Queer Youth Are Five Times More Likely to Die by Suicide by Andrea Gibson

means: You lived five times harder than you should have had to to still have a body when you graduated high school.

means: Hate worked five times harder to make your spirit its wishbone.

means: When your mother asked what was wrong, you were five times more likely to believe you'd lose her if you spoke the truth.

means: You were told five times more often you'd go to hell when you died.

means: Burning for eternity seemed five times more doable than another day in the school lunchroom.

means: You were five times more inclined to triple-padlock your diary.

means: You were five times more likely to stop writing your story down.

means: I write my heart out now. I graffiti billboards with the page of my diary the bullies used to start the rumors.

I tie that page to the end of a kite string and run a crooked line through the straightest mile of the Bible Belt.

That page is a protest sign. That page is a bandana washing the tear gas out of my lover's eyes.

Queer youth are five times more likely to die by suicide

means: I sneak into fascist sleepovers and sharpie my pronouns onto the faces of senators who voted to criminalize my kisses when I was nineteen.

I cut the hate out of my mail and papier-mâché Christmas ornaments for queer couples whose parents do not want to know their grandchildren.

I hack high school curriculums and delete every test that does not ask what the P in Marsha P. Johnson stands for.

I walk through graveyards with a chisel correcting the names of trans kids whose families said, No, when asked, Can you just let me live?

I pace the suburbs with spray paint, editing the welcome mats of homophobes until they all speak the truth: that they personally burned the roof over the heads of queer youth are five times more likely to die by suicide

means: There are many days I thirst for my own silence but walk through the desert screaming instead because I, like most of my queer friends, don't have a child —I have millions—from Nebraska to Chechnya,

to the Baptist church where I grew up. My pride in them is a parade I know won't keep all of them alive, but I keep cutting my diary into confetti to throw at their hopes

when they float by scared or furious or laughing or in love and desperate for the headline to say: Queer youth are five times more likely to:

offer to walk their younger siblings home from school. To notice the different accents of sparrows. To find an eyelash and spend twenty minutes trying to pick what to wish for.

Five times more likely to:

never outgrow blanket forts. To know there is a word for the scent in the air after it rains. To see lifelines look like telephone wires and call a friend who's having a bad day.

Five times more likely to:

adore the last man who walked on the moon just because he wrote his daughter's initials there. To know there is no universe in which they would not be proud of their own children.

Queer youth are five times more likely to:

see you how you dream of seeing yourself. To write something in your yearbook that will get you through the next decade. To spot a stranger crying and ask if there's anything they can do to help.

Five times more likely to: need us to do the same.

— You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson (Page 22)