Pride Letter
Subject Line: Because You’ve Asked: My Thoughts on Gay Pride Month 6/1/2024
Dear Colleagues and Associates,
I have been conscious of being gay just about as long as I have been conscious that I am human. It is hard to believe what I have seen, heard, and lived through in sixty three years. When we set aside a month - like Pride Month - to celebrate a group of people, we risk marginalizing those same people. Recognition just one month out of twelve causes us to see people not as they are but as we briefly imagine them to be.
The late, great writer James Baldwin talked about the difficulty of understanding different perspectives. He asked the interviewer to consider trees and how beautiful they are, then reminded him that it might not be the same for Black people who remember trees as a place where their ancestors died.
My life has had its share of privilege yet there were many terrors being a gay child before gay was more socially accepted. The societal pressure to “pass” as normal, losing friends to the horrors of AIDs, surviving repeated physical and sexual abuse, exclusion from events and parties for being “queer,” suffering the constant silencing of my voice and ideas, and in my early forties, becoming the victim of two hate crimes.
One hate crime took place in school where I taught, perpetrated by a White boy selling drugs whom I tried to stop only to lose my two front teeth when he slammed the door in my face. Because there was a scuffle and I grabbed the student, I - and not he - was the one investigated. Matters were made worse briefly when the boy’s father said, “Well, you are a faggot aren’t you?” One year later, while witnessing a hate crime against an Asian woman on the train, I stepped in only to have two Black boys knock me down and used magic marker to write “fag” on my shirt. I am not alone. This is, and has been, the plight of many of my gay brothers and sisters.
In high school, I had a teacher ally who gave me a collection of writings by e.e. cummings inscribed with his quote:
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
The statistics are clear:
LGBTQ+ people are more likely to be hate crime victims of sexual orientation or gender bias crime and less likely to be victims of race or ethnicity bias crimes compared to non-LGBTQ+ hate crime victims.
A Vanderbilt University study found that 83% of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals reported going through adverse childhood experiences such as sexual and emotional abuse, and worse mental health as adults when compared to their heterosexual peers.
Up to 25% of the general LGBTQ+ community has moderate alcohol dependency, compared to 5-10% of the general population. Some subgroups of the LGBTQ+ community have even higher rates of abuse.
I have been privileged to help many people navigate the terrain of understanding when it comes to oppression in my community. Service has prodded me on and kept me from the wells of despair and victimhood. In addition, as the statistics indicate, my need to recover from alcoholism (33 years) has allowed me to use my experience as an example of how to develop what I call the hope muscle.
Many trusted friends ask me if oppression is the same for all groups. My answer is, of course not, it is as different as the people who experience it. I think in some ways a thoughtless focus on identity, with no consideration for other dynamics and pressures, can be reduced to selfishness and the ensuing hate to protect one’s own fear.
People also ask about Pride festivals, parades, and months. Yes, we should be able to celebrate like everyone else. “All” should mean all in every instance. But it is important that we not be self-congratulatory or judge other groups because individual freedoms are interdependent and cannot happen without connection.
My recommendation is to know history. For example, Pride marks the date of the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 when a Greenwich Village bar was raided. “Coming out” means coming out of shame, that persistent self loathing that can hold you captive. It is said that “shame dies when stories are told in safe places.” The need to hide who you are, and the experience of being silenced for who you love, is as insidious as is grief which takes its own merry time to be absorbed and healed.
I recently attended a wedding of two amazing young men. Sitting in the audience with my partner of almost fourteen years, I couldn’t help but think about how far we have come to be able to gather and celebrate this union in a multi-generational, extended blood and found family. It is my hope that this generation does not forget all of us who have come before and made this moment possible. Abundant joy is only made possible by the years of pain and struggle associated with speaking out. The obstacles have all contributed to the development of my hope muscle.
“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”
Audre Lorde
I realized clearly at that wedding that we do not want, or need, approval. We need humanity. We deserve the respect the world seems to want to afford a limited few. It is not enough to speak of justice, we must live it so the world will know what it looks like. We fight for what is right, and good, and celebrate it into existence because speaking of oppression is not enough, we must live into liberation.
Thank you for reading and recognizing LGBTQ+ people. Your openness to fully recognizing oppression, in all of its forms, can transform the world.
Andy Flaherty