Hey, I'm Michael, 30 years old and proud to be gay and part of the LGBTQIA+ community! In this guest post, I'd like to tell you more about heteronormativity (I'll explain what that is later), some facts about the community and Pride and tell you about my personal experiences with topics such as coming out, homophobia and my path to my personal Pride.
But why Pride anyway? As a straight man, you're not proud of being straight, are you? As a gay man, you are often confronted with the homophobic comment "I have nothing against gays, but do you always have to let it hang out like that?". And my answer to that is "Yes, we have to!" I want to be able to live out and express my sexual orientation and identity, just like heterosexual cis people (people who identify with their biological gender) are allowed to do from an early age.

Heteronormativity - subconscious programming

From an early age, we learn which role models of men and women are socially accepted and desired, how we should be, what is expected of us and what is not. One example: When I think back to my childhood and think about the games we played, the first thing that comes to mind is "father, mother, child". There was no question that a boy naturally played the father and a girl the mother. In this way, we imitated the behaviors and dynamics that we had experienced with our own parents. Another example: all of us know parental wisdom and gender clichés such as "an Indian knows no pain" (when a boy cries) - girls are well-behaved, demure and good at school, boys wear light blue - girls wear pink, boys play with toy cars - girls with dolls, boys want to be astronauts or firemen - girls, princesses or supermodels.

This list could go on forever, but it illustrates quite well how much role models and expectations are imposed on us from an early age, which become more and more ingrained in our thoughts and actions the older we get. These values and gender roles are also known as heteronormativity. Nowhere, really at no point in my childhood were there any counterexamples that would have shown me that other realities of life are also possible or even lovable and deserve tolerance and respect. And this lack of alternatives as to how everyone can shape their lives influences us for the rest of our lives; we are ashamed to want something different, to feel something different, to be something different - even though we are all equal and equally worthy.

Outing & the question "Who am I?"

Growing up with this unfree and narrow-minded reality makes it difficult to come out or even to realize that you are different. This very important realization that many, if not all, of these learned values do not apply to one's own person and are not applicable becomes overwhelming and frightening in this context. If I don't have a classic family with a "father, mother and child" at some point, if I am creative and emotional as a boy, if I am loud and rebellious as a girl or even analytical or technically gifted, if I like boys as a boy or girls as a girl, if I have no interest in sex at all, if I am in the wrong body, if I simply don't fit into society's mold, who am I then? Am I still lovable then? Am I still valuable? What will my future look like? What can I use as a guide?

All of these questions come to young people who have just come to the realization that they are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Fortunately, there is now more and more representation of LGBTQIA+ people in the media and pop culture. Nevertheless, the same questions arise for young people who are about to come out.

Pride does not come by itself

As part of our community, at some point in your life you will inevitably be faced with this pile of broken pieces of your own identity and life reality and have to create your own mosaic. Who or what is family for me, what does being a man / woman / diverse mean to me, and who am I actually? And if I know that, am I good the way I am?
For most of us, finding our identity is a long process with many ups and downs. And when we have reached the point where we can say "I am good the way I am. I am valuable, I am lovable", when we have internalized that our own identity and reality of life is just as valuable and worthy of protection and has just as much right to exist and deserves tolerance and respect as that of heterosexual society, then we have every reason to be proud and to let it "hang out".

"The first pride was a riot"

In German-speaking countries, the term CSD is more common. CSD is the abbreviation for "Christopher Street Day" and commemorates the first uprisings of the LGBT movement. On June 28, 1969, homosexuals and trans people resisted for the first time during a police raid at the Stonewall Inn (a popular gay bar on Christopher Street in New York) against the police violence against homosexual and transgender people and the arbitrary arrests that were common at the time. From this initial resistance and the subsequent unrest, which was largely triggered and led by the drag queens and trans women Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, a movement developed that could no longer be stopped. Since then, homosexual, bisexual and trans people have been standing up for their rights year after year and Christopher Street Day still commemorates this first violent resistance and these heroes of our community.

LGBTQIA-What?

While these uprisings became an annual tradition and homosexual and transgender people took to the streets year after year for their rights and achieved their first successes, the spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities that were taken care of in the community expanded. More and more terms for groups of people who were (and still are) even more underrepresented and undesirable than homosexuals were added to the previous letters "LGBT".

Today, the term LGBTQIA+ is generally used. The "L" stands for "lesbian", the "G" represents gays. The "B" stands for bisexuals, i.e. men or women who are attracted to both men and women. The "T" refers to trans people, i.e. people who do not feel that they belong to their innate biological gender, but to the other (binary) gender.

The "Q" is a little more complicated: "Q" stands for queer. Like the German "Schwul", the term was initially a slur for homosexuals and meant something like "strange" or "different". But similar to 'Schwul', the community adopted this word as a positive self-designation and thus changed the connotation of the term. Today, queer has two main meanings: Firstly, it is simply an umbrella term for all sexual orientations and gender identities that the community encompasses. So if I want to say "I am part of the LGBTQIA+ community, I am different and I am proud of it" I can say "I am queer". On the other hand, in the recent past, the word 'queer' has also increasingly come to mean people who cannot identify with the socially established binary genders and who perceive gender as a fluid spectrum and therefore also describe themselves as diverse, non-binary or genderfluid.

The "I" stands for intersexuals, i.e. people who have congenital biological characteristics of both sexes. And "A" refers to asexual people, i.e. people who have no desire or interest in sexual activity. The plus sign is representative of all other sexual orientations and gender identities that are on the LBTQIA+ spectrum but cannot and do not want to be so clearly categorized and that our community will continue to grow as it has in the past and, with more education, new underrepresented groups will also be heard.

Why is Pride still important today?

We have already achieved a lot in the past with the legalization of homosexuality and the introduction of gay marriage. But even today, there are still many issues for which we must continue to demonstrate: To this day, same-sex sexuality is still a punishable offense in 69 countries around the world - in some countries it even carries the death penalty. And our hard-won rights are not as old as you might think: homosexuality was only fully legalized in Germany in 1994. Until then, homosexuality was still listed as an offense in the Criminal Code in the infamous Paragraph 175, which earned entire generations of gay men the discriminatory nickname "175er". Particularly shocking: according to the WHO, homosexuality was considered a disease until 1993.

Since then, the community has been able to achieve a great deal. Worldwide, 28 countries have adopted marriage for same-sex couples - in Germany since 2017. A total of twelve countries have an explicit ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in their constitution, including Bolivia, Mexico and Austria.
But there is still a lot to achieve: In Germany, sexual orientation and gender identity are still not protected from discrimination by the Basic Law. Men who have sex with men are still not allowed to donate blood and bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual and non-binary people still face many discriminatory prejudices and little has been achieved for their rights.

My personal Pride story

For these very reasons, it is also very important to me personally to raise awareness about LGBTQIA+ and Pride and to take part in Pride myself. I myself had to deal with a lot of discrimination and bullying in my childhood and youth. Other children and teenagers called me homophobic names before I even realized that I was attracted to my own gender. So I've never been the kind of gay person who can hide well and blend into the crowd. As a creative and artistic mind, I have always been on display and relentlessly exposed to homophobic bullies. It was a long road for me before I was able to accept myself for who I am. And an even longer journey until I was able to love and accept myself. My path to finding and living out my own Pride is representative of the paths of so many people in the LGBTQIA+ community. And whether you are one of them, a supporter or simply interested in the topic, I would like to leave you and all other readers with a final message: You are valuable, you are lovable and good just the way you are, so: be proud!

Happy Pride!

Your Michael