Symbols of PRIDE
The teacher in me was a little sad that he didn’t remember that we spent a few weeks in class talking about how the meaning of signs is always shifting, but that doesn’t ever mean that the old meanings go away. Instead, ALL the meanings haunt the latest meaning and every sign ends up referring to multiple ideas and feelings which probably feel contradictory. But these contradictions can also be understood as portals to understanding connections and shared affinities.
That’s how teacher-me felt.
But other parts of me felt really connected to the things he was expressing. I also know how it feels to have a beloved symbol changed in a way that feels wrong to me.
As a young boy I was taught that the American flag must be respected in a number of clear and prescriptive ways. Some of these rules included:
The flag should never touch the ground.
The flag should be respectfully retired once it grows too old.
The presentation of the flag invites an audience to stand respectfully.
The flag should never be worn as a garment.
The flag should not be modified in any way.
So when Colin Kaepernick took a knee, I was shocked. When a Mennonite friend told me that he,
on religious conviction, did not pledge allegiance to the flag, I was shocked. When the flag started
to show up modified to signify that “Blue Lives Matter” in response to the Black Lives Matter movement,
I was shocked.
It’s really hard to see symbols as portals for understanding, especially when the new meanings
champion ideas that you disagree with or feel strong negative emotions toward.
My former student’s post received hundreds of responses and the majority of those responses were supportive and expressed a similar antipathy to the use of the rainbow to signify pride. These symbols do not just have private meanings – they also tether us to people who we care about. People who we connect to. People who affirm us.
And they also divide us.
This year when the University I teach at introduced a series of Spiritual Formation sessions focused on the intersection of faith and the LGBTQ community, another of my students expressed exhaustion, depression, sadness, and fear to me. Partly in response to one of these sessions, her professor in another class had encouraged the students to “Take Back The Rainbow!” – presuming that all of the students agreed with her. While my student is out to most of her friends and the people who she trusts, she is not out in that class or to that professor. To be “out” felt threatening to her. And the judgment implied by “taking back the rainbow” triggered many moments of homophobia she has experienced in the last few years.
The idea of “taking back the rainbow” suggests that it is possible to eliminate the new meanings in order to reclaim the old meanings. It suggests a kind of rallying around exclusion in favor of tradition. But these tactics of re-appropriation, reclamation, and accusations of misappropriation are leveraged by every “side,” once a shift in meaning is widely understood.
That’s why the picture I’m including in this essay isn’t a flag. But as a private symbol of “pride” for me – I’d like to share why and how I came to thing about gay pride in a different way.
But first, a story.
When I was in seventh grade, I had a best friend.
Since I had recently moved to a new town and a new school it felt great to have someone to hang out with at the lunch table at school and at church youth group. He was funny - he had a quiet, wicked, ironic sense of humor. He was talented - a musician. He was smart and emotionally accessible. We had great conversations. He joined the cast of a play with me and I tried to play handbells which was one of the many instruments he was good at. I hung out at his house and he introduced me to “They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haa!” which I found to be the funniest and best thing that I had ever heard before. When our youth group choir went on a multi-state tour, we hung out together non-stop. The only picture I have of him and I together is in front of a roller coaster which I remember him riding with great agony and horror just to ride along with his friend. I was (and am) a huge fan of roller coasters.
In eighth grade, we drifted apart. I remember that he asked me why that was happening. At first I denied it. Later I affirmed that I still wanted to be friends but I just wanted to keep developing friendships too.
It wasn’t until many years later that I could acknowledge a more truthful recounting of why we drifted apart.
He wasn’t good at sports like basketball. (Neither was I.)
Playing handbells wasn’t really something that boys or men should do. (Neither was theater.)
He was really kind and gentle and empathic and expressive – which is NOT very masculine.
(I too was kind and gentle and empathic and expressive.)
I am NOT PROUD of any of this, but I am trying to tell the truth in this story.
He acted a little bit gay. (And I wondered, did people think that I acted a little bit gay?)
The truth is that as soon as I knew what the word gay meant - I know it described me.
And I especially knew that in middle school, being called “gay” was a way of demeaning people. It was a way of suggesting you were not a viable man. It functioned like the scarlet letter, turning you into a pariah, especially in your own mind.
I moved away from that town at the end of my eighth grade year having never apologized to him, my best friend, for avoiding him, for letting go of our friendship because I was afraid that I would seem gay.
I kept doing this to more friends and people that I met throughout high school and college. I was naturally drawn to these friends. And once I realized that they might seem gay? I would put plenty of distance between myself and them. I was never cruel and this tactic was always unconscious.
I did it because it was part of a larger effort that I was trying to accomplish. I was trying to not look gay. I was trying to lie about what was true about me. I was trying to lie about it because I wanted to please people. Because I wanted to be well-liked. Because I wanted my parents and teachers and family to be proud of me. Because I wanted to be respected. Because I wanted to be a good Christian. Because I wanted it to not be true, and thought that maybe by acting-as-if-it-were-not-true, I could make it not true.
I am not proud of any of those choices.
Many many years later, through mutual friends on facebook - I ended up finding out that my friend had moved across the country, was still a very talented musician. Also, that he taught college students. I loved looking at his facebook profile and seeing his life from afar, but I couldn’t bring myself to request his “friendship” because I knew what a bad friend I had been.
When I had an academic conference near where he lived I reached out to him through facebook and said that I’d love to meet and catch up.
I was so happy when he said yes.
We had dinner at THE RUSTIC. The barbecue was delicious. There was good live music and we sat at a picnic table under the strings of light bulbs that you can see in the picture. We caught up on some of the basics about our lives and then I told him that I had finally come out as gay and I told him a little bit of the struggle and a little bit about the happiness that it included for me.
And I told him that being honest in this way had helped me see how hiding and lying had hurt many people. I told him how sorry I was that I had hurt him. I told him how sorry I was that our friendship had ended. I was crying which felt very inappropriate for the celebratory-picnic-table-under-strings-of-lights vibe of The Rustic.
He told me about his coming out journey and the rejections that he had experienced from many in his family back home and the happiness he had found in his new life here. He also cried and said - we were just kids - and that he understood what it meant to do things to please other people.
It felt like a really happy night that also included crying in public while eating barbecue at a picnic table.
We talked once on the phone after that and always had long chats over text at each of our birthdays.
I re-read all of these chats this week, because he died last week. I got a link to his obituary from another middle school friend and I’m writing this on the day of his funeral. (Posting it later.)
To me this picture signifies pride because of a restored friendship. Pride because I had the courage to tell the truth about me even though it cost me a lot. Pride because my friend, also, found that courage. Pride that both of us, far away from each other, survived all the internalized hate and loathing that we had accepted from others and directed toward ourselves for so long. (So many young Christian gay people do not survive this profoundly lonely internalized loathing.) Pride in the ability to form friendships with other gay people – who I was taught to fear, avoid and disdain. Pride to have renewed that specific friendship with that specific friend. Proud of the life that he lived even though it cost him a lot. It was a life full of music, investment in others, laughter and growth.
I don’t want or expect anyone to adopt my picture of THE RUSTIC, my memories of live music, barbecue, picnic tables and slightly ridiculous tears to become symbols of pride. But I know that one of the worst things is when we can’t understand people that aren’t like us. People that believe things that we dislike or oppose.
Because of how long I lived “in the closet” and because of where I grew up – I know that there are many of my friends and family, who, like my student, find the celebration of PRIDE MONTH to be distasteful, ugly, warped and wrong.
Many of you feel those things.
I partly know that because I too felt those feelings about gay pride. Even when I knew that I was gay. Even after I came out to my family and close friends. Those deeply held feelings cling to us, long after we have stopped tending to them and affirming them consciously.
And so I tell this story to thank and honor my friend and to invite people to understand one of the things that PRIDE means to ME this month, in hopes that it is easier to feel empathy and feel the cost of what PRIDE means to us.
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