Wrap It Up In a Rainbow (Patreon)

For my 40th birthday, I flew across the country to spend it with some dear friends. At this moment I am on the return trip home, killing time until my connecting flight back home.

I had intended to write about Pride but…

I had a really good Pride. It’s the first one I’ve gone to in about 20 years. I associate Queer Spaces with identity gatekeeping and bullying so I stopped going to them after committing the cardinal sin of falling in love with a man. Hurt people hurt people, you know? And queers can be some hella hurt people. Haha I’m nervous sharing my experiences here, since it’s already a well established eye-rolling stereotype to be a White Bisexual Woman With a Male Partner Who Whines About Feeling Excluded From Queer Spaces. But also this is my lived experience? I try to just accept that I am cringe. It’s part of my charm.

So anyway, I went to Pride.

I wasn’t even supposed to be in town that day! There was this whole debacle with my flight being cancelled (WITH NO NOTIFICATION*) that completely threw off the days I was supposed to be in one friend’s city and then the other.

*I knew Spirit Airlines had a terrible reputation but I thought that just meant an uncomfortable ride, which is worth it to me for cheap tickets. I didn’t imagine that their poor service would include cancelling a wholeass flight with zero notification. No email, no text. I only found out when I went to check in online the day before and the site was like “This flight doesn’t exist”. My return flight was intact! But the flight out just… wasn’t there any more. I actually started to doubt if I had actually booked it in the first place until I got through to an operator on the phone and she confirmed it had been cancelled (When?? When did it even happen? How long had my flight ceased to exist since I bought the tickets several months ago????) Girl, never again.

So there I was marching in the Pride parade as part of my friend’s gym group.

It was real cute.

Each year someone volunteers their car to be pulled on this… human leash-thing? Like, it’s a vest with a thick ass leash on the back. The car is in neutral and the parade route is almost entirely a very subtle descent, so my friend tells me that the physical feat of towing the car by human is actually less impressive than it looks— BUT IT SURE DOES LOOK IMPRESSIVE. There’s one part where the route does go uphill, which is when a couple more people push it from behind.

The next impressive feat from the gym-paraders was two people each pushing along these kind of weight sleds, with those big round disk weights stacked on them plus little kids who would take turns getting a ride.

Meanwhile, the rest of us marched alongside, waving and tossing out candy until the leader would blow her whistle and announce “FIVE BURPEES!” or “TEN SQUATS!” and we’d all drop into the activity, more or less in unison.

It’s been three days and my thighs still feel that parade’s worth of squats.

Between exercise reps, I waved and cheered and smiled till my face hurt and I held back tears.

The tears would catch me by surprise.

I’d look out into the crowd as we walked by and a stranger would make eye contact with me. They’d see me individually, not just part of a mass of humans flowing by. We would see each other, direct eye contact, this other person and me looking straight at each other, and we’d smile and wave with chaotic parade color and music swirling around us. Each connection couldn’t have lasted more than a second- in fact, in the beginning, looking into a stranger’s eyes was too much of a shock for me and I’d flick my sight away instantly. As we marched (and squatted and burpeed and push-upped) further down the route, I pushed myself to make my eye contact last just a tiny bit longer.

It’s just really intimate to me.

Somebody looking me straight in the eyes makes me feel exposed, vulnerable, naked. I’m being seen. They’re taking me in and holding me, my whole form, in their eyes and their memory. What if they don’t like what they see? What if they don’t like me?

They smiled. They looked me in the eye and they smiled at me. We smiled at each other. We cheered and we waved at each other and for each other, connecting across the distance between us from the middle of the street and the sidewalk, and my eyes would sting with tears.

Oh, I thought. This is that thing.

This is that thing I’ve heard about and I didn’t think it applied to me because I’m The Wrong Kind of Queer who shouldn’t be “taking up space” from the truly abused and oppressed people who actually need it. That “thing” being joyful acceptance and celebration because we’re all part of the same community that has enough love for everyone. Every one.

That’s an over simplification. You put all these people on a committee to organize something or even just share a hobby and god only knows how the personalities would conflict and resentments would build and the gatekeeping and bullying would commence, because that’s just how humans work.

But.

In that moment?

On the day of my 40th birthday, I was marching in a city where I wasn’t even supposed to be yet, blinking back tears between waving at beautiful strangers and doing reps of squats in the street with my friend.

I’ve boarded my flight and it’s about to take off. I’ll leave off here.

Happy Pride.