Frank Ocean posted a lengthy note on his Tumblr page Tuesday (June 21) in response to the vicious massacre at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, earlier this month. In the note, the elusive musician rounds up a few incidents involving the persecution of LGBT men and women before diving into his own personal thoughts on why hate crimes towards the community must end.
“I read in the paper that my brothers are being thrown from rooftops blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs for violating sharia law,” he wrote. Sharia law is the body of the Islamic faith, and is deemed by those who follow this religion as the proper way to behave. Frank later writes that his pastor in church also read scripture for his religion describing same-sex relationships as a sin (“Words like abomination popped off my skin like hot grease as he went on to describe a lake of fire that God wanted me in.”)
“I heard on the news that the aftermath of a hate crime left piles of bodies on a dance floor this month,” he continues, bringing up a chilling mental image of what the club could have looked like during the wee hours of June 12.
“I heard the gunman feigned dead among all the people he killed. I heard the news say he was one of us. I was six years old when I heard my dad call our transgender waitress a fa**ot as he dragged me out a neighborhood diner saying we wouldn’t be served because she was dirty…Many hate us and wish we didn’t exist. Many are annoyed by our wanting to be married like everyone else or use the correct restroom like everyone else. Many don’t see anything wrong with passing down the same old values that send thousands of kids into suicidal depression each year. So we say pride and we express love for who and what we are. Because who else will in earnest?”
He caps off his post with some moving affirmations about his hope for the world, and he also wonders what the “insane” and “indoctrinated” hear when talking to their personal God.
“I daydream on the idea that maybe all this barbarism and all these transgressions against ourselves is an equal and opposite reaction to something better happening in this world, some great swelling wave of openness and wakefulness out here… We are all God’s children, I heard. I left my siblings out of it and spoke with my maker directly and I think he sounds a lot like myself. If I being myself were more awesome at being detached from my own story in a way I being myself never could be. I wanna know what others hear, I’m scared to know but I wanna know what everyone hears when they talk to God. Do the insane hear the voice distorted? Do the indoctrinated hear another voice entirely?”