Can You Help Me Find Tina?  

What is crystal methamphetamine (aka Tina) to the queer community?  

It is part of our reality.

This is an invitation to you, my brothers and sisters and those identified in trans- or non-gendered terms, to be real - to tell the truth about your lives to one another, relentlessly, and also to relentlessly refuse the trap and dead end of their lies - the trap of their mendacious discourse about our lives - the discourse that always tells the same story - the story that heterosexual life is to be emulated, that we should want marriage and families and ridiculous and creepy styles of self-presentation and all of their sad baggage. 

I need for you to tell the truth, and this telling the truth is essential to revolution.  The name of this essay is not in vain nor is it merely stylistic.  Finding Tina is finding the truth.  Your gay brothers are dying slowly, are checked out from reality because of their pain, or respoinding to it with desperate attempts to go somewhere else, because heterosexist life does not offer enough or the right things and offers a surfeit of the wrong ones. They are dying from H.I.V. infection because their methamphetamine use prevents them from taking care of themselves; they are wandering the streets and wandering through the interstices and alleys of our society, brain-damaged,  with speech impediments and cognitive impairment and diminution of attention due to the effects of methamphetamine.  They are the living dead whose mark is the capital T.

They are not to be cast aside.

They are us.

The addicts, the many methamphetamine addicts that comprise a significant part of us, they are an essential part of the truth of our lives and of our reality.  And yet, the regime and its queer adherents and rah rahs bury this and other essential and important elements of our reality by disfiguring them with delusions.  The ongoing crystal methamphetamine "Tina" epidemic among us, I will venture to say, is our real life. Tina is the truth.  Marriage is a lie.

 Our real lives and desires do not have much of anything to do with theirs, and this is the hard truth, the revolutionary truth.  I want to ask you to stop supporting those who demean us by their very existence and who want us to validate their mechanisms of abuse and control, mechanisms like marriage and the end of public sex and public sexual spaces.  Your queer comrades need you. The revolution needs you.   I need you to tell the truth of our existence.  I need your help.  Let me state again, and risk misinterpretation, that the truth of our lives is in many ways addiction to methamphetamine more than it is heteronormative desires like marriage or family, yet every day our reality, our discourse, our lives are being thoroughly buried by the regime, and this is why we must work to unbury our lives, to know them, to build from our reality from the truth.   

This seeking and finding and uncovering of the reality of queer lives is itself a type of revolutionary work, and it takes unity and concert.

Let’s work together.         

So, I ask again.  

Can you help me find Tina?