Pride 101: LGBTQ+ survival

Cisgender heterosexuals—how many times have you:

• Gathered with other straight cisgender friends while people with bullhorns held giant signs and screamed at you that they hope you die of AIDS
• Gotten egged and insulted by people screaming out of a car as you waited in line to enter a straight bar
• Pretended to be someone you’re not out of fear that your mechanic or doctor or waiter or accountant or employer or family would do something bad to you, yell at you to leave or eject you from their lives
• Walked down the street holding hands with your spouse or partner and been accosted by a stranger calling you filthy and disgusting and declaring that he or she shouldn’t be “forced” to see your affection
• Been told that other people's manufactured discomfort about who your are is more important than you being authentically who you are
• Been silenced about even casually mentioning who you and your family are by a "don't say straight" law
• Watched your rights being used as a bargaining chip in national political machinations
• Had your inequality dismissed as a "social issue" and cemented into law by a public vote over a state propositionHad your inequality cemented into law by a public vote over a state proposition
• Watched people fight so hard to discriminate against you that they take their hatred all the way to the Supreme Court
• Joined a church that condemns you to hell
• Been consumed by your own white-hot hatred that you don’t want and you don’t need and you don’t deserve because the above hostilities constantly bombard you while you have almost no recourse

Probably every LGBTQ+ person you know has been called a faggot. Or worse. I have. More times than I can remember.

Probably every LGBTQ+ person you know has had something thrown at them with the intention to hurt or humiliate them. I have. It was a barrage of eggs thrown from a car as some friends and I stood on a sidewalk in Chicago's Boystown … where we'd assumed we were safe from such bullshit. The cowards who threw the eggs missed all of us and raced away cackling like they were big men who somehow mattered.

Many LGBTQ+ people you know have been physically, violently assaulted. I never have, but I have friends who've been assaulted so violently that they've been hospitalized.

It's 2024. The homophobic violence that our forebears endured may have lessened, but it hasn't stopped. And while straight cisgender people probably barely even think about what we endure, we all still get up, walk out the door every day, and live our lives as openly as we dare and as comfortably as we can.

THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.