Pride, As Different as LGBTQIA+
It’s the first of June. The month when some of the coolest people were born (ahem), when we officially welcome summer even though it has felt like it for weeks, and when people and organizations everywhere let their rainbow flags fly! That’s right – Pride Month.
Nostalgia crept in as June approached. I began thinking about how I have experienced Pride celebrations in the past, from working looonnggg shifts in gay bars in Columbus, OH to attending myriad events across the country over the years. It has always been a good time, filled with drinking and drag queens and parades and music and so many differently colored rainbows and people. A raucous good time where we took to the streets and partied! I smiled, as I fondly recounted all of those memories.
History of PRIDE
As I was trying to write a historical overview of Pride for this blog, thinking maybe I should set the scene of how we got to dancing in the streets I decided to check my facts and did some reading on the “history of Pride” and the Stonewall riots of 1969. I quickly determined it was too complicated for me to ensure I was indisputably historically accurate and that wasn’t ultimately what I wanted to write about anyway. So, here is a link to get you started if you would like more information. Through my reading though, I noticed there were words that kept cropping up around the history and story of gay pride - “community”, “liberation”, “honor”, “celebration” – that kept rattling around in my brain.
A different kind of PRIDE
“No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.”
This past weekend my wife and I took the kids to the Equality Virginia block party just up the street from the TSM office in the Fan. It was a different experience than any Pride event I’ve ever attended and at first, I wondered if the kids (and maybe I too) would be disappointed. Instead of cocktails and drag queens and corporations vying to make sure I knew they liked queer folks this month, I found a welcoming space centered on self-care. There was acupuncture, a gender-affirming clothing swap, haircuts, headshots, a community fridge, and a community art project among other things. This was a celebration of Pride where people took to the streets to ensure other people had what they needed to continue on their journey. The nostalgia of my 20s and 30s met the reality of my 40s on Belmont Avenue last Sunday afternoon and those words, community, honor, liberation, celebration got louder in my brain until I had to put them on paper.
Where I landed is that Pride can look as different as the LGBTQIA+ community does. We are all in different phases and places and celebrate our history and our existence in different ways. There is power to dancing and partying and celebrating in the streets. There are so very many things to celebrate - coming out, that they haven’t taken all of our rights away, that love is love, that you made it to see another Pride…and I am here for it!
There is also power in celebrating Pride by being in deep community, by honoring ourselves and each other by providing for and uplifting one another.
I think about my friends, my family, my kids, and my kids’ friends and I realize that self-care and community support may be the only way some of us will make it to party in the streets next year. So, it turns out I was not in fact disappointed by that block party in the Fan last weekend, I was changed by it.