I AM

[maggy_97]

So, I read this the other day. It is floating around the internet for some time now and I searched for the source of it. Now I found it. I don't post it in it's entirety, I just pick out the sentences that are the most thought-provoking to me.



(Picture taken by me at the Berlin Pride Parade 2009)


I am the child that dreams of seeing my mum again. The courts won’t let me because she lives with another woman.

I am the boy who never finished high school, because I got called a fag every day.

I am the girl that was raped behind my school because some stranger wanted to teach me to be a “real woman”.

I am the girl who can't hang out with girls because they assume that if I'm nice to them I have a crush on them.

I am the teenager who doesn't tell my mother the truth in fear she'll tell my homophobic father.

I am not one of the lucky ones. I killed myself just weeks before graduating high school. It was simply too much to bear.

I am the boy whose friend committed suicide at 14 because he was harassed at school and called a fag. His friends wouldn't have cared about his sexuality. We loved him the way he was.

I am the girl kicked out of her home because I confided in my mother that I am a lesbian.

I am the gay teenager whose zealot parents yanked him out of public school and threw him into an academically inferior fundamentalist religious school in an attempt to un-gay him.

I am the foster child who wakes up with nightmares of being taken away from the two fathers who are the only loving family I have ever had. I wish they could adopt me.

I am the boy that always wanted a Barbie, but no one would let me have one.

I am the boy tied to a fence, beaten to a bloody pulp and left to die because two straight men wanted to “teach me a lesson”.

I am the sister who holds her gay brother tight through the painful, tear-filled nights.

I am the brother that gets called a fag just because my brother isn’t ashamed of who he is.

I am the Christian that can’t find a pastor to marry me to a woman in the eyes of God.

I am the prostitute working the streets because I can't find anybody who will hire a transsexual woman.

I am the person who never knows which bathroom I should use if I want to avoid getting the management called on me.

I am the mother who is not allowed to even visit the children I bore, nursed, and raised. The court says I am an unfit mother because I now live with another woman.

I am the domestic-violence survivor who found the support system grow suddenly cold and distant when they found out my abusive partner is also a woman.

I am the domestic-violence survivor who has no support system to turn to because I am male.

We are the couple who had the realtor hang up on us when she found out we wanted to rent a one-bedroom for two men.

I am the bisexual who does not tell her parents for fear of being shunned for what I am.

I am the father who has never hugged his son because I grew up afraid to show affection to other men.

I am the mother that sees my son come home from school every day in tears because the other kids call him a girl.

I am the openly lesbian mother who helplessly watched all 3 of her daughters get ridiculed for having lesbian mothers, whose friends were never allowed to sleep over, who were never invited for sleepovers with those brave enough to be their friends.

I am the home-economics teacher who always wanted to teach gym until someone told me that only lesbians do that.

I am the guy down the street that can’t get a disability pension because my partner is a man.

I am the man who stopped attending church, not because I don’t believe, but because they closed their doors to my kind.

I am the Youth Worker that sees hundreds of kids thrown out of home because they were honest with their families.

I am the man that is afraid of losing his job, for expressing his true identity.

I am the celebrity that wishes I could tell the world who I am, but I'm too scared.

I am the footballer scared to come out because I might lose my contract.

I am the woman that wants to join the army, but my family wont let me because I would look like a dyke.

I am the person ashamed to tell my own friends I’m a lesbian, because they constantly make fun of them.

I am the woman who learned the true meaning of love and commitment from a couple together for more than 40 years I called them both Uncle.

I am the man who lost his family, because my mother's devotion to her religion was stronger than her maternal love for her son.

I am a woman who lost her family, because they simply couldn't accept, that I am bisexual and I have as the same rights to be happy as everyone has.

I am a woman who lost her virginity because her best friends decided for her that she had to be with a man before she can decide she's gay, so they drugged her one night and set her up with two guys. Her best friends set up a rape because they couldn't accept her homosexuality.

I am the woman who married a man because that's what I was "supposed to do" even though I really wanted to marry a woman.

I am the woman who wants nothing more than to marry the woman of her dreams because deep down inside, I have always wanted a wife.

I am the girl frustrated because I want see my best friend get married one day to the man he loves.

I am the bisexual who is told by both straights and gays that I need to get off the fence and make up my mind.

I am the man confined to a wheelchair, unable to walk or even feed myself, because of the injuries I suffered at the hands of a group of homophobes.

I am the person who has to hide what this world needs most: love.

I am the gay man whose parents disowned me for being gay & then refused to come to my funeral when I died of AIDS.

I am the woman who died when the paramedics stopped treating me because they found out I didn't have a female body.

I am the man who died alone in the hospital because they would not let my partner of twenty-seven years into the room.

Source: http://wiki.youth-guard.org/index.php?title=I_am