Monday, October 19, 2009

National Equality March - Christine Thomas

Gay Pride & the National Equality March



When the LGBT community gets together, one of the activities we enjoy most is marching. We don’t seem to care much where we do it, it doesn’t matter what time of year it is, and we don’t need any one reason—we just like getting together, making signs, chanting and cheering at the top of our lungs, and causing a big scene no matter where we end up. I mean, sure, it’s most effective when we go somewhere like Tallahassee, FL, to demand our rights from our state’s capitol at the Rally in Tally; or when we go to Washington, D.C., to participate in a nation-wide show of force to demand our rights from our nation’s capitol during the National Equality March. Still, if the LGBT community can get some attention by being a part of a big gay parade anywhere, anytime, for any reason, we’re in.

Why did we start up with this whole “marching” thing, anyway? I think we’ve got the Stonewall Riots of 1969 to thank for this particular tradition in the LGBT movement, as the first gay pride march occurred one year after the riots in order to celebrate their anniversary. “The first marches were both serious and fun, and served to inspire the widening activist movement; they were repeated in the following years, and more and more annual marches started up in other cities throughout the world. In New York and Atlanta the marches were called Gay Liberation Marches, and the day of celebration was called ‘Gay Liberation Day;’ in San Francisco and Los Angeles they became known as Gay Freedom Marches and the day was called ‘Gay Freedom Day.’ As more towns and cities began holding their own celebrations, these names spread.” (Stolen straight from Wikipedia.org.)

Last Friday, several members of UWF’s Gay-Straight Alliance embarked on a pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., to participate in the National Equality March. Some of these members rode on a bus for over 24 hours, traveling all over Florida to pick up students from other Universities before heading on a course to the nation’s capitol. Unfortunately, yours truly was having her own fun at a leadership retreat and could not participate in the LGBT festivities, but I’ve heard all sorts of magnificent stories. Those in attendance at the National Equality March got to hear from speakers such as Judy Shepard and Lady Gaga… those speakers alone would have made it worth the trip, in my opinion. There was lots of cheering, lots of flag-waving, over 300,000 LGBT individuals and their allies, and best of all… a ton of pride and demands for equality. Words cannot express how very proud I am of my friends and fellow GSA members for participating in this monumental event.

Check out these fabulous videos from the National Equality March!

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=national+equality+march&search_type=&aq=f

National Equality March - James Goodson

Pride - Christine Thomas

Pride

There are many models of the “Stages of Coming Out,” but my personal favorite is a six-step model consisting of the following:

1. Identity Confusion
2. Identity Comparison
3. Identity Tolerance
4. Identity Acceptance
5. Identity Pride
6. Identity Synthesis

To sum it up, when a person realizes that he or she (to simplify my typing, let’s just go with “he”) is somehow different (for our purposes, we’ll just use the blanket term “gay”), there is a psychological process that he goes through in coming to terms with this new realization. It starts with confusion: he’s not quite sure why he’s attracted to other guys and tries to deny or fight against these feelings. Next, he begins to compare himself to others, noticing that he is different and trying to figure out what exactly a gay person is comprised of. In the tolerance stage, he begins to admit to himself that maybe he could be gay, and in the acceptance stage, he starts to come out to others. We can refer to the pride stage as the “I’m here, I’m queer” stage. This level is all rainbows and gay paraphernalia all the time. When reaching the level of synthesis, he begins to see himself as a person who happens to be gay, rather than a person who lives and breathes nothing but homosexuality and gay culture.

While Identity Synthesis is the ideal level in coming to terms with one’s sexuality, the stage that seems to bring the LGBT community together is #5: Identity Pride. For one, the word “synthesis” just isn’t as easy to rhyme, say, or tweak as the word “pride.” For another, I think it takes individuals who at least keep a toe in the Identity Pride stage to really make a difference when it comes to LGBT equality. If we were going to make this model a scale, I’d be at about 5.5—halfway between Pride and Synthesis. Most of the time, I don’t go around thinking or talking about being bisexual. Contrary to popular belief, I’ve got a life outside of LGBT activism that doesn’t involve my sexuality whatsoever. I’m pretty well synthesized, if I do say so myself. Really, though, since such a huge part of my life consists of the fight for equal rights, my sexual preference (and the preferences of my friends and activist colleagues) is a consistent topic of conversation. Therefore, I still wiggle around a bit with Identity Pride.

If you haven’t noticed, pride is a really big deal in the LGBT community. It’s important to not only accept our sexuality, not only to not be ashamed of it, but to announce it loud and proud just to make sure we’re grabbing everyone’s attention. I like to think of pride as more than an excuse to wear lots of loud crazy rainbow accessories… pride is more of a tool in the battle for equality. Think about it. If the LGBT community was guaranteed 100% equal rights and no discrimination, would we have any need to scream and shout about our sexuality? No. We’d be considered (insert gasp here) normal members of society, and would have no need to go any further than accepting and understanding who we are. As it is, however, we face all sorts of hate crimes and the legal inability to marry and denial of employment and housing and… you get the picture. Therefore, we have to show “the man” that we are proud of being members of the LGBT community and that we do not want to change to fit into society’s pre-determined mold of who is and is not worthy of equal rights due to issues of sexual preference. In this way, we use pride to help us achieve our ends.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my rambling on the subject of pride. This was all really very train of thought and I’m just glad you people seem to care enough to read about my random LGBT musings. Thanks a bunch and have a great week. :D

Pride - James Goodson