Why do we need Pride?

“You were screaming at the evangelicals. They were screaming right back from what I remember.” —Phoebe Bridgers 

Today was my first day back to working on campus after 15 months at home due to the coronavirus pandemic. It was a beautiful and full day: sunny but mild weather, a haircut, good coffee, fairly significant progress on research (particularly unusual!), and the promise of dinner with some dear friends after work was over. On my way into Berkeley earlier that day, I had even texted a friend from the East Coast about how there was a particular and nearly inexplicable spring in my step with the advent of Pride Month that had been happening. Something about the city—and me—just felt alive. 

As I had walked onto campus I noticed a huddle of people carrying signs that said vague but threatening messages about Jesus and salvation and hell. I walked past them on my way to the office and quickly put them out of my mind. It was not so easy for me to ignore them on my walk home later that day, when they were blocking the entire front entrance to Cal’s campus and arguing with strangers over a loudspeaker system.

(Oh, if I could put into words the complicated mixture of dejection and shame and frustration that comes from being triggered by the presence of people who purportedly belong to the same faith tradition as you.)

Somehow, without needing to have it explained to me, I knew that these Christian people were here because it was Pride month; somehow I knew that they were there to protest my own existence. I knew this when they were just an inaudible and inconspicuous huddle on the side of the plaza hours earlier. I knew it before I heard the words they were saying over the microphone. 

“What are you doing here?” I asked the first person I came upon as I was leaving campus, someone whose name I said only twice and can no longer bring to my mind. I cannot—and even if I could, would not—rehash the details of this exchange. Condemnations about everything and everyone ranging from “homosexuals” to “Catholics” to “the world” to “fake Christians” to “education” to “theology” cause a dichotomous reaction of anger and apathy in me. These are the signposts that someone is not willing or able to engage in an actual conversation about these things, and they should be the signposts to quietly walk away. Loudspeakers are signs of this too, and I need to start letting those deter me. 

“What are you doing here?” I ask myself as I find myself debating my own legitimacy, personhood, and religion with a stranger as I’m on my way to dinner with friends. 

All the while my mind is split between the conversation—if you can call it that—I’m having with the person across from me and the conversation—if you can call it that—happening between the man organizing the event (“Pastor David”) and another person who happened to stop to see what was up. “You’re one of the worst cases of brainwashing I’ve seen,” I hear Pastor David drone over the microphone. "There’s no need to talk about brainwashing,” his interlocutor responds, with much more grace in his voice than I can seem to muster in the moment. 

“Have you read any progressive Christian takes on what the Bible has to say about gay marriage?” I ask my own conversation partner, who looks at me blankly, before saying something about how she doesn’t need to read anything else or pay attention to anyone else because God has told her in her heart that homosexuality is a sin. She doesn’t seem to realize the arrogance of assuming you have a direct line to God in a way that other people do not, the arrogance of saying “I just believe what the Bible says” as if no one who disagreed with her could possibly have also read what the Bible says. 

The refrain, to me and to her, reverberates in my head: “What are you doing here?” 

I leave my own conversation to encourage the student talking to Pastor David before heading on my way. “Are you a Christian?” I try to ask him quietly, as Pastor David and someone with him each try to shove a microphone in my face to capture what I’m saying, as others in their crowd have (not inexpensive) cameras that must have been capturing the rage rising in my face and my body. 

“I’m not anymore, but I used to be,” he responds, and I wonder how many not-anymore-but-used-to-be’s have Pastor Davids to thank for the trajectories of their religious or spiritual lives. 

“Well, I’m a gay Christian, and there are plenty of us. If you’re interested in religion, I promise we’re not all like this. I appreciate you being here, but it probably is not worth your time,” I tell this student and remind myself while I continue to unsuccessfully avoid the microphones being pushed in my direction. 

“You’re not a Christian, just look at you!” I hear someone in the crowd say while they feign a limp wrist in my direction. 

“You’re interrupting us, that’s very Christian,” Pastor David intones. 

“Let me guess, you think ‘love is love’?” comes another voice from the crowd. 

After thirty second of more of the same, I decide to leave, this time for real, the last thing I hear from the crowd is Pastor David’s voice continuing to echo how “rudely” I interrupted their “conversation” as he laughs about people who say they are “gay Christians.”

This, of course, is all “love” to them, and they likely construe me as the aggressor. At 11:56 p.m., I do not have the energy to explain how and why this is the hardest part of it all, but it is. 

My mind is as loud as my mouth is silent (like a sheep before shearers?), things I wish I had said before walking away.

“‘Interrupting?’ That sounds like Jesus violently turning over tables on the Sabbath to cleanse the temple of the religious leaders who were exploiting religious and ethnic foreigners who were coming to worship.” 

“Jesus’ harshest criticisms were reserved for the religious elite who assumed they knew who was in and who was out, and these are the people who ultimately begged for his crucifixion. Maybe you should reconsider which side of this you’re actually on.” 

I wait for the bus while reaching out to friends—oh to have friends—and make my way to dinner. At the table are friends who are Jewish, friends who are Hindu, and friends whose religious convictions I know nothing of, if they exist at all. They feed me. They make me laugh. They receive the fullness of who I am as I try and hope to receive the fullness of who they are. Tonight, these people were my Church without intent or pretense that they would be so. The meal we shared was my Eucharist. They were for me what the people in my own religious tradition so often refuse to be. I am so thankful for them, and I can hardly think of somewhere else I would have been in the middle of this mess. 

All of this is exhausting and dizzying because I still locate myself squarely within the boundaries of Christianity. I lose no sleep over God’s indiscriminate love for me and all LGBTQ+ people. And still, to this point in my life, nothing makes these encounters easier. Nothing makes me contemplate disidentifying with Christianity than encounters with Christians like the ones I have had today. Even recognizing that this is just one (toxic) version of Christianity among many, it sometimes feels far too tempting to toss out the baby with the bathwater. Twin-sister duo Tegan and Sara put it best: 

“Sometimes it feels like the side that I’m on

plays the toughest hand,

holds the longest stand

Sometimes it feels like I’m all that they’ve got

It’s so hard to know I’m not what they want

…

I’m not their hero, 

but that doesn’t mean we’re not one and the same

I do my best to walk the finest line

’til I’ve had all that I can take.” 

*****

Earlier in the day I had stumbled across a piece from a prominent evangelical publication that was bemoaning the fact that Pride had become a monthlong holiday “competing” with Christmas, questioning why something like Pride would even be necessary. (Why these holidays are construed to be in “competition” at all is a matter for another time.) Why do we need Pride? For me, after all of this, the answer (or at least part of it) is as clear as it has ever been: Christians.

Christians are the primary reason that we still need Pride, at least in the American context. As long as there are people who center their religious convictions on denigrating indelible parts of others, we will need Pride. As long as people believe that God does not love gay and trans people as gay and trans people—that God has no agenda or desire to change us—we will need Pride. If Christmas is in competition with Pride, ludicrous as this phrasing may be, I believe that God is squarely on the side of Pride, that God is more concerned with the dignity of the gay and trans people walking on the planet today than with commemoration of the Incarnation of Christ thousands of years ago. Indeed, this sentence highlights the absurdity of the comparison: the commemoration of the Incarnation of Christ and the dignity of LGBTQ+ people today are part-and-parcel, one-in-the-same. The failure to recognize this is the chief theological misstep of homophobic and transphobic Christians, and I believe it places them more squarely outside of the bounds of Christian thought and practice than they think my gay-affirming theology and “lifestyle” puts me. 

Instead of wringing their hands over a fake culture war that they feel like they are losing, I wish more Christians had eyes to see the ways that the story of Jesus continue to be played out in the world. I wish they could understand how their jeering and mocking and condemnation locates them as the antagonists in the story of Christ’s Passion. I wish that they could believe the Bible like they say they do and allow it to transform the ways they oppress and marginalize all the peoples of the world who are not like them. I wish that they could be born again. 

All of this theologizing is a coping mechanism for me, a way that I can get distance from the things I don’t like through abstraction. It allows me to pretend to be equanimous in a way that I am not, and in a way that I shouldn’t be. The reality is that all of this stirs up in me an anger that I don’t know what to do with. I am trying to believe that this fire is a sign that there is something right, not that there is something wrong. I am trying to believe that this anger is Holy and to let it rage.

I never know how to end these damn things.

To the gaybies and theybies: y’all are my favorite. You make life on this planet so much richer and much more fun. I am Proud to count myself among you. Don’t let the Christians get you down this month. We really just suck sometimes. When other people won’t celebrate you, celebrate yourselves. When other people won’t love you, love yourselves. I’m grateful for a month where we remember that these are some of the things we do best. I’m grateful for all of you. Let the Benediction that you are Good and you are Enough carry you through the month. Be full of Pride, and be full of Joy.

Anyway, it’s late, and I’m going to practice loving myself by washing my face and going to bed. A new eye cream was waiting for me when I got home, and I’m excited to try it out. If I’m going to burn in hell for all of this, you know I won’t have bags under my eyes when I get there.

Happy Pride, my loves.