ages names
44 44 58 37 49 47 50 40
Selim Esen
Abdulbasir Faizi
Majeed Kayhan
Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam
Andrew Kinsman
Dean Lisowick
Soroush Mahmudi
Skandaraj Navaratnam
all men
old enough
adults
not teen-age runaways
not ‘I’ll live forever’ twenty somethings
men
one commentator said
‘who should know better’
all men
all with beards
all found dead
two white
6 missed
2 not missed until found dead
1 unnamed even when found dead
7 found online
all looking for love
that isn’t clear
all looking for sex
that isn’t clear
some seeking asylum
acceptance
finding limits pushed
but not expecting
to be pushed beyond limit
most so fearful
of discovery
they took what they could get
without … I want to say complaint
but no one knows
no one can know
what they were looking for
what they expected
we know what they got
death
a talking head on TV said
‘they learned their lesson’
what lesson
that homosexual men
are all sadistic murderous predators
a cliche
once more proved valid
or
dating apps aren’t to be trusted
that searching for sex
deserves to be punished with death
that they got what they deserved
they deserve better
than some talking head on TV
shifting blame
from perpetrator
to the dead
I performed this piece as part of my Shanty Tramp set on Jan 26, 2020. I placed it in the middle of the set along with another of the Terra Cotta poems. All of them deal with the serial killer of gay men here in Toronto in 2017/18. Like some of pieces it deals more with the media coverage as the cases unfolded. It also echoes the naming of names that I have heard/read in relation to the massacre of trans people. This list isn’t as long. It also echoes the use of names & ages in the news. Ages are used when they aren’t relevant to the report – ‘an age gender died in a fire.’
Here I separated the ages from the names of the known victims. I have not memorized or perfected their pronunciation for performance – I never want them to come easily off my tongue the way they did with news announcers. I don’t even connect the names with the statistics around race etc. I don’t venture a statistic about their sexuality.
The commentator quotes are real. I found myself watching some of the coverage, even things on 2020 & ‘news’ shows of that ilk. I also read something into the subtext of remarks made by various talking heads – essentially these men got what they deserved for being gay – the same logic behind spousal abuse – if she had been more compliant etc. The shifting of guilt from the perpetrator to the victim.
Some of the subtext was that these weren’t good queers like the ones who got legally married & adopted children in heteronormative acceptability. The shaming of sexuality – no, it is broader than that – the shaming of enjoying a variety of sex partners (regardless of genders) played a bit part in the media coverage. Only married homos or celebrate homos are good – the rest get what they deserve & this serial killer gave them justification for this lesson.
My lesson: media will use any excuse to be condescending & self-righteous.
Hey! Now you can give me $$$ to defray blog fees & buy coffee at Capturing Fire 2020 – sweet,eh? paypal.me/TOpoet
TOpoet 