Last night I look at the stars here in Monticello Florida on my journey #<3trip. I didn't recognize them and so I felt alone.

You are never alone - Socalled

And this dude makes music with David Krakauer whom I got to see play at Bard a couple of weeks ago with a symphony and he blew my head off. Seriously. I had to walk down from the mid-level balcony to the mezzanine to get it and stick it back on. Then I could feel the film strip between my ears, so I know what Socalled is talkin about.

I reach New Orleans tonight people. I think I'm going to visit with some clarinet music.

I may find a way to do a show.

If you'd like to meet up reach me @heathr

I'm writing ( and soon video-ing) for three reasons:

•to participate in Dan Savage's #ItGetsBetter project to encourage queer youth

•to reply to the many comments (Megan McCardle's the first among them) I've seen on the web suggesting that there's no need to specifically address queer youth suicide and encouragement because we should just address all bullying and it's all the same, and

•suggest a new, twist to #ItGetsBetter. That we not only talk to queer youth but listen to them. Let's not just tell or ask. Let's listen. Let's not just witness the Tyler Clementi's after they're tragically gone.

I'm asking queer youth to tell us their stories and feelings, asking us to #PleaseHearMe. And I'm asking you queer youth to post them as video responses to people who have posted #ItGetsBetter videos and the IGB folks to respond. even with one sentence. Please, let's witness our youth. 

So:

I'm not so pleased with all the "it's no different than being fat etc". Listen bullying is shit for everyone and I know about it intimately. The point of the LGBT outrage this week is not that bullying isn't shit for everyone who is pegged as different and tortured. it's bad and we should do everything we can to stop all bullying and listen to all kids who are alone and isolated.

BUT

there is a special kind of queer invisibility that is related to the active legal persecution of LGBT folks. I'm not saying "our pain is better than your pain." I know pain, like Fran Lebowitz said of genocides are like snowflakes: no two are alike.

I'm saying that the not even understanding who or what you are, especially in the heat of sexual identity development is tough and especially when you have no mirroring, no examples and for some of these kids religious parents or institutions actively persecuting them and telling them basically that what they naturally feel isn't what they naturally feel or that it is evil.

A basic feeling, driver, like "I'm hungry" or "I'm tired' is wrong. This is shown to you a million ways- even from those who have most influence over you. Now try to trust yourself, your instincts, your perception of the world. We know what we know psychologically because it is mirrored. It's how we all develop as people.

And is it fucked up and wrong that peoples projected discomfort and anger is getting poured all over queer kids (or anyone) and that this is ENCOURAGED or allowed. This intolerance is mirrored as ok rather than the most basic impulse of life and life's BEST impulse: affection, caring, desire, LOVE.

I was treated like absolute shit most days of my high school life for all kinds of reasons: being nerdy, thinking differently (then rarely called more kindly: creatively), being pegged young in a small town (bullies rarely innovate in terms of targets and worse than bullies were the many who just silently shunned me) socially inept, intellectual, very much so for being Jewish not so much for being openly gay because I was confused as hell about it, not really so completely gay and I guess I could pass a little bit. 

But the truth is that I didn't even know the WORD LESBIAN till I got to college. There was not a single book in the public library under "homosexuality" when I looked and I was more and more inept, looking back, BECAUSE I was faking so many heterosexual things which were the social currency of having any kind of friendship much of the time. Once I started to feel I was feeling something intense for girls I started to fear I'd be disowned for it. (I was not but I lived with that fear for a while as a teen)

So I only had "dyke" yelled at me once even though I had the entire football team stand up daily and chant anti-Semitic stuff at me every day in the cafeteria. The latter was humiliating but I never felt odd about being Jewish. I felt comfortable and proud because I had a strong Jewish community and family and lots of fun and warmth associated with it.

There was no one gay though. No one. Except Velma on Scooby Doo.

I contemplated suicide as a teen and I did a pretty useless attempt at something once (and I'm aware the the insurance system is bizarre enough that these words may be scraped, de-contextualized and used against me some day but I'm putting them out there now because it's too important to not share if I can help even one young person know that i really do understand and feel an ounce better). But I loved life. As painful as it was at the moment and as much as I lived for the future there was so much beauty in people, ideas, learning, music, sport, a story...there was just too much that I loved. And I lived for and in my mind, the future. I was desperate to be seen in those lonely lonely days.

So to all of you at the nerd table: the Jews, and the geeks and the fat kids and the freaks and regular looking and privately vomiting or awkwarding ones and the misfits. I love you all. It will get better for you and all of the injustice done to you is unfair and the bullying should not be tolerated. But to you young queer kids: please, please know that those feelings you might already be learning to push down are yours. No one else gets to own them, tell you they're not real. Your feelings are how you know you're alive.  They're the sensors of life. They are what art is made of and that's the greatest thing humans have ever come up with. They are why you're fabulous and please please please find a way to have those feelings and share them with someone or the Net in a way that works for you.

Let those feelings flow through you, course through you, harder and stronger every day. Don't limit them. You can contain them. You can be smart about when you and how you express them (thus leading to a level of emotional maturity your peers will probably wait decades more to develop) but please please don't listen to someone who tries to erase them.

They are part of your magnificence. Please share them. We're listening. Practice seeing and focussing on the ones who can hear you and know that just because many cannot does not mean no one can. We'll hear you. Someone will hear you. Please feel. Please stay alive. They are the essence of life. 

I made it through teenaged years the only ways I knew how. I took friendliness wherever I could find it. I hid out in the library and the guidance counsellors office and among adults who couldn't be as bad and I read books like some do crack.

That's what I had. You have all these people making #ItGets Better videos. You have the web at least. If it's safe (you can turn away from the camera if you must...you don't just have to listen. You can talk and be listened to. And I urge each wonderful person making an #ItGetsBetter video to please respond to each video sent to you by a kid that says #PleaseHearMe. Even if it's a one sentence response. Please listen. So it will get better.

Please tell us what you need hear queer youth. Mark it #PleaseHearMe and post it as a video response to an #ItGetsBetter video you like.

photo: Melissa Gira Grant

I headlined at an event called Comedy in the Park last night in Brooklyn. 

Comedy venues are usually deep dark womblike basements. This was the opposite.

Nothing to contain the "room" but you. And of course, it's tough to be more interesting to look at than the Manhattan skyline or the occasional unremarkable Burg hipster modeling with a fox mask on.

I was standing on a rock using a mic and little guitar amp with a wire run from the booker's van. It gave you exactly the same delicate tones as the guy on the street corner screeching you into Jesus love through Spanish language hell and damnation. 

So I did a little Jewish version of what our evangelical sound would be and almost as if on cue a Hasidic men (orthodox Jew) wandered right in front of me and my bare shoulders and knees.    

There was nothing to do but buy an audience member a coconut ice from the ice cream man going by and up the absurd with a wedding story that really showed some promise. I was grateful to have finally found a NY 'room" where you could actually work out long material for my interactive style because I really was able to bring people in and connect in that space. It was like the comedy equivalent of ankle weights.  

((tag: stand-up comedy, Williamsburg, Jewish, wedding, absurd, fox))