2005
So Much More than Pride.
In the black leather jewelry case that finds the top of a nineteenth century American walnut dresser to be its home sits a labrys. It’s about an inch and a half long, silver, and hangs from a long silver chain. It gets touched everyday in the grand melee of my dressing for work in the mornings and the ritual changing of the jewelry from what I wear at night to what I wear for day. It lays intimately close with my gold Star of David that I wear when I sleep, mostly out of habit and memory of a lost love. It’s up front and in center, but it has begun to tarnish: I rarely ever wear it.
It is June, the season of the great queer holiday known as Pride, but I am one lesbian who doesn’t get the concept. Pride? Just for being queer? I stare confusedly at anyone who broaches the subject with me. Sometimes, I engage in conversation, even debate, with anyone who sings the virtues and praises of Pride to me. I don’t begrudge anyone their festivities, but it always comes down to one fine point for me: I have a hard time with Pride because there is so more for me to be proud of than just my queerness.
I’ve known that I happen to be queer since I was roughly four years old and thought it perfectly normal for Barbie and Midge to be lovers, so much so that when my horrified mother introduced Ken to the mix, I turned him into an evil, oppressive misogynist and had Barbie and Midge hangs him from my bed posts. This isn’t to say that I didn’t have my adorable little girl phase of really liking boys, I just liked them more for their cool Tonka trucks than for their gender identities. In fact, I even punched the first guy who kissed me, all while resplendent in my ruffled dresses and mary janes. I’m gay. I’m a lesbian. I dress like a girl, wear makeup, get misty eyed at romantic comedies, scream bloody murder when it comes to spiders, and am generally a walking, talking girl stereotype at least in appearance. I just happen to be queer. It’s part of the package. I’m a girlie girl who kisses girls. I have nicknames like Lolita and Temptress and a don’t ask, don’t tell policy with my family. It’s just who I am, my homosexuality is a part of the greater whole. I’m also a writer, an artist, a musician, an accomplished scholar, Jewish, speaker of Swedish, can wiggle my ears, recently graduated with my MBA, and am half Irish. I don’t feel the need wave my guitar over my head any more than I feel the need to traipse around a city block one weekend every June and be overly thrilled about my gayness. I’m no different than my conservative, Republican neighbor because we are both human beings with multiple facets of who we are and how we live. She doesn’t run around screaming about how great it is that she’s Republican for a weekend in November or has curly hair for a weekend in March.
No, my gods-given sexual orientation does not make me proud. The actual struggles that my sexual oriented forebears endured at Stonewall make me proud (I would so much rather honor their fight by attending lectures or something else productive rather than be part of a growingly commercialized excuse for getting drunk and sexual in public.) Seeing an increasing number of vehicles with family van or other queer identifying badges on them tooling about in the suburbs makes me proud. Hearing my brother take up for equal rights for all persons makes me proud. Helping to raise my niece with a worldview of tolerance makes me proud. Little things, daily struggles and victories make me more proud than any weekend in June ever will. I look for Pride everyday, in my own life, in how I live it. And every day, I ask myself the question in Heather Small’s song Proud, what have you done today to make yourself proud? More often than not, what makes me proud that day has nothing to do with being gay.
Back to that neglected labrys. I wear it on occasion, like when I’m really dolled up and need a representative item of lesbianica to keep me from getting into really ugly situations at a bar or when I’m trying to point out my queerness and solidarity within that (like during political rallies.) It has use. There was a time when I wore it every day, needed for people to see it and see that I was Different and Special! And then one day I woke up, rolled over, looked at my then-partner and realized something: being gay has nothing to do with how Different and Special I am. It’s WHO I am that makes me special. Being gay, that’s just a bonus.
By Nickie
