Last summer I visited my friend Bishop Gene Robinson in Washington. He told me he had recently visited the makeshift memorial set up in a street in Ferguson, Missouri, for Michael Brown, a young, unarmed black man killed by a policeman.
As he stood reflecting on events he saw a cardboard box standing like a pillar. It had been painted black and written in gold letters were the words:‘They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds’.
Gene was moved by the resiliency of these words. He told me as a gay person most of what he knows and understands about his own community’s fight for equality comes from what he has learned from the black civil rights movement even though he is fully aware that his ‘white privilege’ works to protect him from the full knowledge of the extent to which he is rewarded for the color of his skin.
He researched the origin of the words on the cardboard box and discovered they come from Dinos Christianopolous, a living Greek poet, who had been marginalized by the Greek literary community throughout his life because of his sexuality. He had written way back in the 1970’s: ‘You did anything to bury me. But you forgot I was a seed.’
Source: – Gay Star News
