I appreciate the July 18 op-ed in The Advocate by Chase T. M. Anderson (right). Entitled “I’m Queer, Not Gay. It Matters,” Anderson’s piece is a direct response to Matthew Vines’ June 30 New York Times op-ed, “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.”
Vines’ piece elicited strong responses from many within the LGBTQI+ communities, especially from those who identify as “queer.” (See the previous Wild Reed post, “Queer Perspectives on an Anti-Queer Op-Ed.”)
Following are excerpts from Anderson’s op-ed.
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The terms “gay” and “queer” are not synonymous. When someone says “gay” to me these days, I think of cisgender. What comes to mind are people who say they’re “woke” but are silent as transgender people across the country are attacked. I think of being locked into acting how the heterosexual society wants our community to act.
I think of palatable.
Queer is often associated with describing the LGBTQ+ spectrum, an umbrella term of sorts. The word “queer” for many has been reclaimed – from a derogatory slur to a word of empowerment. This reclamation began after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, where our community fought against police raiding the Stonewall Inn, a place of gathering for queer people. Over time, the word has come to be a term of inclusion for many. It is a term that describes how many people live outside of the binary of male and female, and how sexual orientation and identity can be fluid over time. The word has transformed into a statement of empowerment, of “potential and a future, not something that is stagnant.”
Queerness is also an emphatic no to the cisgender, male-centric, ableist, White, inflexible way we've been taught that we “must” live from a young age.
. . . “Queer” has become one of the most elegant and powerful words I use to describe myself.
It has been a word I have reclaimed for myself.
Telling people I’m queer comes with a certain gravitas. A certain “do not come for me unless I send for you.” The word is a rose with thorns – one that combines a gentleness with the passion of someone who has had to fight to survive. When I say I am queer, it means I am here to battle for our community’s rights while wearing gold eye glitter as armor. To be queer in America means that I will also bring the softness of someone who years ago envisioned a world where we all were frolicking and got along.
To be queer, to me, is to hold onto that hope while dealing with the realities of now. At its core, being queer means being free to express myself however aligns most with my internal sense of self – and that is a power that many people fear and try to control.
By calling myself queer, I no longer let anyone dictate how I should label myself or try to have me “fit in” to a society not built for me.
After all, I’m queer, and not gay. It matters.
To read Chase T. M. Anderson’s op-ed in its entirety,click here.
Chase T. M. Anderson, MD (he/she/they), is an assistant professor in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and Medical Director of The Muses Program for Minoritized Youth. You can follow them on Instagram, X, and BlueSky.
The higher you rise, the deeper you must have gone first. There is no exception to this law.
Jung did not mean hell as a place of punishment. He meant it as the underworld of the psyche, everything rejected, buried, and denied. Every fear you have refused to name. Every wound you have covered instead of healing. Every part of yourself you decided was too ugly, too dangerous, or too shameful to claim as your own.
Most people try to grow upward while ignoring what lies beneath them. They chase enlightenment, success, or peace without ever descending into the parts of themselves they have spent a lifetime avoiding. And so they stay small, reaching toward the light with roots too shallow to hold real height.
The alchemists called this the nigredo, the blackening, the necessary descent into darkness before any true transformation can occur. You cannot skip this stage. You cannot bypass it with positivity or spiritual bypassing dressed as growth. The tree that reaches heaven does so precisely because its roots have gone where it is uncomfortable to look.
This is not a metaphor for the weak-hearted. It is a law of the psyche, as real as gravity. What you refuse to face controls you from below. What you finally face becomes the foundation that lets you rise.
The serpent wrapped around this tree is not the enemy of ascension. It is the guardian of it, the very thing that must be integrated, not defeated, before the branches can reach the sun.
Your shadow is not what is wrong with you. It is the root system waiting to hold your growth.
Stephen Miller stood in front of representatives from more than 60 countries this week and called left-wing politics a “fatal cancer of civilization.” He said left-wing terrorism, “left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag.” Elsewhere, he’s vowed to “uproot and dismantle” what he calls left-wing terrorist networks, and says Trump’s NSPM-7 directive will mean debanking and defunding left-wing “political terrorists.”
Worth noting that the Trump regime has been sending people to gulags in El Salvador.
Now let’s check the data regarding terrorism: CSIS tracked 750 domestic terror attacks and plots from 1994–2020: right-wing extremists committed 57% of them. Left-wing extremists committed 25%. Since 2016, the far right has carried out 152 attacks to the left’s 41 – and right-wing violence has killed 112 people in the last decade. Left-wing violence killed 13.
(Yes, 2025 saw a brief anomaly where left-wing incidents edged ahead – but that’s because right-wing attacks cratered, not because the left surged. Researchers stress the numbers on both sides remain historically low.)
So the actual data says the right is the dominant terror threat in America. Miller’s solution: call the left “cancer” and “terrorists” who must be uprooted.
This playbook isn’t new. After the 1933 Reichstag fire, Hitler blamed Communists and declared: “we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”
Cancer. Pest. Terrorists. Root them out. We’ve read this script before, and we know how it ends.
What makes this even more preposterous: The Department of Justice (DOJ) quietly deleted a federal study – “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism” – that found right-wing extremism outpaces the left. It just vanished from the DOJ site. No announcement. Lawmakers demanded answers in November; DOJ still hasn’t republished it.
The seven members of Russia’s last Imperial Family were shot and bayoneted to death by their Bolshevik captors in the cellar of the “House of Special Purpose” in Ekaterinburg in the early hours of July 17, 1918.
As I’ve noted previously, I’ve long been fascinated by the Romanovs and their tragic story. In marking this year’s anniversary of their deaths, I share an excerpt from Nicholas II, The Last Tsar by Michael Paterson.
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Accounts describe the executioners’ astonishment when bullets ricocheted off some of the women. Only afterward did the reason become clear – they had jewels sewn into their bodices that had deflected the shots. [Thus] not all were killed outright, despite the careful targeting. Anastasia seems to have fainted. She regained consciousness seconds after the fusillade and had to be finished off with a bayonet. The maid, Demidova, was unharmed enough by the first shots to run back and forth to defend herself with a cushion that had been in her hands. Otherwise it was mercifully swift.
Arguably this sudden end, horrific as it was, was preferable to further months – or years – of captivity and degradation. Time and again over that interminable, fourteen-month wait, they must have asked themselves: “How much longer can this go on? How can we endure?” The youngest member of the Family, during their last days in Tobolsk, told Alexandra: “I would like to die, Mama; I’m not afraid of death, but I’m afraid of what they may do to us here.”
It is unlikely that the Romanovs would have been released, and they could have lived on, prisoners in some Gulag, for decades. Alexandra and Alexis would not have survived. The girls could in theory have lived until the end of the twentieth century – and thus might have seen the demise of the Soviet state in 1991. Had the Bolsheviks put Nicholas on trial he would have been made a national scapegoat and condemned to death. There would have been the same type of tragic parting from his family that was seen with Charles I. Alexandra too might have been tried, for treason – the fact that no evidence existed would not have mattered – and could have suffered her own Calvary in the manner of Marie Antionette. How much better that this close-knit family was together and that it happened without warning. One wonders why the executioners did not simply shoot them in their beds as they slept. Perhaps Yakov Yurovsky was one of those who wanted to see the Tsar stand trail, hence his brief delivery of sentence [before being the first of the executioners to open fire in the cellar].
As the world knows, the bodies were taken to a clearing outside the town and rendered down by a crude process of dismemberment, acid and burning. They were then buried and the site of their grave was disguised. They would remain undisturbed for more than sixty years while, from the moment they disappeared, rumour and speculation and wishful thinking would keep them alive.
Had the Family been able to flee and find sanctuary abroad, they would never have known peace. The secret police of the new state were to prove extremely adept at carrying out executions of dissidents and other enemies no matter where in the world they settled, as witness the killing of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Though a great many Russian aristocrats, and a number of Romanovs, were to live unmolested in the West for the remainder of their lives, the immediate family might not have been so lucky. They could have been – and they would have felt – hunted for the rest of their lives.
Above: Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra pictured under house arrest in the garden of the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo in May of 1917. The Alexander Palace was the preferred residence of the last Tsar and his family, and it became the family’s initial place of imprisonment after the first of two Russian Revolutions in 1917 overthrew the House of Romanov in February. In August, the Provisional Government evacuated Nicholas and his family to the Siberian town of Tobolsk. After the October Revolution, the Bolshevik regime moved the family in the spring of 1918 to the Urals city of Ekaterinburg where they were executed in July of that year, together with several of their retainers.
After undergoing years of renovation, the Alexander Palace opened in the summer of 2021 as a state museum housing relics of the former Imperial dynasty.
The Governor’s Mansion in Tobolsk (right) in which the Romanovs were imprisoned, is now also known as Kuklin House. Located on 10 Mira Street, the mansion is protected by the Russian Federal government as a historical monument. Following the Revolution the house was renamed the “House of Freedom.” In 1937 a carpet from the Governor’s Mansion was sent to and preserved by a museum in San Francisco. Following a complete restoration of the building, which included demolition of an art deco portico and its replacement by one in the original design, it was reopened in 2018 to house The Museum of the Family of Emperor Nicholas II.
The Ipatiev House (the “House of Special Purpose”) in Ekaterinburg was demolished in 1977 by order of the Politburo to the local Soviet government, almost 59 years after the Romanov family’s murder and 14 years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
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In closing, here is the “Nicholas and Alexandra Suite” from the soundtrack of the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra. Composed by Richard Rodney Bennett, this work is one of the truly great film soundtracks – epic, haunting and, like the film itself, often underrated; so much so that it remains to this day unavailable on CD. The film's “Love Theme” (the second movement in the suite) is much beloved by my Mum, who can play it beautifully on the keyboard. It was turned into a rather torchy song, “Too Beautiful to Last,” and recorded by Engelbert Humperdinck in 1972.
If you woke up to your neighborhood smelling like campfire, you’re not alone.
Poor air quality is forecast for nearly all of Minnesota Thursday due to wildfires.
Air quality has reached the maroon category for much of eastern Minnesota, including the Twin Cities metro, meaning it is hazardous for everyone, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
The MPCA says anyone in the maroon or hazardous area should avoid any outdoor activity and stay inside.
Farther west in Minnesota, purple – very unhealthy – and red – unhealthy – alerts are in effect.
The MPCA says heavy smoke will remain across the state Thursday as existing smoke recirculates and mixes with new smoke from wildfires across northeastern Minnesota and southern Canada.
Heavy smoke remains possible beyond the alert expiration time across portions of northeast Minnesota, but the potential for rain Friday could greatly reduce smoke output and improve air quality, according to the MPCA. As for the rest of the state, a cold front is expected bring cleaner air on northwest winds through the day Friday.
ICE has killed yet another person – a 25-year-old Columbian man in Biddleford, Maine.
According to initial reports, this young man, who was authorized to work in the United States and was not the target of a warrant, was shot through the windshield of his car by ICE agents. These agents then dragged him out of his vehicle and handcuffed him as he lay dying on the road. There are also reports that this brutal and unwarranted killing took place in front of the young man’s wife and three-year-old daughter.
In response to this shooting, residents of Biddleford have spontaneously taken to the streets in protest (right and below).
This killing is the eleventh by ICE agents this year. To date, there has been absolutely no accountability demanded from those responsible for these execution-style deaths, and no justice for those killed or for their families.
ICE is out of control as it continues to act without impunity as the domestic terrorist organization that it is. The Trump regime is not going to stop this madness as it is of its making. ICE, by design, is Trump’s personal paramilitary group. Only a massive disruption to “business as usual” across the country will bring this travesty to a halt – localized general strikes, in other words. Those who are profiting from the fascist Trump regime and, in particular, the expansion of ICE and the building of for-profit detention centers have to be hit were it hurts most. We also have to organize locally to support workers and their families who will be most impacted by these strike actions.
We also need to be very clear about what ICE is really all about and who it is that benefits from its deadly actions in our communities. In understanding this, Mark Greene’s recent commentary is very helpful. Following is what he says about ICE as a weapon of the Eptsein class. Greene wrote his piece in the aftermath of the July 9 shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents in Houston, Texas.
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We need to understand exactly what’s being created inside ICE, inside Homeland Security. The murder of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is one of hundreds of murders that have taken place either in detention centers or on the streets of our cities. Over 1,000 detainees disappeared from Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. Their records [have gone missing from ICE’s online database, with their families and attorneys unable to locate them].
It takes time for tens of thousands of men in an organization like ICE to slowly become desensitized to violence and torture. And it can only happen when these federal organizations, led by men like Donald Trump and Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, say explicitly to their officers that there are no limits on what they can do. It takes time for those men to believe it. It takes time for those men to try out little acts of violence fotst, to look around at the cameras pointed at them and say, I guess nobody’s gonna stop me. And slowly but surely, they grow their appetite for violence and cruelty.
The number of people that we do not know about, who have lost their lives in massive detention centers, people who are held in those centers not because they can’t be deported but because a private prison corporation is making massive profits every day that they hold those individuals.
It’s no accident that the men and women who run an operation designed to make profit off human torture and murder are also in the Epstein files. Over twenty people in the Trump administration are named in the Epstein files. This is the systemic and brutal torture being funded, operationalized, and profited off of by the Epstein class.
ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, and Homeland Security have become a massive for-profit murder and torture operation. And what comes next is they cease to make their mission immigrants and turn this huge infrastructure they’re building onto controlling and detaining American citizens.
We are at a grave and dangerous point in American history. This level of violence and torture being organized and implemented by our federal government isn’t going to end until the Republican Party loses its majorities in the Congress and eventually its grip on the White House.
But elections alone aren’t going to save us. And the only way this is going to end is if millions of Americans show up in the streets of our cities and demand that this ends. And it will not happen in a a single day. It may take months. We may be looking at an American Spring where we finally say this level of brutality, this level of savagery, this level of Epstein class violence must end.
UPDATE: The man killed by ICE in Maine today has been identified as Johan Sebastián Guerrero, a 25-year-old permitted worker from Colombia.
Wrote Qasim Rashid when he shared the above image on social media today:
This is Johan Sebastián Guerrero, the 25-year-old Colombian father and husband murdered by ICE fascists in broad daylight in front of his 3-year-old daughter.
He was NOT the target of the ICE warrant. He was documented. He did everything right. ICE murdered him anyway. And the Supreme Court of the United States has already ruled it legal for ICE to profile people based on skin color.
Saying it again – it was never about law and order. It was always about murdering anyone not white. This is fascism. Abolish and prosecute ICE.
No body cameras. An unmarked vehicle. Officers in civilian clothing. A man is dead.
Stop arguing for just a moment, and let that sink in.
This is no longer just about one life. This is about the soul of our nation.
The whole world is watching America right now. They’re watching to see whether we still believe in justice, accountability, and the dignity of every human life – or whether we’ve become so divided that we’ve forgotten how to see each other as people.
Our greatest threat has never been one another. Yet every day we’re pushed further apart – by fear, by anger, by politics, by hatred. We are fighting each other while losing sight of what has always made this country strong: our unity.
When a nation is divided from within, it appears weaker to those who wish it harm. History reminds us that countries are strongest when their people stand together, not when they turn against one another.
This is bigger than immigration. Bigger than political parties. Bigger than race. Bigger than any single headline.
This is about whether we still have the courage to say that every human life matters, that every family deserves answers, and that justice should never depend on who you are or where you come from.
If we continue to let hate define us, then hate wins. If we continue to treat our neighbors as enemies, then we are helping destroy the very nation we claim to love.
America has always been at its best when ordinary people chose courage over fear, compassion over cruelty, and unity over division.
The world is watching.
Our children are watching.
History is watching.
The question is no longer who is right.
The question is who we will become.
Let’s choose to be remembered as the generation that refused to let hate have the final word. Let’s rise together – not as Republicans or Democrats, not as immigrants or citizens, not divided by race or background – but as human beings who refused to give up on each other.
Because if we lose our humanity, we’ve already lost everything that ever made America worth fighting for.
As you’ll see and hear, both the reading from A Course in Miracles and the lyrics of Tina’s song share a number of spiritual insights and truths.
I should note that the original Course in Miracles text uses the metaphor of father for the Divine Presence. I prefer and use the metaphor of lover as expressed in the phrase “Beloved One.” As with the previous adaptations I’ve shared (see here, here and here), if this one resonates with you, feel free to make it even more meaningful by using your preferred images and words: “God,” “Allah,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” “Holy One,” “Mother.” . . . I trust that they all serve as different pathways leading up the same holy mountain or, to use another metaphor, different gateways leading inwards to our center, the deepest part of which we all share. For as Henri Nouwen so beautifully reminds us: “In the depths of my being, I meet my fellow humans with whom I share [all things].”
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Let me remember I am one with God.
Today let us give thanks for our Identity in God, the Beloved One of our Soul. Our home is safe, protection guaranteed in all we do, power and strength available to us in all our undertakings. We can fail in nothing. Everything we touch takes on a shining light that blesses and that heals. At one with the Beloved and with the universe we go our way rejoicing, with the thought that the Beloved goes everywhere with us.
How holy are our minds! And everything we see reflects the holiness within the mind at one with God and with itself. How easily do errors disappear, and death give place to everlasting life. Our shining footprints point the way to truth, for the Beloved One is our Companion as we walk the world a little while. And those who come to follow us will recognize the way because the light we carry stays behind, yet still remains with us as we walk on.
What we receive is our eternal gift to those who follow after, and to those who went before or stayed with us a while. And the Beloved One, Who loves us with the equal love in which we were created, smiles on us and offers us the happiness we gave.
Today we will not doubt His Love for us, nor question His protection and His care. No meaningless anxieties can come between our faith and our awareness of the Beloved’s Presence. We are one with Him today in recognition and rememberance. We feel the Beloved in our hearts. Our minds contain His Thoughts; our eyes behold His loveliness in all we look upon. Today we see only the loving and the lovable.
We see it in appearances of pain, and pain gives way to peace. We see it in the frantic, in the sad and the distressed, the lonely and afraid, who are restored to the tranquility and peace of mind in which they were created. And we see it in the dying and the dead as well, restoring them to life. All this we see because we saw it first within ourselves.
No miracle can ever be denied to those who know that they are one with God. No thought of theirs but has the power to heal all forms of suffering in anyone, in times gone by and times as yet to come, as easily as in the ones who walk beside them now. Their thoughts are timeless, and apart from distance as apart from time.
We join in this awareness as we say that we are one with the Beloved. For in these words we say as well that we are saved and healed; that we can save and heal accordingly. We have accepted, and we now would give. . . . Today we would experience ourselves at one with the Beloved, so that the world may share our recognition of reality. In our experience the world is freed. As we deny our separation from the Beloved One, the world is healed along with us.
Peace be to you today. Secure your peace by practicing awareness you are one with your Creator, as He is with you. Sometime today, whenever it seems best, devote a half-an-hour to the thought that you are one with God. This is our first attempt at an extended period for which we give no rules nor special words to guide your meditation. We will trust God’s Voice to speak as He sees fit today, certain He will not fail. Abide with God this half an hour. God will do the rest.
Your benefit will not be less if you believe that nothing happens. You may not be ready to accept the gain today. Yet sometime, somewhere, it will come to you, nor will you fail to recognize it when it dawns with certainty upon your mind. This half-an-hour will be framed in gold, with every minute like a diamond set around the mirror that this exercise will offer you. And you will see the Beloved’s face upon it, in reflection of your own.
Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, you will see your own transfiguration in the glass this holy half-an-hour will hold out to you, to look upon yourself. When you are ready you will find it there, within your mind and waiting to be found. You will remember then the thought to which you gave this half-an-hour, thankfully aware no time was ever better spent.
Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, you will look into this glass, and understand the sinless light you see belongs to you; the loveliness you look on is your own. Count this half hour as your gift to God, in certainty that His return will be a sense of love you cannot understand, a joy too deep for you to comprehend, a sight too holy for the body’s eyes to see. And yet you can be sure someday, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, you will understand and comprehend and see.
Add further jewels to the golden frame that holds the mirror offered you today, by hourly repeating to yourself:
Let me remember I am one with God,
at one with the world and all within it,
and at one with my Self,
in everlasting holiness and peace.
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Now, it might seem a stretch for some to find similarities between the above text from A Course in Miracles and a song by the Queen of Rock’n’Roll, Tina Turner. But to my ears, mind and heart the similarities are there.
Tina was a practicing Nichiren Buddhist and Buddhism holds that reincarnation is part of the human/spiritual experience. Tina most resolutely explores reincarnation in her 1984 song “I Might Have Been Queen,” but she also does so in her later song “Whatever You Need,” which is about souls coming together in recognition over successive lifetimes.
These souls recognize that only love is ultimately real, and that the sacred source of all things (called “God” my many) is Love. Their ultimate identity is in this Love, a Love that illuminates the truth that we are all one. Moving through life with this truth and the illuminating vision it provides, ensures that, in the words of A Course in Miracles, “everything we touch takes on a shining light that blesses and heals.”
I don’t know about you, but I feel and see that energy of blessing and healing in the video for Tina’s “Whatever You Need.”
In what other lives have I known your kiss?
And what forgotten moments have I felt like this?
The way you touch me, I come undone
You know me more than anyone
Whatever you want
In what other lives have I touched your face?
And what words did we whisper
in a strange forbidden place?
To be with you, is to find myself
We’re two of a kind, you and I
I couldn’t love anyone else
You are my beginning, my end
You are my lover, my friend
In this life, in this time
Whatever you want, whatever you need
I will be right here waiting
Whatever you want
Whatever you need
I will be right here waiting, yeah, yeah, yeah
In what other lives, did I feel your skin?
And when exactly did I breathe you in?
Feel like I’ve known you for a thousand years
You’re so familiar to me and there is no fear
Watch the sun go down, yeah, yeah
My past and future in you are bound, oh yeah
I watch as time moves on, I’m alive and strong
And when I’m with you, there’s no right, no wrong
Nolan Wells’ death is all over my timeline. I’m seeing mostly Black folks talking about it and saying this is a cautionary tale for why Black parents should side eye these kinds of friendships where their child is “the only Black kid” in white spaces. What looks like acceptance and belonging could end up being a trap.
Fourth of July. Mississippi. An island. Water. A cluster of white boys. One Black boy missing. Nobody bothered to report him missing. That combination of facts lands in the Black imagination with historical weight and triggers our collective nervous system.
Black people are not reacting in a vacuum. We carry a whole archive of similar stories. We know what water has meant. We know what “boys being boys” has covered. We know what “accident” has sometimes been asked to explain. We know how many Black deaths have become official shrugs because the living white witnesses were granted innocence before the dead Black youth was granted humanity.
Now, that does not mean we know what happened here. But it does mean we know why Black folk are suspicious.
It’s being called “one of the most iconic photos of our time,” a future Pulitzer-winning photograph, and “the defining image” of Trump’s America.
Here’s what social commentator and media critic Tommy J. Housman has to say about Cheney Orr’s photo and the reactions it is generating.
Yesterday I posted a photograph of a Black woman sitting alone on a train surrounded by members of Patriot Front, a white nationalist and known hate organization that openly organized, promoted, live-streamed, and later claimed responsibility for the event. The post reached more than 80,000 people, generated over 21,000 engagements, and received more than 3,000 comments. What concerns me is how many people rushed to defend, excuse, minimize, or redirect attention away from an organization whose entire purpose is built around racial nationalism and exclusion. Instead of discussing why groups like this exist, why they are growing, or why Black Americans might find such imagery threatening, many commenters immediately began comparing it to unrelated crimes committed by random black individuals or openly expressing support for the organization itself. Completely ignoring the historical context of hate groups and what hate groups mean to Black people such as enslavement m, imprisonment, beating, rape, and death by lynching. Instead of acknowledging this history, people chose to laugh.
That should alarm every decent person in this country. Black Americans do not view organized groups of masked white nationalists through the lens of abstract political theory. They view them through the lens of slavery, lynching, segregation, racial terror, voter suppression, church bombings, and generations of organized efforts to intimidate and control Black people. What I saw in the comments was not thoughtful disagreement. I saw deflection, whataboutism, historical ignorance, and in some cases outright sympathy for a movement that defines itself through exclusion.
I saw similar reactions across multiple posts discussing the same event. That suggests a deeper problem than a handful of internet trolls. We have reached a point where large numbers of people seem more offended by criticism of a white nationalist organization than by the existence of the organization itself. Real strength is protecting people who are vulnerable. Real courage is standing against intimidation and hatred, not marching anonymously behind masks in a crowd. If thousands of Americans can look at a photograph of organized racial intimidation and see nothing wrong with it – or worse, defend it – we should all be asking ourselves what that says about the state of our country. Almost every comment and Laffey face was from a white man. Cowards.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
