hot mess

It’s Pride month all over and here in Philadelphia, we celebrated with our largest LGBTQ event of the year: Philly Pride. Starting as a parade and ending as a festival at Penn’s Landing, this event attracts thousands of people from all over, organizations and vendors, famous performers and even our town captain, Mayor Nutter.

I support the idea of pride. That folks can get together and really celebrate integral parts of themselves: sexuality, gender identity and/or expression. Two core pieces of self that effect every other piece of self. There is something beautiful about getting to show up somewhere as your whole self.

Unfortunately, most of the pride events in Philadelphia (sans Black Pride the Philly Dyke March) are heavily populated with gay, cis white men. Cis white men in general already take up a lot of space in the world and sometimes it’s disheartening to see the lack of representation from queer folks of color, trans people, visibly queer folks, and basically any demographic that is not a white cis gay man or a white cis lesbian.

Having pride in something that is traditionally shamed is a gift. It brightens and beautifies your life, offers courage and support, and gives you the confidence and liberation to show up each day as your entire you. When you are able to do this, there is almost nothing you can’t do.

I am someone who carried around a lot of shame and guilt. What used to sit on my shoulders like a heavy backpack eventually lesioned my skin then poisoned me. Internalizing insufficiency made my insides weak with decay. I didn’t want to be Asian or queer so I would navigate my life in ways to keep these facets at bay, a series of smoke and mirrors, thin steamy streams of uncertainty, carefully constructed to unveil a not-me.  I didn’t want to be the way I was made so I made myself something else.

For a lot of my life I kept these things at bay, using  technicalities and loopholes to justify that I was straight and white. I desperately wanted those privileges, that sense of belonging, that ability to be filled with pride without having to own myself or anything else. I could just be. As a straight, white American, I could just be. I didn’t have to be celebratory or ashamed, I could just be. The reality, however, is that as much as I struggled to construct not-me, everyone else was seeing me.

I came out in 2009 as a person of color. I came out to myself in 2009 as a person of color. Those around me met this debut with shifty, confused eyes and a series of elipses. I was telling them what they already knew. Some people backlashed, claiming appropriation, were in disbelief and denial. White people. I slowly began unpacking my racial baggage and my perspective cleared. I immediately navigated the world with stronger strides and steps, a relief.

In 2010, I came out as queer. The past few years had been tumultous, trying unsuccessfully to find and claim and own an identity that encompassed me in an authentic and full way. A journey that began with a genderqueer, genderfluid, transmasculine boyfriend (or, as he might say “boifriend”) in 2008 and trying to fit ourselves into a clean, crisp construction. Straight. You’re a boy, and I’m a girl. Straight. A title that fit in technicalities but not in practice, impractical rationales and long drawn justifications. Snooping through loopholes, a splattered rainbow trail behind me, queering it all up.

Even as a queer rights activist, a human equalist, as someone who had been arrested a total of three times for LGBTQ rights, who had lost a job and a social circle and been belittled and dehumanized countless times already, I clung to what few privileges I had as a “straight ally”. I built a bridge between them and them and got to be the mediator, the one single string in the middle of misunderstanding and reality. LGBTQ folks liked me because I stood in solidarity with them and straight people liked me because I was one of them. Here, I was different, but safe.

My not-me was different, but safe.

My not-me was not me.

Over time, I learned to embrace and celebrate the things that made me actually different and, in some ways, unsafe. The things that made me abnormal and less than in a partiarchal, heterosexual white society. Owning up to what took away my supposed privilege was more liberating than the privilege itself. I wasn’t going to not-me or other me, I was just going to be me.

Figuring out who you are and learning to not just live it but own it offers you a level of liberation not otherwise possible. Suddenly, it’s all freeing. You do what you do because it’s you. This, my friends, is pride.