KarMel Scholarship 2006
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Best Gay Pride “Everlast” By
Tawal
Panyacosit Jr. |
Desciption of Submission: “An essay on the meanings of Pride through
the years.” - Tawal
Why Karen and Melody Liked
It: This essay truly defines what is is to have gay
“pride”.
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Pride is telling
your best friend you’re bisexual at fourteen. Pride is telling your best
friend you’re really gay at
seventeen. Pride is, haphazardly, mentioning your new boyfriend to the woman standing
next to you on the bus to work. Pride is speaking
up when your co-workers make homophobic remarks. Pride is speaking up when your
best friends make homophobic remarks. Pride is coming
out to your mother. Pride is your
mother coming out to her co-workers and friends when a year before she made
you promise never to tell a living soul. Pride is coming
out to all your friends two weeks after you promised yourself you would; then saying “yes” when asked to speak in front of
five hundred of your classmates about your experiences as Gay Asian-American man.
Pride is actually doing it. Pride is
running into and up to your primary school teacher in
the Castro after attending your first queer youth conference. Pride is losing
one hundred pounds of both physical and psychological weight when you realize
that real love doesn’t expire and
that just maybe you do love
yourself. Pride is
singing along at the top of your lungs, while gyrating
your hips and flailing your arms to Gloria Gaynor’s disco anthem “I am what I
am”. Pride is
speaking both of the native tongues of my immigrant parents better than my
own as an infant, distancing myself away from their respective cultures and
thus languages through adolescence, only to redevelop my fluency by haltingly
telling my mother about the new boy I met. Pride is speaking
up when your best friends make racist remarks. Pride is speaking up when your
mother, errantly, makes racist remarks. Pride is marching
for the first time…and the second, and the third. Pride is
remembering how far you’ve come from when you attended the “gay parade” in
middle school with your friends, completely closeted, isolated, compliant and
complicit, to the point where you’re standing on your neighbor’s doorstep
informing him of the escalating violence against LGBT people and the need for
us all to rise up, band together, and organize. Pride is continuing
to fight for same-sex marriage despite
the calls to settle for domestic partnership or civil unions and moving
forward in spite of the apparent scapegoating
of our community by our closest allies. Pride is who we
were, are, and will be, and what we did, do, and have yet to do. Pride is ubiquitous,
quotidian, and vital to our existence. Pride is this. |
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