What Can You Teach Us About Pride?
As a bisexual Christian man, I know something about exclusion, belonging, faith, and the cost of living honestly. But Pride has also taught me how much I cannot represent. As a white, cisgender man, I cannot speak as a trans woman, as an intersex person, as someone living with HIV, as a sex worker, as a queer elder who survived the AIDS crisis, as a 2SLGBTQIA+ person in prison, or as someone whose queerness is shaped by poverty, migration, racism, or colonialism in ways I have not lived.
Those stories are so important to hear. None of us carries the whole story of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community alone. The community is too large, too diverse, and too rooted in different histories for any one person to hold it all. Even after a month of reflections, I am aware of how much remains beyond the frame of what I have written.
The older I get, the less interested I become in mastering someone else’s experience well enough to explain it. I am more interested in making room for people to speak from their own lives. That requires humility, but it also requires trust. Trust that our communities become stronger when we stop treating difference as a problem to manage and start receiving it as part of the gift.
So today, I want to ask a different question: What can you teach us? What wisdom has emerged from your life, your community, your body, your faith, your grief, your joy, or your resistance that the rest of us need to hear? Pride is not one story. It is a community of communities. We need one another’s voices if we hope to see a fuller picture.
