Why Do We Need Pride Events?

People all along the age spectrum have asked me these questions over the years,

1. “Why do you have to have those Pride Marches every June?
2. “Why do you think you deserves these special rights that straight people don’t have?”

Both of these questions are very simple for me to answer. Referring to question 1, I say:

“If there were no oppression against LGBTQ folks, we would not need Pride Marches. So straight & cis people, stop the oppression from yourself, your organizations, and from the larger society!”

Question 2 is, likewise, simple to address:

“I don’t want special rights. But, unfortunately, when we are attacked, beaten up, and bullied, when we lose custody of our children based solely on our sexual and/or gender identities, when we are marginalized in our communities, vilified and scapegoated by our elected leaders including the sitting (sleeping) president of the United States, when we witness our histories erased and our books banned in the schools, when members of our transgender communities are viciously attacked and murdered, can’t receive the medical care they deserve, cannot enter public facilities of their choice, well, all of these are ways we are treated ‘specially’. Quite frankly, I’m sick and disgusted of being treated specially. I prefer to be treated equally with equality and respect.”

And similarly, we will not need an organization like Black Lives Matter, for example, when and if we come to a point in our country when we as a collective society finally and completely look at our racist white supremist past and come to terms with the full history of our country, when we see Indigenous heritage people, African heritage people, Central and South American heritage people, Asian heritage people, people of Middle Eastern heritage, people of any and all ethnic and national heritages living freely, unencumbered by the lingering freedom-killing legacies of our racist past.

Yes, the solutions are quite simple, but, unfortunately, they are not at all easy to implement. We can continue to pass equal rights laws and reinstate those past laws that leaders in our government have whittled away over time. But as governments can grant rights those same governments can take them away.

For our country to function as a country “with liberty and justice for all,” we must ensure equality of rights to all, including to people outside of the majority, for democracies function on majority rule.

Yes, each June is designated as Pride month in several countries across the globe. Millions of people of all sexual and gender identities celebrate the hard-fought rights to love who we want to love and express our gender how we want to express ourselves.

In this age of governments rolling back our rights to live our lives as we choose, we must continue to join together as allies, to stay vigilant, and to connect with progressive people of all identities to counter the terrorist tactics being waged against us.

The histories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and questioning (LGBTIQ+) people are replete with incredible pain and immense pride, of overwhelming repression and victorious rejoicing, of stifling invisibility and dazzling illumination.

Throughout the ages, dominant groups have labeled LGBTIQ+ people using many terms: from “sinners,” “sick,” and “criminal,” to having a “preference, “orientation,” “identity,” and even being given “a gift from God.”

Though same-sex attraction and sexuality and gender nonconformity and expression have probably always existed in human and most non-human species, the concept of “homosexuality,” “bisexuality,” “transgender,” “heterosexuality,” and “gender conformity,” in fact, sexual and gender identities in general and the construction of identities and sense of community based on these identities is a relatively modern concept.

It is only within the last 160 or so years that there has been an organized and sustained political effort to protect the rights of people with same-sex and both-sex attractions, and those who cross traditional constructions of gender identities and expression.

As we enter the momentous month of June, a time set aside in countries throughout the world to commemorate and celebrate our annual LGBTQ Pride events, we can take stock and reflect back on our setbacks and also on our victories great and small over the past years within the personal, interpersonal, institutional, social, political, and religious realms.

For me, a touchstone event was when then United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented a historic address to the United Nations delivered on International Human Rights Day, December 6, 2011, in Geneva, Switzerland.

The majority of her speech centered on the assertion that LGBTQ rights are, indeed, human rights. That same day, President Barack Obama issued a memorandum directing all federal agencies to “promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons.”

While I too felt pride for our President “coming out” for marriage equality on May 9, 2012 during a televised interview with Robin Roberts, I was particularly impressed by Hillary’s courage and forthrightness in bringing to the highest level of world’s attention a simple truth that many of us understood that day on a deep level and have been working towards for most of our lives. Her entire speech deeply moved me, and in particular when she said:

“It is a violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished. Being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality. And protecting the human rights of all people, gay or straight, is not something that only Western governments do.”

Throughout the decades, I have both organized and participated in hundreds of LGBTQ-focused events, and I have attended numerous LGBTQ Pride activities, including precedent-setting and annual marches and parades.

I was fortunate to have attended the second annual Christopher Street Pride march for LGBTQ rights in New York City in June 1971. This was the first time I felt the freedom to be fully myself as I walked down the boulevards with thousands of my comrades.

A few days later, I returned to visit my former college classmates for the first Pride march through the streets of downtown San José, California. This experience was vastly different from the open atmosphere in Manhattan, as 28 of us walked very tentatively down the main street, while bystanders hurled vicious epithets and pelted us with garbage and rocks.

When I sometime begin to take the annual LGBTQ Pride events for granted, I think back to those early marches in New York City and San José, and as I do, I refocus on the importance of continuing the struggle for the rights and dignity of expression for LGBTQ people and our allies, and for all minoritized people whom dominant groups attempt to construct as “other” in this country and throughout the globe.

In this current era as the political and theocratic Right attempts to reverse progressive human and civil rights initiatives won over the past decades and to prevent such measures from taking root where they have not grown previously, I am extremely encouraged by the leaders from the highest levels to the grassroots showing courage in the face of resistance and backlash.

During her speech at the United Nation, Secretary Hillary Clinton committed herself to and spoke for people of good will everywhere when she said:

“To LGBT men and women worldwide: Wherever you live and whatever your circumstances…please know that you are not alone.”

As the truism advises, “Think globally, and act locally,” my hope is that we can join together to create the world as a place where everyone will celebrate their Pride safely and with integrity in ways that express their truest joys while showing their full humanity, freedom, and liberty.

During this Pride season and throughout the year, let us join in making that a reality.