Our Pride festival is today. But we've opted to celebrate the day by honoring the love and family my partner and I have created together. We'll be barbecuing ribs in the back yard, with beans and coleslaw, then we'll toast homemade marshmallows in the chiminea (that's how you know we're gay.)
Then we'll head downtown for the parade which begins when it gets dark. It's a big fabulous parade of lights and always draws a huge crowd, of all styles and orientations.
As far as the justification for gay Pride day, I think a lot of non-gay people misinterpret the word pride to be in the sense of, "look Ma, I made a batch of cookies all by myself!" or "Look everybody, I suck weenis!" To me, what pride means is not self satisfaction for accomplishment or for just being gay. Pride, to me, is used more in terms of the 'absence or opposite of shame."
When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, it was IMPOSSIBLE to admit to a single other soul on earth that you were gay. You just couldn't do it. You grew up hearing people you respected (parents, teachers, clergy, your favorite aunt, everyone!) telling you that homosexuals were perverts and molesters and killed kids after they'd molested them and were basically monsters and all sorts of things. There was no information available to the contrary.
So when you began to have feelings of attraction for the same sex and began to suspect that you might be one of these homosexuals, it kinda ****s your mind up. You can't talk to anyone about it. So it simmers in you and you start to fear that you will grow up to be a child molester or a monster and your life becomes filled with unwarranted shame, that you did absolutely nothing to deserve.
You're an outsider everywhere with this secret shame you hold...until you come out. And that's what gay Pride is about. Freeing yourself from that shame. Standing up and telling the world, this is who I ****in' am. I am not a monster or a pervert or a molester. It's freedom gained from the power of throwing off a shared oppression together among others who have gone through what you have.
Now, things change as time goes on. There is less (or less obvious) oppression. And younger people, thanks to things like Gay Pride, have a different experience today, to which one of them might like to speak.
But I'm here to say, that I celebrate gay Pride because I can and because I ****in' want to. I'll celebrate any day any way I want without anyone's permission or approval, and even if, or maybe because, someone doesn't "get it". What I feel and do are no longer determined by whether or not others approve or understand me. That's Gay Pride.
Happy Pride, everyone!!!
Art has a double face, of expression and illusion.
Updated On: 6/21/08 at 03:32 PM
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