Life's Pleasures Quote by Troy Perry

Violence is usually meant to shrink a movement down to its most frightened, compliant size. Troy Perry flips that logic and, with it, the power dynamic. The opening list is blunt, almost reportorial: drive-by shootings, spit, a slap, gunfire, a broken bottle. It’s not poetry; it’s an inventory. That choice matters. By refusing melodrama, Perry denies the attacker the one thing they’re after: the ability to turn queer faith into a spectacle of victimhood. The cadence also builds credibility: this isn’t theoretical courage, it’s field-tested.

Then the pivot lands: “But the way we look at it...” That “we” is doing heavy cultural work. Perry isn’t performing lone-hero toughness; he’s speaking as a pastor and organizer whose project was communal survival, especially in an era when churches often functioned as engines of exclusion. He’s narrating a collective theology of resilience: persecution isn’t proof of failure, it’s a predictable response to visibility.

“Wake up in glory” is the quiet coup. It reframes harm through eschatology, but not in a passive, “suffer now, reward later” way. In Perry’s mouth, glory is defiance in advance: you can assault our bodies and still fail to colonize our meaning. The attackers get to control the moment; they don’t get to control the story.

Context sharpens the edge. As founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, Perry was building a sanctuary for LGBTQ people when “religion” was routinely weaponized against them. The quote reads like a sermon stripped of ornament: a survival manual that turns terror into testimony and converts fear into a communal, stubborn horizon.