Once upon a time I breathed a sigh of relief. It was the night that New York State passed marriage equality. Only the year before, Andy and I had had to go to Boston to get legally married. We drove into Albany to celebrate, and as we neared Rocks, I felt a burden lift from my shoulders, a weight to which I’d grown unnoticeably accustomed. It had always been there, and I had never known
When you’ve spent your entire life being told, in explicit and furtive terms, to be silent, to be quiet, to be less, the first taste of true freedom, of genuine equality, is an enthralling relief. We exhaled that night – an exhalation decades in the making – and the state of New York suddenly galvanized something in some of us that we’d never even known was there. A sense of worth that I had long pretended I didn’t need.
The same thing happened when we watched from afar as the White House was lit in the colors of the rainbow and marriage equality was made the law of the land. The exhalation. The sudden lifting of a burden that was still somehow there.
With the current administration, I feel those burdens being placed on some of us again. With every murder of a transgender person, with every refusal to fly the rainbow flag, with every appointment of an anti-LGBTQ judge, I feel the burden get heavier. We have come too far and fought for too long to go back. And so I resist as best I can. In little ways and little words. In posts like this that maybe someone in need may read and recognize themselves, offering a resonance that might be the extra push someone needs to stop crying, or stop hurting themselves, or stop dying.
In our daily life, we must refuse to be anything less than who we are.
It is our right to become what we were meant to be.
It is our right to find happiness.
It is our right to live as we wish.
Such a simple concept, why it should be so fraught with enemies is incomprehensible to me.
This weekend, World Pride comes to New York City, and the parade looks to be one of the largest the world has ever seen. Until such time that we don’t have to fight, until that day when we have all achieved equality without question, reservation, or condition, then we need Pride. Perhaps now more than ever.
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