Todd Clayton

I started working at Starbucks three weeks after I graduated from college.

We cannot be timid about calling this what it was: a terrorist act of racially-motivated hate, perpetrated by a 21-year-old man who penned his white supremacist manifesto 150 years after the abolition of slavery.

Someone grabbed my arm while I was ordering a beer and told me I was just her friend’s type, and would I come meet him?

Today I present you, in Seussian verse/ A list, comprehensive–no lies interspersed.

Too many religious communities, the one in which I grew up included, prize–more than service to and advocacy for the oppressed–pre-marital virginity. To “lose your virginity” before your wedding day is to relegate yourself to the margins of the congregation–shame and self-loathing your near-constant companions.

Trans* voices are conspicuously absent, and too many uninformed and insensitive lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer persons are doing harm to the trans* community while simultaneously purporting to speak for them.

Mainstream gay culture privileges the white narrative, and it does so at the expense of its own legitimacy.

New York is Thai take-out, long nights in the library, and drinks in Greenwich. It’s Emily, Matt, Heather, and Toni.

Like pulling up a weed from the flower, token victories, while undoubtedly important, can cloud our vision and prevent us from fighting against the root of social systems that make such victories necessary in the first place.

“When I pray,” he says, “I am always asking for love. And if it is a guy, then so be it.”

And then Brandon Flowers comes on while you’re standing in H&M — the song he sent you months ago — and, like an army of guerrilla warriors hell bent on foiling your resolve, the missing invades your consciousness, secures its flag in your otherwise preoccupied mind, and holds you hostage.

Equally frustrating and difficult to stomach, however, is the horrendous portrait of the Christian tradition that Worley has painted with his bile and hate-filled rhetoric. He has spoken authoritatively and with dangerous certainty for what is an infinitely diverse community, one in which his hostile, conservative, antiquated voice is becoming a minority.