We’re proud because despite relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes, when entire states codify our families into second-class citizenship, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.
We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what the Christian hate industry works so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay.
We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on our blogs … and even on national television.
We’re proud because we’re slowly achieving marriage equality state by state. And even though the change is happening at a glacial pace, we’re still making it happen.
We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our increasingly venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and relationships and the way we live our lives.
We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world is starting to notice and respect us and emulate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.
We’re proud because this weekend we’ll celebrate with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, attitude queens and you’d-never-know-they-were-queens queens, and together we can see through the “pride” in our parade and enjoy the underlying Pride in our parade.
Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so much to be proud of.
12 comments:
Great post! Couldn't have said it better or more eloquently... makes me wish I could make it to SF Pride this weekend!
nice post. thanks for directing me to it via JMG. have a great pride!
Well Puut Jake. Happy Pride!
I love reading your words - always right on the mark. Not to mention that you're always funny as hell.
Annette
Can I get an AMEN from the Church? AMEN!
And a few of us straight folks are proud of you for having a voice...and sharing it.
shouldn't we be celebrating pride 365 days a year?
It's just like gay days at Disney. Gay days there should be 365 days a year. Hold your partners hand where ever you are.
Thank you!
I would love to share this on my blog. Can you let me know if that is okay? I hate to share it without your permission. Great stuff.
My blog is here http://jesushas2daddies.blogspot.com/
Tom -- share anything you want on your blog! And congratulations to you two and your lovely family. I poked around on your blog to check you out. :-)
Wow I guess the bible is wrong then? Yeah right...
The bible has a long, rich history of being wrong: about slavery, about national imperialism, about the subjugation of women, about science. Plus it says very little about homosexuality in relation to its myriad condemnations of heterosexual divorce and adultery, both of which are so abundant in the U.S. that they qualify as national pastimes ... with hardly a whimper of protest out of so-called "christians."
Besides, the bible is little more than a book of contradictory Bronze Age fairy tales. Anyone who looks to it for guidance of any kind in the real world has neither the emotional nor intellectual firepower to participate in rational public discourse.
So keep your bible bullshit to yourself.
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