What is Pride, really? What is it that we throw parades for each June? Pride is something different to everyone, so I had to know: What gives you pride?
Ali Davis: I’m proud to be bi because sometimes I feel like it’s a superpower. Admittedly it’s not the Wonder Woman kind, where you’re always awesome and never conflicted (Call me, Diana!), but more like the Hulk kind, where it messes with your life occasionally. But I feel like my difference is a useful difference.
As a writer and a performer, it opens my perspective. It helps to be able to see what’s attractive about everyone (OK, I still don’t get being attracted to jerks, but you get where I’m going.) and to know what it’s like to be in a relationship with more than just the one gender. The fact that I occasionally take flack from or get brushed aside even by gays and lesbians reminds me to listen to and make space for transfolk, and to look at where my own blind spots and unconscious prejudices might be. I’m far from perfect in that regard, but I feel like I at least have something that regularly nudges me to check myself. I screw up a lot, but I question a lot. Which makes me somewhere around halfway there, as always.
The fact that I don’t fit seamlessly into any one group in one area of my life (if you’re about to say that I’d fit seamlessly into a group of bisexuals, you’ve never been in a group of bisexuals) helps keep me on my toes in the other areas and makes it easier to challenge my own assumptions. The fluidity of my sexual orientation makes it easier to spot and work on other areas of my life where I’m unnecessarily locked down. If nothing else, it helps make me a tiny bit more likely to take a breath, stop worrying about which tidy specimen box I’m meant to fit into, and just do what I want and figure out how to label and store it later – if that even needs to happen at all.
My fellow bisexuals are frequently weirdos and sometimes difficult to get at first. I like that about them.
If I, by being out, am quietly demanding that other people think less rigidly, then that means I’m obligated to do the same, whether that’s about politics, pop music, or the fabric of the universe. My superpower is the power of maybes and gray areas, the Cloak of Moosh.
Plus I can really clean up at Spin the Bottle.
Lucy Hallowell: There are a lot of silly things that make me proud to be gay: never having to wade through the sea of douchebag frat boys to find a decent date, seeing the jealous look on the faces of the moms at playgroup when I tell them I have two kids but only had to be pregnant once, being able to share clothes with my wife.
