SMASH STREET BOYS BLOG

I am never comfortable without a shirt. People might see my scars.

Sometimes, our scars are who we are.

My guts were spattered all over the wall. I dropped the shotgun and screamed.

It’s harder to kill yourself than you think. The human will to live is awesome.

They call us survivors. Of whatever. I don’t want to talk about it.

How many suicidal kids have I dealt with over the years who have looked me in the eye and said: I do not want to talk about it.

Hundreds.

I’m sorry. But we have to talk about it.

I didn’t think I would ever have the courage to put the above photo here. Or anywhere. Ever. I try not to think about it. But it hurts, I still have the lead from the shotgun shell inside of me, and it often reminds me of one thing: the wall.

I do not know how I can ask the suicidal to talk about it if I can’t, and every word of this is very difficult to pound out.

I hate my body. I hate what I did to it.

Recovery was a breathtaking nightmare. But that is another story.

I work with boys with HIV. All of whom have done sex work.

I did sex work. My tricks always wanted to touch my scars.

Sometimes I even let them. The ones I wanted to love me.

In sex work, we say it’s all business, and it is. And it isn’t.

It’s intimate.

Touching my scars is more intimate than fucking me.

I can’t indulge my own hypocrisy unless I put the photograph here. I can’t ask anyone to talk about how badly they want to kill themselves unless I write this here.

I don’t want to sound like a broken record. But there are some boys I am dealing with (we make a lot of art) to whom this is a beginning.

I can’t say I know how you feel tonight. Because I don’t. All I can say is that I was there. All I can say is that I hear you when you tell me the darkness is eating you alive.

I understand it does that. I understand you do not want to be here. On this planet.

I want you to hear that suicide is harder than you think.

After my guts were splattered all over that wall, and some of them were hanging from me, I pushed them back in, and I ran up a flight of stairs to where the people were who were screaming. They had heard the gun. They knew. They stood at the top of the stairs. 

The people who had abused me.

I loved them. I still love them. I will always love them.

I have forgiven them.

I can’t tell you that you have to live.

I will tell you this: forgiveness is the hard part. It is way, way, way more difficult than shooting yourself.

It doesn’t mean I’m not mad.

I am so mad. You have no idea how mad I am. The memories of abuse do not go away.

But they do not have to control you. You can learn control yourself.

I have never met a sex worker who was not abused somehow, somewhere. And I have known many, many of them.

I have met a few who claim they were never abused, and are not being abused now.

I believe them when they say they are not being abused now.

But I do not believe they were never, ever abused.

It’s a personal failing. I have many failures. But I just do not believe them.

I have seen too many of them suddenly remember.

I have a very difficult time posting many of the videos that kids make in Show Me Your Life.

So many of those videos are guts on the wall.

I am told: it gets better.

It’s bullshit. It’s rhetoric. It’s PR propaganda designed by gay white men with advanced educations who very much want there to be light at the end of that tunnel.

It might not get better.

It might get worse.

Depends.

There are no guarantees.

To unlearn how to snake these legs of chains from around and around our grim existence. Our deaths deserve more than the superficiality of one more fucking slogan. Just get tested. AIDS-Free generation. When are we going to learn that when we discount what the reality is, when the enormity of it all has cut us in two somewhere just above the knees, we cannot dance the rites of passage, the labyrinth of corpses trails our insides like a path through the woods of razor blades. If we keep saying — it gets better — we can make it true even when the slogan itself is the glimmering of a lake of blood. I am often asked: what do I have to do to get your attention, Tim.

You have to stand in front of me. You have to grab me. Sometimes you have to shake me. Sometimes you have to make a very loud noise.

I will stop what I am doing.

All I will promise is that I will listen. I do not know your pain because no one does. It belongs to you.

If you want to work to live, I will try my best to be there for you.

You see: I am doing it again.

Allow me to erase the word T-R-Y.

Try hard. Try hard. Try hard. Try hard. Sometimes all the trying hard is what undoes us.

I will be there for you. Pound the table at breakfast and scream to be heard.

I will listen.

No more walls.

I am told that our scars, the scar tissue each of us possesses somewhere, and it’s in different places with different people, is tougher tissue than the surrounding tissue.

You have no idea how tough I am. There is nothing you can say that will shock me or hurt me. That would be on me.

We drag our slow length of scars along.

But we are the other tissue, too.

Exit wounds need tending. I cannot promise you so much as bandages or a place to sleep. A lot of it will be on you.

What I can do is help you put your guts back in. We will use our hands. We will make a lot of art. I will not be waiting at the top of the stairs. Frozen. Or too afraid to go down there. I will go down there to find you if I have to. I will be quick about it. Sometimes, the clock ticks very slowly. Sometimes, it ticks lightning fast. We can make it to the top of the stairs together.


I AM MORE THAN JUST INFECTED


THERE IS A LIGHT INSIDE MY SKIN


THAT IS MORE THAN JUST INFECTED


I AM GLIDING THROUGH THESE


OTHER LIVES ON FIRE AND THEY


ARE MORE THAN JUST THE LOUD


AND THE INFECTED, OH, WORMHOLES


THE SMOKE DRIFTS ALONG THE

PURPLE SHORES BECAUSE WE


HAVE TRAVELED PAST THE LIVING


AND THE DEAD AND TIME AND WE


ARE MORE THAN JUST THE QUICKLY MOVING


BY THROUGH TIME AND THE INFECTED



If you could only see the beast you’ve made of me

I held it in but now it seems you’ve set it running free

Screaming in the dark, I howl when we’re apart

drag my teeth across your chest to taste your beating heart

And I become this child again. Walking our bikes up another rocky road. I have another crush one more time. I try not to. I fight it, and then I give it up when they disappoint me.

He tells me to stop copying, to stop copying him, and he says he is no role model. But I have an ear for it. For whatever the rhythm of a heartbeat sings. But how do you do that, how do you stop copying someone when you do not know you are copying him, and he keeps you at arm’s length, and he knows I am probably dangerous, and all you know is you can touch the rhythm, and he can do that, too.  He makes you push it and push it and push it until you are using words you never heard before or maybe you heard them in another life.

He is teaching me to write poetry. He throws books in my faggot’s face. How do you teach poetry. You take me to a quiet place where I can write with paper and a pencil. And then you leave me there like Tim does.

If I say something like, “The stars are beautiful and I walk between them in soft shoes,” Tim will roll his eyes.

“Avoid cliches,” he says. If it is a cliche, Timothy will piss on it. He is part dog. That is not a metaphor.

There are animal symbols among us. And you wonder where we live. Among the mountain whelps and mist that hangs above the ground. In the Blue Ridge where the bike trails will tear your skin and bones apart. 

When a pack of whelps sleeps together, they are always moving together, too, even in their sleep. My bike is double-twisting mid-air, and it’s the frame that has to take the punishment. If I fall, and I always fall, I will get back up again crushing me or no crushing me. Why do I fall only for kind men who can never love me back?

Tim is a junkyard dog. I am a Sparrow Hawk. Keveon is a gazelle. Trigger is the patience of a tiger. You never know when it will go off but you know it will kinda like an earthquake you cannot predict, but you know in time the threadbare earth will move.

My fingers claw your skin, try to tear my way in

You are the moon that breaks the night for which I have to howl

My fingers claw your skin, try to tear my way in

You are the moon that breaks the night for which I have to

Howl, howl

Howl, howl

Tim loves this song and I know why. We all walk between all of this and all our deaths in soft shoes star to star. Beneath most plain men are prisoners with no hope and their cruel windows. I was a prisoner in a Youth Authority Detention Center. The whole world gets reduced to fluorescent flickering. The light goes on and off again. And we are just a group of boys together who have by accident escaped destiny’s harsh laments like rolling papers that get flushed away and down the toilet because the cops are at the door.

Darker and darker and house to house. Love to love. Crushing and it’s all crushing me. We aren’t all that good for much. But we can escape any afternoon of dust lost from everything but desire. We know all her wet secrets and all her boundary stones, and at night we listen to the silhouettes of howling as it steadfastly refuses to give up something we will never know. You can’t know everything, and Tim walks away from the why, why, why lashes of that whip.

And I become this child again. Walking our bikes up another rocky road. He makes you push it and push it and push it until the words you heard in that other life have become alive in this one.

I walk in soft shoes between the torment and the sorrow. Like a Bedouin who has touched the treacherous sand with his constant eyes of rushing blindly through the whispers like a parasite tearing open each boys’ becalmed throat and each boys’ belly until we have looked at all our bloodied hands and then the screaming starts.  

Now there’s no holding back, I’m making to attack

My blood is singing with your voice, I want to pour it out

The saints can’t help me now, the ropes have been unbound

I hunt for you with bloody feet across the hallow’d ground

like some child possessed, the beast howls in my veins

I want to find you tear out all your tenderness

And howl, howl

Howl, howl

Sometimes There Is A Key By Jonah

I sit in this group with guys just like me and he sits

There in his chair turning the keys in everyones’

Gut and mine and sometimes I hate him for that for

Making me look at who I really am beyond the identity

of what I once did for a living to survive because it

Was the only way I knew how and if I keep telling

Myself that lie maybe someday I will believe it

because the key is just another dagger plunged

through my eye so that I might unlock all the

coffins I have hidden in

To participate in the drug trial, I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Empirical Knowledge in an Humanitarian Disaster: AIDS DRUGS TRIALS

April 22, 2013. Washington, D.C.—Today, Congresswoman Barbara Lee issued the following statement as the Supreme Court hears oral arguments for U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) v. Alliance for Open Society, International (AOSI). Congresswoman Lee, along with Senators Enzi, Leahy, Daschle and Frist, and Reps. Lowey, Waxman, Berman, and Kolbe, signed an amicus brief in support of AOSI. “At the heart of this case is a pledge, the Anti-Prostitution Loyalty Oath, which requires groups getting money to fight AIDS from USAID to specifically pledge to be against prostitution. The unfortunate side-effect of this pledge is that groups are barred from reaching one of the most at-risk groups for AIDS: sex workers. “As a member for the United Nations Global Commission on HIV and the Law, I am deeply concerned that the global response to the AIDS crisis is being undermined by this harmful and discriminatory law. The pledge is counterproductive to the good work that many AIDS organizations are performing, and I’ve introduced legislation to repeal it. I hope the Supreme Court does the right thing and rules in favor of stripping this provision.”

“But the patient is not being cooperative.”

Are you looking for the hard to reach or for cooperation. Decide. You can’t have both. It isn’t possible. Get over it.

We could never afford the drugs. Where has public health been advocating for us. We are poor. We have no money. What has public health done at the doors of Big Pharma. In a word, nothing.

When public health tells us everyone can be treated we do not believe you. We KNOW people who are on waiting lists. We think you want to use us and abuse us simply because everyone does and that is our experience.

So you have a LONG way to go to reach young boys doing sex work and the statistics bear that out. The video we have posted here will make you uncomfortable even if it is only two seconds long.

It portrays a kind of bondage that can be inherent to sex work, and it portrays the kind of relationship we understand we would have with public health. 

Я сожалею, что он ушел. Я скучаю по его улыбке. Все, кто знал его будут помнить его. Россия может быть опасным местом для жизни.

http://showmeyourlife.tumblr.com The Smash Street Boys, kids at-risk themselves, work as mentors with children all around the planet in Show Me Your Life. It is our hope that in this context — photography, video, music, dance, painting, story-telling, poetry — children at-risk can find validation through expressing themselves, and that the story of what “at-risk” means can begin to be told.

L’accent mis sur les enfants, car ils seront l’avenir avant que le futur arrive.

Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center works to eliminate sex worker stigma that marginalizes sex workers and their access to things like health care and housing. This goes a long way toward addressing the issues HIV brings to both male and female sex workers whether they are trafficked or doing sex work by choice. They are all people and people have rights. The more sex workers are empowered, the more they are able to provide protection for themselves whether it’s protection against violence or a virus. Sex workers who are empowered and able to more effectively control the safety levels in the environments they work in have a positive impact on public health.

Most social networking is ambiguous. How does it benefit anyone or anything. Especially when most of it is nothing more than social ritual. Good morning have a nice day. I seriously question the quality of those connections. Quality versus quantity. There is a lot of rah-rah rah-rah cheerleading out there concerning the interface between individuals and their social networking via the Internet. It feels like publicist rhetoric. It is, in fact, an embrace of what is fundamentally competition. Competition to be heard. Competition for resources; it’s disingenuously disguised as a modern, cutting-edge concept although it’s as old as the tribal cave it comes from. In the non-profit universe I live in, it’s facetiously the public-health paradigm choir preaching to itself. So what if I connect to a hundred other AIDS orgs. After a while, they all have the same thing to say. The politically correct mantras. Get tested. Get tested. Get tested. After all, it’s all your (underlying message) fucking fault. Get tested does NOT mean get treatment. Way too many people assume that if they get tested, they will find their way to treatment. Treatment is an economic dynamic, not a medical one. The AIDS-helper community thinks that the shock of having been tested (where you will now redefine yourself) comes from some kind of psychiatric imperative. This is more bugabuga. The shock is often a result of having just learned that everything you will have ever earned will now go down the AIDS-meds shit hole. A thousand of us or a hundred thousand of us sliding down that bankruptcy pipeline on a social network doesn’t change anything. Social networks do not so much as simply collapse, but they implode into the metastasis of the social institution. All social institutions have their own unique take on code, secrets of the tribe, and mechanisms referred to as order. Versus chaos (another tribe, not usually a friendly one). The status quo to social networks can be found in the extent to which the language of the tribe refers to reality as it is, or an agreement that we will all share the same values because if we don’t, the values of another tribe will evolve to predominate identity itself, and we could even have problems recognizing ourselves because our particular tribal affiliations are in name only where a numbers game is exposed as being what it is (the illusion that we exist or matter) versus finding validation in existence as a fact, and not a common consensus. Social networks can be highly amusing if only because what they reflect is the gargantuan stupidity of a species whose race with death continues to be a bargaining with the devil who is us. 

The sad truth to it is that there are some kids who are going to live their lives on a dead end road. The educational suits are going to tell you authoritatively that they can somewhat predict who the loser kids are going to be, and who the winners already are. If you have the bad judgement of telling them that these assessments are not always correct; that they are inherently mean (and racist), and act as artillery in class warfare, the suits will blink, and in that blink of that one eye, they will turn the sizing up on you.

The suits will always win at any version of a numbers game. They’re suits. It’s what they do. Teachers are at the bottom of the prestige list suits make up. Although teachers are the people on the front lines on the ground. Doesn’t matter. No culture war is ever fought simply on the ground in the midst of any given battle. During the Second World War there were plenty of German suits in offices who did things like keep all the records and accounting (suits like accounting) up to date in the procuring of the chemicals that were used in gas chambers in concentration camps. The supplies and demands of concentration camps kept many suits employed.

In today’s culture wars, the kids who are going to do well anyway come to it with validation already built into the paradigms that move them forward. Every time Good Johnny throws that football, and it is received, Good Johnny knows what he looks like, knows who he is throwing to, knows how the set of actions necessary to perform this task will feel like, and everything about him from his sexuality to his social status gets reinforced. He’s only throwing a football, yes. But he’s throwing it right, and it validates him. He does not internalize: oh, I am being validated. He simply feels good because his brain has evolved to release feel good chemicals when he performs certain tasks correctly, and Johnny Good comes to understand that in life, he’s going to do okay.

Last week, the Smash Street Boys posted a video that has caused me to get feedback (and many questions) from parents. A few of these parents have asked me basically the same question which has to do with what IS my educational theory. It is my distinct impression that what these parents are really saying is: we’ve tried everything. I am sure they think they have. Usually, what they’ve tried is your typical follow the cultural rules stuff. Parenting as the status quo. You’ve done everything you’ve been told to do. Not everything that can be done.  These people come to it tired. My purpose here is not to beat them up. It’s simply to respond.

Thinking outside of the box isn’t easy. Usually, it involves the same kind of self-initiative we are asking for from the kids themselves.

There’s one history I have a hard time with. It’s personal. The parent who has thrown a kid out of the home because they can’t handle the news that a kid might be gay has little sympathy from me. The parent who goes into high shock syndrome because Johnny Bad was living on the street doing survival sex, and now has HIV, just makes me roll my eyes. You’ve pushed the kid into a corner. Teachers on the ground know this: not everyone should be a parent. This means you.

I don’t have a theory. I rock and roll. If I had a premise, it would have to do with validation.

Where do we even begin.

By construction.

Construct a football. Construct a process of throwing it so that when the kid does it — and I do not mean does it well, I mean just does it — he self-reinforces an image in his mind of who he is. The street doesn’t have a process other than rendering kids fundamentally worthless. If there has never been a process of validation for a particular kid, for whatever reason, then it’s up to you as the parent to invent one. Because if you don’t, the kid will. He’ll reinvent himself. Kids do it all the time. They reinvent the game. You’re either a player in that game or you’re not.

I listen a lot. A lot. No. I said: A LOT.

One of the things I hear very frequently is a dialogue between them that goes to who was the better sex worker and who totally flubbed it. Wearing obviously expensive designer clothes and flaunting it is not the sacred thing you might think of as coming from adolescents. The boys who do sex work well work hard at not being arrested, they’re understated. The concept is to look clean. The trick isn’t looking for the peacock. He’s looking for an object that isn’t going to redraw the lines of the trick’s status quo. The trick is usually a married man. With children. All whores know this: the trick always wants to get off, but he never wants to pay for it.

Being busted is paying for it.

HIV can be paying for it.

You play. You pay. Life itself makes no exceptions.

What I see are kids who are really very good at reconfiguring the paradigms of play. If HIV becomes a part of that, the usual response is to build a vast hall of secrets. What HIV.

Kids know.

They have us by the balls. They will tell you that we adults only want to bust them.

We remain indicted until we prove otherwise.

Our institutions exist to marginalize the nonconformists.

To assume kids are stupid is a big mistake.

At-risk kids have no mechanism and no directions in the box in terms of how to validated themselves. What adults and educators do not want to hear is that usually by five it’s too late to make real fundamental changes in the football team. If I am really going to reach a kid to the extent that he isn’t getting his dick sucked for peanuts, I need to be able to do that work before they’re two. This is rare.

If you are one of the billions of box builders out there who can only understand a thing by building boxes, I would build you a box called validation.

The rest of it is always rock and roll, and on the road. What Kerouac reinvented was Kerouac, not literature.  You can build that road WITH the kid right up to the presence of the stop sign. But if this street is to really be extended, that’s when the kid assumes responsibility not for the status quo you’ve taught him to respect, but this is where the kid begins to understand no one really knows where the road is going to go.