June is Pride Month, the time of year when people within the vast and varied LGBTQ community celebrate their gender and sexual diversity. Yet, in Yorkton, you would be forgiven if you didn’t realize this was something that actually exists. There is not a single rainbow flag flying in a prominent place, and no real events planned to commemorate the month. Why not?
There are plenty of people in the community who identify under one of the letters in LGBTQ, and I know this because I’ve met at least one of each. There will soon be two men getting married to each other in the city, they just got engaged last week and are excited about their future together. We have people who exist within the city and the region who do not have the same recognition as they do in other centers. For many people, they make it a priority to just get out of the region instead of trying to be both LGBTQ and within a rural area where they don’t think people are comfortable with who they are.
So why is Pride actually necessary? That’s a question a lot of people ask in the face of the celebrations. Pride is about visibility, because it’s centered around people who were forced to hide in the past. Their relationships were often illegal and they were essentially in hiding for part of their personality which was effectively beyond their control. Pride is basically an event celebrating the idea that they don’t have to hide who they are anymore.
The problem with getting such an event off the ground is that for some people there is still a fear. It’s especially true in an area that trends conservative and where families might not be as open to people who aren’t straight like they are. This does happen to by why Pride happens to be so important, because it’s based on the idea that there should be no fear, and that’s why it’s especially important in a town like Yorkton. While we strive to be a welcoming community, we have to remember that there are a lot of people out there that need welcoming, or might find a relatively conservative community a scary place when it comes to being themselves.
The only way to make people stop being afraid of those in the LGBTQ community is to have it an open and accepted part of our society. It’s difficult to be afraid of someone you get to know, and once you get to know people you begin to realize that they’re all just regular people with normal needs and wants, even if those needs and wants are slightly different from yours. I know several people who have previously said nothing but bad things about LGBTQ people until they met and became friends with one, someone who long grumbled about “perverts” eventually turning around and saying that just because a woman she knows is in a relationship with another woman doesn’t mean that people should treat her different. That’s important, and that’s why a Pride event is important. The end result, changing minds, is something that Yorkton needs.
It wasn’t very long ago that my friends couldn’t get married. They are a loving couple, great influences on the kids they know, really happy together and are set to have a long and loving marriage. The fact that there are still people who disapprove of their relationship and relationships like theirs is fundamentally ridiculous, and something that, as a community, we should be upset still exists. In a perfect world, every single person who meets them would be happy that they’re on the path to marriage, but we know that, unfortunately, that’s not necessarily true.
A gay friend of mine said once that it’s easy for a straight person to be proud of who they are, they get to do it every day without consequences. It’s not so easy when you don’t have that same luxury, and that’s why events like Pride exist. It would be nice if it wasn’t necessary, but history and even recent events surrounding bathrooms south of the border have proven fairly conclusively that it’s still relevant and people still need these events to be able to feel confident enough to show who they are. If Yorkton has a Pride event, it’s a way for the city to show that it is proud of all its citizens. This is because Pride is about proving that everyone can be proud of who they are.
It’s easy to pretend that events like Pride aren’t relevant to everyone in a community, but it’s not true. A community is not a bunch of little sub-divided parts, it’s the entire city, in this case the entire region, with everyone in it connected by the place where they live and the people who live around them. Yorkton should celebrate Pride because it’s about people in community, and we should go out of our way to state, without ambiguity, that they are welcome here and we are proud to have them here. Yorkton should be proud of everyone who lives here, and if we can have events to show people who might not otherwise feel as welcome that they belong, it’ll be a great thing for the entire community.
