“You’ll Respect Anyone but a Christian”
June 22nd, 2024 at Pride, Someone Said This to Me and I’ll Never Forget it
Yesterday was Pride in Surrey, British Columbia. I didn’t dress up — I wore a rainbow-colored skirt, a crop top t-shirt that said “Blessed” and my pair of orange runners with flashy colors and peace signs on the side.
It was dressy for me, but it wasn’t “Pride” dressy for me because I wasn’t planning on going.
Have you ever felt like the weight of the world is on your shoulders, and there’s no one to cry to because everyone around you feels the same way?
That’s how I and many of my friends have been feeling lately. I’ve been talking to Nada Chehade as often as possible, but as she well knows, there’s nothing I can say about how “I” feel when she’s in the same boat.
We’re in the ocean, as allies, freedom fighters, and activists who want a better world. An ocean surrounded by folks who don’t want a better world, who don’t need a better world, and who could care less about those of us who do.
When I saw the image above on a t-shirt I wanted to say “Did you design this?” but instead I started to cry. It’s such a powerful, beautiful, wisdom-filled image, and it brings me so much hope in a time when I wasn’t feeling hope, when I didn’t see an end to the battles of the war, in a time when I just needed to cry.
It hit me. It hit me so hard that I am writing about it today because I want you all to race out and buy Kim’s work but also because I want you to have a moment with a piece of art that is so beautiful it brings you to tears.
Everyone deserves to feel that kind of emotion in their life, and that’s why Pride is important. Now I am ready to write about Palestine and the unfairness of it all again. Now I am ready to make content again, now I am ready to get back to work so I can do my part and maybe save a life or two.
Pride gives us the strength we need to get through the dark times, it brings us together with allies who are fighting the same fight so that we can see each other face to face.
There are a lot of people in the world who want to abolish Pride as a whole, for a lot of reasons, but the core of it is they mostly don’t feel included.
Yesterday I saw two Brown skinned male presenting people holding hands in the Surrey Central mall, I’ve never seen that before, and I have lived here for most of my life AND worked in a sex store that was mostly surrounded by Brown skinned people living in the neighborhood.
So if that’s not special if that’s not a beautiful moment, if that’s not precisely why we need Pride, then why do we?
Surrey is a big place, but two see two boys young as they were (maybe early 20s), holding hands, unafraid of what the world outside might think of them, in a world that shows me this image so fucking rarely, is just perfect.
It’s the perfect example of how love often has to hide out of fear of violence, and why love should never have to be hidden.
I am tearing up as I write this because I know how many of the people who attended openly yesterday are in hiding today.
I know so many of those folks who take off the makeup, the rainbow clothes, and the “Look at me” attitude, are now in hiding because it’s safer for them to be than it is for them to be as open as they were yesterday, every day.
That’s not how this world is supposed to work. Centuries ago a mad man climbed a mountain, starved himself for weeks, and did God only knows what else, only to return to tell the ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD, how they should live according to his mad illusions.
And while some of the advice is great, a lot of it does harm to the most vulnerable among us, those that we are pointed to by God — allegedly — to protect.
Every year in Surrey it rains on Pride day, and every year it pisses me off, until yesterday when I started thinking about all the people who won’t ever get to be at Pride because they are dead, or in hiding.
I thought about the elderly man who once came into the adult store I was working at, just to tell me that he spent his entire life hiding because he was terrified that his family would find out he really loved the LBGTQ2S+ community.
I think about him every year and I hate that I never encouraged him to come out or to be more open because I didn’t know at the time what he was telling me. I didn’t understand because I was not yet out, so as much as it didn’t bother me? I wasn’t as open and supportive as I could be until later.
I didn’t understand how horrible that must have been until we had a Pastor at our church taking his final rites as a student. He invited a transgender woman to be an usher for him, as well as myself and several others. Almost everyone in the room was cisgender, but there were a few LGBTQ2S+NB folks as well.
All folks could talk about was the transgender woman, they made her so uncomfortable she never came back to the church. I was humiliated, and I never forgot the way they treated her or spoke about her behind her back — to me as if I would accept the language they used.
I tried to quell it, but when you are faced with hate in a community of people you’ve known most of your life, it’s hard to communicate to them the importance of changing ways that are ingrained into their very bones.
It’s certainly harder when you are the lone dissenting voice in the group.
It was inevitable I would leave the church, that was always the goal, but I never expected I would leave the church with so much hate in my heart.
So when the Christians — who show up every year to tell us all how evil we all are — told me I had no room for Christianity, I fucking agreed.
I don’t. I have no room for organized religion in my heart. I spent 37 years in the church and all it did was break my heart and in very real ways, my spirit.
Pride is where I found myself, it’s where I find myself, year after year, the one place that reminds me of who I am and why I come. It’s not to meet a lover, or to have a good time, its to see all the happy people showing me what love really looks like, so I can stop thinking love means getting your face punched in every other day.
Love means caring for those around you, it means opening your heart to the idea that love is different for everyone, that it’s inclusive, beautiful, and often knows more than we know about who we are, who we want to be, and who we could be.
That’s Pride.
Pride is everything, nothing, and all the things in between, that the darkness can’t touch no matter how ugly the darkness presents itself as.
We are united BECAUSE we have Pride, taking that away now just undoes all the work of those who came before.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl
