Pride
It’s that time of the year again.
It’s Pride month. A month that takes the time to celebrate and acknowledge the LGBTQIA+ community and all it is and has been through. We celebrate our queerness with colors and bright bold clothes, drag shows, parades, and all sorts of events.
For a month.
Come July 1st, many places paint over their colors, change out their marketing tools, and anything queer vanishes as if it never existed. It’s a marketing fad. While I appreciate visual recognition, I don’t want it to be a fake way of pulling me into your business or simply virtue signaling to show the current people to support for a short period of time. This isn’t a fad, just like talking about depression and medications that many of us take for it isn’t a fad. My existence isn’t a way for you to jump on some trend that lasts for a month and then just move on to the next thing. It’s meant to be a platform so that the rest of the year can be a place of affirmation for our existence as people and not some circus animal put on show.
Moving on.
For me, Pride is about my journey and narrative, and how that fits into the greater tapestry of our community and cultural narrative. This has been a journey of deep spiritual wounding, and finding healing and hope in a place I never thought existed. It’s a journey in which I have slowly come to believe I am worthy of a person that loves me for me (and to this day I still struggle with believing it). It has been a journey where I have had to let go of the ideal self I should be, as dictated to me by various faith communities, or our cultural marketing machine. For example, I am a religious gymgoer. I go for my mental health and the hope that I can remain functional and mobile for as long as possible as I continue on my developmental existence. When I go to a place like GNC for supplements, there are posters of dudes that are ripped and super bulked up and we’re told we, too, can look like this. This image of the ideal guy is a lie so many of us believe we can be that we sacrifice so much to try to get there, only to find ourselves in a desert chasing a mirage. Yet no matter how far we go, we come no closer to water. We think that if we can just be like this image, we may be more attractive, desired, or good enough for others. Sadly, many on the journey of vanity become so lost to the ideal that they lose a sense of who they are and become incredibly narcissistic, arrogant, and overly bloated that no one wants them anyway. It’s an illusory journey that ultimately leads to nothing more than broken glass and all the lacerations we received from it.
I came from a religious faith tradition that taught me that I am abnormal and unnatural and that I can pray it away and talk to people to help me recover the straight man that is lost inside. Of course, that’s complete and total bullshit. These people have the belief that being gay is about behavior and not attraction; as if I chose to like a dude because I wanted to be different. In reality, it’s attraction. I cannot change who I am attracted to any more than you can. It’s hardwired into me. Thankfully after feeling a deep call to something greater, I left that place and found a denomination of Christianity that affirmed I am wonderfully made and beautiful and worthy of love. I am not an abomination. I am loved as a Child of God. That community of support and affirmation helped me find a better sense of who I am and what I believe I am called to do. I have seen what people of this community can do through a lens of religion when love is the way forward. Like my friend, Isaac, who is seeking to go to seminary for the Methodist Church. Isaac is also a drag evangelist and minister for a really cool church model in Illinois. It’s a reminder that there is a place for all of us here that seek to share love. This calling leads to something greater.
Reconciliation. As a member of the Christian Church, I believe it important that I seek to help members of my community find healing through forgiveness for the grievous wounds this institution has done. It’s not a ploy to try and suck people back into church, but a means to help others find healing in these wounds so they, too, can have the freedom of discovering who they are without the shackles of religious persecution telling them what they should or should not be. If you are someone with such pain and you are reading this, I am so terribly sorry for what has been done to you. No one; NO ONE deserves to receive such treatment and dehumanization because you don’t fit the mold of an institutional human construct that clings to the values of a white male heteropatriarchal system.
I. Am. So. Sorry. I hope that you can learn to forgive us for what has been done, and what continues to happen by those in Christianity that believe you are wrong and seek to remind you through emotional, verbal, and/or physical abuse. It’s not okay; it’s quite fucked up, and no human being deserves that. I, too, carry such wounds and have found hope and healing, though the journey has been long and arduous. I hope whatever that is for you, you may find it. I hope that our wounds and scars can be sources of hope and strength for those that come after us; that our stories tell others of what we have experienced, and why.
Pride is about story. Pride is a narrative of struggle, achievement, pain, fear, suffering, and death. It also has themes of joy, hope, love, reconciliation, compassion, and perseverance. All the materialistic stuff is just stuff. Yes, it is nice to wear things that are affirming and they can certainly be a means to share your narrative and to remind people we exist and are not going anywhere. In the end, it’s our wounds, scars, and stories that carry the banner. As we take this time to stop and celebrate who we are as a community, may we do it through story, and not just show up to places with rainbow attire to be part of an in-group for a month. Our stories need to be told so that people see us as people who are wonderfully made and deeply worthy of love. Our tapestry continues to be woven with threads of silk and tattered threads of linen. That tapestry is our banner to carry to the world, not just this month, but every month hereafter.
Happy Pride.
