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

matt katsolis: dia de luz (day of light).

In Managua, Nicaragua, 1500 people live their lives inside a huge landfill called “La Chureca” (The Scavenging Place). Adults and children sift through piles of flaming trash looking for anything they can eat, fix, or recycle.

In “Dia De Luz” (Day Of Light), director Matt Katsolis and musician Braddigan, working with non-profit anti-poverty group Love, Light, & Melody, chronicle one full day in La Chureca and show us how hope can grow in the darkest of places.

This film is important for two big reasons: we need to acknowledge that places like this exist so we can hopefully work to stop it, and we need to absorb that if these people, in a place so devoid, can celebrate and find joy in their lives then the rest of us have no reason to not do the same.

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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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amnesty international: defy them.

I honestly believe that actively supporting Amnesty International is one of the most important things we can do to encourage global equality and the enforcement of human rights.

“Torturers, traffickers, rapists, executioners, they all share one hope: that you DON’T WATCH THIS FILM, and you DON’T JOIN AMNESTY”

private hand: the last request.

George Bernard Shaw said “It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel each other out, but similars that breed their own kind.”

Last week I found an online list, originally published by the the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, listing the final meal requests of every person executed in Texas since 1982. It included some details, ostensibly overlooked by whomever typed the list, that I found astonishing. Scraps of insight, glossed over by the bureaucracy compiling them, that brought the reality of the night before a pre-described death into a sudden and inescapable emotional relief. A due date of mortality.

The original list was pulled down after complaints that it was tasteless, but I was lucky enough to find this video, created by facts from the same list, by graphic designer Mike Stanfill (a.k.a. Private Hand).

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It’s not the answers that astound me as much as the fact that the question is asked. Yet, in the study of its meaning, everything I read was continually pulled back to the act of the criminal. Their humanity overshadowed completely by their actions, and their condemnation too complete and final to allow for their final free choice to be studied with an open heart.

I understand the abhorrence of their crimes. But I can’t escape imagining how it would feel for this person, removed of all choice over their own destiny and about to have the ultimate decision, their own death, made for them, to in the end be given control over one last thing: their last meal.

We could assume that for the ones who put some effort into it that they’ve chosen their greatest pleasure. Imagining my choices, each one is tied to memory. The food is a physical manifestation of a psychological experience. It’s no coincidence that so many of them pick homefood.

Many go the stereotypical route and go all out. But some refuse it. And some others are so intriguing as to be undeniably tied to something within these condemned people that we’ll never know: Cool Whip and Cherries. An apple. A jar of pickles. A chocolate birthday cake with “2/23/90” written on top. These are not last acts of gluttony, a drive to be ridiculous in the face of all their unbelievable circumstances. These are sense memories. Opening the door to the past through the edible and olfactory. A final reaching for a shard, a sliver, of something they can’t put their hands on anymore.

But it was the entry for Delbert Teague Jr. where something inside me broke. In a sentence so unassuming and literal that it almost belied the meaning within. “To please his mother, he ate a cheeseburger.” And so I realized…his mother was there. Her son was about to be murdered by her government. And the only thing she could do, in the great nurturing act taken on by every mother, is to get her son to eat. Despite the fact he wouldn’t live long enough to digest it.

Besides being the only country in the Western World to still execute it’s own citizens, the United States is even pretty murderous in comparison with some of the most violent non-democracies in the world. In 2006, 90% of all known executions in the world were committed in just five countries: China, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and the United States.

Clearly, the U.S. isn’t exactly keeping esteemed company on the human rights front.

Not many of us will know, so chronically and succinctly or with such slow, impending certainty, the exact moment of our deaths. And very few of us will ever experience a moment where we know that we are about to make our very last decision. A lifetime distilled into one last desire. Food as both memory and epitaph. I wonder what these people feel when they order. I wonder even more what they feel when they’ve finished, and realize that truly there’s only one thing left for them to do.

mato atom: headache.

Smart contribution to an amazing must-see site, Designers Against Human Rights Abuse (DAHRA) by Mato Atom.

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Via Motionographer

dickson chow + vinh chung: the veiled commodity.

The world feels full of so much hope right now, and with the inauguration of Barack Obama a historic step has been made. People have realized that true change can be realized in their very own lifetime, and that’s a truly transcendent thing.

It’s tempting right now to begin to think that all of our debts have been repaid. That part of the shadow of slavery has been lit away by the election of America’s first African-American President. And perhaps some of it has. But “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it”… and that’s precisely what’s happening. Slavery exists around the world at this very moment – sexual slaves, migrant workers, child soldiers. At this very moment the exact abominations we might like to think we’re finally rectifying are happening over and over again. Sometimes in our own backyard.

Directors Dickson Chow and Vinh Chung know that awareness needs to be spread. Watch this film. To do something, visit Stop The Traffik.

Via Feed.

humanitarian lion.

Writers, designers, and artists excel at creating ideas that can change the way people think. With the power of funding behind them, it makes complete sense that creatives could develop ideas that will literally change the world. 2009 is the year we need to begin to make the Humanitarian Lion a reality.

The Cannes Lions are the most coveted advertising award in the world: the Ad Oscars. If we could take some of the energy and cash that goes into winning an award and use it, as this video suggests, to do some good the possibilities are boundless.

No matter what industry you work in, you have the power to support a movement like this. Visit Humanitarion Lion , watch this video and support the power of the idea.

amnesty + mother: you are powerful.

The great tragedy whenever human rights are violated is not simply that it’s happened, but that so many well-meaning people around the world believe that there’s nothing they can do to stop it. Despite how it sometimes may seem, there is more good in the world than evil.

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Amnesty International teamed up with renowned agency Mother London to create “You Are Powerful.” Watch it and believe it, because there are people all around the world who need us to wield this power and protect their human rights.

Send this video to everyone you know. Visit Protect The Human. Fight for Human Rights.

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11.11.11 + andreas hasle: workers are not tools.

Belgian advocacy group 11.11.11 teamed up with BBDO Brussels and Caviar Content’s Andreas Hasle to create this punch-in-the-gut spot. For those of us who don’t use our hands for much more than typing or occasionally turning on an iPod, It would do us some good to take a moment and think of the physical work we rely on other people to do for us every day and make sure we respect them for it.