Tag Archives: Poem

‘I Want A Dyke For President’ – Watch Mykki Blanco Recites Powerful Poem

Ahead of next month’s Presidential election, queer artist and musician Mykki Blanco has been enlisted by Dazed to recite legendary poem “I Want A Dyke For President,” written in 1992 by artist/AIDS activist Zoe Leonard.

Written nearly 25 years, the peom aggressively questions the violent banality of our elected politicians – remains as relevant and striking as ever.

Especially as we watch Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump battle it out for control of America, as xenophobic politicians helped the United Kingdom leave the EU, and as Russian bombs drop on Syria

It begins:

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia.

I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying.

I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harrassed and gay-bashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape.

I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy.

I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.”

US Inaugural Poet, Richard Bianco, Writes Tribute to Same-Sex Marriage – #MarriageEquality

The US inaugural poet, Richard Bianco, has written a tribute to same-sex marriage.

Bianco became the first out inaugural poet when he read at Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2012.

His new poem ‘Until We Could’has been penned for Freedom To Marry, to celebrate a decade since Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage.

Blanco said

“It seemed like the perfect fit immediately. It was a cause I believed in and wanted to be part of.

As the first openly gay inaugural poet, it felt very inspirational. Love is love, marriage is marriage. In both cases they come with the good and bad, the great and dysfunctional.

 I wanted the poem to convey that in a way that even straight couples could relate to. I took moments based on personal experience, so I’m retracing the love I have for my own partner, and my own sense of marriage.”

Richard Bianco

The poem, released today, was brought to life in a video by House of Cards star Robin Wright, and X-Men actor Ben Foster. Watch below…