Today (June 21), Frank Ocean published an open letter to express his thoughts about the Orlando nightclub mass shooting that left 49 dead and dozens injured last week. Ocean (who came out in an open letter a few years ago saying he had been love with a man) expressed solemn, poetic, sentiments for the victims of the shooting in a Tumblr post.
In his candid entry, Ocean discusses his experiences with discrimination as someone a part of the LGBT community, homophobia, and his first experience witnessing transphobia from an incident that happened with his father when he was a child.
“I was six years old when I heard my dad call our transgender waitress a (homophobic slur) as he dragged me out a neighborhood diner saying we wouldn’t be served because she was dirty,” he wrote. “That was the last afternoon I saw my father and the first time I heard that word, I think, although it wouldn’t shock me if it wasn’t.”
In closing, Ocean poetically mentions how he wonders how others speak to their version of a higher power. “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,” he wrote. “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?”
Read the entire post HERE.