Pride Month and LGBTQ Spirituality

I remember my first Pride Weekend 2 years ago very vividly for many reasons. I remember the days leading up to it and my parents asking the question, “Why must you go to this parade where people wear their sexuality on their sleeve? Throwing your gayness onto people isn’t the way to achieve equality.” I had no answer other than “Because for 363 days we live in the minority, are told that we are sinful and deviant, treated as social inferiors. For 2 days, we take over Chicago and are in the majority, we are with others who will not judge us for who and what we are. We are given 2 days to make up for those 363 other days.” However sassy and insightful that response may seem, I never understood the true meaning of Pride until a week ago.
In Christianity, pride is one of the 7 Deadly Sins. It was pride, or the excessive regard of oneself, that lead to the fall of Satan and the cause of humanity’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. Yet, as LGBTQ Christians, we are now celebrating “Pride.” At first this may seem like a contradiction, however, in light of our personal experiences, Pride celebrations can also have a profound spiritual significance to us.
I remember the shame and confusion I felt when I started having crushes on other girls instead of boys; I hated God so much and even thought that God had made a mistake. I tried desperately to change the way God had made me. Indeed, thinking that God had made a mistake and that I could “fix” that mistake is no doubt an excessive regard for myself and blatant distrust in God’s plan for me. I know that my experience is not unique, though. Almost all LGBTQ youth feel immense humiliation and even guilt about their sexuality. We live in such a hetero-normative society that still, decades after the Stonewall riots and the counter culture movements, values gender roles and stigmatizes any variance from heterosexuality. Suicide is still the number one problem that plagues LGBTQ youth and adults. Accepting our sexuality is no doubt also an acceptance of God’s plan in our lives.
But Pride isn’t just about our own journey of acceptance. Pride month was established to commemorate the Stonewall Riots of 1968 when a bunch of drag queens and other gay patrons of the Stonewall Inn said enough is enough and fought back when the police came to again raid and arrest the patrons for the crime of being homosexual. It is kind of like a celebration of the “LGBTQ Saints” whose bravery in the face of laws saying being gay was illegal paved the way for much of the Gay Right Movement. We owe much to their courage; they took a big beating (literally) and were called all sorts of hideous things by religious people seeking to demonize LGBTQ people to the rest of middle America. If as Christians we celebrate the lives of those men and women who have courageously lived according to God’s plan, than we must do the same as Christians who are also queer to celebrate the lives of those men and women who fought, and continue to fight, for full LGBTQ equality.
Pride is celebration of who and what we are, children made in the image and likeness of a Loving Creator. So in response to my parents question, it is absolutely necessary that we wear our queerness on our sleeve during Pride month, but also at every other time. It is our duty as Christians to proclaim the living Gospel of the Lord, and being proud of the way in which God made us is one of the ways in which we do that. It has become my prayer that somehow the Gay Pride celebrations become a sign of hope for all those LGBTQ youth struggling to accept their identity from God that by us fully being the person God made us to be, one more LGBTQ youth will be at next years parade for the first time, accepting him or herself as God’s blessed creation.