Pride!
Every year since I moved to Minnesota, I’ve been going to GLBT Pride in the Twin Cities to sit at a booth and talk to alumni and prospective students about the university where I work. And every year, at one point or another, I get emotional, remembering my first Pride in Cincinnati in what must have been 1994. The “parade” included a total of about 50 people, mostly a group called the “Lesbian Avengers,” some half-naked men, and some drag queens, along with a few of us unaffiliated but politically active types. We marched on a sidewalk (there was no permit, if I am remembering correctly) across the city and ended up in a park, where a few people gave a few speeches. Then we grilled some veggie burgers and stood around either flirting with each other or talking about social justice and what we needed to do to progress the movement or both. Later that night we all went to the same dyke bar (whichever one of the two in the city was our favorite) and hung out with our friends and danced and drank, as usual.
Things have changed dramatically since I came out in the early 90s, obviously. There are still mostly-naked men and drag queens and S&M divas in the parade (and I have to admit I love this aspect of Pride), but there are way, way more churches, activist groups, politicians, and corporate-sponsored floats than any of the typical paraders. Hennepin Avenue has rainbow banners on the streetlights, similar to those that would be displayed for any other event in the city, likely paid for by the city itself. The entire area shuts down for the parade, and Loring Park is teaming with over 100,000 people (literally) all weekend. Every year, I realize when I’m packing up the college's booth that I missed an entire row of booths somehow—it’s that big.
Now that I’ve been here nine years, Pride really is also a reunion. Former student activists stop by, and they always have awesome stories about what they’re up to now. Former students who weren’t out when they were in college show up and tell me their coming out stories. This year, two students I knew well stopped by to talk about their soon-to-be born baby, and another one of my favorite students showed up, as he always does, with his mother, who, though she took some time to get to the point of supporting his journey, is now his greatest friend. And prospective students come by, excited by our reputation, hoping to get in—-or totally clueless, but interested after talking to us—-and that, too, is rewarding. In short, I am on a high all weekend, happy about every aspect of my job and life.
This year, S and I marched with Rainbow Families (GLBT families) in the parade. In the past, I’ve always watched the parade rather than marching in it, but it was great to be with other families and to hear the cheering. I wept a couple times. Lisa made a sign that said “Lesbian Mom, Straight Daughter, Happy Dog = Family,” and our dog WAS actually incredibly happy the whole time (it was his first Pride). As a side note, if you are interested in meeting women at Pride (and this probably works for men, too), just take along a dog and be sure to put a rainbow collar on him—you’ll get hit on way more than you ever did before, or at least, that was my experience this year.
But back to the parade: S and I stood out, because Rainbow Families consists mostly of lesbian couples who have adopted infants or given birth, so mostly we were a group of cute infant-to-six-year-olds wearing shirts that said things like “I love my lesbian moms” and riding bikes with training wheels and lots of rainbow bling. Only two gay male couples were there, and they had a slightly less traditional family—-kids in the 8-to-10 age range whom I suspect were adopted out of foster care, though I didn’t ask. One of them marched the entire parade on stilts! These kids took to S and our dog right away. One of them even tried to teach our dog how to skateboard (unsuccessfully, I might add). But as usual, I realized how my decision to adopt a teenager out of foster care as a single, queer woman was—-well, unusual, to say the least. Even among these "nontraditional" families, S and I stood out.
Most of the parents who have adopted kids like S are fundamentalist Christians who see adoption of special needs/hard to place kids as a calling. (I do, too, but I am not a fundamentalist Christian, obviously). I have been meeting monthly with a group of moms in my area who have made the decision to adopt such children—and I am definitely the most liberal, the only queer, the only one who is not active in a church, the only person with an advanced degree, and the only single parent. They are nice to me, though—I know at least one of them knows I am queer because we had an argument once, long ago, in the newspaper editorials about GLBT issues (and I have an unusual name, so I doubt she’s forgotten, though I can't be sure). But, I haven’t come out to them directly, which makes me feel a bit awkward, as I am very out everywhere else, from our local police force to ministers in town to...well, you get the idea.
But I need these women right now, because they help normalize what I’m going through and provide a kind of support my friends cannot. Maybe I am afraid of losing them—but I believe so strongly in being out, especially to people like them, that it is hard to justify my decision not to tell them. And yet, honestly, it hasn’t come up. My work, my political views, the fact that I’m single, the fact that I don’t belong to a church in town and don’t want to join one—all of those things have come up naturally in our conversation, and given the opportunity, I suppose I’d say I was queer, but as a single person, it’s not a topic of conversation that comes up naturally.
But what I want to write about is not how affirmed and hopeful it felt to be at Pride, or even how torn I feel about not being out in my support group, but what happened when I left Loring Park in search of the parking garage where I had, more than 10 hours earlier, parked my car. I was in a hurry, so I took the dog but left S at the booth to help her godparents (a lesbian couple from our town) and some students tear it down. The plan was that I’d get the car, drive up to booth, and we’d pack up and get out of town quickly.
But, I didn’t realize I was parked about two miles away (I’d parked closer to the parade’s start than the park), and once I did, it was impossible to do anything but walk there, as I couldn’t take the dog on public transportation or in a cab. As I left the area where Pride had taken place, still wearing stickers and buttons all over my shirt and shorts, I realized I was moving into less-friendly territory. I hit a mostly touristy/upscale area, and for awhile, things were fine—people eating outdoors glanced over at me, got quiet, then remembered it was Pride weekend and went back to their conversations. Some were even more friendly, commenting on how cute our dog was. Maybe they aren’t allies per se, I thought, but they aren’t freaked out, either.
And then, just as I was turning a corner toward the garage, across from one of the large sports arenas in town, two men walked by me and said, loudly, “I can’t believe you people are parading around on the Lord’s day when the Bible says you’re going to hell.” At this point, my cell phone was ringing, and I was realizing that I really needed to hurry to get to the car--it was already half an hour past the time I'd hoped to be driving out of town. I took the call, let my friend know I was close to the car, and kept walking. The men went on to shout some Bible verses at me—the typical, out-of-context verses--and just before entering the garage, I shouted back, “We were actually celebrating God’s love for us,” then disappeared quickly from their view.
I wanted to say more. The men were African-American, and I wanted to talk to them about how St. Paul, the only person who condemns anything even remotely “homosexual” in the New Testament, also wrote that slaves should obey their masters, and how nobody in their right minds would agree that this was God’s word now. I wanted to talk to them about the historical context of the verses they were quoting. I mean, I know this shit, backwards and forwards. But, I was afraid.
Did their race play into my fear? I really hope not. I feel like I am not a racist, but I am a white woman and live in a racist society and therefore have internalized biases that, though unconscious, may have played into my decision not to confront them more directly. If someone asked me who I would trust more, an African-American straight man or a white straight man, I’d say the African-American straight man for sure; probably this is due to the fact that, in earlier times of my life, I had some very close African-American straight man friends, and partly, I think, I generally tend to trust people who have dealt with any kind of oppression more than those who have not, for better or worse. But alone on a street in a city I am only marginally familiar with, I wonder. I wonder why I didn’t try to engage these men in conversation, and what that says about me.
Right after shouting back at them, I realized the entrance to the garage we had used earlier was locked, and for a second, I panicked. Every hate crime my friends or I have experienced ran through my mind. I ran around the garage, trying to find an unlocked entrance. Finally, I found one, but it was another 20 minutes before I actually located our car. (I learned later that this garage is the largest in the Twin Cities, and that it had closed an hour earlier. My car was one of the only cars left).
In any case, at one point during my search, I sat down on the ground against a pole and started to cry. My dog jumped into my lap and licked my face. Then he lay down next to me. After crying for a few more minutes, I shouted, “Fuck them!” The dog didn’t seem the least bit startled. I nuzzled my face against his neck and whispered, “I was feeling so good about myself, and S, and everything. But they made me remember everything bad about what it was like to come out.” The dog licked my face again, and I stood up, pulled myself together, and found the car.
Later, as we were driving onto the highway, S said, “I was so worried about you, mom. I should have come with you. I have a better sense of direction than you do.”
“I found the garage with no problem, amazingly,” I said. “I just couldn’t find the car.”
“Green, fourth floor, S20,” she said.
“You, my dear, are amazing.”
“I know.” She smiled at me. “It was so…fun. I love Pride.”
I burst into tears when she said that.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I’m sorry, honey. These men just said some mean things about gay people to me when I was walking toward the car, and I guess I’m still upset about it. But I’m glad you loved Pride. I loved it, too, and I loved being there with you.”
“Those bastards!” S shouted. “Fuck them! If I was there, I would say, fuck you, this is my lesbian mom and I love her and I’m proud of her.”
“Well, you know, I probably should have said more, but it’s always important to be sure you’re safe, and they were the only two people around. I just wasn’t sure if I was safe. Anyway, I can usually take things like that. I’ve been dealing with things like that all my life. It’s just that…I felt so GOOD after Pride, you know?”
“Well, I would have told them, ‘go fuck yourself, go suck your own balls.’ Or, I would have said, ‘why don’t you fuck each other? Maybe you would enjoy it.’”
I couldn’t help but laugh, though while laughing, I also noted, “That is SO inappropriate.”
“But they deserve it.”
“No, it never does any good to say things like that. I would have tried to talk to them and change their minds if I felt safe.”
“Some people’s minds can’t be changed, Mom. The best thing you can do is tell them to fuck off.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to think about it. I hope you’re not right.”
S turned to the dog, who was passed out, exhausted, in his kennel in the back seat. “Sorry about those bastards, Cody,” she said to the dog. “Did you see that, Mom? He NODDED. He IS PISSED at those men.”
And then, suddenly, everything seemed hilarious, and I started laughing and couldn’t stop. And S called my aunt, whom she calls “yiayia,” or grandma in Greek, and she told her everything good there was to say about Pride, including the fact that she had collected 27 condoms, some of them on sticks like lollipops. Apparently yiayia wasn’t as freaked out by this as I assumed she’d be. S said, “I mean, my school doesn’t even TEACH how to use birth control, and that is RIDICULOUS.”
And suddenly, I remembered something big. Last year at Pride, S and I had gotten into an argument about birth control: she said she wanted to get pregnant right out of high school and hoped she would. She also cried when the atheists marched by in the parade, outraged because she didn’t think it was right not to believe in God. Now she’s an atheist herself (or maybe it’s a pagan who believes in lots of gods? It changes a lot, but at least she’s exploring, and accepting of others). When the drag queens marched by last year, she was freaked out; this year, she critiqued their outfits, noting which looked best. And she had a conversation with one of the students working the booth about the decisions transgendered people have to make about whether or not to change their bodies, and I heard her say, “Top surgery is probably painful and seems unnecessary, but I don’t really judge people who do it, because it’s their choice.” I’m pretty sure that last year, she wasn’t really aware of what a transgendered person was, much less what top surgery was.
Anyway. The point is, people DO change. So I said to her, "Remember Pride last year? You were SO upset about the atheists and the drag queens.”
“Don’t bring that UP, Mom. I was a DIFFERENT PERSON then. God!”
Exactly my point.
When I step back and think about the changes S has been through in the last year, there is no way to look at that story without feeling a great deal of hope--even if doing so does not resolve my questions about when and whether to come out and does not erase the pain I felt when confronted by homophobes after such an amazing weekend.
Things have changed dramatically since I came out in the early 90s, obviously. There are still mostly-naked men and drag queens and S&M divas in the parade (and I have to admit I love this aspect of Pride), but there are way, way more churches, activist groups, politicians, and corporate-sponsored floats than any of the typical paraders. Hennepin Avenue has rainbow banners on the streetlights, similar to those that would be displayed for any other event in the city, likely paid for by the city itself. The entire area shuts down for the parade, and Loring Park is teaming with over 100,000 people (literally) all weekend. Every year, I realize when I’m packing up the college's booth that I missed an entire row of booths somehow—it’s that big.
Now that I’ve been here nine years, Pride really is also a reunion. Former student activists stop by, and they always have awesome stories about what they’re up to now. Former students who weren’t out when they were in college show up and tell me their coming out stories. This year, two students I knew well stopped by to talk about their soon-to-be born baby, and another one of my favorite students showed up, as he always does, with his mother, who, though she took some time to get to the point of supporting his journey, is now his greatest friend. And prospective students come by, excited by our reputation, hoping to get in—-or totally clueless, but interested after talking to us—-and that, too, is rewarding. In short, I am on a high all weekend, happy about every aspect of my job and life.
This year, S and I marched with Rainbow Families (GLBT families) in the parade. In the past, I’ve always watched the parade rather than marching in it, but it was great to be with other families and to hear the cheering. I wept a couple times. Lisa made a sign that said “Lesbian Mom, Straight Daughter, Happy Dog = Family,” and our dog WAS actually incredibly happy the whole time (it was his first Pride). As a side note, if you are interested in meeting women at Pride (and this probably works for men, too), just take along a dog and be sure to put a rainbow collar on him—you’ll get hit on way more than you ever did before, or at least, that was my experience this year.
But back to the parade: S and I stood out, because Rainbow Families consists mostly of lesbian couples who have adopted infants or given birth, so mostly we were a group of cute infant-to-six-year-olds wearing shirts that said things like “I love my lesbian moms” and riding bikes with training wheels and lots of rainbow bling. Only two gay male couples were there, and they had a slightly less traditional family—-kids in the 8-to-10 age range whom I suspect were adopted out of foster care, though I didn’t ask. One of them marched the entire parade on stilts! These kids took to S and our dog right away. One of them even tried to teach our dog how to skateboard (unsuccessfully, I might add). But as usual, I realized how my decision to adopt a teenager out of foster care as a single, queer woman was—-well, unusual, to say the least. Even among these "nontraditional" families, S and I stood out.
Most of the parents who have adopted kids like S are fundamentalist Christians who see adoption of special needs/hard to place kids as a calling. (I do, too, but I am not a fundamentalist Christian, obviously). I have been meeting monthly with a group of moms in my area who have made the decision to adopt such children—and I am definitely the most liberal, the only queer, the only one who is not active in a church, the only person with an advanced degree, and the only single parent. They are nice to me, though—I know at least one of them knows I am queer because we had an argument once, long ago, in the newspaper editorials about GLBT issues (and I have an unusual name, so I doubt she’s forgotten, though I can't be sure). But, I haven’t come out to them directly, which makes me feel a bit awkward, as I am very out everywhere else, from our local police force to ministers in town to...well, you get the idea.
But I need these women right now, because they help normalize what I’m going through and provide a kind of support my friends cannot. Maybe I am afraid of losing them—but I believe so strongly in being out, especially to people like them, that it is hard to justify my decision not to tell them. And yet, honestly, it hasn’t come up. My work, my political views, the fact that I’m single, the fact that I don’t belong to a church in town and don’t want to join one—all of those things have come up naturally in our conversation, and given the opportunity, I suppose I’d say I was queer, but as a single person, it’s not a topic of conversation that comes up naturally.
But what I want to write about is not how affirmed and hopeful it felt to be at Pride, or even how torn I feel about not being out in my support group, but what happened when I left Loring Park in search of the parking garage where I had, more than 10 hours earlier, parked my car. I was in a hurry, so I took the dog but left S at the booth to help her godparents (a lesbian couple from our town) and some students tear it down. The plan was that I’d get the car, drive up to booth, and we’d pack up and get out of town quickly.
But, I didn’t realize I was parked about two miles away (I’d parked closer to the parade’s start than the park), and once I did, it was impossible to do anything but walk there, as I couldn’t take the dog on public transportation or in a cab. As I left the area where Pride had taken place, still wearing stickers and buttons all over my shirt and shorts, I realized I was moving into less-friendly territory. I hit a mostly touristy/upscale area, and for awhile, things were fine—people eating outdoors glanced over at me, got quiet, then remembered it was Pride weekend and went back to their conversations. Some were even more friendly, commenting on how cute our dog was. Maybe they aren’t allies per se, I thought, but they aren’t freaked out, either.
And then, just as I was turning a corner toward the garage, across from one of the large sports arenas in town, two men walked by me and said, loudly, “I can’t believe you people are parading around on the Lord’s day when the Bible says you’re going to hell.” At this point, my cell phone was ringing, and I was realizing that I really needed to hurry to get to the car--it was already half an hour past the time I'd hoped to be driving out of town. I took the call, let my friend know I was close to the car, and kept walking. The men went on to shout some Bible verses at me—the typical, out-of-context verses--and just before entering the garage, I shouted back, “We were actually celebrating God’s love for us,” then disappeared quickly from their view.
I wanted to say more. The men were African-American, and I wanted to talk to them about how St. Paul, the only person who condemns anything even remotely “homosexual” in the New Testament, also wrote that slaves should obey their masters, and how nobody in their right minds would agree that this was God’s word now. I wanted to talk to them about the historical context of the verses they were quoting. I mean, I know this shit, backwards and forwards. But, I was afraid.
Did their race play into my fear? I really hope not. I feel like I am not a racist, but I am a white woman and live in a racist society and therefore have internalized biases that, though unconscious, may have played into my decision not to confront them more directly. If someone asked me who I would trust more, an African-American straight man or a white straight man, I’d say the African-American straight man for sure; probably this is due to the fact that, in earlier times of my life, I had some very close African-American straight man friends, and partly, I think, I generally tend to trust people who have dealt with any kind of oppression more than those who have not, for better or worse. But alone on a street in a city I am only marginally familiar with, I wonder. I wonder why I didn’t try to engage these men in conversation, and what that says about me.
Right after shouting back at them, I realized the entrance to the garage we had used earlier was locked, and for a second, I panicked. Every hate crime my friends or I have experienced ran through my mind. I ran around the garage, trying to find an unlocked entrance. Finally, I found one, but it was another 20 minutes before I actually located our car. (I learned later that this garage is the largest in the Twin Cities, and that it had closed an hour earlier. My car was one of the only cars left).
In any case, at one point during my search, I sat down on the ground against a pole and started to cry. My dog jumped into my lap and licked my face. Then he lay down next to me. After crying for a few more minutes, I shouted, “Fuck them!” The dog didn’t seem the least bit startled. I nuzzled my face against his neck and whispered, “I was feeling so good about myself, and S, and everything. But they made me remember everything bad about what it was like to come out.” The dog licked my face again, and I stood up, pulled myself together, and found the car.
Later, as we were driving onto the highway, S said, “I was so worried about you, mom. I should have come with you. I have a better sense of direction than you do.”
“I found the garage with no problem, amazingly,” I said. “I just couldn’t find the car.”
“Green, fourth floor, S20,” she said.
“You, my dear, are amazing.”
“I know.” She smiled at me. “It was so…fun. I love Pride.”
I burst into tears when she said that.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I’m sorry, honey. These men just said some mean things about gay people to me when I was walking toward the car, and I guess I’m still upset about it. But I’m glad you loved Pride. I loved it, too, and I loved being there with you.”
“Those bastards!” S shouted. “Fuck them! If I was there, I would say, fuck you, this is my lesbian mom and I love her and I’m proud of her.”
“Well, you know, I probably should have said more, but it’s always important to be sure you’re safe, and they were the only two people around. I just wasn’t sure if I was safe. Anyway, I can usually take things like that. I’ve been dealing with things like that all my life. It’s just that…I felt so GOOD after Pride, you know?”
“Well, I would have told them, ‘go fuck yourself, go suck your own balls.’ Or, I would have said, ‘why don’t you fuck each other? Maybe you would enjoy it.’”
I couldn’t help but laugh, though while laughing, I also noted, “That is SO inappropriate.”
“But they deserve it.”
“No, it never does any good to say things like that. I would have tried to talk to them and change their minds if I felt safe.”
“Some people’s minds can’t be changed, Mom. The best thing you can do is tell them to fuck off.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to think about it. I hope you’re not right.”
S turned to the dog, who was passed out, exhausted, in his kennel in the back seat. “Sorry about those bastards, Cody,” she said to the dog. “Did you see that, Mom? He NODDED. He IS PISSED at those men.”
And then, suddenly, everything seemed hilarious, and I started laughing and couldn’t stop. And S called my aunt, whom she calls “yiayia,” or grandma in Greek, and she told her everything good there was to say about Pride, including the fact that she had collected 27 condoms, some of them on sticks like lollipops. Apparently yiayia wasn’t as freaked out by this as I assumed she’d be. S said, “I mean, my school doesn’t even TEACH how to use birth control, and that is RIDICULOUS.”
And suddenly, I remembered something big. Last year at Pride, S and I had gotten into an argument about birth control: she said she wanted to get pregnant right out of high school and hoped she would. She also cried when the atheists marched by in the parade, outraged because she didn’t think it was right not to believe in God. Now she’s an atheist herself (or maybe it’s a pagan who believes in lots of gods? It changes a lot, but at least she’s exploring, and accepting of others). When the drag queens marched by last year, she was freaked out; this year, she critiqued their outfits, noting which looked best. And she had a conversation with one of the students working the booth about the decisions transgendered people have to make about whether or not to change their bodies, and I heard her say, “Top surgery is probably painful and seems unnecessary, but I don’t really judge people who do it, because it’s their choice.” I’m pretty sure that last year, she wasn’t really aware of what a transgendered person was, much less what top surgery was.
Anyway. The point is, people DO change. So I said to her, "Remember Pride last year? You were SO upset about the atheists and the drag queens.”
“Don’t bring that UP, Mom. I was a DIFFERENT PERSON then. God!”
Exactly my point.
When I step back and think about the changes S has been through in the last year, there is no way to look at that story without feeling a great deal of hope--even if doing so does not resolve my questions about when and whether to come out and does not erase the pain I felt when confronted by homophobes after such an amazing weekend.
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