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When ‘politics’ are personal, speaking up takes courage

When ‘politics’ are personal, speaking up takes courage

Matthew Pizzuti

Friends tell me I’m a broken record, especially since becoming Junior Editor at Out Front Colorado last month: “OFC is for everyone.” Women and men, old and young, transgender people, people of color, lesbian and gay. We need to hear everyone.

I wasn’t born with this concern. It was a journey.

It starts in 2002 – I’m a gangly 17-year-old senior at a large high school in the suburbs. I’m sitting with another student and a school counselor in her office. We’re planning a new school club: a gay-straight alliance.

Just three months after I came out to my family and friends, I was facing surprisingly-personal insults from peers, rejection and sometimes threats. I swallowed it down, coping with the only tool I
knew – the safe distance of political language.

“The Gay-Straight Alliance isn’t about whether I’m gay or you’re gay,” I kept saying, as if being gay made me an untrustworthy witness to homophobia. “This is about the right to be tolerated.”

The other student in the room was black, and said something I remember poignantly.

“At this school it’s harder for me to be black than a lesbian,” she said. “If somebody has a problem with gay people I don’t tell them, but they still know I’m black. I get more shit because of that.”

I wish I could say the suggestion blew my mind; instead it skipped off and got lost.

I wrinkled my nose. “How is that possible? You’d get written-up for saying something racist, but people say ‘faggot’ every day.”

She didn’t argue – saying only it was something she needed us to know.

Fast-forward six years, to another moment, in summer 2008. My first job out of college is standing in public places with a clipboard, registering voters. On this particular day I’m working with a straight guy in his mid-20s, several inches taller than me and very masculine. As are most of my coworkers, he is black.

We’re outside a grocery store entrance, in, of all places, Denver’s Capitol Hill. When a wave of people approaches the store – often middle-aged women, white college kids, gay men, hipsters, professionals – we’re eager. “Can I help you register to vote today?” we call out. They line up in front of me in twos and threes, thanking me for my youthful political idealism. I tuck the pen into my pursed lips, fumbling to pull extra forms off the clipboard to hand out.

I glance at my coworker. He’s standing alone, awkwardly, at the other side of the store entrance, his clipboard dangling in hand over his thigh. He looks lost.

I want to mouth, I’m sorry. Instead I turn back to the folks; “you put your driver’s license number right there.”

That situation happened many times that season – people would line up behind me, avoiding my black coworkers and especially him, who in our five-person team is the only black male. For a long time he didn’t talk about it, and he even avoided topics that might lead there: when our team gathered in the car at the end of each day to tally our contacts, he’d be reluctant to offer his own number. Racism was the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

It took months for us to build the trust and friendship to talk openly about something I’d been previously oblivious to – the stares, racially-charged offhand comments, and most of all the avoidance my black coworkers would get from strangers. Ironically, many of these strangers were voicing eagerness to vote for Barack Obama.

It took about as long to talk openly about those things as it took me to tell my coworkers I’m gay, to confess I’m not just politically interested in LGBT rights but personally concerned. In honesty, I’d clung to the stereotype of black people as religious and homophobic, but when it came roaring out they embraced me with more restraint and understanding than any group of friends I’ve had. With time I was able to bring up with them experiences that had humiliated me so much I’d blush to recount them to anyone else.

Why is that all so hard? Why do we have to “build trust” to be honest about realities that are, for us, just plain truth? I imagine it’s because we don’t want to disclose something deeply personal – the sense of rejection and “shit we get” from the world – only to meet a wrinkled nose or a skeptical response like how is that possible?

So instead we distance ourselves from reality – cloaking our experiences in political language, anger or even silence. We swallow it. To speak truthfully, to admit we are not “above it” but human and personally affected by prejudice, takes courage.

Thank God for courage – and for those with an abundance of it. Some are so courageous they’ll trust us before we’ve earned it, or even courageous enough to put it on the record in print. We’ve all been that wrinkled nose and sometimes worse, and we don’t change until someone is courageous enough step forward and blow our minds.

That’s a courage I hope we can celebrate at Out Front Colorado: the courage to speak and to help others speak, and to take the risk of telling the world what we need the world to know.

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