Pride 2023:
I have been out for over 1000 days.
But this year has by far felt the hardest.
The rawest.
My queerness feels more honest. Intimate.
It feels more deadly.
The sharp edge of a shattered glass that is transphobia.
The gentle kaleidoscope that reflects from it- queer joy.
My gender feels more exotic.
Primordial attraction.
My queerness feels more rooted.
More like the river.
The wind through cheatgrass.
It feels like interconnection.
Like mourning carving a well
to bathe in.
Like soap stinging against your ankles.
Seeping into thistle and micro cuts.
It feels beyond me.
But it feels like home.
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I hold my breath and press ok. The poem successfully posted on Instagram, my yearly pride post achieved. I started doing a post specifically for Pride month a few years ago. I’m not entirely sure why. It likely had to do with feeling fed up with corporate Pride. Massive corporations waving cheap flags for a month before turning their backs to fund anti-LGBTQ+ politicians. It likely formed from this craving for Pride to honor its roots. Violent riots and protesting. The AIDS epidemic. The need to highlight queerness as something more complex and nuanced– which it is.
But this year felt really different. I spent the whole month trying to come up with the right words, and ultimately, I posted a short snippet of my actual experience this Pride. So, that’s what this is. My thoughts without filter. The significance behind the TLDR of a Instagram post.
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My best friend’s father is transphobic. I learned this fact on the first day of Pride, listening in on his conversation with my mother. We were returning from my cousin’s graduation when he called, asking about a new K-12 curriculum which introduced concepts like gender expression and identity. He was livid– the conversation shifting from curiosity to animosity. His argument was the same as most conservatives, the queers are indoctrinating the youth, they’re trying to confuse our kids, they’re threats, the same things shown on the news. I was both shocked and unsurprised. This man had shared some conservative beliefs in the past, but I never thought he’d regurgitate the same anti-trans rhetoric seen on TV. But frankly, more than shocked or unsurprised, I was hurt. A man who had known me nearly since I was brought back from China, a man who has watched my journey of coming out and social transition believed that my community was a threat. It shook me. Mainly because I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to simply cut him off because of my friend. I couldn’t. Deep down I had this belief that if I could just sit down with him, we could make sense of some things.
He also reminded me of a traumatic history as a marginalized person in a rural mountain community. I never had the language to describe my experiences, raised in a valley that never really talked about it. Looking back, to say I was unhappy would be a huge understatement. Everything felt so unbelievably empty. Like all the kids around me had some secret code to unlock how the fuck life worked. It wasn’t prepubescent angst, it was a deeper inexplicable disconnect. I understood there were rules, to how you act, look, behave, but I didn’t know what they were and I much less understood that they could be broken.
Coming from a mountain town often feels incongruent with my queerness. Not the mountains, but the people. The valley I was raised in is somewhat fanatic about sports. Half the kids in my 5th grade class were prodigy athletes. My school would run biyearly outdoor trips every grade. I could pitch a tent by myself by the end of 2nd grade. I was skiing double blacks by the end of 4th. The sad thing is, this probably isn’t even that impressive to the people who read this and do live in the Roaring Fork Valley. This is the norm. Everyone treats the land as though its a playground and we’re all trying to master its little quirks.
The Roaring Fork valley has since made significant progress but, well, they are a group of mostly non-minorities trying to bring every voice to the table. That is an extremely difficult thing to do, especially when all voices simply don’t exist there. So, despite the immense amounts of effort put into inclusivity in the Roaring Fork valley, there is still so much misunderstood.
It took me a very long time to unpack what living in a culture that would never help me to understand my own identity meant. Sometimes I’ll see a post and it’ll spark a new flame of anger. Of grief and regret. I learned about AIDS more intensely this summer. About how the hatred towards the LGBTQ+ is a new thing. The truth that I didn’t mention on my post is that I’ve spent most of the summer enraged, resentful, and hurt.
This year has by no means been the easiest on my queerness. I feel so inexplicably vulnerable and raw. Like skin scrubbed hard. In many ways I feel broken, the last pieces of my youthful naiveté surrounding the magnitude of hate around us, shattered. Right now, I am working hard to remember that mosaics are beautiful things too. That broken does not mean bad. That sometimes cracks must be made; for the light, for the plants, to come through.
That is what I’m thinking about this year. Resilience.
Resilience and Interconnection.
