Pride Month Is Not A Game.

We are in the middle of Pride Month, and as much as I would like to post something inspirational and positive and motivating, my heart feels heavy this year.

I grew up in a conservative Christian home. After struggling with the tension between my faith and my sexuality for 21 years, I am today a happily out and proud gay Christian whose faith still serves as his ultimate compass. That big smile you see there in the photo didn't come easy, and it was the first genuine one I'd had since I was 13.

I feel compelled to draw some attention to why a Pride month is necessary in the Year 2022 and how frustrating/terrifying/anxiety-inducing it is to be queer, even in this day and age.

Over the last week two big news stories surfaced – both out of Texas – which drove home the urgency and the need for visibility and celebration of queer individuals of all stripes.

One of them was?this story?about Pastor Dillon Awes of Stedfast Baptist Church in Texas, who gave a sermon last week lambasting the celebration of Pride Month across the U.S. He said that gay people are “dangerous to society” and that “all homosexuals are pedophiles.”

This is an actual quote – verbatim – from his sermon:?

“These people should be put to death. Every single homosexual in our country should be charged with a crime. The abomination of homosexuality that they have, they should be convicted in a lawful trial. They should be sentenced with death. They should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head.”

Read that again and let it sink in.

And before you say, “But Matt, this is just a tiny church in Texas – this isn’t representative of the American church as a whole!” Let me just take you on a little sample tasting tour of some of the things that have been said from American church pulpits all over the U.S. just in the past few years – let alone the past several decades (and you know this queen has the receipts).

• Just hours after the massacre at an Orlando gay club in 2016, California?Pastor Roger Jiminez said, “The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die … I’m kind of upset that he didn’t finish the job.”
• In 2012, North Carolina?Pastor Charles Worley?preached that the U.S. could “get rid of all the lesbians and queers” by rounding them all up and placing them in concentration camps with electrified fencing. “In a few years they’ll die out,” he said. “You know why? They can’t reproduce.”
• Finally, and closest to home, Mark Driscoll, the former pastor of the church I used to attend in Seattle during my 20s, scoffed at queer people, calling them “Damn freaks … I’d tell you to kiss my ass, but I’m afraid you’d take me up on it.” Week after week, I sat in that church watching Pastor Mark make fun of “effeminate” or “limp-wristed” men.

But Matt, you’ll say,?this is all just rhetoric. Sure, it’s abhorrent, but isn’t it safer and more accepting than ever before to be an openly LGBTQ+ individual today? Aren’t you guys in the alphabet mafia making a mountain out of a molehill? Gay people are totally safe and widely accepted in our culture today.

Except we’re not. You don’t see the danger because it doesn’t affect you. But I see the headlines all the time.

Like?this one?from 2021, in which a young man was beaten and blinded by members of his boyfriend’s family because they believed he had turned their son gay.

Or?this one?from just a few months ago in New York, when a man was attacked on a subway by someone he didn’t even know.

Or?this one?from 2017, in which a group of men targeted gay men on Grindr and then held them at gunpoint to force them to withdraw cash from their savings accounts at ATMs.

Or?this one, in which a gay man was targeted and beaten within an inch of his life.

Or?this one, when Holland, a South Korean K-Pop star, was assaulted in Seoul.

In my adopted hometown of Munich, Germany, I still get called “faggot.”

Just last week, while visiting Seattle for my sister’s wedding, my boyfriend and I were accosted by a woman who screamed and spit at us, waving her middle finger, when she saw us walking by holding hands.

Guys, I’m tired.

I spent 21 years of my life – my prime years of youth – in a battle with myself over my sexuality, where my life literally hung in the balance. I am a survivor of self-harm and attempted suicide. I’ve been to hundreds - maybe thousands - of hours of therapy with 6 different therapists over my life. It took me a really, really long time to get to a point where I felt comfortable with myself – let alone comfortable enough to walk down a street holding another man’s hand.

I still watch closely the faces and body language of every single person my boyfriend and I pass on the street together – hyper aware of everything around me and how every single person in eyeshot of us is reacting. Many of us in the queer community know exactly what I am talking about. We don’t have the luxury – even in liberal cities – of letting down our guard.

So I am tired. I am really, really tired. The endless parade of vitriol, hatred, and slander is so exhausting, my very soul is ready for a nap.

I – and so many queer people like me – just want to live our lives. We want to get back the years we lost because we were fighting for our own survival. We want to thrive. We want to be happy. We want to be loved and to love someone else.

And yet I look around and I see vast swaths of people whose attitude is indifferent at best and hostile at worst.?

In a best case, people think we queers just love the attention and limelight of Pride Month and that the battle for equal rights is over. In a worst case, people openly call for our execution – or take that power into their own hands.

So the next time you hear someone ask “Why do we need a Pride Month, anyway?” or hear someone complain “Ugh, Pride Month, rainbow everything again…” I want you to come back and read this. I want you to think about what it feels like to have your very existence called into question. What it feels like to have people sneer at you when you walk down the street with your partner. What it feels like to have thousands of church leaders calling for your exclusion at best and execution at worst.

New research from The Trevor Project?showed that in the last year,?50% of LGBTQ+ teens between 13-17 seriously considered suicide and 18% actually tried. This represents DOUBLE the suicide rate of all US teens.?This was LAST YEAR, folks. Not 1950. Not 1960. Last. Year.

Listen to me very carefully.

Pride Month is not a game.?

Lives are still very much at stake and the fight for safety – let alone equality – is far from over. The visibility - and sense of not being alone - that Pride generates would have been hugely influential in my life had it been as big as it is now when I was 13. It might even have saved me from becoming one of those statistics.

Remember Pastor Dillon Awes who I talked about earlier? His homophobic sermon was about the perceived persecution of Christians in an increasingly liberal America and was titled “Why We Won’t Shut Up.” (The delicious irony of preaching a sermon complaining about how Christians are culturally persecuted while simultaneously calling for mass executions is apparently lost on Pastor Dillon).

Well, Pastor Dillon, I’m sorry you feel as though you’re under attack. You’re not.

But you’d better buckle up, because I promise you one thing:?

We queers won’t shut up either.

Happy Pride 2022, dear queer fam. ??