You Know, I’m Proud
Your favorite thing? Gay people invented that.
My dad is very Christian. Like, very. He is the son of Evangelical Christian missionaries who met at a Billy Graham conference. They believe that God created the earth in seven calendar days, that the earth is roughly two-thousand years old, that evolution and the big bang are bogus liberal myths. Needless to say, I didn’t grow up in the most gay-friendly household. His side of the family doesn’t believe gay people should exist so it gives me great pleasure to report that not only do we exist but that we invented anything that makes life worth living.
Despite having a father who would make us memorize the Psalms and only used his car radio for Christian talk shows, there were things that slipped through the cracks—mostly brought in by my mother, just under the radar. Some were overt: Oscar Wilde’s stories, Mariah’s Honey album, Clinton Kelly, the astrology column in Cosmopolitan magazines I would leaf through at the nail salon, but some were more subtle: Frog & Toad, our family pug who slept in my bed, Mary Poppins, Stacy London, an oil painting of my siblings and me, tea parties at the Brown Palace, the concept of “moving to Paris”, that every bed in our house had throw pillows and a dust ruffle. These nascent forms of representation were all I needed to survive, like an orchid growing in the indirect sunlight of gay content. As I got older, I saw that so many things, including the best of the best things, were gay. After I came out, I was deemed flamboyant and dramatic by my peers which was erroneously correlated with my being a homosexual. But it was the Christian upbringing that made me dramatique, honey. A god that would swallow cities for disobedience? A woman turning into salt? Sending Daniel into a lion’s den? Calling one of your prophets up in a chariot of fire? Enoch and Methuselah—you know they were a couple, babe!
We invented democracy. We invented iced coffee. We invented doing a one-finger wave at an acquaintance while holding said iced coffee. We invented bell-bottom jeans and drop-waist skirts. We did not invent peplum tops, obviously—that was the bastardization of our chic Greek peplos that has been worn since the Classical and notoriously gay period 500 B.C. We painted the Sistine Chapel. We popularized snapping your fingers in a Z formation. We invented a jockstrap with pockets! I specifically invented Derek Chadwick, whom I am certain exists only in my mind. Can anyone else see him? We invented crystal decorative decanters for who else could make theater out of pouring wine? We invented theater, for that matter. We wrote Antigone, Ragtime, Rent, Dreamgirls, and Mean Girls. Okay, Tina Fey wrote ‘Mean Girls’ but Damien ties the movie, the musical, and the RuPaul Drag Race Cinematic Universe together. We invented assless chaps. We invented inhaling household chemicals, long before a President of the United States endorsed it.
Hyacinths are gay. Cocking your head to get a better look at something is gay. Going to a hardware store is gay. Drinking a sip of something refreshing and going “Ah!” is a little gay. Driving down a freeway with a scarf tied around your head with the end billowing in the wind is gay. Both long and short hair are gay if you think about it. Poetry is very gay and by proxy, music. Even Def Leppard.
When I think of my childhood, I used to frame my early years as a wholly disparate self from my current one; that I’ve grown upward and into the gay person that I am today. But the truth of it is that the undercurrent of my adolescence created the space where I live today. Every dust ruffle, every art class, and certainly every Bible passage has contributed to the layers that make me who I am. This matters because it determines how we navigate the world now, what questions we ask and how we seek to answer them. This month I look back with immense pride on what has come, and what is coming next.
Happy Pride!
