I am Bradley Manning

My name is John Vick. I am gay and went to school in small town Oklahoma in the late 1970s. I’m sure things haven’t changed. Bradley Manning needs medical care - outpatient, and largely for the certain PTS he surely is left with after the brutal way he has been treated. 

I’m from Minneapolis. I used to write a lot of poetry - including a lot about Pvt. Manning. I came out in a small town in Oklahoma decades ago, but I know the drill - and I went into the air force ultimately to get away from the south, and “become a man.” All to my detriment, as I was discharged for homosexuality under Reagan. I am truly Brad Manning in a lot of ways. Oklahoma confuses a young gay man as to self-image, gender role, everything. All is challenged and it is frankly near unbeatable.  

I wrote this a couple of years ago:

VISITATIONS WITH MANNING.

In the heat of industrial paint and steel, the dungeon-master

knows “innocence” on sight.

Complex.
As in queer boys?

Wind blows through skyscrapers, to ghetto high-rise kitchens
filled with smells of fats,

sugar.

A way of saying, “yes” by saying, “no,” while ceasing moral support.
A way of controlling

by diminution of humanity.

A grown man thrown away. Lifted up.

As a transitive, “culpable” follows “conning” in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Such is the way
of a promise

of heroics with perturbational heterosexuality.