The Pen and the Sword

The Toulouse Pride Parade is tomorrow, and I’m going to be going out to that. My LGBTQ group has a float, and there will be a place on it for me to dance, most likely, or a place for me to walk beside it. I’ve never been to a Pride event before, and I’m pretty excited. But Pride is a hot topic in the never ending debate around queer rights, and a lot of people in my life seem to be unaware of the issues that lead to it, so here it is. Gay Pride 101.

A question I hear from a lot of straight people about Pride is probably one you’ve heard before, too: “why isn’t there a straight pride parade?” That question is related to another one: “why are you proud to be gay? It’s not like it’s something you had to work for.” For some people, this is asked in earnest confusion; for most, it is an aggressive gesture, a response to the feeling that one’s privilege is being threatened. And, at one point in my life, these were questions I asked, too.

You might think this an odd sort of thing to be wondering about, from a professed queer who frequently describes herself as “full of gay,” and you’d probably be right. But context is important.

When I first started thinking seriously about my own sexuality and came out as bisexual (a label I have since moved on from in favour of the delightfully invented neologism of “pan-queer”), not only was I still mainly interested in men, I was largely ignorant of the issues facing the LGBTQ community. I had been socialized, as most people are, expecting to be straight, and I’d spent my childhood without it even occurring to me to think about my own preferences. When I did come out, it was to an astonishingly accepting community: accepting parents, an accepting school, an accepting and mostly queer friend group. In a lot of ways, I was still experiencing privilege. I knew, in the vaguest sense, that homophobia was still a very serious issue in most parts of the world, but without much experience of it myself or any form of education on the issue I found it hard to reconcile with my own life experiences.

I had also grown tired of the people who I encountered on various internet forums, who used being “proud to be gay” as an excuse to tell everyone about their sexuality (regardless of the intended conversation topic), and cried homophobia when people (rightfully) told them they were being obnoxious. Sexuality, I decided, is an important part of identity, but it isn’t and shouldn’t be what ultimately defines you. This is still something I believe today.

And so I wondered–why no straight pride parade? If gay people are allowed to be proud, why aren’t straight people?

Then I grew up a bit. Then I started learning. Then I found my interest in the same sex growing, and more and more I felt excluded by the mainstream. And then I understood.

There are two things to understand about the concept of gay pride. The first is this: being proud to be gay is not an active pride. It’s not like being proud of an accomplishment, or getting an A on a project, or finishing a difficult task. It’s not something you are proud of in expectation of being congratulated for. Being proud to be gay is a basic pride, a pride in oneself, like being proud to be an individual person. It is being yourself, and being unashamed of that self in a world that so much wants you to be ashamed. Being proud to be gay is refusing to bow to shame.

And that’s where Pride events come in. The queer community is still excluded every day. People are presumed straight until proven otherwise; no straight person ever has to declare themselves so, to come out or reveal their heterosexuality to the world. But anyone who isn’t straight, if they want the same recognition of that part of themselves that their straight peers receive automatically, has to explicitly state it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work, either; all too often, someone who casually mentions their sexuality in conversation or reveals that they have a same-sex partner is told to stop flaunting their sexuality, that the other party doesn’t care if they’re gay but doesn’t want to hear about it–something that never happens to straight people. Couples in advertisements are always straight, unless the product is specifically targeting gay people; in literature and film, main characters are rarely queer unless the plot of their story centres around LGBTQ issues. Queer people become so starved for media validation that we cling to the gay characters we find, we treasure them and hold them close to our hearts, simply because we’re so used to being left out. And so the second thing is this: there is no straight pride because heterosexuality is already celebrated every day by every part of culture–except queer culture. Here, we celebrate us.

We have Pride because it gives us a place to belong. We have Pride because there, we are accepted, in a way we so rarely are anywhere else. We have Pride because it brings us together. We have Pride because it’s the one place in our lives where we can look around and for once, assume nine tenths of the people we see are queer. We have Pride because it brings attention to our cause. We have Pride because it reminds the world that we are here. We have Pride because it visibly celebrates all aspects of our culture, from drag queens and flaming twinks to dykes on bikes and stone butches to bears, leather D/s, and lipstick femmes, to androgyny, genderplay, and anything in between. We have Pride because we are fucking proud, and no one has the right to take that away from us.

One day, Pride won’t be necessary, but that day is a long way off. So tomorrow, I will be out there in eyeliner and chipped nail polish, a chest binder, and vinyl pants, and I will be making noise and wearing rainbow buttons on my shirt collar and being unapologetically fabulous, because that’s who I am and that’s never going to change. I will be out at Pride, proud to be there, and proud to make people sit up and take notice–because we’re still here, we’re still queer, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.