GhostCracker

Maybe letting you go is the most honest love I have left to give.

Because right now I am still a wounded coyote, carrying old teeth marks beneath my fur, flinching at tenderness, mistaking safety for danger.

And I love you enough to know that love should not always ask someone to stay.

Sometimes it asks you to step back.

To respect the distance.

To stop reaching for a hand when your own is still shaking.

So if I walk away, it isn't because I stopped loving you.

It's because I haven't yet learned how to love you without bleeding on everything I touch.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.