Walking fast on New York’s magnificent linear High Line Park on a recent brisk February day. A giant 20-by-30 foot poster, installed on a pillar of the Standard Hotel, stops and holds me mid-stride.
The typewritten text, words crossed out on a single page torn and tattered by exposure to the elements since October 2016, rivets me and other visitors passing by.
Written a quarter century ago by queer feminist activist/artist Zoe Leonard, I want a president is, at once, a poem and a political manifesto — direct, blunt, heartfelt and angry.
It remains urgent and relevant today, as our country may be circling the drain, thanks to government-induced and sanctioned exclusion, racism, homophobia, misogyny, narrow-minded ignorance, incompetence, and a distressing lack of empathy for nature, humanity and the human condition.
In a statement, Leonard explained: “I am interested in the space this text opens up for us to imagine and voice what we want in our leaders, and even beyond that, what we can envision for the future of our society. I still think that speaking up is a vital and powerful political act.”
Here is Leonard’s poem:
I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for 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 to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air-conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed 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 and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty 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 thief, and never caught.
–Zoe Leonard, 1992
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As someone who never gets to the High Line because I’m always working elsewhere, and who never heard of Zoe Leonard, I much appreciate your putting this photo and the text in your blog. Although I think the writer is wrong about a few U.S. Presidents, and that experience in government service can be a considerable help before one is charged with running the entire country, the poem’s analogy is huge, whole, and fully charged with feelings that everyone can understand, at least–agree or not. It’s a breath of fresh air IN the fresh air.