merman: dedicated to matthew shepard.

11 years ago tonight, a beautiful young wisp of a man lay comatose and bleeding to death in a hospital in Wyoming. 10 years and 364 days ago, I realized for the first time that there were people in the world whose hearts were so black they would want to kill me simply for being gay.

This was not one of the usual demons I’d read about: parents who’d renounce you or kids whimpering “faggot” in the hallway. This was a real monster. There were people in the world who would beat you until your bones broke so you could not run and your face bled so badly you would not be recognized. They’d strip your humanity away until you didn’t even look human anymore. And they’d tie you to a fence with your own shoelaces and leave you there to die.

When I think of Matthew Shepard I hurt. There is very little separating me from him other than the random elemental geography of where I happened to be born. We were both born close to the same time and both in the vast middles of our respective countries. We lived in small towns in long, wide, flat, open places where the sun sets for days and the sky never ends. And we were both gay. There but for the grace of God go I…

His legacy to us is both a freedom and a burden. His murder unlocked a societal door and in the last 11 years, for all of our turning, we have not opened it. We do not always carry this weight well. We get lazy, we let shit slide. And each time we don’t stand up for ourselves, we let Matthew bleed a little longer. We let Lawrence King’s wound rip deeper. We let Sean Kennedy fall to the pavement and break a little harder.

We owe the dead an absolution. It’s no longer enough to just remember them. We need to fight for the rights that their deaths have paved for us. If we are more free now, it’s because we walk on their backs. If we are less free, it’s because our apathy and stasis will dig our own graves.

Remember, there are people in the world who’d be only too happy to help us slide into them.

I promised myself that if I ever developed any kind of voice I would use it to encourage and gather the kinds of decent, humane, forward-thinking people that have always been the ones to find their own personal strength before they can fight for a social one. Caustic, divisive, violent people have no inner-voice; they are hollow and so their emptiness leads them easily, thoughtlessly, and rapidly to attack and decay. Their hatred is so fast.

The kind, the good-hearted, the caretakers of humanity – our first reaction is shock. Dismay. Disbelief. Though we are filled with love we wait too long. We are gilded with the will to create, not to destroy, and we look inward first. We are slow to respond because our deeds are imbued with thought. We move forward with grace and vision. But while we take our time some of us are killed, more of us are beaten, and all of us are denied the rights we deserve. For no matter which country we live in, and the laws and protections some of us are lucky enough to have, when one person, anywhere, is denied their equality we are all fundamentally less equal. Our humanity wanes.

So we must move faster. And as we do we will gather and we will take a step forward, along the path that all decent people have tread before us, towards making things solidly, purposefully, permanently better.

It’s no longer acceptable to let a muttered “faggot” slip by. It’s no longer acceptable to leave our boyfriends and girlfriends at home while we sit at the Thanksgiving table with our families. It’s no longer acceptable to pass for straight when it’s convenient for us. For if we do so then we will sit and wilt and erode while our rights are slowly, secretly denied by our own governments and our love becomes locked inside our homes and is never allowed to shine.

If you’re anywhere near Washington this weekend you need to go there to scream, shout, and march with all the vigour and passion you feel when someone hates you for nothing more than the person the universe crafted you into. Turn their hatred into your rallying cry.

We are whole. We are right. We deserve to love openly. We belong here. We’ve done nothing wrong except, perhaps, to let our innate goodness lead us to not be vehement in our own defense.

So now, for Matthew and all of those gay men and women who cannot, we must fight.

Please visit The Matthew Shepard Foundation. Please read “Losing Matt Shepard” by Beth Loffreda.

In honour of Matthew, I want to end with a moment of beauty. In October 1998 my favourite musician, Tori Amos, was touring and started playing a B-side called “Merman.” Though the song wasn’t written about Matthew, she began to dedicate it to him during her live shows. She told Attitude Magazine in 1999 that “A lot of guys were asking me to sing it for him and it just kinda took a life on of its own.”

It’s not hard to see why:

go to bed
dream instead
and you will find him
he’s a merman to the knee
doesn’t need something you’re not willing to give
he’s a merman
doesn’t need your voice to cross his lands of ice…

…let it out
who could ever say you’re not simply wonderful
who could ever harm you
sleep now

pride week: sigur rós: viðrar vel til loftárása.

Sigur Rós makes music so beautiful it can convey pain. So exquisitely fine that it can carry the darkest feelings we know and make it understandable to everyone.

I really started obsessing about Sigur Rós about five years ago, and I’ve always loved this song, “viðrar vel til loftárása” (which translates into “Good Weather For Airstrikes”) from their second album, “Ágætis byrjun.” And even though the vid dropped in 2002, now that it’s Pride Week in Toronto it feels like the perfect time to take a second look at it.

There’s a certain kind of dehumanization that goes with homophobia. It makes you feel an incredibly specific sort of loss that’s impossible to describe to anyone that hasn’t felt it. Intellectually it can be understood. Morally it can be related to. Human compassion and decency knows that pain is pain and no human should ever intentionally make another human feel it. But it can only be known by those who have lived it.

I think it’s because the most beautiful human emotion – love – is accosted by the most evil human emotion – hatred. Many people are discriminated against for many reasons, but to have your sense of love attacked so caustically by people that don’t know you is a particular kind of poison. It’s like the purest form of our existence being attacked by our darkest. Being told that not only you, but also your universally common desire to share yourself with someone you love is wrong.

I don’t think anyone who hasn’t personally experienced it can truly know how it feels. But this video, in combination with the soul-stirring music of Sigur Rós, comes as close as I’ve ever seen. During the week when more than a million people will come to Toronto to celebrate everything that joins and unites us, this vid can give everyone insight into, and hopefully motivation to keep fighting against, the fear, bigotry, and ignorance that some people use to try to separate us and destroy the human right to love.

charity water + josh spear’s birthday.

My friend and one of the original kings of design/art blogging, Josh Spear, just turned 25. Instead of gifts, he turned his blog spotlight on one of my favourite causes: charity: water.

The movement to make fresh, clean water available around the world is near to my heart. When I was in South Africa recently I saw just what a vital tool a village well can be. Seeing people travel huge distances to carry clean water home (usually in large jugs balanced on their heads) was eye-catching, but more so was hearing about just how vital one well can be for hundreds of people. To see such gratitude over something we take completely for granted each time we turn on a tap completely changed the way I look at some of life’s fundamental needs.

The math isn’t hard to understand: A $20 donation can give one person clean water for 20 years. 1.8 billion people around the world don’t have access to safe water. That’s 1 in 6 human beings on the planet. For Josh’s birthday, he’s gunning to raise $5000 to create a well that will deliver fresh water to 250 people for 20 years.

I donated. You can too, by clicking right here. Plus, this gives us another reason to watch charity: water’s excellent 2008 PSA supported by Jennifer Connelly:

matthew brown: gay = sin.

Harvey Milk said “more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, my friends, that is the true perversion.”

Amen.

Thanks to Matthew Brown for opening up some eyes (hopefully).

Vodpod videos no longer available.

holi + poras chaudhary.

Today I’ve made a major personal discovery and I’ve just added a new one to my life’s To Do List: go to India and experience Holi.

What went down? A while ago, I posted this incredible mystery pic. I’d usually never post a pic without knowing what it was or who took it, but the kick ass colours and mood were too much for me to ignore…

Thanks to a post at one of my absolute favourite blogs, COLOURlovers, and an email from Jessica at Thoughts Punctuated,  it turns out the picture was taken at what has to be the most chromatic, singularly beautiful religious celebration in the world: Holi, or the Festival of Colours. In early March, India and other countries with big Hindu populations usher in spring and represent the triumph of good over evil with what basically amounts to a national multi-coloured water fight in the street. People head out of their houses and cover each other in coloured paints, powders, waters, and dyes. It’s the literal, visual interpreatation of the colourful re-birth of spring come to life on people’s bodies. How rad is that?

I started doing some research and found a whole series of pics, including the mystery pic, on Desi Nuts and learned that the photographer of the mystery pic is Poras Chaudhary.  Here are some more of Chaudhary’s sensational pics of Holi:

 

 

 

We’ve got joy. We’ve got happy. We’ve got colours. We’ve got smiling, happy, joyous people running through the streets rubbing colours on each other. It’s a photographic dream. The pictures from Holi are some of the purest I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how I’ve lived without Holi in my life for so long. Each March I’ve been hiding little chocolate eggs, watching bunny rabbits, and then eating a ham. Meanwhile they’re tearing off their clothes, getting communally hosed down by a gigantic orange-dyed fire hose, and rubbing paint all over each other. I have proof – check this shit out:

Even worse, all the eggs I’ve been hiding are pastel. PASTEL! Pastels are the second place of colours. The almost-colours. The kissing your sister of colours. The one number off winning the jackpot of colours. Yes, pastels are the blue balls of colours. So close, and yet no chromatic climax.

The colours at Holi are life itself: acidic, clashing, screaming, yearning, vibrant. These are colours that say we are celebrating some serious stuff: Life, Goodness, Joy. Pastels celebrate the increased seasonal sales of Cadbury Mini-Eggs.

I’m just going to come right out and say it: Holi kicks Easter’s ass.

For more specific details about Holi and its rituals, head to this other COLOURlovers article by Colette Bennett. Also here are some more pics, pulled from an article on Holi at Boston.com:

 

 

 

off to south africa…

Howzit. Tomorrow I’m heading off to South Africa. I’m not sure what the internet connection (if any) will be like in the rural area where I’ll be, but while I’m there I’m going to try and update on my trip-blog, Small Great Love.

I’ll be back posting to shape+colour on April 28th.

small great love.

Hey everybody. Some of you have noticed the new tab at the top of the blog, but today I’m officially kicking off a side project: Small Great Love.

Next week I’ll be going to South Africa, with 9 other people from Virgin companies around the world, on a “Wake Up Trip” created by Virgin Unite – Virgin’s global charity. We’ll be heading to Newington – a village about 6 hours drive northeast of Johannesburg – where we’ll spend a week building a crèche (the South African term that’s similar to “kindergarten”) for the local families. Their current crèche is run down and, even worse, the 5 and 6-year old kids are forced to cross an active railroad track to get to it. We’re going to not only be building on the safe side of the tracks, but we’re also going totally environmentally friendly: VOC-free paint, recycled materials, eco-friendly learning toys, a play set made from recycled tires, a vegetable garden, rain-water collectors, and way more.

Starting today, I’ll be chronicling the trip on Small Great Love. The name arose from a quote by Mother Teresa, that “we can do no great things, only small things with great love.” This idea means a lot to me; it speaks to the power we all have to do small things that are unspeakably meaningful. If we look at the world as a whole, our problems easily seem insurmountable. But with acts of small great love any person, any where, can make a difference in the life of someone else. To me, that’s such a beautiful, life-affirming thing.

If you’re into it, please check out Small Great Love. Follow it so that I can show you the trip. And if you want, you can also donate online to the crèche directly through Virgin Unite. The more cash we can raise, the more support we can give the kids at the school. Thanks y’all.

myself + appendicitis = thoughts of terry fox.

Sorry for not posting last week, but I have a decent excuse. 8 days ago pains in my abdomen led me to an emergency room, where I found out I had acute appendicitis and the next day my traitorous appendix was removed. It’s odd when your own organs decide to mutiny. So now I’m pretty much free of all my unnecessary biological parts: tonsils, gone; wisdom teeth, gone; appendix, gone. It’s interesting the way we’re evolving and shedding all these vestigial pieces of ourselves, genetic hold-overs from when we ate bark or had tails. After all… what did you think your tailbone originally was for anyway?

The ironic part was that, only hours before the pain started, I’d been reading “Terry”, Douglas Coupland’s exquisite photo-biography of Canadian cancer crusader and all around hero Terry Fox. The beginning of the book deals with his diagnosis of osteosarcoma, the resulting amputation of his leg, and his time enduring chemotherapy. I’m not comparing appendicitis to cancer in any way, but I’d been thinking, as I read, about how long it had been since I’d been in a hospital, how scary it must be, how lucky I was to have been healthy for so long (in retrospect, I was basically daring the universe to smite  me with something…) Twelve hours later I was in a hospital myself. Then they gave me morphine, and I didn’t give a fuck about much after that. The next time something hurts, I highly recommend intravenous morphine. 

 

If you’re not familiar, Terry Fox is an icon and an intrinsic part of being Canadian. His name is spoken in hallowed tones: I’ve seen people grown instantly quiet and still and almost break into tears at the mere mention of his name. That’s how deeply ingrained in our national conciousness is the idea of Terry Fox.

He’s the quintessential Canadian superhero: humble, idealist, innocent, extraordinary. Boasting is completely un-Canadian, and Terry was a model of pride and modesty. A trail-blazer, he did unbelievable things, but didn’t seem to think himself deserving of any more praise than anyone else. He turned down every corporate endorsement, including a major one from McDonald’s, in an effort to keep all attention on his purpose. Any money given to him was to be donated to his cause, no advertisements or branded-strings attached. His aim was pure. His legacy was to be left in his actions, not in an image he was trying to create. Like a prism, plain and unassuming cradled in your hand, never hinting at its inherent glory. But when held up to the light by another, it bursts into a constellation of rainbows. Terry was that prism, and his modesty and unifying determination led the people of Canada to hold him up to the light. 

After losing his leg, Terry Fox trained for 18 months before he began his Marathon Of Hope. To achieve his goal of raising $1 for every Canadian ($24.17 million to match the population in 1980), he was going to run 8000 kilometres (5000 miles) across Canada. Simple. He would run a marathon – 42 kilometres (26 miles) – every single day, from one end of the second largest country in the world to the other… with one artificial leg. Nothing even close to it had ever been attempted before. 

He began on April 12, 1980 and in the months that followed wrote one of the greatest stories the world had ever seen. 143 days later, after running 5,374 km (3,339 miles) he was forced to stop due to pains in his chest. His cancer had returned, and Terry flew home to resume treatment. This is where everyone else kept running when Terry could not. A nation-wide televised fundraiser, watched by Terry from his hospital bed, raised more than $10 million dollars in one weekend. By February 1981, Terry realized his dream as the Marathon of Hope passed the $24,170,000 dollar mark. A dollar for every man, woman, and child. That June, one month before his 23rd birthday, Terry Fox passed away. 

That September, the first ever Terry Fox Run was held. In Terry’s honour, people raised money to compete in a non-competitive run. This was the blueprint, the genesis, for the countless numbers of walks and runs held by almost every medial fundraising organization in North America. Like most things he took on, Terry did it first. 

Today, the Terry Fox Run has raised more than $400 million dollars, and more than 2.5 million people have participated in the run in 53 countries around the world. The cancer that claimed Terry in 1981 then had less than a 50% survival rate. Today more than 70% of people diagnoses with osteosarcoma survive.

I think Terry would like that. 

the voting booth: this is democracy.

Tonight, either way, history will be made in the United States. If one of the most racially-divided countries in the world can elect it’s first African-American President, then it proves that things really can change. If they choose to remain where they are, despite the pleas and hopes and proddings, then it proves that perhaps they’re incapable of change. And that it’s time for the world to move on.

We’re waiting, America. Choose wisely.

Thanks The Denver Egotist

causecast + harvey milk: got hope?

I put up a lot of posts about human rights around the world and hope that maybe we can all open our hearts up a bit more to the realities of people who fight for freedom and equality around the world. Right now, though, I’m terrified at how human rights are being attacked right here in North America.

California, a state of more than 35 million people, larger than the population of Canada, is about to vote on Proposition 8 – a government act to legally deny gay people the right to marriage, including the family, tax, legislative, and judicial rights that go with it.

Created by Causecast, this amazing video reminds us of a famous speech given by an outstanding human being, Californian, gay rights activist, and the first openly-gay person elected to public office in the U.S. –  Harvey Milk. Please send it to people you know. Especially if they live in California.

Visit No On Prop 8. If you live in California, vote no on Prop 8.

And know that if we, as citizens of democracies, allow our governments to legislate homosexuals as second class citizens, it diminishes us all. Love is love. Human rights are human rights. And nobody has the right to take away anyone’s right to hope.

Via Towleroad