Happy Pride Month!

I’ve noticed in the ten years I’ve been celebrating Pride that some years are harder than others. This year feels hard in a way that demands me to speak and write about my personal experience, which is something I haven’t done in quite a long time. 

This year, Lexington Pride was held on May 30th. I wasn’t able to attend because I was at a friend’s wedding. Naturally, after it was over, I found myself scrolling through photos from the parade and festival.

I made the mistake of reading the Facebook comments.

There weren’t one or two hateful comments. There weren’t three or four. There were hundreds. Descriptions of hell. Comparisons to predators. The kind of jaw-dropping, stomach-churning rhetoric that many of us have, unfortunately, come to expect.

Comments like these don’t make me want to crawl into a hole out of shame. They make me want to crawl into a hole out of fear. As I read them, I found myself imagining these keyboard warriors taking it offline. Taking it to the parade. Taking it to the office. Taking it to the grocery store. What does that kind of rhetoric look like when it’s played out face-to-face?

We have historical examples. None of them ended well.

What struck me most was not necessarily the comments themselves, but how familiar they felt.

When I was a teenager, I attended a small, country church. After same-sex marriage was legalized, a man gave a sermon and talked about how unfortunate it was that we could no longer stone gay people. I remember sitting there, closeted and terrified, listening to an adult openly wish death and violence upon people like me.

It is difficult to describe what that feels like when you’re young. To know that something so fundamental about who you are is viewed as dangerous, sinful, or deserving of punishment. I sat there in my pink cat sweater, wringing my hands, until I finally found the courage to leave the pew and sit in the bathroom for the remainder of the service. That is one example. One message. There were so many others. 

When I was 17, I had just begun to understand my own queerness. I didn’t know many openly LGBTQ+ people. Everything I knew about queer people had been filtered through the opinions of others, and those opinions painted us as broken, corrupt, or doomed. That same year, I was hospitalized for mental health struggles following my family’s less-than-positive reaction to my coming out. That story in and of itself is one of the darker chapters of my life. It highlights the connection between others wishing violence for LGBTQ+ and the unfortunately high suicide rate in our community. 

Looking back, one of the hardest things wasn’t just feeling alone. It was feeling unable to imagine a future for myself. I really couldn’t picture what my life would look like at 25, 30, or 40. I literally couldn’t picture growing old.

Then I attended my first Pride.

I had lied to my family about where I was going. At the time, identifying as bisexual felt safer than fully embracing what I knew about myself. Everything about the experience felt exciting, rebellious, and a little bit terrifying. But what I remember most is looking around and seeing what felt like a million light fractals of myself.

For the first time, I wasn’t seeing queer people through someone else’s lens. I was seeing joy. I was seeing couples holding hands. I was seeing families!!! And I was seeing people who were older than me.

That last part changed my life. At pride, I wasn’t looking for validation. I was looking for evidence. Evidence that queer people survived. Evidence that they grew older. Evidence that they built careers, relationships, friendships, and ordinary lives.

Queer joy on display gave me permission to see my life going past 18.

Ten years later, I am much more settled in my identity than I was then. I have spent years building a life I love. And yet, somehow, seeing those comments this year hurt more.

Maybe it’s because the rhetoric feels harsher or because of the political climate. Maybe it’s because after years of progress, lately, I’ve had the sinking feeling that we’re sliding backward.

Or maybe it’s because I know exactly what those words sound like to the 17-year-old reading them. I know what it feels like to wonder whether there is a place for you in the world.

I know what it feels like to be afraid.

The truth is, there are still spaces where my girlfriend and I instinctively let go of each other’s hands. There are still moments where safety has to be considered before affection. There are still reminders that visibility comes with risk.

That’s why Pride still matters. 

But because there is another teenager somewhere reading those same comments and wondering what their future looks like.

And they deserve to see what I saw. They deserve to see joy. They deserve to see community.

They deserve to see queer people growing older.

They deserve to see that a full and meaningful life is possible.

If I could place one image in front of my 17-year-old self today, it wouldn’t be an argument or a statistic. It wouldn’t be a social media post.

It would be my best friends.

My girlfriend, Madeline. 

My chosen family, which is full of more gay people than straight. (ily2, straighties) The people who have held me up when things were hard and celebrated with me when things were good.

I would point to them and say: Look! We are still here! We are still queer!

You are more grounded than you can possibly imagine.

You have people to lean on.

You are loved.

And most importantly, you are not and have never been alone.

Happy Pride, y’all.