Pride Month is the perfect time to remember that from the Stonewall Riots to the Pulse club shooting, the existence of the LGBT+ community has been radical. The community lives beneath a microscope, grows in courtrooms and on lawmaker’s desks, walks and talks and eats under the eyes of the entire global population. Straight people can come home at the end of the day, shut their curtains, turn off their TVs, go to bed. They can enjoy the small things they take for granted: holding their partner’s hand in the middle of a crowed mall, their parent’s presence on their wedding day, safety and ease and security.
I’ve heard the gay community called flamboyant before, as though they don’t have a right to be grand and over-the-top when they’re already a radial statement just because they exist. They’re already constantly analyzed: their clothing, their hair, whether they ‘pass,’ whether their sexuality is fluid. To hold your partner’s hand in public is such a small, throwaway gesture; when a man and a woman hold hands it symbolizes a relationship, yet when two women hold hands the gesture is bigger than they are. Their linked hands stand for pride and courage in the face of adversity; they stand for all the girls who don’t feel safe enough to hold hands. They stand for a political statement that that couple did not intend to make. What a relief it would be if just this once, their linked hands could be a symbol of their relationship and nothing more.
There’s pride in showing pride. There’s pride in fighting for your love, fighting for your identity, fighting for the right to be viewed as legitimate and valid instead of something obscene or dirty. There’s pride in linking hands with your significant other and throwing your hands into the air together as an act of rebellion against a society that wants you to “keep it in your bedroom.” Yet this same society has yet to acknowledge that it has crept into your bedroom and sullied it, made it unsafe. The LGBT+ community cannot come into their bedroom after a long day and shut their curtains, turn off their TVs. They live the horrors you read about in the newspapers, they live the political debates you see on TV. Society has radicalized and politicized their existence; every step and every moment and every gesture of love they make becomes an argument. Their bedrooms are courthouses and the offices of politicians and the bathrooms they are not allowed to use and the streets on which they are murdered and raped and shot, open to the public as though they're a spectacle.