Pride Matters
As a business, we aren’t very vocal or visible during Pride.
We are open about the fact that we are partners in business and spouses in life all year ‘round, in every professional setting. It feels important to us to be open with clients and participants in our programmes. And yet we haven’t really felt the need to be overly visible during Pride. In part this is a reaction to ‘Rainbow Washing’ — all the Corporate celebrations of Pride month from organisations who want to sell products by ‘celebrating’ Pride, especially organisations whose month-long gestures of solidarity are contradicted by their year ‘round policies and operations.
Somehow, we did not want to add to the noise, but this month we have been wondering if we haven’t valued Pride, haven’t fully connected with the fact that, to arrive at equity, protest is still needed, and celebration. Pride events raise awareness and open space to celebrate the human right to freely express ourselves.
On the whole our experience as a couple has been one of safety and support. We see now that it REALLY matters that we stand for this, that we acknowledge this and recognise that, in expressing ourselves as an LGB-led organisation we show what is possible.
We do sometimes come up against occasions that jar and result in us being positioned outside ‘the norm’: we get pauses when we come out in work settings, a moment of uncertainty about how to react; we hear inappropriate comments from professionals (“I have worked with people like you”); we get comments about the length of our hair, the clothes we choose to wear, or how we choose to create our family; we hear things like “how can that Movie Star be a lesbian, she is so feminine?”
At Amity we spend our life sharing the fact that our experience is created by Thought taking form from the inside out, not from an objective truth in the world determining that we should live in a certain way. Given this, we know that such homophobic comments innocently come from (sometimes) invisible, heteronormative thinking. We don’t tend to take it personally or hold it against people. We know that we too have thinking that results in our own blind spots of prejudice.
This morning, Katie caught the opening of an episode of ‘In Our Time’ (BBC Radio 4) entitled ‘The life of Stars” and was struck by the discussion of the fact that
‘Stars, like everything else in the universe, are subject to change. They are born among vast swirls of gas and dust and they die in the stunning explosions we call supernovae. They create black holes and neutron stars and, in the very beginning of the universe, they forged the elements from which all life is made.”
This is something we share in our work too — the fact that we humans are all, at our core, the same universal energy. We literally are all Stars! The lives we get the opportunity to create, are unique expressions, in form, of that same life energy — we are a unique expression of the elements from which all life is made. This fact is not yet understood by most humans, meaning being different from the prevailing norm can result in marginalisation, persecution, prosecution, and in some parts of the world, death.
Remembering this, we want to celebrate the fact that we have been able to get married, we are soon to welcome a daughter into the world, and we have a wonderful network of people who love, care for and appreciate us and our life together. We are going to be considering this carefully and intend to start telling the story of our love, a true element of life, and share more that it is from our love that our business-life emerges.
It matters fundamentally that we are visible and that we raise awareness and celebrate the interplay of:
our true nature
how our experience is created
and the form our life takes
In so doing, we display what is possible, and in a small way, we can be part of change that is needed for us all.
Katie & María x
