[Vision2020] The Damage Done in this Community

[Melissa Hendrickson]

I want to share with all of you, those who post and those who are "lurking" what a friend of mine wrote tonight while we were hanging out.  I asked her permission to post her writing on this list, because I felt it was something that people needed to hear.  We can go back and forth on this list spewing words not thinking that those words have any effect on the world around us, but they do.  I ask that we all listen to her words, not just read them.  She asked that I not share her name, and you will understand why when you read the letter. 
All the emphasis is in her original letter. 

Mo

   "It's not just that the Revolution & Modernity Conference, (that is happening RIGHT NOW) is killing us.  It's not just that I am afraid of persecution in a million forms, but actually afraid for my physical safety as well. It's not just that I am afraid for my mental health. It's not just that I have had two hours of sleep in the last 40 hours.  It's not just that my friends and I have been working in a self-sacrificing manner on this for five months, and it's not because I have become a vulnerable public target in order to do what my spirit and mind require of me - and I had no other choice, bujt the choice of allowing my soul to corrode and my world to deteriorate and a (non)alternative to fighting what I KNOW I MUST DO.  
   
    "But it is also that I feel that the love of my life is slipping away from me at the same time and my heart is breaking while I have tried to fight for justice.
   
    "Such a juxtoposition may seem trivial to some, but as a gay woman, I know that my gay community deals with this struggle everyday - the struggle to fight the battles of life AND fight the daily battles of being gay at the same time.
   
   "This is my world.

   "Remember this when you go home to rest in your safe place tonight, because some of us have none."