My Attitude Awards 2024 Acceptance Speech: More Than a Question
Last year, I was honored to accept Attitude Magazine’s Music Award 2024. This is the speech I gave at the event which was frankly dazzling, overwhelming and which honored people much more deserving than me. Looking back, I said that night feels heavier today. The time for questions is over.
Thank you. Thank you for welcoming me and for giving me this award. It means more to me than I can can say to you being stood in a room where Elton John and Jessica fucking Gunning have stood. So thank you.
Maya Angelou used to say that when was going on stage she called on everyone, alive or dead, who has ever been kind to her and says come with me. I need you. We’re going to the stage.
Well, I tell you if all the people who had been kind to me and led here tonight were on this stage with me, it would collapse. But at the front of the crowd would be my grandfather, Charles Hansel. He lived, by many people’s standards, a little life. He was born in a coal camp on Kentucky, he married my grandmother who he met in bible college, he became a preacher and a professor at Union College. And like many ministers of his era he felt spiritually compelled to join the civil rights movement. And when his college job threatened him for speaking up publicly about what was then called “the negro question,” true to their word, they fired him for just that. He was photographed next to a black person simply for holding a sign that said “I Am A Man.”
Now many of us here know what it is like to treated as less than human. When I was a child, my schoolmates called me ‘it’ because I didn’t look like a boy or a girl. Looking back they knew something I didn’t yet have a word for. And many of us here tonight know what it is like to be spoken about as a “question.” The gay marriage question. The AIDS question. The trans question. The trans children question. My husband is a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union. I expect that many of you come families like his that survived or did not survive the Jewish question. And I wonder how many children are waiting for a meal or a drink of water while the world debates the so called Palestinian question. How many trans kids wait for life saving medicine while some bigot debates the question of trans kids.
So many of us here know what it means and have been wounded by being treated as a questions rather than humans-—wounded by family or shame or laws or violence. You have been debated on talk radio. You have been shunned at home. That wound binds us, but it remains remarkably and unstoppably surpassed by the joy I see here in a room so large and loud that it simply could not have existed a generation ago.
And so I know that even our wounds are not without gifts.
The gift of a wound is tenderness.
The gift of a wound is empathy.
Do not suffer that wound for nothing. Stay tender. Let your wound stay open. Fight for the ones who are dehumanised and turned into questions today.
Someone who needs you, a survivor, a queer elder, they may call upon you, may call upon the courage and dignity you showed during your little life. And when someone like that calls upon you, and brings you to their stage they will not need “questions.”
The world needs your courage
and it has no use for cowardice.
We are in a tenuous moment in history. I want to tell you that what comes next will be ahem- marvellous.
But the truth is I don’t know.
But I can tell you that if you are person who is a someone’s …question, who is a topic on talk radio, or a slur on the lips of anyone who would dehumanize you or do you harm…
Anyone that comes for you, anyone that would wound you…
Has to go through me first. So that’s where I’m starting.
