This post was submitted by Meaghan, who is responding to our request for your thoughts on Pride.

While the specific date eludes me, I do remember it was late at night. My chubby, sweet 15 year-old little brother was quaking with tears on the floor of my bedroom, clamoring internally for a way to say what he so desperately needed to say. I think I sat in my desk chair, patiently waiting, while he drummed up the nerve to get it out. And when he finally did say those three words, “Meaghan, I’m gay.”, I was quite certain I died and was born all over again. It was too much to hear and too much to feel at 19 years-old. So I kept it in, and scribbled furious things in my journal when I felt them, and didn’t discuss it with him for many years.

Something happened, though, a few years later. I was living in Switzerland and my brother was teetering on the tight rope of adolescence. He was out to my mother but not out to my father and I was terrified for him. I couldn’t do anything but tell him to wait. Wait until I got home, wait so I could protect him, wait so I could defend him. Whether I was angry or supportive, I had never wanted to do anything but save him from the Big Bad World. He didn’t wait for me, however, and after a huge fight with my parents my mother took it upon herself to out my brother to my father. “You don’t understand our son! You don’t understand him because he’s GAY.”

A few months later, I started my first real relationship…and my first real relationship with a woman. I was 21. She was older, tender, tolerant and fond of hiding. I felt safe in this relationship, because to most people it looked like nothing but friendship. I didn’t have to tell my parents, I didn’t even have to tell my brother, because no one but our incredibly small circle of friends knew. I didn’t need to come out, I didn’t need to be proud, because there was safety in my anonymity. As far as the world was concerned, I was straight. My dirty deeds late at night didn’t encompass who I was, and I was completely satisfied with checking off “single” on government forms and applications for the rest of my life.

Two years later, I realized I couldn’t hide anymore. My first relationship was over, and I was head over heels in love with someone who wasn’t invisible. She wasn’t easy to ignore. It wasn’t just the tattoos and piercings that gave her away, it was the blatant “gayness” revealed by her clothing and jewelry (and tattoos) that made it impossible for me to be invisible anymore. It was her incredible Butchness. A few months after we starting dating, on the cul-de-sac in front of her house, I screamed at my mother in her mini van (she had been looking for me everywhere, because I had been hiding from my parents), holding the cell phone with my father on the other end, “The reason why I’m like this is BECAUSE I’M GAY.”

Like Alice falling through the rabbit hole, I was dizzy and high…with pride. So much pride, in fact, that I couldn’t find it within myself to care about my parents or my family. I essentially excommunicated myself from my family at that point. Not because they didn’t love me, but because I had lied to them. For years and years, I had given them the impression that I was straight. I tried so hard to be straight, in fact, that I didn’t realize I was gay. I, specifically, couldn’t possibly be gay. And I, specifically, couldn’t possibly be one of a two gay kid household. But I was, and even amidst the distress and pain of coming out, I managed to go to Pride. It was just what I needed.

That was five years ago. Since then, I’ve left the big bad Butch, dated quite a few other folks who run the gamut from closeted to queer-as-fuck. I am now settled in a relationship that will, without a doubt, stand the test of time. And because I’m so blissfully in love and so incredibly gay, I need to be proud.

I need Pride.

I have chased candy and beads in the thick of the parade crowd, I sat shotgun on the DC Eagle float two years ago, and last year I rode shotgun in the Mr. and Ms. Capitol Pride Leather convertible, right behind the gyrating men in leather thongs and chaps. I drove a convertible full of bodacious femmes in the Dyke March two years ago, too. Pride is, no matter how you participate, an opportunity to scream, rejoice and revel in everything that makes you You. Pride is a celebration of everything we have to hide in order to make the world comfortable. Pride is an opportunity for our inner freak, who is regularly regarded as a second-class citizen, to march in the streets without hesitation. Pride is an opportunity to show the world, en masse, that there are enough of us to count and enough of us to deserve the rights withheld from us unconstitutionally.

I saddens me to hear that so many of my LGBTQ family is “over Pride” or not interested in participating. It is an integral part of our heritage and of our legacy. If you don’t feel like participating in Pride because feather boas aren’t your thing, do it anyway. Every queer person who puts it all out there opens the door for kids like my brother (and me) who are terrified that they are alone.

Happy Pride, people.

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