I’m thirty three years old, and I’ve been gay my whole life.
Yesterday was the first time I understood the purpose of Pride.
Picture this.
You’ve been a lesbian your whole life, but you don’t realize it til you’re an adult. It’s a messy road, but you get there in your twenties.
You’ve never been to Pride before, but you go to Pride, cause when you’re gay that’s what you do. You drink, and the sun is hot and high, and you expect to meet other gay friends and you don’t. Everyone is with their gay friends already and they don’t care about you. You leave Pride feeling wounded and trying to pretend indifference.
You go to Pride a few years in a row because Pride is a party, and maybe this time you’ll make friends with the other gays standing in the drink lines. You don’t make friends, but you do feel uncomfortable in your body. You drink and feel a little sick. It’s hot outside, why can’t Pride be a fall event? You can still party in the fall. Why can’t you ever make friends? You’re all gay, it shouldn’t be this hard. You leave Pride without yours, embarrassed, annoyed, a little spiteful. Pride just isn’t what it was supposed to be.
You don’t go to Pride the next year, or the year after that, or the year after that or after that or after that. It wasn’t ever for you anyway, you always just felt lonely and left out and uncared for. Pride was supposed to be community but nobody ever offered it to you every time you went so what’s the point? Pride can be for other gay people, you guess, just not for you.
You’re thirty three, and you get tickets to Pride. You don’t know why you suddenly want to go. It’s never worked out before, you never make the gay friends you want to make, it’s always just hot and sticky and lonely, and you don’t even drink anymore so you can’t party like everyone else, so what’s the point? You get the tickets anyway. You go to Pride.
You spend all day in the sun, walk until your feet hurt, sit in the shade and watch a river of colorful people flow past and around you. Nobody stops to notice you, nobody says hello. You don’t make any new gay friends. But something unfolds.
There are children running by with queer flag face paints, with the lesbian flags in their hands. A young person with shaggy hair and big feet is gay, you can tell from the flag he wears like a cape. Men walk past with trans colors painted into their beards. Drag queens perform Lady Gaga on stage and you scream along to the lyrics that have never moved you even once until now, until you hear them blasted through your soul by the stacked speakers on stage, until you belt them at the top of your lungs surrounded by the trans, gay, queer strangers that are your people, your community.
You sit in the shade with a lemonade and aching feet and watch the sea of people ebb and flow around you, wearing colors that signal who they are, walking and talking and speaking and existing in ways that show their true selves, that tell you in no uncertain terms the way that they exist on the inside, and you are in the privileged position today, this one sacred day of the year, to see it shown like this on the outside too.
You will leave here tonight, all of you, and you will take off the paint and the flags and the colors. You will go to work on Monday, or to school. You will have your safe spaces and people, yes, who know you. But for the most part the world will see you and it won’t know for sure what you are. It will have to ask, or it will assume, or it won’t give you any notice or consideration at all. But at Pride, you were real. At Pride, you were purposeful. You were meaningful. You wore the lesbian flag as a bandana around your neck and you watched other lesbians dance with each other, you watched the gay men flaunt, and the trans women in their skirts and overalls, their sneakers and heels and their big, beautiful laughter. You watched the trans man with his new haircut and his simple black t-shirt with the trans-flag skeleton emblazoned on it, and you knew him. And you held hands with the love of your life, and danced, and walked, and laughed, and kissed, and they all knew you too.
