Originally ran June 7, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.
If you ever start feeling jaded about Pride parades or what the gay movement has accomplished, wait for the sea of marchers from P-FLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. What makes their role and their message so powerful? Maybe it's love.
I THOUGHT I WAS TOO - JADED, I guess. Too jaded to be moved by something as commercial as the Millennium March.
And for a while I wasn't. I watched our people go by, delegation after delegation smiling and waving flags and carrying signs. I snapped pictures. I applauded. But I wasn't moved.
And then they came. PFLAG.
In a sea of red shirts, men and women - parents, most of them - tossed kisses to the crowd and made the American Sign Language hand sign for "I love you." And they said the words, too; over and over, catching the eyes of people in the crowd, catching my eye, they said, "We love you. I'm a mother, I love you. I'm a father, I love you."
I began to cry.
Love is powerful, we all know that. Love is transformative. We say these things enough that they become cliches. But I don't know if I understood exactly how powerful are the words "I love you" until that moment. These were strangers using "I love you" to heal a million hurts and help thousands of hearts.
By saying "I love you," they weren't just saying, "You are our children; we love you because we have to."
They were saying, "We recognize that you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender. We recognize your sexual and gender orientation to be an integral part of who you are. And we love that whole person. And we're proud of you for being yourself and being out."
Imagine that. Imagine your parents saying "I love you" to you in that context. Maybe they do that already. Maybe you're one of the lucky ones. Maybe you have parents who can look through their dreams of you and their hopes for you and see the actual you standing before them But maybe, because of your sexual orientation, they won't see you at all.
I thought that I was resigned to the way my parents ignore my sexual orientation. I thought it didn't matter anymore, that I was past caring. But hearing these parents say what my own would not - and hearing them say it directly to me, as if they knew my heart - left me shaken. Left me moved.
These are the kind of moments that draw us together into a family. This is the magic of Pride.
We throw around familial words all the time. We say, "She's a sister," or "He's family." And we mean it, kind of. At least we mean that we recognize in someone else that they share our sexual orientation and so most likely share some of our experiences. We mean that we feel comfortable with other GLBT folk, that we can relax around them in ways we might not be able to relax in straight company.
We use family-type words as synonyms for "community." We mean "they're like us." But in the GLBT context we don't usually use them to mean that we would act as if strangers were actually family. We usually don't hug strangers, or ask intimate questions about their lives, or worry about them, or express our care for them.
But something about Pride, and Pride-like events such as the Millennium March, lets us open up to each other in new ways. Something about Pride fills us with such joy that we are able to let go of our every day petty grievances and be the full and expansive people we are.
Maybe it's love.
During this one month, our community turns inward. We care less about pushing our way out into the world and more about nurturing our own fragile selves. We celebrate the lives that, for too long, were not celebrated by anyone else.
For one month, we let go of the fight, at least a little. We let down the barriers that protect us from regular injustice, from daily name-calling, from small, biting attacks and large, organized threats.
For one month, we unguard our hearts.
And so we become different people. We do hug strangers. We do listen more carefully to people we've just met. We do look out over the crowd, catch someone's arm, and say, "I love you."
I rode on a Pride float once. I did it out of a sense of obligation and support. I wasn't expecting to enjoy the endless, hot ride; I was worried about the threat of supersoakers and catcalls.
But our community gave me a gift. Gave a gift to all of us who rode or marched or strutted down the parade route. People in the crowd, strangers, shouted out to us, "We love you." And from the joy on their faces, the ecstasy in their bodies, we could tell they meant it. They were proud of us for marching. And we were proud of them for being there.
This is the rare, sacred gift we can continue to give each other on Pride. We can love each other in the way we need to be loved: recognizing that our sexual orientations are a vital part of our personhood, understanding that it takes courage, even now, to admit that we're proud to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.
We can tell each other, "I'm a sister, I love you. I'm a brother, I love you."
Or, most moving of all, "I'm a parent. I love you."