what is pride?
some stories from childhood, and how i've grown into myself over the years
Hi! First — the change to lowercase titles. Pretty much everyone who knows me well knows that I primarily write in lowercase, whether it’s in texts or emails or the long-winded political rants that filled up my Facebook wall from around 2015 to 2020. And, frankly, the titles I chose for most of my previous Substack posts have sucked. So I’m changing things up to be a bit more true to myself, in the spirit of Pride and expressing one’s true identity, and maybe I’ll return to propriety at some point (but maybe I won’t. maybe i’ll start writing my posts entirely in lowercase. ha!). Anyway, this post is a bit more autobiographical, inspired by my recent experience being back home for NYC Pride, but mostly just some things that I haven’t shared before that I want to.
I was also inspired by this essay by Celine Nguyen, an author I discovered and engaged with on Substack just a couple of months ago. The piece uses the philosopher L.A. Paul’s framework of “transformative experiences” in the context of queer identity formation and, more generally, how we approach decisions that may transform who we think we are and(/into?) who we are. More on this later.
I was in eighth grade when my mom asked me if I was “questioning my sexuality,” and I began to regret saying yes as soon as the word left my lips. I had barely mumbled it — maybe there was still time to take it back, to pretend it was just a cough. But I had nodded, too: a betrayal. I only really started to beat myself up about it when I replayed our conversation over and over again in my head later that night.1
I’m fortunate that the conversation itself was relatively unmemorable. At minimum, I received love and compassion, which is more than what many queer kids get from their parents. My mom was concerned for my wellbeing — I didn’t go to middle school in a particularly accepting, or even tolerant, place.
There were exceptions. I had come out to one of my best friends a few months prior. We went to the mall and saw a movie, and I remember the whole time thinking that I was going to tell her, that I had wanted to hang out just with her so that I could tell her, but I was too scared. My mom arrived to pick me up, so we started to walk over, so it was suddenly the last minute and I turned around and looked into her huge brown eyes and said “I have something to tell you,” my face burning, and I grabbed her and whispered in her ear “I’m gay” and then I literally ran away and didn’t look back until I was in my mom’s car and could apologize over text. It was my first time saying those words out loud.
The next week, she stopped me in the hallway at the end of a school day and said “I have something for you,” and slyly produced a brown paper bag, which she pressed into my hand with a finger held to her lips. I ducked into a bathroom stall to open the bag, in which I found three rubber bracelets in different rainbow varieties. She told me later that she just wanted me to know that, no matter what, she supported me. She kept my secret completely, as far as I know.
So, by the time I had that conversation with my mom, there was incontrovertible evidence that I was not merely questioning my sexuality, but I was fairly certain that I was gay, and I wanted her to know that.2 Maybe that particular question, and my answer to it, especially rankled because I had spent so much time up to that point going through that questioning, doing the classic stepping-stone hop from straight to bi to gay, wondering what the hell was wrong with me while being surrounded by kids who would debate what consequences might await their future son were he to come out as gay, trying to outdo each other in terms of ensuring that their hypothetical child might wish he were never born — yet I remained confident in what I had discovered about myself.3
It’s funny how untrustworthy and capricious our memories are. Throughout elementary school, I told this story of my first kiss with this girl named Emily. It was under a slide in Pre-K, and it took place before I moved downstate. There wasn’t much to it other than it “happened,” and I would use that anecdote to stave off any rumors. It was only when I ran this by my father years later that he told me the truth about Emily, that she was a mean girl who would torment me on the playground and I would run home crying about her (over her?). I have a mental image of black pigtails, a huge, yellow slide, and no way to know whether it happened.
I also have a distinct memory of telling my friend Isaiah that being gay means you like boys and being lesbian means you like girls. It naturally followed, then, that all boys were lesbians and all girls were gay — except those who weren’t, of course. He must have asked, and I got good grades, which made me an authoritative source. “We’re lesbians,” I said confidently, and Isaiah nodded.
I don’t know when this conversation took place, and I can’t be 100% sure it happened at all. Why would this have stuck in my mind into adulthood? Had I already started to suspect myself as an exception to this rule? Was I not, in the technical sense, a lesbian?
Another element of my narrative was a pretty blonde girl named Julia, on whom I ostensibly had a crush for many years, although I never acted upon it. She was always just kind of there, as a name that I could pull out of a hat if someone asked me if I was interested in anybody.4 I recall a time (and this definitely happened) when I was probably about ten, on a motorboat blasting “Crush” by David Archuleta from my iPod Touch through wired earbuds, thinking about Julia, as if I were trying to induce a Pavlovian response to generate a real crush that I’d be compelled to act upon.5 A bit on the nose, in retrospect.
When I moved for high school, I didn’t need to construct any more of these myths. I was going somewhere new, where no one knew me or my past, so I was free to reinvent myself as I wished. I was also settling into Ithaca, a hippie town where being weird or different is a virtue and an expectation.
Easier said than done. Sometime during my first month at this new school, I worked up the courage to wear one of the rainbow bracelets my friend had gotten me. In geometry class, a boy wearing a beanie, long brown hair covering one of his eyes, pointed to my bracelet and simply asked “Gay pride?” I coughed. I think I stammered something about being an ally. He said “right on” and we barely spoke again after that. I’m sure his reaction would have been the same had I told the truth in that moment.
After that incident, I resolved to answer honestly whenever someone might ask me about my bracelet. I wore it every day. But no one else did, not even my closest friends.6 It’s an awkward thing to broach with someone, maybe even more difficult when you become closer with someone. You don’t want to be wrong, of course — but what if you’re right, and you rush someone before they’re ready to come out? At the time, though, I just wanted someone to ask me so I didn’t have to make a big deal out of it.
In the fall of my sophomore year, after playing in the pep band for the homecoming football game, I sat on a bench with a cute fellow percussionist, one of the only out guys in the school, and we talked until midnight. A month and a half later, I posted a Facebook update that I was in a relationship with him, and just like that, I was “out.” And thank god, because I was growing impatient.
Even by the time I got to college, I was still trying to not “make a big deal” out of being gay. I was “out,” for all intents and purposes, and I still wore my rainbow bracelet, but at the time I just wanted to be a guy who happened to be gay. I regret to say that I harbored some contempt for some of my peers who were very flamboyant or otherwise made their sexual orientation an essential aspect of their identity and the outward expression thereof. I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, see what they got out of that.
Part of the message that I had received from my mom (well-intentionedly), from society (often less so), from the limited role models I was exposed to in my teenage years, was that finding success as a gay man meant suppressing most if not all outward manifestation of gay identity. Be more like Anderson Cooper or Pete Buttigieg. Be mindful of your voice, wrists, gait, clothes. Being gay isn’t really anything to celebrate — it is what it is.
Sometime during the summer before heading to Georgetown in 2017, I read an article called “The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness” by Michael Hobbes that fucked with me a bit.7 The premise of the piece is that, although LGBT people (the article primarily focuses on gay men) have attained rights and recognition that were unthinkable in recent memory, we’re still depressed and lonely, obsessed with body image and drugs and sex and validation. It’s a very well-written piece, replete with empirical and anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon, and to an 18-year-old without robust experience with the “gay community,” it was terrifying.
The way that the article diagnosed the issue resonated with me deeply, even if most of the piece about adult gay loneliness felt more distant and impending at the time.8 Gay men are “primed to expect rejection,” according to a psychiatrist Hobbes interviewed. There’s a layer of minority stress, the extra effort that goes into not being the “default” in a given social/work/etc. situation, amplified by the fact that sexual identity is intrinsically invisible and therefore able to be concealed. Part of this effort, then, is spent convincing the rest of the world that you’re normal because you might actually get away with it. Hobbes describes the phenomenon of being a gay adolescent as “being careful, slipping up, stressing out, overcompensating.” Spending so much energy this way builds up stress in the body, which over time can manifest as a kind of trauma response, research shows.
So when I arrived, I didn’t actively seek out community with other queer people. First of all, they were impossible to avoid, so I didn’t need to go out of my way to seek them out. Georgetown has the moniker “Gaytown” for a reason — maybe it’s something about being a Jesuit school, getting repressed closeted guys from Catholic high schools, or being full of over-achievers like D.C. more broadly, but it seemed like every other guy there was gay.9 I even managed to get my heart broken by one within a few months of starting classes.
More importantly, though, I thought I knew who I was and how I related to my identity. I was not only conscious of how I expressed myself; my reading had made me conscious that I was conscious of how I expressed myself. My solidarity with the queer community went as far as being aware of and sometimes vocal about the myriad struggles that we faced. Even so, in terms of my day-to-day life, I saw myself apart from “the community.”
In her essay on transformative experiences, Celine Nguyen wrote about who she thought she knew she was, and what she wanted, five years ago: a straight woman who “wanted a reasonably egalitarian but mostly conventional heterosexual relationship.” Now, she has been in a relationship with a woman for over four years. The experience of realizing her friend was super hot at a party (Celine’s words, not mine!), and then acting upon that attraction, was transformative because it made her aware of something that she couldn’t have known before — in doing so, it changed her identity and her expression thereof.
She continues in a discussion of desire, inspired by Caroline Godard’s piece about the “Am I a lesbian?” masterdoc, as anticipatory, oriented toward (hopefully) future experiences that may clarify that desire or reveal other related desires. What follows is an insightful analysis of queer identity, which is increasingly online and isolated from actual tactile, human, transformative experience, well worth the read.
What resonated with me, though, was the realization that I had my own transformative experience during college. I thought I knew who I was and what I wanted in terms of my engagement with the gay community. Little by little, that began to change as I opened myself up to certain transformative experiences, motivated by anticipatory desires that I cautiously allowed myself to explore. For example, it’s impossible to describe the rapture of my first gay bar experience, even if it was overwhelming. A friend convinced me to participate in the annual Coming Out Day celebration organized by GU Pride, an organization I had all but avoided since arriving on campus.10 Most of these experiences were small, perhaps not transformative on an individual level, but cumulatively they had a profound impact.
I began to build on these experiences, too, constructing and modulating my own identity and relationship with not only my sexuality, but my comfort and identification with and within gay culture. Living in a very gay house with three other queer people, watching season after season of RuPaul’s Drag Race during the first few months of the pandemic, was not something I would have imagined for myself even a year prior, but it was one of the best experiences of my life.
This brings me to the titular question of this piece, one that I’ve been avoiding in favor of a long-winded, chronological history of my gayness — forgive me. Pride is something I didn’t always have. The gay experiences I’ve described so far, even those following my “coming out,” were marked by a relative absence, for the most part, of pride.
It’s hard not to give into what a dominant vein of society wants us queer people to feel, which is shame and self-hatred. But even when I was out, I would wear my rainbow bracelet every day but still feel mostly neutral rather than truly proud. This exercise of reaching back into my (clearly flawed) memory to unearth my old thoughts and feelings has not been easy, but it has been rewarding to see how far I’ve come.
I went to my first pride celebration in D.C. with a few friends in 2018. I barely remember it now, and I have no photos to prove it. I still hadn’t lived in D.C. for a year, and breaking out of the Georgetown bubble to go to Dupont Circle was a big deal. After graduating years later, I moved to Dupont Circle, specifically 17th Street NW, which is one of Washington’s historic “gayborhoods.”
In the past, I might have been embarrassed by the flamboyance of the rainbow crosswalks and pride flags lining the 17th St. corridor. By the time I moved there, though, I had internalized and embraced my pride. Just stepping into the street would fill me with comfort. One day I spent around an hour in the laundry room listening to John, one of the many older gay gentlemen living in my building, who told me about getting his heart broken while serving in Vietnam, about how the AIDS epidemic ravaged his social circle, about how things have changed over the decades. Pride is seeing myself as part of that history and honoring those who sacrificed so much not only in defense of their truth and dignity, but also so that future generations wouldn’t have to suffer.11
Pride is euphoria. It’s the profound joy of a drag show, irrespective of the show itself, simply in its being a celebration of community and authenticity. It’s the time three years ago when I went to Provincetown for the first time, alone, and my heart grew wings and soared over the shoreline. I stopped into a queer bookstore there and after chatting with the owner (and giving him the book I had finished, Norwegian Wood, because my backpack was overstuffed), he recommended Cleanness by Garth Greenwell, which I bought and by which I was gutted.12
I, who am too-often loath to talk to strangers, found myself striking up conversations with all kinds of gays on my solo day in P-town. For the first time, I understood the appeal of gay paradise and could see myself existing and thriving among its bodies, breath, sun, salt. I gave myself an experience and was transformed by it.
The anniversary of my move to Buenos Aires is coming up. Although I didn’t have L.A. Paul’s concept of the transformative experience to frame my thinking, that is what I sought, essentially, and what I’ve gotten out of the decision in spades. Paul wrote that these experiences serve as “crossroads in your path towards self-realization.” This analogy is especially useful because crossroads imply, well, a road, likely one that has future crossroads, diversions, or meanders. Buenos Aires has certainly proven to be that for me, offering me so much that I wouldn’t have known about myself without giving myself the experience.
Although most of these facets of the experience have nothing to do with my sexuality, my engagement with the LGBTQ community has been fundamental to my journey here. I explicitly sought out queer spaces while in the throes of relative friendlessness during my first few weeks here. Luckily, I happened upon a massive WhatsApp group for queer Argentines and expats interested in building community in Buenos Aires. By the time of the annual pride march in early November, I had friends to go along with.
Pride in Buenos Aires isn’t a parade, like it is in New York or Washington, but a march. While you can stand on the sidelines and watch, the vast majority of people are in the thick of it, and it’s pure joy. There are no corporate sponsors and vendors are everywhere selling beer and choripán. The party goes on for hours, ending in the Plaza de Mayo for speeches and performances after sunset. It was the best day I had had in a long time.
I could write so many paragraphs about the range of gay experiences, transformative or not, that are emblematic of the pride that I’ve grown into. For most of the first half of this year, I was in my first relationship since high school, for which I’m deeply grateful even if it didn’t last. Listening to Brat in the gay club for the first time in Buenos Aires, followed two weeks later by my friend getting Brat tattooed on her leg in a gay bar in New York — that’s pride too.
It’s obviously been weeks since Pride Month ended, so this essay isn’t a timely addition to the flourishing of queer content each June.13 For now, I hold my arms outstretched, welcoming new experiences in all their potential transformative power. At age 25, I don’t think I’m anywhere near my fully realized self. In discovering and embracing pride, at least I’m closer to it.
Recent reads/etc. <3
Drawing inspiration from several of my favorite Substacks, I wanted to take some space to share some of what I’ve been reading and watching lately, especially those related to gay stuff to keep in theme. I’m aiming to include these in future publications as well! Let me know what you think.
Last week I watched Nuovo Olimpo (2023) on Netflix, an Italian film about two men who meet in a movie theater frequented by cruisers in the 70s. After meeting and falling in love, they are separated — the film follows the rest of their lives together but not together. I was reminded of Past Lives, which came out in the same year and admittedly did a similar storyline better, suffering from fewer pacing issues, but I still recommend Nuovo Olimpo for its complexity and beautiful acting.
Nuovo Olimpo along with Fellow Travelers, the Paramount+ show with Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer that I’ve almost finished, both illustrate the obstacles that gay men faced and the unique ways they dealt with them, which was instructive and also emotional for me. The acting in Fellow Travelers is exquisite, and Jonathan Bailey is, well, yes.
The Condition by Jennifer Haigh follows a New England family before and after it crumbles, with each member of the family dealing with their own secrets and guilt as to why things are the way they are. One character is closeted to his family and unwilling to pursue any path that might change the status quo. The book peeks behind the curtain of family mythologies, sometimes a little too blatant in terms of how it addresses the WASP-y obsession with image and status (although that may be the point). Ultimately, Crossroads (2021) by Jonathan Franzen, which I read last summer, approaches a similar framework much more profoundly. I recommend both books — the former for a good page-turner, and the latter if you want to get your heart ripped out.
Finally, I have to recommend this fantastic essay I read here that is perhaps more relevant to those who are active on Substack than anyone else. It speaks to a phenomenon that I’ve encountered on this platform over the last several months of incredibly surface-level content doing numbers! without really saying anything at all. Part of the issue with the social-mediafication of a platform like Substack is that it changes the incentive structures for its users. Tending to an algorithm is exhausting! Yet I still found quite a few nuggets in Griffin’s piece that I’m attentive to and mindful of in my own writing, and in fighting the urge to care about readership and all the markers of Substack “success.”
As always, thanks so much for reading! I am earnestly aiming to publish more often than I have been recently — now that I’m back in Argentina after a month in the United States, things should be a bit more stable. If this post interested you in any way (or if you hated it!) you’re more than welcome to respond via email or Substack DM. I’d love to hear from you.
I suspect she phrased the question this way merely to be more tactful than to ask outright “Are you gay??” but it still occupied my thoughts for a long time afterward.
To be fair, Mom facilitated a good deal of my journey to self-discovery, unbeknownst to me, right at home. Much of my early exposure to gay stuff came from Tumblr and online forums when I was in middle school. What solidified my understanding of my identity, however, came from the YA literature that my mom would grab from the library and leave on the bookshelf in my room, even before we had this conversation (because, well, she knew). In fact, the only reason my mom ended up asking me that question is because I drew a pride flag on an English assignment in which my teacher told us to draw the kinds of books we liked reading.
One of these books — Will Grayson, Will, Grayson — was a collaboration between John Green and David Levithan that totally rocked my world. John Green was obviously a celebrity, and Looking for Alaska was one of my favorite books ever in seventh grade. David Levithan, on the other hand, was new to me at the time, but introduced me both to a gay protagonist and to writing completely in lowercase in the even chapters of the book. I was hooked.
I hadn’t thought of David Levithan for a long time until recently, when his name came up in the context of the fascist book-banning craze that Republicans have embraced in the last few years. His book Two Boys Kissing, about two boys who try to beat the world record for longest continuous kiss, has been consistently included among the list of targets by parents concerned that their kids may discover empathy and understanding for people with diverse experiences — lest (god forbid!) marginalized people share their voices and demand dignity and respect.
In an ironic twist of fate, I even developed a crush on one of the worst macho homophobic douchebags of the bunch in eighth grade. I came out to some of my friends (and my brother and my cousin) in a tent in Canada late at night, as we were going around naming our romantic interests. I was too nervous and embarrassed to say mine out loud, so I finally wrote his name into the Notes app, passed it around and shut my eyes tight. There was a pause. I remember my cousin blurting “Joseph is a weird name for a girl” to break the silence, and I was blushing so furiously I thought my head might catch fire.
It helps that this “crush” was unrequited, which I suppose didn’t bother or deter me. We were friendly with one another, although it was a bit awkward: a small price to pay.
That David Archuleta himself came out as gay just a couple of years ago, and is now writing love songs about boys, is delicious symmetry. “Crush” still makes it onto my Spotify Top 100 songs every year, though, because it’s a banger.
On Coming Out Day in October 2016, I posted a rant on Facebook about my frustrations with the phenomenon and expectation of coming out. Here’s a direct quote to give you an idea of how I felt back then (two years after “coming out” myself):
“queer kids (and adults!) shouldn't have to feel obligated to tell the world about their sexuality! the whole ‘straight until proven gay’ mentality is bullshit and needs to be stopped. but it's not that easy. it's hard not to play into its lie. i lived a significant portion of my life trying to pass as straight as well as i could while simultaneously hoping, wishing that someone would actually confront me about it so i could say ‘well, actually, since you asked...’ and let me just tell you that no one asked, and it sucked (and would have probably still sucked if they had asked).”
I didn’t realize that the article was written by Michael Hobbes until rereading the piece just now, although to be fair I didn’t know who he was when I first read it. I started following him a few years ago when I started listening to this hilarious podcast called If Books Could Kill, which essentially drags shitty yet mainstream-popular books, often in the self-help category like Atomic Habits and Rich Dad, Poor Dad. He’s also funny on Twitter.
This is even more of an aside than most of my footnotes, but I recently read the first half of the June 2024 issue of The Baffler in the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn. Zachary Siegel’s piece “Permanent Crisis” brilliantly lays bare the failure of the federal and local governments’ response(s) to the opioid crisis, a crisis that is not new and is more systemic and symptomatic of fundamental issues that have pervaded for decades. He writes, of subsequent “epidemics” of drug addictions and overdoses (crack cocaine, methamphetamines, opioids, etc.) over time: “it gets framed as a series of discrete, though sometimes overlapping, epidemics, implying a predictable arc that spikes, plateaus, and eventually falls.” He continues later: '“When we zoom out, we have what looks less like a collection of epidemics involving a series of novel, addictive drugs, and something more like a chronic social crisis exacerbated by market conditions. Underlying sociological and economic drivers must be at work.”
This is more a criticism of the title of Hobbes’ piece rather than the substance thereof, since he doesn’t really try to make the case that “gay loneliness” is an “epidemic,” although it sets the stage for him to bring in epidemiologists’ research and make comparisons to the AIDS epidemic. At the end of the day, it isn’t an isolated epidemic at all. Hobbes paraphrases a Canadian social epidemiologist: “The problem, [Travis Salway] says, is that we’ve built entirely separate infrastructures around mental illness, HIV prevention and substance abuse, even though all the evidence indicates that they are not three epidemics, but one. People who feel rejected are more likely to self-medicate, which makes them more likely to have risky sex, which makes them more likely to contract HIV, which makes them more likely to feel rejected, and so on.”
I’ve spoken with several gay men who relate to the experience of striving, over-achieving, packing a daily routine full of hobbies and extracurriculars to avoid being alone with their thoughts, which is especially tormenting for people who are in the closet. It also has a lot to do with the fear of rejection, and the over-reliance on external forms of validation, that Hobbes’ article describes (although it’s nothing groundbreaking) as characteristic of the gay male experience. It ultimately leads to a great deal of stress and burnout — no wonder the research shows that gay men have, on average, higher rates of cardiovascular disease, despite being so obsessed with working out!
On the other hand, as Trixie Mattel once said, straight people hate us so much because “we have so much of what they’ll never have. We’re good at everything, we’re smart, we make more money, we’re better with women,” and the list goes on. Another way to look at it, I suppose.
And, for those reading the footnotes, commemorating an institution that I had railed against just a couple of years prior. It’s called growth!
In other words, acknowledging my existence in the context of all in which I live and what came before me (sorry).
Greenwell is an insanely talented writer whose prose is lyrical and poetic, rich with evocative metaphors that capture the range of human emotion in ways I’d never read. That being said, I was compelled by an excellent essay I read last year called “Gay Sincerity is Scary,” in which Paul McAdory diagnoses an issue in books like Cleanness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Shuggie Bain (all of which I’ve read) that exemplify what McAdory calls sincerity: “a mode of address that privileges weepy disclosure and self-serious sentimentality.” This style of writing is assumed to be beautiful and poignant because, well, it’s so vulnerable and emotional and raw that it must be. Of course, there’s a baseline of quality here — none of these are bad books. But I think McAdory is right to call out the tendency to explain oneself in terms of gay suffering and misery at the expense of “affective complexity,” books that can “discomfit and enrapture and enrapture by discomfiting.”
This is the kind of criticism that I really admire: “At bottom, on a deeper level, at our core, deep down, on the inside, after all, etc., we are soft, sweet, painfully susceptible to catching feels, and too easily interpretable by the ever-perceptive Gay Sincerity psychologists. As they peel back our layers, moving from exterior to interior, eventually they arrive at the capital-T Truth, and therefore at what is most beautiful and valuable. No matter that this Truth is merely more onion, or that the discarded layers might have something to say. No matter that iced coffee is a whole ass mood.”
Ideally, a novel experience will transform me into the kind of person who publishes a meandering every two weeks instead of every two months.
I know what pride is. It's having a son like you
Casey!! I so enjoyed reading this and am so touched that you responded to my post with such beautiful and insightful reflections from your own coming-out experience. It’s very easy ime to feel like all the problems of queer identity are solved in our present moment, and that coming out is a single moment and then it’s done…the reality, as you wrote about so thoughtfully, is that it can take a very long time to settle into actual self-acceptance and a sense of pride.
I really relate to the feeling of not wanting to make a big deal of it—only recently have I felt that I SHOULD be part of gay/queer communities and that I don’t have to apologetically diminish this part of myself. Loved reading this—thank you!!!