Steven Boyle’s slam poetry entitled “I Hit Send, or Modern Meltdown” is an often hilarious, sometimes bittersweet, and eminently relatable piece of spoken word on the trials and tribulations of growing up queer and coming out as an adult. The performance was given at Penn State University.
While my experiences as a lesbian trans woman are clearly different in some major ways from those of a cisgender gay man, I can still relate very strongly to Boyle’s words. I find especially compelling his descriptions of adolescent worries about hiding his identity, and the way he speaks about the conservative ideologues whose sole purpose seemed, at least to teenage me, to be to make us feel bad about ourselves.
Spoken word has never been one of my writing style fortes. I have an amazing amount of respect, and not too little amount of awe, for anyone like Boyle. Those who can construct with word, tone, gesture, and rhyme a piece of aural art which is almost physically tangible in its superb craftsmanship.
Video via Steven Boyle/YouTube.
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