Pride Month

I've been putting a lot of thought into pride month this year, and how I want to explore and celebrate it in this blog, the very title of which is about reclaiming the things we love that we have been told one way or another to put behind us. This blog attempts to be a place to re-evaluate the parts of ourselves that we have viewed as flawed, and to celebrate them as a part of our full beautiful selves.  hope, here, to explore all human qualities that we may have once viewed as flaws, and to understand them as a very valuable part of our whole beauty, and this is largely the message of Pride Month, in the context of extremely high stakes.

Pride Month celebrates an uprising that occurred June 28th, 1969, in which a marginalized people stood up to the authorities which had been shaming them for years. This uprising took place at The Stonewall Inn in New York City, and the events that took place in the early hours of that day are known as The Stonewall Riots. And yes, I don't like violence. I don't celebrate it. But let's look at what was happening. The people at this bar had long been considered easy marks by the authorities. Their sexuality had made them so. They were the cockroaches of humanity, and for years the police had flipped the metaphorical lights on to watch them scatter.  So I will celebrate the night that those people chose not to submit. That night, these people who had been mortified, imprisoned, and who's lives were constantly in danger of ruination by being publicly named in newspapers as sexual deviants, people with the strength of spirit to know that every societal message telling them they were sick and did not deserve respect was a fallacy? Those people took a unified stand against these acts and declared those acts wrong. Rather than allowing a system of oppression that was firmly in place continue, they stood up against it. They stood against the idea that they were diseased and not worthy of the same rights as others, merely because of who they loved.

This kind of thinking, often expressed privately, but for the first time taken on by a unified group, was a galvanizing force which gave rise to a number of lesbian and gay organizations across the world, and which has changed much of society's thoughts on homosexuality, person by person. One year after the Stonewall Uprising, the first Pride Parades took place, not only in New York, but also in  in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. The idea that not only was gayness not only something not to be ashamed of, but in fact, could be actively celebrated along with many other traits and qualities that make people diverse and beautiful, has been an idea that has taken us as far as we have come today. It is an idea that we celebrated through the Pride Parade, and which was later celebrated as a weeklong event, and which is now called "Pride Month".

And the message of Pride? It is universal, and is a message of inclusive, not of exclusion. Yes, this particular celebration arose because of a particular set of circumstances experienced by a particular group of people, but the idea of pride is big enough to encompass much more than that. Whatever you perceive as your flaws?Why do you perceive them that way? Who has told you this? First of all, IS someone outside of you telling you this? Or is there something in you telling you this? Does this quality harm other living creatures? Or is it something that can help to spread a little beauty? And if so, why not celebrate it as a part of the whole of you?

Now, I've read about people wanting to celebrate "Straight Pride" during this month. And this is not meant in the spirit of inclusion. It is because, somehow through this celebration of shifting thoughts about what is and is not "ok" to be in the world, there is a minority of heterosexual people who think they're being told they are "less than", and that's simply not the case. Nowhere in the idea that gay people have the right to be as proud of their sexuality as everyone else, is there a message that those people already having the privilege of being accepted by society should not be proud. But truly, everyone's been proud of them their entire lives for simply being this way. And if someone is straight and doesn't see how their conformity to the norm has been celebrated, they simply are not paying attention.

Think of it as a great big party where many people have been invited to drink and celebrate, and yet, not all people were allowed entrance to the festival. And then, at some point it was realized that a mistake was made, and more people were worthy of coming to the party and more invitations were sent. Nobody disinvited the people who were already at the party. And not one of those people already drinking and partying it up, were they thinking logically,  would feel the need to declare "And we're gonna be here too! We have the right to be here at the party, too!" This is blatantly apparent. Other people just want to join in on the rights and privileges that others have already had. Thankfully, neither love, nor acceptance, or legal rights are pieces of some metaphorical pie of which there are only so many pieces to go around and where one person's receipt of rights means there is less for someone else.  Equality and pride are to limited and quantifiable. There is enough for all.

That said. I plan, this month, to explore and shine a light on LGBT art and artists, and to make this month the most prolific one yet. So stay tuned!