Pride Reflections

By: Peter Gandolfo, Professional Certified Coach at 3Be Coaching

I’ve been sitting with the question, “How do I want to experience Pride?” It’s been 22 years since my first Pride. I’m reflecting on what Pride meant to me in previous years through three lenses: my own coming out and journey to self-acceptance; coming to terms with my own unconscious biases and blind spots about the experience of other LGBTQ+ people; and personal, national, and global issues affecting the lives of LGBTQ+ people. A participant in a coaching circle for gay men that I co-facilitate with John Volturo describes looking back on who we were at different Prides like reflecting on the rings of a tree. The tree is always evolving and growing, but the experience each year leaves an indelible imprint.

1999:

I am 25 and living in Orange County, California. Less than three months after coming out to my family, I drive the hour from my suburban apartment up to West Hollywood to attend my first Pride parade with my college friend Mike and his MBA classmates from UCLA Anderson. I’m excited and curious to see what Pride is all about. We gather at the Palm Avenue apartment he shares with his friend Sherie before walking down as a group to Santa Monica Boulevard to watch the parade. I stand on the curb taking in the largest group of LGBTQ+ people (and allies) that I’ve ever seen. My experiences in my hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, with its small gay community, never prepared me for this. I’m both intrigued and overwhelmed.

I am at a stage in my coming out process where I am wanting to prove to everyone, including myself, that — aside from being gay — I am not different from them. I want to settle down with someone and build a life. I want to have kids. I value the same things they value. Because of this, I’m uncomfortable with the kaleidoscope of people at Pride expressing themselves in any way other than what I think is “normal.” Due to my heteronormative worldview and intense internalized homophobia, I don’t have the awareness or language to understand why thinking in terms of what’s “normal” is inappropriate. Twenty-two years later, it’s hard to write down these narrow thoughts, to see them on paper.

2001:

I am on a four-month assignment in New York City, living in a corporate apartment in Chelsea that I could never afford on my own and enjoying discovering the city. My college roommate Mark, who also came out just a few years ago, is crashing with me while he resettles in New York after completing his master’s in architecture. For Pride, we walk down to the West Village. Just steps from the site of the Stonewall uprising, we witness a parade on a scale far bigger even than the one in West Hollywood. I am surprised to hear that the parade route crosses such a large footprint of Manhattan, including many neighborhoods beyond the “gayborhoods” of Chelsea and the West Village. It seems natural to me that Los Angeles Pride was confined to West Hollywood, a community known for being gay-friendly. Marching outside a community like that feels provocative. I realize I’ve mentally labeled neighborhoods as “straight” simply because they aren’t explicitly gay. I just want to be myself in any neighborhood. Maybe it is okay for me to be gay beyond my known safety zone.

Hillary Clinton, a newly elected senator, walks in the parade. Until now, it hasn’t occurred to me that a straight person, especially someone as well-known as she, would find it important to appear in the parade as a sign of support. If she isn’t fazed by being associated with the parade, why am I?

2009:

I’m thirty-five, single, living in Los Angeles, and very focused on finding my future husband. I’ve given myself a goal of being married with a baby by my fortieth birthday, and I don’t have time to waste on dating anyone who doesn’t want the same things I want.

Holly, one of my closest friends since high school, has just moved out to Los Angeles from New York with her partner Shelly. In the days leading up to Pride, we talk about the events each of us plans to participate in. Her employer is sponsoring a float, and I want to go watch to support her. Already thinking ahead to when I will be a dad, I say, “I wish there were a kid-friendly event or version of the parade where I could someday bring my kids without worrying about what they will see.” She calmly and thoughtfully responds, “Many of the people in the Pride parade are meant to feel that they don’t belong, almost everywhere they go. That they shouldn’t be themselves. That they should try to blend in. The Pride parade is one of the few times when they can truly be themselves. It’s very hurtful that you would want to censor them for your own comfort.”

I haven’t thought about it this way before. Why do I feel uncomfortable or threatened by other people being themselves? Why do I expect them to want the same things I want? Why do I think that their decisions say anything about me? I realize I have been blind to my own biases about others in the LGBTQ+ community. Ouch! It hurts to come to terms with my self-centered view of what it means to be part of the LGBTQ+ community.

2016:

My husband Andrew and I have been married for three years. Thankfully, same-sex couples in California no longer have to marry in another state, as we did in 2012. We have two boys, one two years old, one eleven months. We are planning to go to the Pride parade as a family. The boys will be excited by the floats, balloons, and colorful costumes. And then we wake up Sunday morning to hear of the horrible violence at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Unclear on who is responsible and whether it’s part of a larger plan to target the LGBTQ+ community, we stay home. We don’t feel safe exposing our kids to potential violence. Pride for me has never felt so frightening.

2017:

It’s the first Pride since Trump took office. The celebratory parade has been canceled and replaced with a protest. I overlook the fact that Pride is the result of the Stonewall uprising and was a protest long before it was a celebration. I don’t think about this until several years later when I am reminded by a friend who was part of LGBTQ+ protests for decades. More people than ever are expected, and the route has expanded to include Hollywood. While the protest is not fun per se, it’s moving to march with our kids in strollers adorned with rainbow flags.

2019:

Pride has expanded into more than weekend celebrations dotted across the country. More than ever, it’s a month-long event that includes parades and parties but also corporate sponsorships, rainbow logos, and rainbow capsule collections at retailers. I feel more visible than ever, and I accept that a more public Pride means a more commercial Pride. I realize not everyone within the LGBTQ+ community feels this way. I assume people and organizations have good intentions. My husband reminds me that my strength is also one of my weaknesses. It’s hard for me to know if corporations are exercising performative allyship.

Finally, over the initial overwhelm of having two children under two, we are eager to engage with more families like ours. We want our kids to grow up knowing that families can look a lot of different ways and that they are not the only kids with two dads. We are engaged in a Facebook group for gay fathers, and for the second year in a row, we organize a Pride brunch for the group members who live in southern California.

Eager to strengthen my professional voice as a coach within the LGBTQ+ community, I lead a panel discussion for Pride month, “Culture Fit vs. Culture Add.” Inspired by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s example of building a cabinet that reflected the diversity of Canadians, I’m committed to building a panel that reflects more than cis-gendered white men. I ultimately secure five panelists, including a Black man and two women, one of whom is Asian. I’m unsuccessful in finding a trans person to participate, which reveals to me many of the career challenges for trans people. This new awareness strengthens with the comments of one woman at the event, a career advisor who has many trans students needing opportunities and support.

During the panel, the discussion shifts to privilege. Jonathan Wilson, the Black panelist, says something that will stay with me: “Everyone in this room has some form of privilege based on the simple fact that you are here right now. You don’t need to feel guilty for your privilege. Just use that privilege for good.” Uncovering my blind spots around the trans experience in the workplace and hearing Jonathan’s words about privilege help me zoom out from my own life experience to see a bigger picture — a picture that’s not as developed for many within the LGBTQ+ community. I have some work to do to be a more supportive ally.

2021:

Official Pride festivities in Los Angeles have been canceled for a second year due to Covid-19. We will gather with another two-dad family for a backyard celebration. Thankfully, Pride now also includes hearing the stories of my LGBTQ+ friends and colleagues — many of whom have intersectional identities as people of color — about what Pride means to them. Pride is talking with people older than me to understand what Pride felt like at the height of the AIDS crisis in the eighties. Pride is learning about people who’ve been out for more than fifty years and people who weren’t out at this time last year. Pride is hearing from people younger than me about the experience of coming out after Queer Eye, after marriage equality in the US, and after Pose. Pride is watching Disney/Pixar’s Luca with my boys again and again.

My Pride experience is now much less about me. It’s thankfully much more about we. I’ve worked through much of my internalized homophobia, unconscious biases, and blind spots. I know I will continue working on them.

In 2021, if I could talk with twenty-five-year-old me back in 1999, I would share some advice I heard from Marshall Goldsmith: “You want someone else to be happy? You go first.” This doesn’t sound that different from RuPaul’s catchphrase, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”

Happy Pride, however you experience it!

Categories: Pride