Pride is for Love(rs)

The one time we all want to be single is summer time, when beach visits, interns, and general debauchery abounds. But the one thing we neglect to remember is how lonely Pride can be when we’re single.

On one hand we’re glad the gay population of our city and half the Eastern seaboard turns out to celebrate. On the other hand we wish we had a man on our arm to show off.

I never thought this particularly applied to me, having spent, pretty much every Pride alone (most notably the year I marched with my parents in Indianapolis for PFLAG). But returning to my college town this year for Pride made me feel like I was missing a plus one. Maybe it was because most of my friends had boyfriends, and I was still single and sassy in the Big Apple. I couldn’t help feel that although I hadn’t always been a visitor I was a bit of an outcast.

Luckily it is a relatively small town and it didn’t take me long to reingratiate myself with the locals. By the end of the second night I had connected with a long lost crush of the past. What I thought was going to be an innocuous evening of catching up with friends and forsaking my liver ended up with an unlikely find: a boyfriend for Pride. It is beyond an exaggeration to call him “my boyfriend,” but it felt like he was mine for the duration of the weekend — all 16 hours of it.

It’s funny how much stress we put on ourselves to have a boyfriend on special occasions that we forget Pride is one of those times we feel that our relationships or lack there of are most on display. With so many homos around we so desperately want to fit into the successful relationship category that we are willing to forget that relationships are only a fraction of what we have to be proud about.

As a culture we have set new standards for what love and relationships can be. We have redefined sex, gender, identity, marriage, and countless other binary and biological ideas that have served to limit the expression of our truth in the past. Our Pride is not only about mass entertainment, circuit parties, and rooftop Bloody Marys. It’s about the freedom to be as different or as similar as what society expects.

Maybe it would be nice to have a cute boy for the whole Pride festivities, but if one isn’t available it doesn’t mean we have nothing to be proud about. After all, a temporary love can be gone in a moment, but Pride is something we carry with us all year long.

Appeared originally on homo-neurotic.com on 6/23/09