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.

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).

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yun suh: city of borders.

Creating buzz at the recent Hot Docs Festival here in Toronto, Yun Suh’s “City Of Borders” looks at a group of people deuling with not one discriminatory social divide, but two. Focusing on the people (some of whom have risked their lives to cross illegally through the wall between Israel and Palestine) who meet at Shushan, Jeruslaem’s only gay bar, to commiserate and cope with not only the deeply ingrained struggle between Jews and Arabs, but also between homosexuals and everyone else. In a strained country, in one of the most volatile areas in the world, these men and women deal daily not only with the political and religious struggles of their people but also with being gay. It’s complexity squared. Don’t even get me started on the Jewish/Arab lesbian couple. They’ve got it rough.

Shot in an extremely open, simple, no holds barred style, “City Of Borders” reveals the inner lives of people who’s mere acknowledged existence brings them scrutiny and, very possibly, harm. Sure, North America has it’s struggles with equality, but I don’t remember ever hearing anyone talk about having to secretly crawl through a barbed-wired filled government-sanctioned wall just so they could have a few drinks and possibly get some. Yun Suh has given us the gift of being able to open ourselves up to the struggles of other who are like us in so many ways and remember just how good we’ve got it.

Via Goliblogski