Have Pride
BY MICHAELA
Here we are, the last issue of this school year, just in time for any lingering students and the recently graduated seniors to take with them. So I’ll be quick!
I was lucky enough, along with my roommates, to stay for graduation. I was happy too, because a friend of ours graduated, and I didn’t realize it, but it was kinda magical watching her walk across the stage, drag queen-level makeup and a blonde wig blowing in the wind. She was in all her glory.
I am going to miss her. I have written about all of the things I have learned over this life changing year.
But almost none of it would have been possible without her.
Sasha – the one-named diva she is–carved out safe and fun spaces for us queers by offering her house almost every weekend for dancing and laughter.
She made another home for us when we needed to get away from campus.
She checked in on us. Mothered u—although she prefers the term Madame—and I am so grateful to her. Thank you, Sasha.
She made it here four years as herself, and is boldly going into the world as such.
She was so proud. The realization of her full power hit me like a ton of bricks.
It reminded me that while we are just humans trying to find our way, we never know what our presence means to another person when they see us.
We hear so much negativity and hate from a society who doesn’t understand us and often doesn’t try that it is almost impossible for our visibility not to be a statement.
I am staying through the summer with some friends, and we were all recently trying to figure out if we want to attend San Francisco Pride.
I was on the fence at first because it felt like pressure to make a statement, when I’m finding my footing as the real me.
I am a Black transexual woman and lesbian.
All of my identities make me highly visible.
The more I read and experience, the more I realize that me breathing, me laughing, me dancing, are all statements.
Like Sasha’s bold sashay across the graduation stage.
Her unwavering spirit was a statement to me.
It gave me confidence, joy, and more. There is safety in shrinking away, and I understand that.
But I personally can never go back. I cannot go back like the countless queer voices I have been reading and listening to: Marsha P.
, Sylvia Rivera, Feinberg, Lorde, Bornstein, Butler, the countless voices in zines, and more.
Of course, I will be the safest I can be, but I have to be me.
I owe that to myself I think. Besides, being me in this country could kill me for a number of reasons, and if I am going to die, I might as well have done some living beforehand.
It feels fitting that Pride this year happens to fall on my first birthday as me.
I want to walk the streets as me on that day, a rebirth of sorts, with my community in solidarity.
It is the one day that we know we can walk as our full selves together, and I want to experience that.
I often have asked myself if Marsha P. Johnson’s smile and spirit would have been so stunning that Andy Warhol had to capture it, if she’d hidden herself away.
Besides, if you are going to be a statement, might as well proudly sashay instead of walk.
At graduation, the commencement speaker, Dr. Vera C.
Rubin said, “Don’t let anyone keep you down for silly reasons such as who you are.
” At the time I thought “easy for you to say.” But then thinking on it, it really wasn’t, in her field.
And then there are all those who survived a night in the tank after being tormented and terrorized by the police just to walk another day as themselves.
They never backed down from who they were.
Dr. Cece Jones likes to remind me that Pride began as a protest, and still is one.
And it finally has landed for me that our joy, our presence, our refusal to be anyone but ourselves, is a protest. Society’s hate may be loud, but we are louder.
We sashay across stages, write down our pain, and question systems. When we can’t go traditional routes, we find new ones.
When the world tries to shut us out, our light burns brighter with the flames of passion and love – and what flames to be reborn amongst.