Observations from the Gallery 1.4

A friend of mine sent me what follows in an email this morning and as much as I love quotes and politics I had to admit I had never seen it before. All she knew about it was that it had been written anonymously, photocopied, and handed out during the 1992 presidential campaign. With a little digging I found it had been written anonymously but was later attributed to artist and photographer Zoe Leonard. Leonard was a founding member of the San Francisco artists collective known as fierce pussy which described itself as a "collective of queer women dedicated to creating public art and direct action addressing issues of lesbian identity and visibility."

It's a perfect thing to read the day after the Iowa Caucus ended in a virtual tie between two men. One a habitual liar who changes his positions with the breeze and the other a throwback to the Middle Ages who would ban birth control.

"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 torest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want 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 gaybashed 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, someone who has eaten 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 theif and never caught."

Thanks again for sending me this.