Ginger HawthorneI’m not the first to say this, but I also think it’s important to say it in my own words, for my own sake.
Less than two weeks from now, June ushers in Pride month. You’re going to be inundated with messages from all sorts of places: friends, family, celebrities, charities, corporations, government officials and more. Most of it will be generally positive, and I’m really trying to suppress the cynic in me that knows most of it is superficial.
But crucially, now more than ever, it has the chance to distract us from some seriously grave issues. Queer people are under attack in the United States. Gay and trans people in particular are the focused target of suppression bills across the country. People in power want to tell us what we can wear, where we can go, what bathrooms we can use, what healthcare we’re eligible for, and more. They even want to ban you from talking about us to your children. This is all a coordinated effort to erase us from public life.
They call us a social contagion. But we’ve always been here. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is our ability to describe ourselves, our ability to find each other, our ability to speak our minds, and perhaps most terrifying of all, your willingness to listen, to see us, to use our pronouns and recognize our marriages. The true social contagion they’re most afraid of is acceptance.
They’re not afraid of us. They’re afraid of losing their ability to keep us in check, confine us to the margins, write us off as rounding errors and convince you that we don’t matter. We’ve seen it before, with abolition, suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, reproductive rights, and on and on. Every time a marginalize group starts to gain ground among the power majority, the supremacists step up to try to quell it before we can threaten the sanctity of cishet white male privilege.
And sure, we’ve made good strides in our long history, but it’s been slow, painful and very, very bloody. The work always falls onto those who are under attack, but the rest of you have more power than you know. They want to test you while they beat us down. They want to know how badly you want us in your lives. How vocal are you willing to be? How loud? If it comes down to it… how violent? Are you willing to put yourselves on the line for us, or will you roll over and accept the changes being proposed?
So this June, please enjoy the rainbows and sparkles and parades. But above it all, remember that YOU are an active part in all this, too. You have a chance to stop being a bystander and start getting into it alongside us. Carry a flag if you want, but please remember that’s a symbol of unity with us. Without that, it’s just a piece of fabric.