by

sparklebutch (who got it from

joanne_c); I've also seen it referenced by

rubynye, who credited

aprilkat for bringing it to her attention.

I am the girl kicked out of her home because I confided in my mother that I am a lesbian.

I am the prostitute working the streets because nobody will hire a transsexual woman.

I am the sister who holds her gay brother tight through the painful, tear-filled nights.

We are the parents who buried our daughter long before her time.

I am the man who died alone in the hospital because they would not let my partner of twenty-seven years into the room.

I am the foster child who wakes up with nightmares of being taken away from the two fathers who are the only loving family I have ever had. I wish they could adopt me.

I am one of the lucky ones, I guess. I survived the attack that left me in a coma for three weeks, and in another year I will probably be able to walk again.

I am not one of the lucky ones. I killed myself just weeks before graduating high school. It was simply too much to bear.

We are the couple who had the realtor hang up on us when she found out we wanted to rent a one-bedroom for two men.

I am the person whose genitals were deemed ambiguous when I was born. The gender assigned to me has never felt right, but I wonder if the parts of me they cut away would have.

I am the person who never knows which bathroom I should use if I want to avoid getting the management called on me.

I am the mother who is not allowed to even visit the children I bore, nursed, and raised. The court says I am an unfit mother because I now live with another woman.

I am the domestic-violence survivor who found the support system grow suddenly cold and distant when they found out my abusive partner is also a woman.

I am the domestic-violence survivor who has no support system to turn to because I am male.

I am the father who has never hugged his son because I grew up afraid to show affection to other men.

I am the home-economics teacher who always wanted to teach gym until someone told me that only lesbians do that.

I am the man who died when the paramedics stopped treating me as soon as they realized I was transgendered.

I am the person who feels guilty because I think I could be a much better person if I didn’t have to always deal with society hating me.

I am the man who stopped attending church, not because I don't believe, but because they closed their doors to my kind.

I am the person who has to hide what this world needs most, love.

Repost this if you believe homophobia is wrong.

Or, you know, don't repost it. I don't post memes of any sort much in my LJ, partly to cut down on friendspage-spam. There are all sorts of reasons, other than not believing homophobia is wrong, not to feed the meme.

The line I added begins with italics. I might have let this meme pass me by, too, but

petronelle and I were discussing the problem of "crises" in the world that are so endemic and ongoing that they're not considered newsworthy enough for constant coverage, and the particular issue I added to the meme within that context, just the other day.

I also changed one of the two instances of "transsexual" to "transgendered," because while some people still use the older term to refer to themselves, many who self-identify with it prefer the latter term.

Comics-based fun will resume in this journal shortly.