EQUITY AND TOLERANCE

FOR STONEWALL

by Roberta Batorsky

 

 

Three days after the Trump administration removed a Rainbow Flag from the Stonewall National Monument, defiant activists hoisted the Rainbow Flag once again in front of a jam-packed crowd of fed-up LGBTQ community members who flooded the area surrounding Christopher Park.  Photo by Donna Aceto. —Gay City News, February 12, 2026

Bury the flag of empathy,
it no longer belongs here.
Turn its rainbow black—
disavow the pride it gave
commemorating AIDS victims,
lives lost as in a war.
and it was a war, unended, unwon.
 
Pull the emblem of suffering
of men, women and children,
renew the prejudice that killed
Oscar*, Alan** and others,
deliver it with its own symbol
of derision and weakness.
 
It wasn’t Ellen D***. that convinced us,
Matt Shepard’s death didn’t convince us:
something fundamentally changed then.
Now bathroom jokes, lewdness, shame,
insinuation, guilt and closeting
all shift to the front burner.
 
Bury the flag of concern for people
deep in the heart of the heart of this country.
 
See us now, re-emerging, colors blazing,
in freedom’s garb,
to shake off erasure,
proclaiming our unity:
Our city, our flag.
 
 
*Oscar Wilde
** Alan Turing
*** Ellen Degeneres

 

 

Roberta Batorsky, a New Jersey poet, has published this month her first book of poetry, Perihelion.

TURING

by Richard O'Connell

Queen Elizabeth II granted a rare "mercy pardon" Monday to Alan Turing, the computing and mathematics pioneer whose chemical castration for being gay drove him to suicide almost 60 years ago. --NBC News, December 24, 2013

Breaking the Enigma code seemed simple stuff

compared to interrogation by police

of whether he was loyal or masculine enough,

desperate for details of illicit loves.

He knew his death must look an accident

to spare his family scandal and abuse,

knowing his persecutors would not relent

and ambiguity was always the best ruse.

He knew Snow White must triumph in the end

but he would not; the witches everywhere

were gathered well beyond the final reel

to flay his flesh and feast on his despair.

He held the lethal apple in his hand

devoid of vacillation or chagrin,

knowing he had constructed a new land

and smiling to himself bit deeply in.

Richard O'Connell lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages, and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The Paris Review, Margie, Measure, Southern Humanities Reviw, Acumen, The Formalist.