Editor’s Note: For most queer people the Pride parades celebrated across the world in the month of June are some of the happiest days of the year. It’s fairly easy to see why if you have ever attended a Pride parade. For an entire day your sexuality—something you may have internalized as something wrong, not quite right—is celebrated and explained as a unique high and an awakening of sorts to the real you. It’s the celebratory feeling of acceptance and love and understanding that you don’t have to cram yourself into a specific way to fit in a mosaic of ordinary and normal. Instead, you can fit yourself into an explosive cannon of color that’s uniquely and entirely your own. It’s a day where those who have been told they’re wrong for who they are but it’s that exact difference that makes you, you; a part of you that allows you to see the world from the outside and say, “you know what? I don’t want to be a part of that world, that mosaic, I’m going to reshape it, make it my own and make it better for the people like me.”
That cathartic explosion, that awakening, allows you to control your life in ways you’ve never been believed before. But with the Pride parades canceled this year and safe social distancing being enforced, that feeling of pride may be dampened right now. Along with everything going on in the world right now, it may seem like all the progress, all our battles won, and the spirt of it all is dampened right now. But just because we’re not together, just because we can’t organize, does not mean that spirit is gone. If anything, it reminds us of the struggles of our queer brothers and sisters and their fight for the rights of the people of their time and the future LGBTQ+ people. It is a fight we must continue on. It means, once again, we must fight to keep that spirit alive.
Here at Romance Daily News we want to keep that spirit alive as much as we can while nurturing the same community and sense of belonging we feel at Pride parades and events. So this month we’re bringing you some old, some new, and a little bit of both from the archives of our website and the minds of our writers. Which is why, sticking with the theme of stoking that fire and reminding each other that our community still is very much alive and thriving, that this article from last year is very much relevant a year later. And the spirit we have, no matter the mood and ego of tyrannical government leaders, people will always defy and fight back against the bad so that the good can shine again.
The article below is a reprint from June of last year:
In a shocking twist, but not so shocking seeing that it came from President Trump and his administration, requests by U.S. embassies to fly the rainbow pride flag alongside the American flag during LGBTQ+ pride month are being rejected.
Contrary to President Trump’s adminstration’s predecessor, the Obama administration allowed for U.S. embassies to fly the pride flag outside for display alongside the American flag on the same flag pole as the American flag in a statement of solidarity and recognition of LGBTQ+ American’s struggle for equal rights. But Trump’s Adminstration has denied American embassies the right to fly the pride flag during pride month. Instead, embassies have stated that they are only permitted to display the flag within their embassies. Embassies can request to fly the flag. However, no approvals have been granted.
Trump has once again contradicted his words with his actions, when he said in a tweet a day before June 1st:
It seems Trump’s statement, like many of his other attempts at appearing as an ally to LGBTQ+ Americans, is simply a statement to pretend as though America is the global power for human rights and equality, apparently forgetting that a basic human right such as marriage was only granted four years ago on June 26th, 2015 to LGBTQ+ Americans.
In response to the Trump Adminstration’s ban on flying the pride flag outside U.S. embassies along on the same flagpole as the American flag, many of these embassies have decided to fly the pride flag regardless, some of which have gotten creative with their display.
Here are the many embassies defying Trump’s wishes and showing solidarity and support for LGBTQ+ people around the world:
Trump’s administration fails to see the importance and strength of a good story as one of the greatest weapons of humanity. The pride flag is a story of representation and struggle, one that I know that if I had seen when I was younger, would have instilled me with the strength to stand up for myself more often, and to feel more comfortable with being a gay male.