Without words I couldn’t do my job. I’m a writer. I’ve always taken a special interest in words. I remember in junior high school finding etymology fascinating. Even now, when writing a book, I will look up certain words to discover their origin and evolution.
It’s common for a word to have different meanings and connotations. The word gay, for example, when I was a little girl in the late fifties and early sixties, the most recognizable definition for the word was happy and lighthearted. In fact, my sister’s Bluebird troop called themselves, “The Gay Bluebirds.” No one giggled and thought about homosexuals.
In the following decades more and more people began seeing the word gay as a synonym for homosexual, and now I never hear gay used how it was when I was a child.
While words and their meanings often shift over time, as it did with the word gay, sometimes a group will highjack a word or phrase and intentionally tweak its meaning to misrepresent a group using the word or phrase. I believe that’s happened with the term Gay Pride.
Before I go on let me say I believe—with my full heart—gay people were born that way. It’s not something you can change like your hair color. I learned this lesson at a young age. We had this cousin who my sister and I had to babysit one time. He was a little boy, with two rough and tumble brothers, and the day we babysat him I knew, without a doubt that kid was gay. Fast forward a decade or so and my suspicions were confirmed.
This was back in the 1960s. If you wonder how I, a pre-teen, knew about gay people in the late sixties, it was because a close family friend of one of my best friends was a professional dancer. She gave us dance lessons, and I remember once we went to some event where a lot of her dancer friends were in attendance, and a lot of those dancer friends were men. Let’s just say, the topic came up.
Every family has someone who’s gay. My husband’s stepfather came from a large family, and two of his brothers were gay. It had nothing to do with them being groomed, it was simply the odds, considering he had something like eighteen siblings.
And please, don’t tell me it’s a sin. That may be part of your religion, but that only makes it a sin in your religion. If you call yourself a Christian, remember there are some Christian religions who don’t believe homosexuality is a sin, and some religious scholars say homosexuality wasn’t even mentioned in the Bible. And it certainly didn’t make God’s top ten rule list.
But I don’t want to argue religion. You have the right to your faith, but you don’t have the right to use your faith to endanger children.
I have read the suicide rate is four times higher for gay teens than straight teens. And considering the suicide rate is high for teens in general, that is a scary statistic. But gay teens don’t kill themselves because they are gay—they kill themselves because people around them bully them for being gay. Adults tell them they are sinners. Yet, they have no control over how they were born.
Praying away the gay or sending a teen to conversion therapy is going to make the teen feel worse about themselves. One study showed that during a 12 month period, 27% of young people in the LGBTQ community who were exposed to conversion therapy attempted suicide. The rate of suicide attempts for those who had not been exposed to that therapy was 9%. Therefore, sending your gay teen to conversion therapy makes it three times more likely he or she will attempt suicide.
So now, let’s get to the meaning of gay pride.
First, let’s look at the meaning of, “pride.” Pride is to take satisfaction or pleasure in one’s own achievement.
So, when a gay person is celebrating gay pride, do they see being gay as some achievement? Of course not, that would be silly. They were no more responsible for being gay than I am responsible for being straight.
When a gay person celebrates gay pride that simply means they have accepted who they are. They understand they have as much worth, value, and a right to happiness as anyone else. And that’s an achievement, because it’s hard to stand tall and accept yourself when people around you are knocking you down, trying to make you feel shame for something that you have no reason to feel shame for.
When straight people celebrate gay pride, they are conveying their acceptance, support, acknowledging to people in the gay community that everyone has the right to happiness.
The most asinine thing I hear some straight people say in response to Gay Pride is, “Why don’t we have straight pride?” That is beyond dense. I want to tell them, “You didn’t do anything to be straight, what do you have to be proud about?” And it doesn’t take courage to accept being straight. Being straight is the majority. Being straight is easy, in fact, plenty of gay kids, before they accept who they are, would rather be straight. Who wants all that hate?
And gay people aren’t shoving their gayness in your face. They are simply being who they were born to be. If you don’t freak out when you see a heterosexual couple holding hands, or kiss, or hug each other, then don’t get weird if you see a gay couple do it. Gay people exist. Gay pride is simply a gay person’s refusal to stay in the closet for your comfort.
Earlier in this post I mentioned there are gay people in every family. That is something I wish these gay pride mockers would consider. Each time they leave some anti-gay pride post on social media they are conveying to the gay people in their lives that they don’t believe they deserve the same happiness as straight people—that they are not accepted.
And that gay person in their life might be a son, daughter, grandchild, niece, nephew, friend’s child, anyone who is still in the closet, coming to terms with their truth, a truth they never asked for. Those thoughtless comments and lack of support might be enough to push a struggling gay teen to take their own life.
Is that what you really want?
Plus, it is dangerous to keep gay people in the closet—especially gay men. And I am quite serious when I say this. When a gay man stays in the closet, it means he has not accepted himself. People who can’t accept who they are often come to hate themselves. People who hate themselves often do bad and hurtful things to others. They might turn their hate on women who they blame for their inability to find them sexually attractive. They turn their hate on openly gay men, who they are jealous of for living their genuine life. If they are in Congress, they are more apt to make laws harmful to women and people in the LGBTQ community.
I honestly believe we would be a happier and safer world if we made gay people feel safe and accepted out of the closet. And that’s the real reason for gay pride.
And one more thing, about those rainbow flags in classrooms. Those aren’t recruitment flags. They aren’t signaling to children to switch teams. For one thing, that’s not really a thing. The purpose of a pride flag is to signal to students that all are accepted, and the bullying will not be tolerated in the classroom. It signals the classroom is a safe place.
Of course, perhaps we need to remove the pride flags from the classrooms to toughen up kids. After all, classrooms aren’t really a safe place anymore, not with the number of school shootings in this country. And there seems to be more attention on keeping rainbow flags and books on diversity out of the classroom than guns.
While we are at it, perhaps we need to stop having the kids saying the Pledge of Allegiance. After all, promising Liberty and Justice for all seems a little disingenuous these days, and no reason to have America’s children recite something that’s not true.
Well, I guess this blog post veered off course. Let me climb off my soap box and get back to work before you all start pelting me with metaphoric eggs.