99 Days of Something #7 – Pride

As Pride month is about to start, and there are a few Pride marches and celebrations happening this weekend, I am once again reflecting on my relationship with Pride. I haven’t been to many. I have never thought of Pride as somewhere I really wanted to be or something I wanted to be part of. I love seeing the pictures of the events, I love reading about them and I love that Pride events exist in a form that is celebratory, full of joy and love. I also understand the importance of visibility and protest and we need that now more than probably ever in my lifetime. I love seeing social media feeds from friends and colleagues who are involved somehow. I love Pride looking in from the outside. I just don’t want to be there. So I feel conflicted about Pride because I feel like I really should want to be part of it. I feel like I should be seeking out those spaces, be visible, take up space. I feel like I should be able to find fun, joy and power in those spaces. I also feel like I should be there to acknowledge that Pride is not just a celebration of love but that it is also a protest, that it is intensely political and a really important form of resistance. But somehow I also feel like I just want to watch Pride from the outside. I absolutely want it to exist, I want to be part of it in the same way that I want to watch some sport on TV – it’ll be fun as long as I don’t actually have to be there or participate.

I realise that is possibly selfish. I also know that it comes from a position of privilege. I don’t need Pride. I never have. I have always had support, I have always been seen for all of me. I never had to hide and have always been able to just be me. So finding and being part of a community and express that through events like Pride have never been important for my existence or my well being. Couple that with my dislike of big crowds, indifference about a lot of the music played and acts featured and generally having other things I’d rather do at the weekend, Pride never makes it to the top of the list of priorities. And then I feel guilty about that. I was vaguely thinking about joining the Leeds Pride march in July because it feels like I should, but I no longer have to worry about that as something else has come up on that date.

I have become increasingly aware of the importance of visibility and of resistance. I am conscious that as a pretty successful out gay woman I have both power and responsibility and a certain vulnerability. I don’t know if it is just getting older and wiser (ahem) that gives me some of that perspective or whether it is more to do with the political climate and all our rights being under threat in a way that I haven’t really experienced before. My consciousness of s28 for example was limited maybe because I didn’t go to school in England until I was 16 and I remember sex education, for example, being way way more useful in Germany. I don’t actually remember anything about ‘non traditional families’ but then there was already a lot on the school curriculum that I thought was nonsense. For example, I remember being one of only 2 kids in my class at grammar school whose parents were not seemingly happily married and together. And that was positioned as the absolute norm. All this talk of perfect nuclear families versus problematic single parent families made no sense to me because I was quite happy in my ‘broken’ family. I was surrounded by diverse family structures and living arrangements. In other words, I already understood that curricula in some ways are always political and always tell a particular story and that story might not at all reflect mine. I might not have been able to express that but I knew there was so much more to the world than the things we were talking about at school from a really early age. So because in my life outside school I was exposed to lots of different ways of living and thinking and because I was also encouraged to read a lot and to think and to not just accept what teachers or authority figures said, I was not looking to school to teach me anything about how families worked or who I was or should be. More and more I realise that while I am sure I have my share of internalised homophobia, it’s pretty limited and I have been incredibly lucky to have experienced exclusion, non acceptance, hate etc as rare exceptions rather than as something that is a constant in my life. In addition, for a lit of my adult life the story has sort of been one of progress. It saw s 28 abolished, it saw the introduction of civil partnerships and then equal marriage, it saw equality in adoption rights, the Gender Recognition Act was introduced, discrimination was outlawed. I am not saying that things were great but we seem to be heading in the right direction. I think taking all of those things together, resulted in it taking me an embarrassingly long time to realise that protest, resistance, visibility and using my voice are really important. Just because being gay and out has not been a struggle for me, doesn’t mean I am not part of the struggle.

But what does that actually mean in practical terms. What can I do that feels meaningful and doable. I am working on that and through June I want to really consciously think about that and maybe explore more queer literature, art and film (suggestions always welcome). I will continue to share snippets of my life and while I never hide and think I am fairly open, maybe I can be more explicit about who I mean when I see ‘we’ or about how I think about the family and life Kath and I have build. I will make more an effort to seek out queer spaces or queer owned businesses. And I will keep showing up as authentically as I can and I will try and really notice the occasions when I hesitate to do that, where the inevitable ongoing coming out that just happens when you chat with new people about your life (‘What does your husband do…, erm, he doesn’t exist) feels awkward or not really safe. Because those are the moments that require resistance and challenge. Those are the moments that doing it anyway is more important than ever – particular in my position of privilege and almost always physical safety.

Anyway, Happy Pride month. Let’s celebrate and protest in equally powerful measures in whatever way we can. I’d love to hear your plans or suggestions for other things I might like to try. Oh and also, here’s my ‘we’: