Earlier this month, I saw an Instagram post that said, “Pride is important because someone tonight still believes they’re better off dead than being themselves,” and it absolutely broke me.
LGBTQ+ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society, according to a report by The Trevor Project.
“The Trevor Project’s research consistently finds that LGBTQ young people report lower rates of attempting suicide when they have access to LGBTQ-affirming spaces,” the report stated.
Back in 2019, Hendersonville, North Carolina, celebrated its first pride. There was no parade, no performances and no drag queens. But there was a potluck picnic in a park, and a cake decorated by local grocery store bakery clerk Hector Trejo.
🎧 “I was in the closet for a long time,” he told journalist Monique LaBorde. “I was in the hospital a couple of weeks ago for trying to overdose. I was there for six days, and to me, seeing all of this right now, just seeing everyone so happy is amazing.”
The event, which was targeted by anti-LGBTQ+ protesters leading up the day, ended up going off without a hitch, much to the relief of the roughly 500 people in attendance. For LaBorde, who grew up in the small city, it was the first time she was able to connect with the local LGBTQ+ community.
“As a teenager, I couldn’t picture living in Hendersonville as an adult,” she wrote for URL Media partner Scalawag. “Now, I realize that inability to imagine my adulthood was related to the lack of LGBTQ visibility. There was a pervasive silence around who was queer. With everyone hiding in their own way, we never had a chance to connect.”
This year alone, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures, according to a report from the Human Rights Campaign. More than 200 of these bills specifically target the trans and non-binary communities.
Of the 70 that have been passed, 15 ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth, seven require or allow the misgendering of transgender students, four censor school curriculum, three create a license to discriminate, and two target drag performances.
Last month, Epicenter-NYC reporter Samantha Zachar wrote about the importance of storytellers in drag.
“Drag Story Hour is not only a fun and engaging event that promotes literacy and acceptance to audiences of all ages,” she wrote. “It’s also one of only a few events that welcomes and celebrates families and individuals who may not feel respected or safe in largely cisgender and heterosexual spaces.”
But having spaces that are welcoming to people in the LGBTQ+ community is the bare minimum. During a time when lawmakers continue to infringe on the rights of LGBTQ+ people, we must work on uplifting, supporting, championing, and celebrating the LGBTQ+ community.
Josh Burford and Maigen Sullivan are doing just that with the Invisible Histories Project, an initiative designed to preserve the history of LGBTQ+ life in the state of Alabama and throughout the Southeast United States.
“We need individual people to see themselves as important,” Burford said. “The old flyers, meeting agendas, T-shirts, and ticket stubs we all have laying around will be important for historians years from now.”
Burford and Sullivan told writer Sarah Prager that having this archive accessible to the public allowed queer folks in the South to see that they are not alone. The piece, published by Scalawag, includes some of the items collected such as this 1987 photo of the Alabama Delegation at the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
More: Cameron PajYeeb Yang is an activist for the Hmong community (Sahan Journal)
It’s been 53 years since the first pride was held to commemorate the Stonewall uprising, and while we as a nation have made many strides since then, there is still so much more work to be done in support of the LGBTQ+ community.
