June 2018: Everyday Pride
I first heard the word lesbian when I was in the fourth grade. I was at recess and innocently holding hands with my friend Angela Santos when Monroe Jones yelled “Lesbians!” in our direction. Without needing to know what the word meant, Angela and I yanked our hands from one another’s. It was amazing how much shame could be lodged into a word that we couldn’t define. As elementary school kids, I don’t think our vocabulary was necessarily all that precise - in the fifth grade, the insult du jour would become “scrotum,” which Matt Ware bellowed at anyone he managed to hit with the soft soccer ball during games of dodgeball. But I always remember that first time I heard the word lesbian. It’s a hell of a word. Erika Lopez in her illustrated book Flaming Iguanas has a passage about how much she dislikes the awkwardness of the word, the clumsy z sound jutting up against the abrupt b. I felt the same way for a long time until I started to take pride in its cumbersome consonants, its history of being flung as insult, its attempt to divide.
Recently I started following @_personals_ on Instagram and delighting in every square of text announcing another queer person looking for love. It’s just a wonder to know the world is populated with us, queers with thousands of words to describe ourselves and our lives and our wants. I have a complicated relationship to pride as a month or a weekend or a parade. My first pride weekend in New York was lonely, and I crammed that loneliness with alcohol and bad decisions until it could blot out my feelings. These days I avoid the parties and the crowds, the corporate sponsorships and the spectators. What’s beautiful is that pride can always be redefined. Anything queer people choose to do, together or alone, has pride in it. One of my most cherished pride weekends was spent cat sitting for a (queer) friend in the East Village. I spent the summer afternoon drawing at her kitchen table and eating guacamole that I'd made. I was young enough to find making food for myself its own victory, and I was spiritually fit enough to see the afternoon not as loneliness but as precious solitude. Even one lesbian sitting by herself in a friend's apartment drawing in a sketchbook is pride. Since then, there have been pride weekends spent at the beach with a queer collective, weekends spent dancing, weekends spent with queer friends and their children, and weekends spent just doing what we usually do - read the paper, vacuum, see a movie, make the bed. It might sound silly, but I often think about the quiet revolution of everything queer people do being queer. When I was a teacher, I never came out to the children, but it doesn't change the fact that their third grade teacher was queer. It was unspoken but it was still true. I think of everything queer people will do (and not do) this month and always. When I first moved to New York, any time I saw another queer person on the street I would grin. I still do. It's one of my favorite acts of pride.
xoxo,
c
P.S.
* Speaking of pride: my dear friend Camille Perri's novel When Katie Met Cassidy is coming out (ha!) on June 19th! Pre-orders for the book at Books Are Magic include a darling rainbow heart pin AND a donation to the Ali Forney Center. <3