What is pride to me?

What is pride to me??

I was born and grew up in the UK under the Section 28 laws, some of the original “don’t say gay” laws that are direct ancestors of the current wave of legalised bigotry in the United States, Russia, Hungary, Poland, and of course coming back in England.

Section 28 was just the most recent in our long British imperial history of genocidal obsession with repression of queer lives and bodies around the world. It is no accident that some of the worst example of legalised anti-queer bigotry across the colonised world in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean are in countries still reeling from the genocidal violence and looting my country meted out on them. And in many cases this is not past tense, as these countries continue to suffer the violent cruel influence of our neo-colonial public organisations and private corporations that systematically stop any chances of healing and recovery.

It’s also no accident that the UK remains one of the biggest centres of generating and exporting anti-queer bigotry around the world. It is not for nothing that we are known as “TERF island” due to our political and media establishment’s years long genocidal obsession with controlling and suppressing trans people.

It’s no accident that all major UK political parties and all major UK newspapers and news TV are in a constant race to show who is the most transphobic. It is no accident that our government has spent years ratcheting attacks on specific parts of our education and our arts to once more censor inconvenient truths and try to enforce “don’t say gay” or “don’t say trans”, along with "don't say slavery", "don't say genocide", "don't say racism", "don't say misogyny", "don't say eugenics", and on and on.

It’s into this atmosphere that I was born. It was in this culture I grew up without any idea of the beautiful range, variety, and complexity of humanity.?

As a child, I just knew that “gay” and every possible slur version were the worst insults possible. Insults that were shouted at the me on the streets by the gangs of violent young white men who roam English towns looking for people to beat up. This despite me knowing I was not gay, and at the time thinking it very important to deny such "slurs".

As a child, I just knew from my family that everyone “queer” (used as an insulting slur, rather than as reclaimed by the LGBTQIA+ community) would get AIDS and were indefinably contemptible people.

As a child, I just knew from media that queer people largely didn’t exist, and when they did exist they were pitiable farcical people who nobody could want to be like.

Section 28’s “don’t say gay” rules meant that I never had any sexual or health education in any of the many schools I went to. I certainly never had education on what “gay” meant, and I never heard any mention of the rarer variety that makes up the rest of the LGBTQIA+ family.?

But of course I did have kids making lurid claims of what would give me the dreaded AIDS, and of course the same gay-bashing insults and threats of violence that were one contributing factor towards me becoming a national level runner, learning martial arts, and generally building an unhealthily attuned situational awareness.

In the end, despite some very confusing experiences and conversations along the way, I made it to adulthood sure that I was “normal”. Sure that I was a just a "normal" cishet man who happened to hate the cruelty, bigotry, and violence of English society, and especially of male socialisation there.

Through luck I managed to leave England immediately after university, and I built a life for myself. First in Japan and then in France. More than 20 years later, I'm still every day grateful that I don’t have to go back. For most of that time I was both grateful to have escaped, and still sure that I’m “normal”, oblivious to the bigoted baggage I was carrying around in my head and so inevitably enacted in various ways.

Over the years, protests and collective actions resulting in a lot of progress for LGBTQIA+ people’s basic human rights in many countries, and so I started to become aware of who they were and what they had been dealing with all this time.?And other protests and collective actions made me aware of the realities of a far wider and more intersectional range of people's existence.

I started to deliberately re-educate myself - filling the gaps maliciously left missing by my country’s childhood censorship policies and correcting the internalised bigotries that my country, my family, and my schools spend so much effort grooming me and all children into.

Then when I was 41, somewhere in my attempts to catch up the education stolen from me - unfortunately I don’t remember exactly where - I heard an interview with an ace person which resonated with something that had been confusing and embarrassing me as long as I could remember.

I had heard the word “asexual” before, but I had assumed it meant something far too literal and absolute. I had never seen it as connecting to me. Here was an asexual person, an ace, who was explaining parts of what I had been feeling for so long, and thinking there was just something wrong with me.

Over the next weeks, I listened to and read dozens of different ace people’s descriptions of what it meant to them. Every story and experience was very different. I started understanding the incredible usefulness of separating the ideas of sexual attraction from romantic attraction from aesthetic attraction from libido from other similar concepts. And inside I found myself - an ace adult, a queer kid all along.

It is surreal to be learning all this during the same years we are living through a violent backlash to the sudden progress of the 2000s, where bigots across the world attempt to use the state, the media, the schools, and the home to force queer people (amongst many others) back into the dark, or eliminate us altogether.

So what is pride to me? Pride is what has been since its beginnings at Stonewall: a protest, a riot, an intersectional cry for freedom in the face of societally encouraged racist sexist homophobic transphobic police violence and surveillance. Pride is a show of solidarity, strength, and defiance. Pride is not and has never been a parade.

Even so, personally "pride" is a difficult word for me, because I’m not proud. And I’m certainly not proud of being ace. I have nothing to be proud of. While the political and motivational value in having pride when you are so hated and violently repressed is obvious, the whole idea of being proud of anything feels very odd to me. Pride matters as a self-defence when even the textbooks say there is something wrong, broken, evil about you. But I can’t say I’m personally proud to be ace.

Pride is also hard for me because my queerness is invisible. I’m not one of the people targeted directly. Without me saying it, nobody would know. Clearly many people noticed something about me as I minded my business around English towns and schools that was different enough to make them shout slurs and threaten violence. And yet, I’ve not spent my life in direct community with those most impacted. I’ve lived in a very segregated world my whole life, something that is only recently starting to slowly change.

Being ace is also not the biggest, most difficult, or most important part of my life. It wasn’t the main reason my childhood was awful and my adulthood one I'd gladly get a refund for. Yes, I feel half my life was stolen by this being hidden from me so long, but it is not the only or biggest thing that was stolen from my life by the same people and systems.?

How can I call myself queer now after 43 years of being an outsider? How can I say I’m a legitimate part of the LGBTQIA+ community when I’ve never been to a pride event, and with this ongoing pandemic I don’t know when I ever will? How can I be part of this community’s biggest event when I am only just starting to have even a few queer friends? How am I not an impostor when I’m not the one facing the dangers?

Pride is a complicated word for me and I’m only just now learning. It’s very late. At least it wasn’t never. ????

This pride, my unlearning bigotry continues. My unlearning harmful and hurtful behaviours and words continues. My standing in protest and defiance of injustice continues.

But not only. I will also continue learning all the history, culture, and beauty stolen from all of our childhoods by those who groomed us all into the ignorant and bigoted adults we are today.

If you want to join me, I recommend this glorious, joyous, wonderful masterpiece of pure ?? from start to finish as a fine place to start your pride month: