Something to Be Proud Of.

Recently I was walking through a mall in Dallas and passed two men holding hands. Nobody looked twice. Nobody flinched. It was the most ordinary thing in the world, and it stopped me cold, because I am old enough to remember when it would have been unthinkable. My younger self would never.

It’s Pride Month, and that small, unremarkable moment is the whole point of it. Not just the parade, though we do love a parade. Pride is the fact that two people can hold hands across a mall on a Sunday and the only person who notices is some grown man who gets emotional thinking of how things have changed.

I did not grow up in that world. There was nobody like me on a screen anywhere. I watched what every kid my age watched, Saved by the Bell, Boy Meets World, Full House, and every one of them was some version of a boy and a girl finding each other. Nobody was working out what I was working out. The church I went to after college told us being gay was like alcoholism, something you suffer from and something you cure. So I did the only thing that made sense at the time. I ran. I took a work project about as far from my family as the company could send me and told myself I was going to find myself, when really I was trying to disappear.

I met Thomas in Ireland, of all places, on another assignment, and he is the reason the running stopped. I came out to my family, built a life with him, and we became the dads of twin boys. I went from a kid too scared to admit a who I was to a man who will not raise his sons in a house where being who you are is something you apologize for instead of celebrate. That is the distance Pride covers, and I walked most of it personally.

None of that distance happened on its own. It was fought for, by people who had a far harder time of it than I ever did. When Thomas and I had our civil partnership, marriage was not an option for us. Not in Ireland, not in the UK, not across all of the USA. A few years later Ireland became the first country on earth to vote marriage equality into law by popular vote, an entire nation deciding at the ballot box that we counted. That is what progress actually looks like. Not a gift that shows up on its own. A thing people stand up and demand.

And here is the part the parade can make you forget. None of it is permanent. The last few years should have taught us that much. We have watched hard-won protections get challenged and chipped at, watched rights that felt settled get treated as if they are suddenly up for debate again. Rights you stop defending are rights you start losing.

So I have come to think of Pride as a responsibility at least as much as a party. The job is to leave this better than we found it. To make sure the ground my boys grow up standing on does not quietly erode out from under them. To make sure the next kid sitting in a church pew, being told he is something to be cured, gets to grow up in a world that already moved past that.

It’s also why we are careful about who we work with. Not long ago we turned down a brand deal, real money, because the company had quietly walked back its support for our community the second that support got inconvenient. I won’t name them, partly because people and companies can change, and I’d rather leave that door open than slam it. But we are not going to cash a check from someone who shows up for us only when it is easy. The brands that matter show up in February and September too, not just for the month with a rainbow logo.

If any of this lands, do something with it. Vote like other people’s rights matter as much as your own, because they do, and because the people working to roll this back are absolutely showing up to vote. Put your money toward queer-owned businesses and the companies that stand with the community all year. Give to an organization doing the real work. And if there is a young person in your life quietly trying to figure themselves out, tell them there is nothing to fix and nothing to cure.

I came the long way around. The least I can do is make the road shorter for whoever is behind me. That is what the parade is for. Everything after the parade is the point.

Happy Pride. From our family to yours!