don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t care who you’re murdering.

okay this was originally a facebook comment on a friend’s post about a rally to repeal DADT but it turned into such a rant that i decided to publish it in my blog: (saffolicious.blogspot.com)

i am terrified of the repealing of DADT. i don’t want to be assimiliated into the fucking war machine. these are the same fuckers that bombed my mother when she was 10 and became a war refugee. i don’t want my queer sisters and brothers being sucked into the fucking death machine.

black people in the US fought long and hard for the right to serve in the military– and look what happened. the military is predominantly people of color being shipped off to kill or be killed by other oppressed people, mostly in the global south. i do NOT want my queer sisters and brothers being sucked into the same fucking war machine.

if DADT gets passed then that means homeless queer and trans youth– predominantly of color– who have run away or have been kicked out by their parents for being queer and have few other options are going to be sucked in and exploited by military recruiters. the fuckers that are organizing this repeal DADT shit don’t give a FUCK about how this is going to affect the most marginalized members of our community. that’s because this agenda is set by the most privilieged LGBT folks

HRC tells us that DADT is hurting the US military.. well FUCK why ruin a good thing? DADT is doing a better job hurting the US military-industrial death machine than any of our anti-war protests over the last 7 years. i don’t want them to allow queers in the military, i want them to ban straights from the military.

the non-profit elites like HRC that set the assimilationist agenda for our community, and the well-intentioned activists that eat that shit up, never consider how this affects the most oppressed queer folks. i don’t want to see queer youth getting sucked into the recruitment war machine. i don’t want to see them killed by IEDs. i don’t want to see them brainwashed and turned into killing machines, and then come home fucked up in the head and abusive. our community has enough problems already, thank you very much.

the fact is the people setting these agendas have their basic necessities met. they have food, they have shelter. most queer folks don’t. the military presents itself as a way out. it preys on poor peoples’ vulnerability. the fact that people are focusing on this shit, the fact that people are so psyched about fucking lady gaga talking about gays in the military, the fact that i see people i know and love as part of my community fucking pissing their pants over the possilibity of DADT being repealed, makes me so enraged and disgusted.

when i first came out as gay when i was 14 and i started to seek out gay community, i felt like i had to choose between my politics and my sexuality. leaving home and finding other folks who were QUEER AS FUCK (not gay, but QUEER), eventually coming out as trans, meeting radical queer communities, i realized that i could respect my gender and sexuality and also my politics which are so deeply tied with my mothers’ experiences as a war refugee at the hands of the west. to see the people who would claim to be my community– the “lgbt” folks– clamor to want to fill the role of the ones who bombed my mothers home, the ones who almost killed her and made her a war refugee, as they do to millions all over the world in neocolonial wars of occupation, makes me feel ashamed to call myself queer.

there are queer Iraqis too. what about their rights?