The local “pridewalk” at our muncipal building was looking a bit worse for wear after a year of hee-haw, knuckle-dragging, pickup-driving, white trash doing burnouts on it. It recently got a refresh, and, of course, it happened while I was out (you guessed it) paddle boarding. I was a bit bummed as I would have pitched in with the repainting.
I am a white, straight dude. I am sure there is a label for that, but I don’t know what it is and am too slothful to look it up. I also can’t keep up with the ever-growing LGBTQsomethingsomething label. I just think of this crowd as “othered” now. It’s not an insult or a slur, it’s just convenient and, well, I’m lazy as fuck (as previously mentioned).
That said, Pride is important to me. My Uncle John, who passed in my twenties, was gay. He was one of the poor souls taken out by the deadly first wave of AIDS. I remember the horrible night that he had to tell me he was terminally ill with AIDS. Worse (for him), it also meant him coming out to me and you could tell he was more worried about how I would react to learning he was gay than learning he was dying.
I had figured out years back he was gay and I didn’t care a bit about that. He was the one relative I looked up to, idolized, and thought of as the closest thing I had to a dad. If I ever had gotten my idealized father, he would have been just like John. I loved him and he loved me and how horrible is it that he was worried that one word spoken out loud – gay – would end of all of that. It didn’t for me and it shouldn’t for anyone else.
Pride, to me, is about letting everyone I know who is othered that they are still people to me, still worthy of respect, and still welcome in my life. It’s not about the label, it’s about reaching out to people who are at risk of, or are being excluded and showing them some goddamn courtesy. Their being different from you does not mean they stopped being human beings. You might have if you don’t get this.
Especially if you’re one those fucking nitwits who does burnouts on Pride sidewalks.
Image taken with a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra on September 09, 2024. I had taken a nearly identical image on September 06, 2024, and then somehow deleted it from my cloud drive. I went out for a retake this evening.
