Grief amidst Pride.

A shift in perspective.

It has been strange, these past few weeks, to be overtaken by such a deep and powerful grief during a month many of us have come to associate with raucous partying and joyful displays and, of course, endless hook ups. What an odd feeling, to be wracked with grief during a month of queer love, to know that when I go to synagogue this weekend to mourn my father, it will be during a service structured to celebrate the pleasures of LGBTQ existence and resistance.

And yet at the same time, there has been something fitting about experiencing grief right now, and not simply because, as my rabbi reminded me, someone is always experiencing joy and someone is always grieving. Though it is easy to forget, the weight, the heft, of Pride comes from the fact that it has historically been rooted in grief: without grief, Pride is nothing more than a shallow party.

I’ve written before about my discomfort with the idea of pride as the immediate and go to queer emotion. At fourteen, I felt pressure to declare myself proud as soon as I was out; to skip over any processing of pain or confusion or comprehension of what it meant to be a bi teenager in a biphobic world favor of a simple announcement of my pride — a pressure I now realize robbed me of the opportunity to fully understand myself as a person, to fully understand the complexity of being an out bi woman, let alone an out bi teen.

And in the current landscape, where some of the loudest voices at Pride are pinkwashed corporations urging us to buy, buy, buy, it can be easy to see this month as little more than a shallow, consumerist bacchanalia. To be out and proud is to have the entire Wal-Mart Pride collection, to be out and proud is to festoon one’s body with pithy slogans and bright colors, to be a billboard for queer joy.

This is why, I think, that as I have grown older I have felt more distant from Pride, and even from pride, period. To be a “proud bisexual” feels at best like a big ask and at worst like an attempt to gloss over the muddled feelings I have about my experiences and identity. To be a bisexual without shame has felt more attainable; indeed, the reduction of bi shame is the stated purpose of this newsletter.

But sitting in my deep grief right now, remembering how much of the queer experience has been bound up in a grief that, while not identical to mine, is certainly equivalent to it, I think I get it a little more now. Pride means something different when it stems from this soul deep pain; pride means something different when it is a bulwark against the tides that threaten to pull you out to sea. I understand that this month in a way that I simply could not before. I understand it, and it is rewriting my perspective on the world.