STAR, sorrow, sickness, stagnation, strength 1999-2009

The last decade (1999-2009) saw some of my best (though small) output in politics and poetry and prophecy.

I made my relationship with Sylvia Rivera, partially, a pretext for writing about her and her politics, abandoning Chelsea, with whom I had had a similar relationship, to the wolves. I learned a great deal from her and Kristianna Thomas'leah about what activism is, and how to write as an activist (more in three years than in all my life previoiusly). Sylvia reconstituted STAR, and I became the secretary and word-person who put her ideas on paper (though in a much more pompous and legalistic fashion than they came from her mouth).

After three years (2002), Sylvia passed away, and then my father three years later (2005). During this time I abandoned myself on and off to the Hospital, including ECT and a stint in the State Hospital, along with a suicide attempt; and to prostitution and drug use, from depression, guilt and politics, again, and also because that was the life I chose and the life that seemed to promise a building of personal strength.

Thanks to the encouragement of Ms. Jamie Hunter and others, I began to see my talents as worth pursuing in a slightly more regular fashion and learned to see the poetry in all the crazed jottings or weighty prose that mingled in my notebooks. I began to read other poets, including Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, WAlt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Anne SExton, Nikki Giovanni, Alexander Pope, Robert Graves and others. I also began to search for the roots of anti-trans religious bigotry in a priestess' perspective through reading many books on religion and myth including Roman and Greek antecedents and parallels to today.

2007-2008 I found a need to reconstruct what still was black and white and mean/violent thinking, which Nathan Schiller and later Antonia Cambareri directed me towards.

In 2008 I had what I thought was a near-death experience that transformed my motivations for writing to more positive and happy, loving ones. I had focused on the Queen of the Universe as the Queen of Death for so long that I forgot that life must for any individual have happiness as its goal.

Then there are these Blogs.\

Next, a promised essay on ????