Written: 06/25/2011
I did want to go down to Pride this year, but alas, work gets in the way, not only because I really shouldn’t have gone down, but also because the day Pride in the Streets fell was staff check in at camp, so I was gathering tax paperwork for 200 staff members to get them paid. Ugh.
Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot about the Pride celebrations going on across the country. And I’ve found that Pride has morphed into less about declaring that we’re here (we’ve done that), but more about celebrating what we’ve done, what we’ve overcome and what we will do.
A true celebration, that incorporates everyone. Especially the straight allies, we could not have made it to where we are without them.
So what have we accomplished, what have we survived? NoFo has a great post:
We’re proud because despite relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes, when entire states codify our families into second-class citizenship, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.
We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what the Christian hate industry works so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay.
We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on our blogs … and even on national television.
We’re proud because we’re slowly achieving marriage equality state by state. And even though the change is happening at a glacial pace, we’re still making it happen.
We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our increasingly venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and relationships and the way we live our lives.
We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world is starting to notice and respect us and emulate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.
We’re proud because this weekend we’ll celebrate with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, attitude queens and you’d-never-know-they-were-queens queens, and together we can see through the “pride” in our parade and enjoy the underlying Pride in our parade.
Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so much to be proud of.
The Village Voice also has the darker side of Pride and what we have to be proud of. Interesting read, but I want to stay positive.
Also, on a side note, it took me freaking forever to find Pittsburgh Pride’s logo. And it’s an awesome logo, I love it! But it is in two places on the Internet. Not good.
All my best,
The King of Spades
