July 8, 2021
Happy Pride!
by Michael Meinschad
Hey, I'm Michael, 30 years old and proud to be gay and part of the LGBTQIA+ community! In this guest post I want to tell you more about heteronormativity (I'll explain what that is later), give you some facts about the community and Pride and tell you about my personal experiences with topics like coming out, homophobia and my path to my personal Pride.
But why Pride? As a straight man, you aren't proud to be straight, are you? As a gay man, you are often confronted with the homophobic comment "I have nothing against gays, but do you always have to show it off like that?" And my answer to that is "Yes, we have to!" I want to be able to live out and express my sexual orientation and identity, just like heterosexual cis people (people who identify with their biological gender) are allowed to do from a young age.
Heteronormativity – subconscious programming
From childhood, we learn which roles of men and women are socially accepted and desired, how we should be, what is expected of us and what is not. An example: When I think back to my childhood and think about the games we played, the first thing that comes to mind is "father, mother, child". There was no question that a boy would naturally play the father and a girl the mother. In this way, we imitated the behavior and dynamics that we had experienced with our own parents. Another example: We all know parental wisdom and gender clichés such as "an Indian knows no pain" (when a boy cries) - girls are well-behaved, modest and good at school, boys wear light blue - girls wear pink, boys play with toy cars - girls with dolls, boys want to be astronauts or firemen - girls, princesses or supermodels.
This list could go on forever, but it does illustrate quite well how much role models and expectations are imposed on us from an early age, which become more and more entrenched in our thoughts and actions the older we get. These values and gender roles are also called heteronormativity. Nowhere, really at no point in my childhood, were there counterexamples that would have shown me that other realities of life are possible or even lovable and deserve tolerance and respect. And this lack of alternatives as to how everyone can shape their lives influences us for the rest of our lives; we are ashamed of wanting something different, feeling something different, being something different - even though we are all equal and equally worthy.
Coming out & the question “Who am I?”
Growing up with this restricted and narrow-minded reality makes it difficult to come out or even to realise that you are different. This important realisation that many, if not all, of these learned values do not apply to you and are not applicable becomes overwhelming and frightening in this context. If I do not have a traditional family with "father, mother, child" at some point, if I am creative and emotional as a boy, if I am loud and rebellious as a girl or even analytical or technically gifted, if I am attracted to boys as a boy or girls as a girl, if I have no interest in sex at all, am in the wrong body, if I simply do not fit into society's mold, then who am I? Am I still lovable? Am I still valuable? What will my future look like? What can I base my life on?
All of these questions are being thrown at young people who have just come to the realization that they are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Now (thankfully) there is more and more representation of LGBTQIA+ people in the media and pop culture. Yet young people who are about to come out are still faced with the same questions.
Pride does not come by itself
As part of our community, you inevitably find yourself at some point in your life faced with the broken pieces of your own identity and reality and have to create your own mosaic out of it. Who or what is family for me, what does being a man/woman/diverse mean to me, and who am I really? And if I know that, am I fine the way I am?
For most of us, finding our identity is a long process with many ups and downs. And when we have reached the point where we can say "I am good as I am. I am valuable, I am lovable", when we have internalized that our own identity and reality is just as valuable and worth protecting and has just as much right to exist, deserves tolerance and respect, as that of heterosexual society, then we have every reason to be proud and to let it show.
“The first pride was a riot”
In German-speaking countries, the term CSD is more commonly used. CSD is the abbreviation for “Christopher Street Day” and commemorates the first uprisings of the LGBT movement. On June 28, 1969, during a police raid on the Stonewall Inn (a popular gay bar on Christopher Street in New York), homosexuals and transgender people first resisted the police violence against homosexual and transgender people that was common at the time and the arbitrary arrests that went with it. This initial resistance and the riots that followed, which were largely triggered and led by the drag queens and trans women Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, developed into a movement that could no longer be stopped. Since then, homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender people have stood up for their rights year after year and “Christopher Street Day” still commemorates this first violent resistance and these heroes of our community.
LGBTQIA-What?
While these uprisings became an annual tradition and homosexual and transgender people took to the streets year after year for their rights and achieved initial successes, the spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities that found protection in the community expanded. More and more terms for groups of people who were (and still are) even more underrepresented and undesirable than homosexuals were added to the previous letters "LGBT".
Today, people mostly talk about LGBTQIA+. The “L” stands for “Lesbian”, the “G” represents gays. The “B” stands for bisexuals, i.e. men or women who are attracted to both men and women. The “T” refers to trans people, i.e. people who do not feel that they belong to their innate biological sex, but to the other (binary) sex.
The “Q” is a bit more complicated: “Q” stands for queer. The term was initially a swear word for homosexuals, similar to the German “Schwul”, and meant something like “strange” or “different”. But similar to 'Schwul', the community adopted this word as a positive self-designation and thus changed the connotation of the expression. Today, queer has two main meanings: Firstly, it is simply an umbrella term for all sexual orientations and gender identities that the community encompasses. So if I want to say “I am part of the LGBTQIA+ community, I am different and I am proud of it” I can say “I am queer”. Secondly, in recent times the word 'queer' has increasingly come to mean people who cannot identify with the socially established binary genders and who perceive gender as a fluid spectrum and therefore also describe themselves as diverse, non-binary or genderfluid.
The "I" stands for intersex people, i.e. people who are born with biological characteristics of both sexes. And "A" stands for asexual people, i.e. people who have no desire or interest in sexual acts. The plus sign represents all other sexual orientations and gender identities that are on the LBTQIA+ spectrum but cannot and do not want to be so clearly assigned, and for the fact that our community continues to grow, as it has in the past, and that with more education, new underrepresented groups are also being heard.
Why is Pride still important today?
We have already achieved a lot in the past with the legalization of homosexuality and the introduction of gay marriage. But even today there are many issues for which we must continue to demonstrate: to this day, same-sex sexuality is still punishable in 69 countries around the world - in some countries it even carries the death penalty. And our hard-fought rights are not as old as one might think: homosexuality was only fully legalized in Germany in 1994. Until then, homosexuality was still listed as an offense in the notorious Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code, which earned entire generations of gay men the discriminatory nickname "175er". Particularly shocking: According to the WHO, homosexuality was considered an illness until 1993.
Since then, the community has been able to achieve a lot. 28 countries worldwide have passed laws allowing same-sex marriage - in Germany since 2017. A total of twelve states have an explicit ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in their constitutions, including Bolivia, Mexico and Austria.
But there is still a lot to be achieved: In Germany, sexual orientation and gender identity are still not protected from discrimination by the constitution. Men who have sex with men are still not allowed to donate blood, and bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual and non-binary people still face many discriminatory prejudices and little has been achieved for their rights so far.
My personal Pride Story
For exactly these reasons, it is very important to me personally to educate people about LGBTQIA+ and Pride and to take part in Pride myself. I myself had to struggle with a lot of discrimination and bullying in my childhood and youth. Other children and young people would call me homophobic terms before I even realized that I was attracted to my own gender. So I have never been the kind of gay person who can hide well and blend in with the crowd. As a creative and artistically inclined person, I have always been on display and mercilessly exposed to homophobic bullies. It was a long road for me to accept myself for who I am. And an even longer road to love and accept myself. My path to finding and living out my own Pride is representative of the paths of so many people in the LGBTQIA+ community. And no matter whether you are one of them, a supporter or simply interested in the topic: I would like to leave you and all other readers with a message at the end: You are valuable, you are lovable and good just the way you are, so: be proud!
H a p p y P r i d e!
Your Michael