For folks who aren’t familiar with the comings, goings, and happenings of events on campus, the second last week of January (the 20-24) is campus Pride Week.
This is a week full of LGBTQ+ programming, featuring everything from a keynote speech about disability justice from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, to the traditional Drag Show at Oliver’s Pub, all of which is put on by the fantastic people over at the Gender and Sexuality Resource Centre (GSRC).
Aside from being a week filled with fun, learning, and a touch of debauchery, Pride Week always starts an interesting conversation about the concept of pride. What is pride exactly? Why do we need it? Why should people care?
When most people think of pride, they think of parades, parties and sexy, shirtless gay boys with rainbow flags draped around their necks. They see it as a celebration, as if there was a great victory and all the problems in the world for LGBTQ+ people were solved in some collective “eureka” moment for all of humankind.
While pride has a celebratory side, and while it would be foolish to ignore the progress made by queer and trans*—a term operating under the understanding not all people identify within a gender binary—folks over the past few decades, pride is so much more than a party. Pride is a form of resistance. You see, there’s a really common narrative that the greatest goal of LGBTQ+ people is (or should be) to be considered “normal.” In other words, “just like everyone else.”
I think we need to start asking ourselves what we mean by normal.
If you think about it long enough, an uncomfortable answer appears. When someone says a queer person is “normal” or “just like everyone else,” what they really mean is “like straight, cis people.” Cis describes someone whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth. They’re being complimented in how much they appear to be what they’re not.
What the main goal of pride needs to be is to resist that narrative. Pride is a spectacular proclamation of who we are. It’s the queer and trans* communities taking pride in who they are by embracing and celebrating what makes us different while simultaneously demanding that the community at large accept these differences, rather than simply taking pleasure from blending in.
Pride is also a work in progress. It is by no means perfect, and we can look at the things that are missing when we wonder what other progress needs to be made. We ask ourselves why we only see skinny white cis men in parades on the news? Is it because people of different bodies, genders, and colours have been erased from the idea of pride that’s been constructed for public consumption?
If that’s not the case, then why are names like Sylvia Rivera (who started the famed Stonewall Riots of the 1960s), Marsha Johnson, and other trans* women of colour who were pioneers in resisting the imposition of this straight/cis ideal, so easily and often forgotten when we talk about the history of pride? How many of you had even heard their names before I mentioned them here? By contrast, how many of you have heard of Dan Savage?
So why does everyone need to care about Pride Week? Here at Carleton University, we regularly pride ourselves in having a diverse, multicultural campus, but for that to really be true we need to start celebrating all of our differences.
We can start to do that by rejecting the notion how queer and trans* people should strive to blend in with the straight/cis majority rather than embracing what makes us unique, and you can do that by supporting Pride Week.
Come to an event. Wear one of those awesome rainbow raven pins. Share it on Facebook, or even just tell your friends about it. We all need to work together in an effort to create a campus where everyone feels like they belong, differences and all.
