Joie d’Eve: Bursting With Pride

Standing behind my kid for Pride Month and every month

As a teenager and young adult, I always celebrated Pride Month – why would I not? Growing up in New Orleans’ thriving arts community (my mother worked at the Contemporary Arts Center for the majority of my childhood), gay people were all around me and were some of my favorite humans.

I remember being about 5 and hearing my mom refer to “Bobby’s boyfriend.”

“Bobby has a boyfriend?” I asked. “But Bobby is a boy!”

“Boys can like boys, and girls can like girls,” my mom told me, and I said, “Oh, OK,” and that was the end of it.

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In high school, I had a “straight but not narrow” button on my backpack, attended Gay-Straight Alliance club meetings, and went to drag brunches with groups of friends both gay and straight. Well into my 30s, I went to rallies in support of marriage equality, and in June 2015, after the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, I took a video of my 8-year-old daughter reading Justice Kennedy’s statement: “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. … They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.” We went down to Jackson Square with some of our friends and cheered and waved Pride flags.

But then, it all changed in 2019 when my daughter came out as queer. I don’t mean that my feelings or values changed – I mean that it became personal in a way it hadn’t fully been before. I’d always had gay friends and supported gay rights, but now I had a child to support, and there is nothing I take more seriously than that. Everything felt amplified, and I embraced her identity wholeheartedly. I was even more all in. We went to Pride as a family. We bought rainbow flags.

Then, within a couple of years, by mid-2021, my daughter changed her pronouns to “they/she” and changed her name (their name) from Ruby to Rowan. Now this … this was harder for me than I expected. I loved the name I’d given her, I’d picked it out specifically to honor someone special to me, and I thought it was beautiful and fitting. It hurt to have a name I cherished rejected. But I knew this was a me problem and not a Rowan problem, and over time, I made my peace with the new name. We still went to Pride as a family. We still hung out our rainbow flags. Rowan participated in several walkouts and protests, and I cried happy tears to watch kids being brave enough to fight for their rights, their identities.

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Now things are changing yet again – the anti-LGBTQ+ laws that have loomed over our state for several years are going to become a reality. Rowan, with just one more year of high school left, is not planning to stay in the state. But I am staying, and I’m fighting. It is my job as a parent and a citizen to advocate for a world where queer people can live authentically and without fear.

This will be a different Pride month than previous ones, I suspect, but like all Pride celebrations, we will be out there as a family. We will continue to honor the beauty and resilience of the LGBTQ+ community and surround one another with love and support – giving us strength for the challenges ahead.

Queer people are still all around me and are still some of my favorite people. No matter what else has changed, that has not and never will.

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Happy Pride, NOLA!

 


For more Eve, check out her blog “Joie d’Eve” on Tuesday mornings at myneworleans.com

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