Remember this day you first stood in the sun

The evolving meaning of Pride

Pride fatigue is a thing in 2023. May is already rolling in with the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia next week - whose unpronounceable acronym announces a month of June overloaded with rainbows.

I can feel a slight hope here in the U.S. that the manufactured “backlashes” against Disney or AB InBev or the economic threats by an ambitious politician in Florida will put a damper on the festivities or at least corporate engagement around them. This could be a turning point for the “LGBTQ+ authoritarian regime.” The moment the “Gay Lobby” went too far and finally became right-sized.

I hate to disappoint, but I don’t think it will happen. Pride is a universal love story mixed with a political thriller, even better than“The Lives of Others,” which boasts an 8.6 on IMDb.

Beyond the protest versus celebration debate, Pride marks an insane rescue over 50 years from the cultural and physical oppression experienced by subjugated people. What once was, does not always have to be.

I was born ten years after Stonewall when my God-given teenage crushes were nothing but a source of pain, a World in which exile or the priesthood were viable alternatives, in which homosexuality meant HIV and loneliness in old age, where LGBTQ+ representation in the media was few and far between, in which a colleague once warned me he was ok with “gay people but not screamers” (I never fully understand what he meant and yet I never forgot). Most of us were not free. And coincidentally, fellow travelers put their heads in gas ovens, drowned in the Baltimore harbor, died of liver failure, hanged themselves in jail, overdosed in ditches, and died by suicide during the pandemic.

This World had succeeded in an even darker one made of internment, electroshock therapy, public humiliation, and deprivation from all joy of living.

Most LGBTQ+  lives are still “poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” but the train has left the station. Just look at India: what is more inspiring than the conversation there in the past few weeks?

I considered Pride as my antidote to shame; deeply entrenched, omnipresent, soul-crushing learned self-hatred. Pride was a medication to avoid being consumed by the accusation that “we made our bed.” But I increasingly see it as a reminder of human potential. If the movement orchestrated such an unprecedented shift in hearts and minds, I could unchain myself, and other humans could unchain themselves. A modern exodus story.

No one needs DeSantis' authorization to dream of a better world. Nobody needs the authorization to live, love, flourish and start anew. That is an important message- LGBTQ+ or not - which deserves an entire month.