PRIDE CALLS

I’m in between Prides. I joined Evan at Seattle’s celebration a month ago and he’ll be here for Vancouver’s parade this weekend along with another Seattle comrade and his best friend from Miami. Why anyone would in Miami would make Vancouver’s Pride part of summer vacation plans is beyond me, but then it often seems like too much of a trek for me attend events when I’m a only half hour’s walk away. I dump on Pride a lot. It’s habit. But I’m working on my bad attitude.

 

One of the things that stood out for me last month in Seattle occurred on the Sunday evening, after all or most of the official celebrations. I’m sure some event planner was still collecting ticket money for a Drag Hangover Gala and clubs were continuing to rake in price-gouging cover charges—Pride and greed can coexist—but Evan and I were done. Enough people, enough sun, enough of the too-short, too-tight clothes we probably had no business wearing. We ate nachos and drank margaritas at a Mexican dive in his neighborhood and then walked with a friend, Ronald, down to Lake Union to enjoy some quiet moments before looking ahead the coming week, the reality that resumes after the rainbow. 

 

The conversation turned reflective, as we considered how we got through our most difficult years coming out and handling homophobia. I’ve only known Ronald four months—he’s a close friend of Evan—but we hit it off from the start when we learned that we’d both gone to high school in East Texas, about thirty miles away from one another. I survived, he survived. Part of that may be on account of both of us having left the Lone Star State. On this warm June evening, Ronald talked about how his mother never wavered in loving him and in speaking strongly and proudly about him despite living in a judgy small town where Baptists regularly reviled homosexuals and, in the name of God, took pleasure in saying the gays would face eternal damnation, burning in Hell. Ah, yes. A loving god with righteous followers. 

 

“I wouldn’t have made it if not for Myrna,” Ronald said. As I glanced at him, I saw tears streaming down his cheeks. It startled me because Ronald is characteristically a strong man, an army vet who can be very sarcastic. 

 

Evan, in turn, talked of his own mother who had him at nineteen—her second child—and raised him as best she could, mostly as a single parent. She still had her own growing up to do and she made her mistakes, but her love was a constant. She too did all she could to accept and support Evan when he came out during his teens in small town Colorado where he faced relentless bullying and found his own ways to act out. She wasn’t just a parent; she was an ally.

 

I didn’t have my own stories to share about family or friends helping me as I came out. I stayed closeted much longer than Ronald and Evan and I can’t nod to a family member or friend for helping me get through the years I hid or the years I found my way forward. It was my new gay friends who supported me. The people who helped me most were Jay, a rail-thin drag queen who taught me to just be myself—that’s an ongoing exercise—and Richard, an older, far more experienced man who found constant amusement in my shocked reactions to all the gay things I didn’t know. 

 

Listening to Ronald and Evan led me to thinking about a missing component of Pride celebrations. Let the drag performances, dance parties and parades continue and please let there be art exhibitions and author talks for those of us seeking a quieter, more introspective Pride booster, but I believe it’s time we added formal expressions of gratitude to the yearly event. 

 

Are you listening, Hallmark? It’s your chance to profit with a new collection of splashy greeting cards. (Please, though, no sparkle glitter inside.) I have no interest in Hallmark’s bottom line, but I think we should begin a practice of formally acknowledging and thanking the friends, family and mentors who supported us and helped us get through the more difficult times when we struggled with our identity and worked through things in messy, imperfect, even embarrassing expressions of queerness. For most of us, there were people who loved and accepted us when we weren’t evolved enough to fully love and accept ourselves. We owe them an annual shout-out for helping us reach a point of genuine pride. 

 

Now that Pride has stretched from a parade to a weekend to a month to, heck, a long summer if you choose to plan an international Pride circuit, let there be a day we set aside to thank our loved ones. Most of us didn’t get through trying times alone. We have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparents’ Day and Ice Cream Day. It’s time we had a day for Pride calls and cards to annually thank the people who made our lives better. Call it Partners in Pride Day or Pride Ally Day. 

 

What do you think? Who goes on your thank you list?