ANTEBELLUM BLOG: SPEECH

Showing posts with label SPEECH. Show all posts

7/17/18

6/10/18

GAY POWER- CIRCA 1973

GAY POWER- CIRCA 1973-

On June 28th, 1969, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera led the Stonewall riots, which were the catapult for the contemporary LGBT rights movement.

Four years later, Sylvia and Marsha were pushed out of the movement and had to fight for the right to have space in Gay Pride parades. Sylvia fought her way on stage at the 1973 Gay Pride march in NYC to deliver a speech that denounces the liberal white gay rights "revolution" and demanded and ACTUAL revolution, one in which QTPOC, specifically, Trans women of color, were centered.
I think of this today, and anytime we talk about Pride

™️: how far have we really come when Queer and/or Trans People of Color still have to fight to be heard in greater LGBT spaces?

*********************************************************

The upload deleted the captions so here's the transcript:

[crowd noise: booing and yelling]

Sylvia: Yall better quiet down!
I've been trying to get up here ALL day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail! that write me every motherfuckin week and ask for your help. and you all don't do a goddamn thing for them. Have you ever been beaten up? And raped? and jailed?
Now think about it.
They've been beaten up and raped
And so they have to spend much of their money in jail to get their self home and try to get their sex change. The women have tried to fight for their sex changes, or to become women, of the women's liberation.
And they write S.T.A.R., not the women's group.
They do not write women.
They do not write men.
They write to S.T.A.R., because we're trying to do something for them.
I have been to jail!
I have been r*ped!
And beaten. Many times!
By men!
Heterosexual men, that do not belong in the homosexual shelter.
But: do you do anything for them?
No! You all tell me to go and hide my tail between my legs.

I will not no longer put up with this shit.

I have been beaten, I have had my nose broken,
I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job,
I have lost my apartment,
for gay liberation.

And you all treat me this way??
What the fuck's wrong with you all??

Think about that!

[crowd noise: applause]

I do not believe in a revolution, but you all do.
I believe in the gay...power.
I believe in us getting our rights
or else I would not be out there fighting for our rights.

That's all I wanted to say to you all people.

If you all want to know about the people that are in jail, and do not forget Bambi L'Amour, Andora Marks, Kenny Messner, and other gay people are in jail, come and see the people at S.T.A.R. house on 12th street on 640 E. 12th Street, between B and C, Apartment 14. The people there are trying to do something, for ALL of us, and not men and women that belong to a white middle class white club!

And that's what you all belong to!
REVOLUTION NOWWWWW!!
Gimme a G! [crowd: G!]
Gimme an A! [crowd: A!]
Gimme a Y! [crowd: Y!]
Gimme a P! [crowd: P!]
Gimme a O! [crowd: O!]
Gimme a W! [crowd: W!]
Gimme a E! [crowd: E!]
Gimme a R! [crowd: R!]
Gay... [voice cracks] [more quietly] Gay power.
[crowd noise: applause]
Sylvia: Louder GAY POWER!!
[crowd noise: whistling]

6/3/18

TERRY CREWS TELLS IT LIKE IT IS- THE LEGACY OF TOXIC MASCULINITY

Actor, artist & activist Terry Crews

accepts the Voice of Courage Award at Safe Horizon's 2018 Champion Awards.

3/26/18

EMMA GONZALEZ MAKES HISTORY

EMMA GONZALEZ

born c. 2000)

is an American activist and advocate for gun control. As a high school senior she survived the February 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida,

and in response co-founded the gun-control advocacy group Never Again MSD.

González first drew national attention after a speech she gave at a rally against gun violence went viral, famously proclaiming "We call B.S." on the lack of action by politicians funded by the NRA. Subsequently, González continued to be an outspoken activist on gun control, making high profile media appearances and helping organize the March for Our Lives, which became the largest student protest in American history. Speaking at the demonstration, González led a moment of silence for the victims of the massacre, standing on stage for six minutes and 20 seconds, which she observed was the length of the shooting spree.

González was attacked for her Fort Lauderdale speech by many from the political right wing of American politics and press. She has also faced derogatory comments made by internet trollsabout her sexual orientation, short hair, and skin color. She was verbally attacked by Leslie Gibson, Republican candidate running unopposed for the Maine legislature and lifetime NRA member, who referred to her as a "skinhead lesbian", whereupon 28-year-old Eryn Gilchrist filed papers to run against him, thus providing an opponent; Republican former state Senator Thomas Martin, Jr., who said that Gibson's remarks did not represent the Maine Republican Party, and that he planned to contact the survivors to commend their courage, also filed to run for the seat. A few days later, Gibson dropped out of the race.

Conspiracy theorists have falsely accused the students, including González, of being crisis actors. Benjamin Kelly, an aide to Florida state Representative Shawn Harrison, was fired after making such accusations. Donald Trump Jr. faced criticism for appearing to support the crisis actor accusations.

Following her highly publicized speech at the March for Our Lives, pro-gun activists doctored fake photos and video showing González ripping up a copy of the United States Constitution, spreading them widely on internet forums and social media. Snopes.com observed that the video was in fact a digitally manipulated Teen Vogue video of her tearing up shooting range targets.

González identifies as bisexual. According to Vogue, her buzz cut is not a reaction to the school shooting. "People asked me, 'Are you taking a feminist stand?' No, I wasn't. It's Florida. Hair is just an extra sweater I’m forced to wear," González recalled. "I even made a PowerPoint presentation to convince my parents to let me shave my head, and it worked."

1/7/18

POSSIBLY THE BEST ACCEPTANCE SPEECH IN GOLDEN GLOBE HISTORY-

OPRAH WINFREY GIVES A KNOCKOUT- ONE, TWO PUNCH OF AN ACCEPTANCE SPEECH @ THE 2017 GOLDEN GLOBES, AND I DON'T EVEN LIKE OPRAH!

11/28/17

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME WINS- GOTHAM AWARDS 2017

11/26/17

ANNIE PROUIX NATIONAL BOOK AWARD SPEECH

Although this award is for lifetime achievement, I didn’t start writing until I was 58, so if you’ve been thinking about it and putting it off, well…
I thank the National Book Award Foundation, the committees, and the judges for this medal. I was surprised when I learned of it and I’m grateful and honored to receive it and to be here tonight, and I thank my editor Nan Graham, for it is her medal too.

We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. This is a Kafkaesque time. The television sparkles with images of despicable political louts and sexual harassment reports. We cannot look away from the pictures of furious elements, hurricanes and fires, from the repetitive crowd murders by gunmen burning with rage. We are made more anxious by flickering threats of nuclear war. We observe social media’s manipulation of a credulous population, a population dividing into bitter tribal cultures. We are living through a massive shift from representative democracy to something called viral direct democracy, now cascading over us in a garbage-laden tsunami of raw data. Everything is situational, seesawing between gut-response “likes” or vicious confrontations. For some this is a heady time of brilliant technological innovation that is bringing us into an exciting new world. For others it is the opening of a savagely difficult book without a happy ending.

To me the most distressing circumstance of the new order is the accelerating destruction of the natural world and the dreadful belief that only the human species has the inalienable right to life and God-given permission to take anything it wants from nature, whether mountaintops, wetlands or oil. The ferocious business of stripping the earth of its flora and fauna, of drowning the land in pesticides again may have brought us to a place where no technology can save us. I personally have found an amelioration in becoming involved in citizen science projects. This is something everyone can do. Every state has marvelous projects of all kinds, from working with fish, with plants, with landscapes, with shore erosions, with water situations.

Yet somehow the old discredited values and longings persist. We still have tender feelings for such outmoded notions as truth, respect for others, personal honor, justice, equitable sharing. We still hope for a happy ending. We still believe that we can save ourselves and our damaged earth—an indescribably difficult task as we discover that the web of life is far more mysteriously complex than we thought and subtly entangled with factors that we cannot even recognize. But we keep on trying, because there’s nothing else to do.

The happy ending still beckons, and it is in hope of grasping it that we go on. The poet Wisława Szymborska caught the writer’s dilemma of choosing between hard realities and the longing for the happy ending. She called it “consolation.”*

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
but only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If he happened on something like that,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’s had enough with dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggle to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction,
with its micro-scales.

Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurried to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow tossed into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly in the last.

Thank you.

Annie Prouix

3/24/17

JOE KENNEDY III- SWEET AS PIE!

1/9/17

IT TAKES AN ACTRESS TO CALL IT OUT

Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.

Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.

But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places.
I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey.
Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn.
Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio.
Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy.
And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem.
Where are their birth certificates?
And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia.

Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian,
and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania.

So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.

But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing.
Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.

O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.

One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.

As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.

11/15/16

AFTERMATH: SIXTEEN WRITERS ON TRUMP’S AMERICA

"To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength? The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?

"These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.

"It may be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices in the name of white power and supremacy. Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause.

"The comfort of being 'naturally better than,' of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.

"So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.

"On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

"William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In 'Absalom, Absalom,' incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its 'whiteness' (once again), the family chooses murder."

- Toni Morrison