A Love Letter for Pride Month.
"Queer not as being about who you're having sex with — that can be a dimension of it — but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it, and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live." — bell hooks
***
I was 21. My friend Mark was 31. He had just come out to me — after a marriage to a woman (I was dating her brother at the time), after a life spent not being who he was.
The night he took me to a gay club in Palm Springs, I understood for the first time what it costs a person to live with their insides and outsides misaligned.
I also understood what it looks like when that finally ends.
***
What I felt in that room — before I had words for it — was this: I was seen by the queerness of it all.
The created family. The audaciousness. The unwavering self-expression. The commitment to justice. The truth-telling. The unapologetic sense of self. I knew that was who I felt like on the inside. I just didn’t yet know how to describe it on the outside.
Queerness gave me my life. My chosen family. A purpose. The courage to become a solo parent — because family is what you say it is. The ability to build organizations and communities and businesses. It gave me the lens through which to view and organize the world around me.
It gave me an unshakeable sense of self that when in doubt — which is every single day — I can turn to, to be reminded of who the f*ck I am.
Queer. To say that out loud.
***
For 20 years, I channeled that into action through the Swish Ally Fund — a gay-straight alliance I co-founded that grew to 3,000 members around the world. We built communities of donors and brought them into queer philanthropy. We marched at Pride in New York and Los Angeles, at EuroPride in Stockholm, at the National Equality March in Washington. We made hundreds of calls for state marriage equality campaigns. We helped win marriage equality in New York, and then nationally.
We gave our first grant to Gays Against Guns, born from the ashes of the Pulse nightclub shooting — the night 49 people were murdered in a space like that one in Palm Springs where I first became myself.
We had a saying at Swish: Laws are important. But you can’t legislate compassion and love.
That’s the space where all the real work happens.
***
For a long time, I called myself a straight ally. That was true — and also incomplete.
The fuller truth is that I have always been the self bell hooks described: at odds with everything around me. Inventing and creating. Finding places to speak + thrive + live. Loving across every line.
That is what alignment looks like. Not the absence of tension — but the outsides finally catching up with the insides. When what you do and how you move in the world actually reflects who you are.
When that happens something shifts. New actions become possible. Making a difference becomes possible. Being of service becomes possible. You stop performing your life and start living it.
That is the work I do with women now. Different context. Same truth.
***
The world is cruel to queer + trans people. Especially Black + brown + poor queer + trans people. Right now, in this political moment, that cruelty is organized, state-sanctioned, and accelerating. I will not soften that.
And.
Pride is about seeing each other in ourselves and seeing ourselves in each other. It is about experiencing each other’s stories. It is about celebrating queerness through art and joy — through all the pain. That moves me so f*cking deeply.
It is about remembering: you are not at odds with everything around you because something is wrong with you. You are at odds with everything around you because you are free.
***
If you are a woman, trans, or nonbinary person who has spent years feeling like your outsides don’t match your insides — like you have been performing a version of yourself that isn’t quite true — I want you to know: that gap is closeable.
That is exactly the work we do together.
My coaching practice exists because I know what it feels like to finally stop performing and start living. And I know it changes everything.
If you’re ready for that, or even just curious, come find me.
***
Happy Pride to all of us who had to invent + create + find a place to speak. We did it. Keep going.
