[CW: (Internalized) Queerphobia]
I have not convinced myself that I should be proud of my queer identity. I’ve seen 100 reasons to be ashamed of it and 0 to be proud of it.
Pride month seems like a joke to me. It’s a month where we’re supposed to celebrate ourselves for who we are, but it only generates the opposite attitude for me.
You can be “proud” of yourself for being queer, but that’s only if you’re not too queer. I am too queer for even other queer people to think I deserve to exist, let alone experience pride in the way I exist.
Never been to any particular ‘Pride’ function but I was quite the slacktivist in the pre-Obergefell days and did my best to live openly and true to myself as I could back then as a queer-adjacent young person. In high school, I got several students on board with me participating in the Day of Silence protests. It really pissed off the admins and I got targeted for in-school suspensions all the time afterward.
And the part that I can’t get over is that all that energy put into expanding gay rights and queer acceptance has been for the rich gays to consolidate their assets. At the time I genuinely believed I was part of some rising tide movement that was going to change things. A decade out it seems pretty clear that the entire movement through the ‘00s and ‘10s was a sham so the rich gays could more easily hoard their wealth like straight couples do. The rich gays finally got to have their dream weddings all while the greater movement backslid and violence against trans and queer people has increased. So the rich gays hide away and start television ad campaigns to lie and condescend to the rest of us and say, “It gets better,” because, in their discrete experience, it does.
As it turns out it was always about class politics and there can be no gay/queer liberation without the rest of it.