Love One Another - Pride Month
Happy Pride Month everyone!
I’m filled with joy that I get to write about such an amazing topic. It makes my heart beam with happiness to see people be who they are and be supported in their journey. With that being said we are still actively making strides in creating an atmosphere that is both safe and inclusive.
This article will be filled with resources, donation ideas, personal stories, ways to help, and how to create a better tomorrow. One filled with love, acceptance, respect, understanding, inclusion, and more.
I am also thrilled to announce I get to write this piece with Bryce Ross. I met Bryce my senior year at Coastal Carolina University. We had an interpersonal communications class together and from the second the class started I knew I wanted to learn more from him. He has an immense amount of resources, knowledge, ideas, etc. in all things, LGBTQ+. It made me realize I need to actively be doing more to both better myself as well as the community.
The term pride in this reference actually comes from a woman of the name Brenda Howard. She was called the “Mother of Pride” and actually created the first Pride parade. Who were the pioneers for LGBTQ+ rights? Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. The two were transgender activists that were fighting for their rights from as early as the nineteen-sixties. Marsha P. Johnson was an African American born in New Jersey, in 1945. She was a drag queen, AIDS activist, trans rights activist, gay rights activist and much more. Pretty amazing, if you ask me. Sylvia Rivera was born in New York City in the year of 1951. She was Venezuelan and Puerto Rican. Similarly, to Marsha, she worked as an activist in trans rights as well as gay rights and was also a drag queen! The two women actually worked together to create what is called S.T.A.R which stands for the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. This was created to help the homeless LQBTQ+ youth. Click on the PSU link at the end of the article to find out more about their stories and experiences.
Pride month is celebrated in June in the United States. It’s an amazing time to celebrate this community and gather for events, fundraisers, parades, etc. but it is also a month of true listening and helping. During the month of June, these voices are amplified, and it is extraordinarily important we listen. As a community, it is our job to actively understand the issues they still face and create solutions to them. Pride month is in June specifically because of the Stonewall uprising that occurred on June 28th, 1969. The uprising occurred due to the raid done that morning and the police violence that came with it. Police arrested people for not wearing gender-appropriate clothing and even had female police check the sex of people who they suspected to be crossdressers. During the 1960s and even into later years, it was extremely common for police to violently raid queer bars.
What do queer people want from you during this Pride month?
I am someone who studies queer theory, who knows a good deal about queer history, and who advocates for queer causes on a day-to-day basis. I selected my master’s program with the express purpose of working with one faculty member in the southeast that is openly gay and has done work in sexuality studies. I have put in quite a bit of time with this kind of work in my academic career and my personal life. With all of this being said, I cannot and will not pretend to be a voice that can sum up all of the LGBTQI+ community’s needs or desires. There are transphobic queer people. There are transmedicalists who are trans but police other people’s transness. There are homonormative individuals who police the way others express their attractions. There is an abundance of discourse within the community that seems to be never-ending. With that being said, there are some assertions that I believe I can make without generalizing or making undue assumptions.
Safe and stable housing is suicide prevention. If there’s one thing that most queer and trans people face, it’s a fear of housing insecurity. Coming out often forces us to consider alternative living situations. Homelessness is a huge issue within the LGBTQI+ community. Consider donating to LGBTQI+ homeless shelters or projects like Casa Ruby.
Queer and trans people do not have to prove anything. If someone tells you that they identify with a certain label relating to gender or sexuality, believe them. They know themselves better than you will ever know someone. Don’t question how bisexual someone is because they seem to express more interest in one gender over others. Don’t ask someone why they don’t want to medically transition. Don’t assume you know someone’s pronouns. Take people’s word for it, and if you don’t have something knowledgeable to say, don’t say anything.
It’s okay to acknowledge that you don’t know much about the LGBTQI+ community. A lot of people in the community don’t either. If you are open about how little you know, that allows us to have a better dialogue than you telling me about the one gay kid or the one trans girl you went to high school with. I, personally, don’t expect someone to know about these things if they don’t have a personal investment in it. I am someone who is comfortable with explaining things to people, but I also like to defer when possible so that more adequate authorities on things like trans identity, lesbian identity, or queer-of-color identity can use their expertise. Those are things I do not identify with.
Language is extremely important. Using pronouns is important. Using someone’s name is important. A deadname, a trans or nonbinary person’s given name, is no longer used when someone chooses their own name. Gendered language is also a big thing to work on not using. Instead of saying things like “feminine products,” one can use “menstrual products.” Instead of saying “men and women” to refer to everyone, just say people. Pregnancy is not a women’s phenomenon, it’s something that is experienced by nonbinary people and trans people with uteruses. There is so much that must be reworked in our day-to-day conversations that create inclusive spaces.
Queer and trans people are still systemically barred from doing many things. The Supreme Court just made a ruling that denying same-sex couples from adopting from a religious adoption agency is constitutionally protected. Gay and trans panic laws are still a thing (Google it). Many states still ban public school teachers from learning about queer and trans subjects. Education is a frontier that I am particularly passionate about, especially because I recently completed a research fellowship regarding South Carolina’s sexual health curriculum and its queer exclusivity. When queer people are explicitly barred from getting personalized sexual health education, that disproportionately subjects us to disease and illness, and is cause for a public health concern. There are many other similar issues that are ordained by the government to keep us down.
While I can make many other salient points, there is only so much one blog post can achieve. All too often, cishet people will tokenize queer people in their lives, essentializing their experiences and romanticizing a queer culture. Queer culture is joy and tragedy. It is freedom and it is incarceration. It is everything and nothing. Queer culture spawned as a response to being outcasted from a normative society, and the sentiments of exclusion can be felt decades down the line. No amount of Pride merchandise at Target can make me feel safer from being hate-crimed at a gas station in an unfamiliar town. No increase in the viewership of Rupaul’s Drag Race will change the fact that I may be passed over for a scholarship opportunity because I do queer studies work. As long as cishet people, and even some queer and trans people, consume a packaged and sanitized form of queerness that has been morphed by the invisible hand of capitalism, we will not know true liberation. As long as organized religion has a place in our governmental processes, we will not know true liberation. Silence in the face of adversity will not save us. Tolerance for the older generation and even the bigoted youth will not save us. Normativity will not save us.
It is the responsibility of each and every cishet ally to amplify the voices of queer and trans people, and to delegate when encouraging a discussion about these subjects. It is the responsibility of cishet allies to reach out to their queer and trans friends, or even just acquaintances, and offer support. It is the responsibility of cishet allies to create a safe physical space for queer and trans people. It’s not appropriate to tokenize queer people, to queerbait, to promote rainbow capitalism (that isn’t for the advancement of actual queer and trans creators). Finally, it is absolutely not the place of any cishet person to tell queer and trans people how they can or cannot express their identity. All too often, cishet people, and those brainwashed normative queer and trans people, try to sanitize and censor conversations about LGBTQI+ topics, but that is unacceptable. Queer liberation has always been about aggression, impoliteness, and doing away with boundaries. Having these discussions during only the month of June is a disservice to the powerful queer and trans elders that have paved the way for us to live happier lives. We cannot continue to let people brush us under the rug. We cannot continue to let people insist that we not “shove it in their face.” We are here, we are queer, and we are making a fucking place for ourselves.
Resources for LGBTQ+
https://www.glaad.org/resourcelist
https://www.everydayhealth.com/emotional-health/lgbtq-friendly-emotional-health-resources/
https://www.youthallies.com/lgbt-youth-resources/national/
https://www.transgenderpulse.com/surgery-funding-assistance/
Where to Donate
Center for Black Equity - https://centerforblackequity.org/
Outright Action International - https://outrightinternational.org/
Trans Lifeline - https://translifeline.org/
The Trevor Project - https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
The Marsha P. Johnson Institute - https://marshap.org/
Silvia Rivera Law Project - https://srlp.org/
It Gets Better Project - https://itgetsbetter.org/
LQBTQ Freedom Fund - https://www.lgbtqfund.org/
Bib –
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/01/health/pride-month-2021-trnd/index.html
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/g32917782/best-lgbtq-charities-to-donate/
https://www.history.com/topics/gay-rights/the-stonewall-riots
Thanks for the art @pia.saurbier