Outside

It’s the most wonderful time of the year in the desert!  The soul-crushing heat of a Coachella Valley summer has gone, and in its place are gentle days with temperatures tickling the mid-80s; nighttime and early mornings are cold, not the cold my relatives in Alaska endure this time of year, but cold enough for me to tell Alexa to turn the heater on.  The seasonal tourists are back, along with the snowbirds who abandon the desert in the summer for places like Michigan or Wisconsin, or Canada, only to abandon those places when it starts to snow there – thus the moniker “snowbirds.”

And to welcome everybody back, we throw a big party the first weekend of November, with rainbow flags as far as the eye can see.  There’s a parade down Palm Canyon Drive and a festival with every aspect of LGBTQ+ life represented, where you’ll find lesbians selling handcrafted beeswax candles from a booth next to a group of gay personal injury lawyers offering to handle your case with “sensitivity.”  You can’t walk fifteen feet without bumping into a drag queen, or a man in leather walking his partner with a dog leash attached to a collar around his neck.

I attended my first Pride the summer of my 18th year.  I was so nervous, so excited, and not at all sure what to expect.  I was a teenager; legally an adult but still a child in many ways.  I was out to myself and a small group of close friends, and had never been around such a large crowd of openly LGBTQ people and allies.  As I watched the parade go by and wandered through the festival, “out” became literal for me – these people, of whom I am one, are not hiding:  they are marching in a parade at noon down one of LA’s busiest streets (the famed Santa Monica Boulevard) and they are gathering in an open field to buy overpriced, watered-down beer and browse lesbian arts and crafts.  After so many years of hiding in the shadows as the boy with a secret, telling close friends or a trusted teacher I was a boy who liked other boys, and feeling like the only one, here they er, I mean we all were.  I know “out” is short for “out of the closet,” but since my first Pride, to me it has meant “outside,” which connotes not just leaving the hiding in the shadows – or the closet if you prefer – behind, but boldly living in the light of the noonday sun, outside where everyone can see you, as part of a group, a community.

Pride celebrations embody the self-value of visibility.  You can’t hide who you are when you’re outside.  Anyone and everyone can see you.  And in time, that will feel less like exposure and more like acceptance – self-acceptance.  In the Mishna, Rabbi Hillel says, “If I am not for myself who will be for me?” (from the Pirkei Avot, “Chapters of the Fathers,” 1:14)  You may not be a drag queen, or into walking someone on a dog lead, or even like candles.  At a Pride celebration, you might not even be gay.  But when you come outside with all of us, you are saying “include me” in this inclusivity which builds community, which excludes no one, which says, “I’m too busy being me to worry about you being you.”

Historically, Pride celebrations grew out of what were called the “Reminder Day Pickets” of the mid-1960s that were held on the 4th of July each year, organized by the Eastern Conference of Homophile Organizations (E.C.H.O) which included the New York Chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the Janus Society in Philadelphia, and the Mattachine Society of Washington and New York.  In the wake of the Stonewall Riots on June 28, 1969 (thus June becoming the traditional “Pride Month”), E.R.C.H.O (E.C.H.O. was by then known as the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations) adopted the following resolution that November:

We propose that a demonstration be held annually on the last Saturday in June in New York City to commemorate the 1969 spontaneous demonstrations on Christopher Street and this demonstration be called CHRISTOPHER STREET LIBERATION DAY.

The Stonewall Inn is located on Christopher Street, and was the flashpoint of the protest which launched the modern gay rights movement.  This is why my first Pride, all the way across the country in LA on the west coast in 1984, was actually called “Christopher Street West.” E.R.C.H.O. member Foster Gunnison, Jr. beautifully captured the meaning and importance of New York’s Christopher Street Liberation Day in 1970; his words are as relevant today as they were 54 years ago:

…and each of these 5,000 homosexuals had a new feeling of pride and self-confidence, for that was one of the main purposes of the event – to commemorate, to demonstrate, but also to raise the consciences of participating homosexuals – to develop courage, and feelings of dignity and self-worth.

Filmed on June 28, 1970, a twelve-minute documentary by Lilli Vincenz called Gay and Proud contains black and white footage of the first Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade as well as interviews with the participants.  Click here for Gay and Proud, housed at the Library of Congress, which summarized it like this:

Documentary short film featuring one of the earliest gay pride demonstration marches, the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March, held in New York, New York, on June 28, 1970, to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Covering about fifty blocks and drawing just a few thousand participants, it and marches like it held the same year in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles eventually led to hundreds of Pride parades throughout the world in the following decades.

My purpose today is not to give a comprehensive history of Pride.  My goal is much more simple.

We live in very tense, fractured, divided times.  We have let our differences define us, and used them to demonize and denounce anyone not like us.  What can be done?  I dare say, “come outside, Pride is the antidote.”