Monroe Drive and the LGBT Community Center

Lyrics

This isn't a monument.
It's just a street.
Monroe Drive.
The asphalt breathes out the day's heat.

Before the paint, there was the walking.
A migration nobody called by name.
From smaller towns, from colder houses.
They came in the 80s, the 90s.
Found a two-bedroom off the park.
Found a welcome in a bookstore Linda Bryant opened back in 1974.
Found a place to put the U-Haul boxes down.

This is how you make a center.
Not with a proclamation, not with a cornerstone.
You make it with rent checks and porch lights left on.
You make it with footsteps, one after another,
beating a path along the spine.
Monroe Drive.
This city's, and yours, and mine.

Then came the years the porch lights went out.
One by one.
They named a building for Phillip Rush. Born 1953, gone 1994.
The Rush Center, on Park Drive.
In a former dry-cleaning shop.
And for years, in the meeting rooms,
you could still smell the chemicals in the vents.
A ghost of something scrubbed clean, but never gone.

This is how you make a center.
Not with a proclamation, not with a cornerstone.
You make it with rent checks and porch lights left on.
You make it with footsteps, one after another,
beating a path along the spine.
Monroe Drive.
This city's, and yours, and mine.

The record is a quiet thing.
It doesn't hold the names of the men from Guatemala who tended the lawns.
It doesn't name the wives listed only as 'spouse' on the quilt.
It doesn't list the households, door by door,
that made this bend in the road a harbor.
The record is quiet.
But the street remembers.

And then, one day in 2016, they brought the paint.
Tenth and Piedmont.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.
Permanent, they said.
Baked into the asphalt.
A headline for a story written in whispers for thirty years.

This is a monument.
It's just a street.
The hum of the traffic tonight.
The weight of the footsteps.
On Monroe.