What Pride Month meant for me
Maintaining two personas
So June was Pride Month, and I’ve been celebrating along with the masses on the internet, going along with the flow. It was, to be fair, quite difficult not to aware of Pride Month if you live in the liberal niches of the internet. Literally even right now the Medium logo is the colour of a rainbow.
As a person who was sort of an observer of Pride Month, I’d just like to provide an outer perspective of what it all looked like to me. I do not live in the U.S. and I live in a relatively conservative country and I mostly live isolated in a boarding school, so I can safely say that I did not experience Pride Month in its fullest sense.
Well, first, I’d like to talk about how I contributed. I couldn’t really contribute anything substantial, reasons being obvious. If I tried to make a public stance, there would be social backlash. Because despite the overwhelming support for the LGBTQ community online, reality was still dismal and I was just one person against a thousand. And despite my fullest belief that we deserve better, I couldn’t do anything to change it. Not on my own, not in real life.
But on the internet, (not on Facebook — Facebook is too closely connected to real life), I can maintain a different persona and I can say what I want without any abject consequences. Tumblr is the number one place for that, I think. Because the culture of tumblr is so liberal and intersectional, you would actually be damned if you weren’t celebrating Pride Month. If you don’t celebrate Pride Month on tumblr, that makes you amish.
I write and I draw so I contributed by writing and drawing to the communities within tumblr. It was fun, I guess. It felt like I was part of a trend. But it didn’t do anything for me to celebrate any actual pride. I actually felt just a bit empty inside, because I kept seeing all of these LGBTQ positive posts where gay people were kissing on the streets and rainbow flags all over Manhattan and even companies were using it as a marketing strategy these days. It was kind of impossible to escape it, as long as I stayed connected to the internet.
And I’m most definitely not saying that Pride Month is something that should be stopped for the sake of people like me, who cannot participate in the fullest sense. But I just wanted to remind people what Pride Month is supposed to be about.
Pride Month is not just a hashtag and a trend you follow to remain hip and cool. Pride Month is not a rainbow flag you post on instagram or a drawing of your favourite character wearing a rainbow t-shirt. Those are all examples of the methods we embrace Pride.
Pride Month is about truly coming to terms and accepting who you are as a person and it’s about taking a stance, saying that I am proud of who I am no matter what society tells me.
Today, Pride Month has become such a hyped up trend that it became an “event” rather than a “movement.” An event and a movement is different — an event implies that it is temporary in nature, that it is fleetingly celebrated and then everything goes back to the way it was. A movement is different — a movement implies change, a revolution.
I am proud of the way things changed, even just a few years ago, Pride Month would have not been this mainstream. And it’s good that has become a somewhat mainstream trend, but it is still in a bit of a liberal bubble. I can say for sure that I am not the only person who celebrates pride online and then maintains reticence in the face of reality. And I had to maintain this dual persona my entire life — the bisexual intersectional feminist who loves seeing guys and girls and everyone in between falling in love with each other versus the girl in real life who was liberal compared to other people but still never took the next step.
I loved June, I loved seeing all of the positivity, but I really do hope that Pride Month breaks out of its domestic bubble and evolves into a global movement so that even people like me can celebrate pride with the kind of support that you get from the internet. I wouldn’t be able to write this piece if it weren’t for pride month, and that is exactly what pride month is about. We stand in solidarity with one another, and it’s about time that people stopped seeing Pride Month as just a “liberal” culture but rather a culture for everyone to enjoy — a culture for love.
