My History With Pride — Why There Isn’t One.
I have been out since I was 15 years old. I had my first serious boyfriend at 18. I’m now 32 and married (not to the same guy, thankfully) yet I have never been to Pride. At least, not on purpose. Let me explain, I once went on a night out in Birmingham without realising it was Pride, the same thing happened a couple of years later in Brighton. I’m not going to lie, I hated it.
I hated it because I felt like an awkward outsider. Having spent years hiding it, I was now surrounded by the people I was supposed to connect with, the people I was supposed to be like, as far as I was concerned, but instead I just felt like the kid at school no one picks for the football team. (incidentally, I was).
Whilst I enjoyed going to gay clubs and bars because it was comfortable, I wasn’t a scene queen. I didn’t surround myself by gay people and culture and as I get older I revelled in the fact that gay was only a small part of who I was as a person, and how I was so far-fetched from ‘that type of gay’.
Growing up, people were affronted by flamboyant gay guys who ‘threw their sexuality in your face’ and perhaps I developed as someone more introverted because of that. But whatever the cause, I just wasn’t a Priscilla Queen of the Desert and being in an environment full of them, or at least that was how it seemed to me, made me feel inadequate, like I was faking it. You know when you go to a job interview that you know is blatantly out of your league? Yeah, that.
I’m also not a city dweller, so any scene involved travelling that quite frankly I couldn’t be bothered or couldn’t afford to do. Poor little country boy, but to be honest it fell in with that feeling of not belonging, because I could use it as an excuse not to go.
Why did I need an excuse? Because I felt that I SHOULD go, that I was in some way letting the side down but not going. These feelings abated as I got older, but there was still a definite sense of FOMO.
They flaunt it because they have fought for decades to be able to flaunt it in safety without fear of arrest, violence or abuse.
Flash forward to 2018 and today is Pride in London and I am pretty sad I can’t be there. For the first year ever I really wanted to go. I can’t pin point an exact time or event that caused the 180, but over the past eighteen months or so my feelings towards the LGBTQ community have changed. I find myself drawn more to LGBTQ issues, events and the community in general.
Maybe I have just matured? My Macbook has Star Wars stickers on, so I’m not sure that’s the reason. In the past year especially, as I have developed as a writer and taken on more writing projects, my research has been geared more to LGBTQ community and the issues therein and I think that has given me a much greater respect for what Pride stands for and why people DO flaunt their sexuality there.
They flaunt it because they have fought for decades to be able to flaunt it in safety without fear of arrest, violence or abuse. They flaunt it because as a community they have overcome a tremendous amount of adversity, discrimination and repression that why the fuck shouldn’t they? But what I have realised about Pride, and the LGBTQ community as a whole, is that actually it isn’t about the flamboyance, it’s about celebrating who YOU are within that community. Whether you’re a massive queen, a bear, a geek, or just a guy who happens to like guys there is a place for you and you deserve to be celebrated.
It has taken me a long time to find my place, and to find that space within myself where I am completely comfortable within my own skin and that is probably the biggest reason I am now more comfortable with Pride and embrace the community more than I ever have before, because I am happy with who I am as a gay man. I don’t feel inadequate or like I’m faking it and I’m fucking proud that I am part of a community that is so strong, so resilient and so all embracing.
So, to all you awkward gays out here, be you male, female, trans, and anything else, don’t ever feel like you are not part of us. You ARE. You don’t have to be anything other than yourself to be a part of this community.
Be fierce. Be glorious. Be yourself. To quite the goddess that is Lady Ga Ga — You were born this way, baby.
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