This is about those suicides--so please don't read it, if it's going to make it harder for you to get through your day in one piece. In fact, if that's you, you should stop reading now, and maybe go have a look at the It Gets Better Project, instead (http://www.youtube.com/user/itgetsbetterproject)--or call the Trevor Project (www.trevorproject.org, or 1-866-4U-TREVOR)--or even get in touch with S. Bear Bergman, happy 36-y-o transman with a family (I'm not posting that info here, but you can find it where he did, on Twitter).

It's just: these are things I have difficulty voicing publicly, without getting the are-you-saying-white-gay-cis-men-and-boys-killing-themselves-isn't-horrible death stare. And because it needs saying: of course, it's horrible.

It's just that it's also horrible when women and trans people and people of color are murdered, or harassed into suicide--who's talking about Aiyisha Hassan? Victoria White? It's that I spent two hours at Wichita's Coming Out Day--the two hours before the candle-light vigil, and then I left, because I was thinking too hard about the closeted friend, smart, cynical, transmasculine, of color, an advocate for everyone except herself, who shot herself less than a year ago; who I miss endlessly, daily; who would never have qualified for this kind of media coverage. Who, in fact, didn't.

It's that any memorial where we name our dead leaves out the countless unnamed ones who were too scared, or young, or inarticulate to name themselves, or whose parents covered it up, or whose deaths were misconstrued as accidents, or who were simply not white-cis-affluent-attractive-able-bodied-educated enough to merit a mention.

I know that we can't do nothing but mourn, and I know that mourning is, itself, not especially conducive to action, and inaction doesn't promote social change, and yet--I can't help wondering whether our endless focus on Pride, our gay-is-good and our rainbow flags aren't some times, in some ways pathological. We are wounded--personally and communally. We are murdered and driven to self-harm and self-murder; we are beaten and raped and thrown out of our families and fired, or never hired; we are hungry, unemployed, homeless, addicts; and sometimes we're as much oppressors as oppressed, acting out our own anguish on anyone we can reach. Am I forcing the point here? I don't doubt that we need all the authentic joy, all the real connection and celebration we can muster. But increasingly, especially over the last weeks, it feels to me like we're a community in deep, deep denial.

It feels to me like enough of us have got it good enough, now, that we can pretend nothing's really wrong--which we want to, right, because it's hard for people to acknowledge that they've harmed others, and we don't want to be difficult; we want to be easy. We want to be Good Gays, really just like you, except for where we put our penises at night, but we won't talk about that. Good Gays don't go there.

It's that I'm tired of hearing the voices of those doing the bullying bluster about how no one ever killed himself because of high school bullying; These Kids all had other issues and that's why they killed themselves--and that I'm horrified by the idea of children and young adults so endlessly guilty and angry over the damage they've caused, when adults around them should have intervened--not after the fact, when the best we can manage is imprisonment or expulsion on the one hand, and a candlelit vigil and 'round the clock coverage on the other. We can do better. As a society, we must do better.

It's that I mentor a handful of trans high school students. We do coffee every week or two or three; I pass around all the best trans books; we talk about bathrooms and binding and colleges with good residence hall policies. They have my phone number and my Facebook account; they can text or call or email. They've all got at least one parent who puts up with this.

They've got other parents who aren't okay with any of it--and for parents read, siblings, friends, teachers. They have eight hours a day, five days a week, in Bible-belt public schools. And I lie awake at night, wondering if I can possibly give them enough of what they need to survive this. And then wondering about the trans kids who don't have that one parent, or me, or internet access, or a PFLAG support group, by way of which to have found someone who's the same kind of different as they are.

We should be rioting in the streets. We should be handcuffed to the tables of school board meetings; we should be dying-in in front of local high schools and universities.

Most of my friends--queer or otherwise--don't even vote.