It’s not hard to find pride coming from the LGBTQ+ community. In June it’s very obvious, with companies changing their logos to rainbow to show solidarity and pride festivals or parades being held in towns to celebrate the queer population. Other months it may not be as public but it is still easy to find with a simple search across any platform of the internet. LGBTQ+ artists and creators often have pride themed merchandise year round, covering a wide variety of gender and sexual identities.
How much they want to show off their pride varies person by person. For some people it isn’t a big deal; they don’t need a lot of pins or stickers or apparel with their identity on it. For others they enjoy covering themselves with flags corresponding with their identities. Both are obviously okay and it is a never-ending spectrum.
I didn’t realize I was LGBTQ+ until early high school and only came out in 2021 about being aromantic asexual. Earlier this year I came out as agender. Now that I am out and I have a nonbinary sibling to talk with, we can talk about LGBTQ+ stuff openly. Prior to this, I didn’t talk much about it as I was still nervous about what it all meant to me and if these words really applied.
If you look at my backpack, it is bejeweled with pins. Many of them are pride pins, depicting the aromantic, asexual, and agender flags in various forms. My water bottle and laptop are plastered with stickers of various origins but both objects have at least one pride sticker on them. I have a couple shirts that are LGBTQ+ themed, all of which I enjoy wearing with a Hawaiian shirt so if the graphic “Be Gay Do Crime” with the Untitled Goose Game protagonist doesn’t catch their eye, the red floral will.
Pride is very important to me because it explains so much of who I am. It helps me wrap my head around my social interactions of the past and why things fell the way they did. It’s amazing how learning some words and definitions can be so groundbreaking.