Pride Month at Tildes: #9 - What are you hopeful about?
What are you hopeful about?
The flipside to last week:
Looking forward, what are you hopeful about? What good do you see on the horizon?
You can share hopes that are social, political, personal, or something else entirely.
Addenda:
-
These don’t have to be big picture things — they can be tiny or insubstantial hopes as well.
-
Sharing hope can be hard because it can feel like you’re being dismissive of struggle, but remember that struggle is often possible to endure only because of hope. Posting hope is a way of helping others, not disregarding them.
Event Guidelines
Everyone is welcome to participate. This includes allies! You do not need to identify as LGBT in order to join in the topics.
I will use "queer" and "LGBT" interchangeably as umbrella terms to refer to all minority sexualities and gender identities. These are intended to be explicitly inclusive.
Be kind; be gracious; listen to others; love lots.
Schedule
I won't reveal everything upfront, but with each post I will give a teaser for what's next:
June 1st: Introductions and Playlist
June 4th: Who is a historical LGBT advocate that you admire?
June 7th: What positive changes have you seen in your lifetime?
June 10th: What's something you wish more people understood?
June 13th: Ask almost anything
June 16th: What media representation resonated with you personally?
June 19th: How are things with your family?
June 22nd: What are you worried about?
June 25th: What are you hopeful about?
June 28th: (teaser: ending on a good note)
If for whatever reason you would not like to see these topics in your feed, add pride month at tildes to your personal tag filters.
I work with college students and they delight me with how comfortably they handle gender and sexuality on the whole. Queer and trans youth are coming to my university happier and struggling less than I think they were (I didn't realize I was in that bucket til after college) when I was in school. Still work to do, still all the things but yeah, that makes me feel good.
Similarly, when you put the loud voices of hate aside, most every day folks are supportive, some certainly louder than others, and most can be brought around from uncertainty or distaste into general acceptance. See the Idaho Pride celebration post I made today. So many people showed their support even harder when hate was spoken.
I wear rainbow glasses daily, and I have numerous little moments of someone complimenting my glasses, sometimes in an "I'm an ally and support you" way, sometimes in a "I admire your aesthetic" way, and sometimes, especially when from someone very young, or someone in a red state when I'm traveling through, in a "I see you way. And almost always they have dyed hair or a subtle pin or something that lets me say "I see you" back. And I love those moments. They all make me hopeful for their future experiences.
(Actually 3b but I hated the formatting break.) I tabled at a sporting event for a Pride night this past school year and our mascot came by and greeted us and took pics, then after he left we got a handwritten letter from "a good friend of Mascot" as a college student, thanking us for being there and representing as queer adults and supporting queer students. I cried. And I once again find hope for the future in those moments.
Regarding 1: I'm a teacher, and I feel the same way about my students. It warms my heart to see that they're getting opportunities to know themselves and live openly very early in life. The shame and isolation-heavy paradigm for queer youth that I grew up under is lessening significantly. As someone who effectively feels like I had my adolescence and teenage years stolen from me by the horrors of the closet, it's amazing to see kids and young adults walk a different, much brighter path. It's healing for me.
I'm a high school teacher in a somewhat conservative region and while I've definitely overheard some less than charitable discussions among students of mine, I also recently helped out as a substitute teacher in another class with a trans student, and I was very positively surprised by the fact that despite currently presenting female, everyone used the student's chosen male name, and the student felt safe having pride pins on his backpack. I've since started wearing my ace ring at work in the hopes that it'll be a signal to people in the know that I might be a trustworthy person, though I understand it's pretty subtle and many won't know what it means at all.
It doesn't feel at all dangerous to be queer in public (here at least)! People are kind, supportive, and trustworthy, and anyone who claims to speak against trans people on behalf of the public are a vocal minority trying their damnedest to distort people's perception of reality! I'm so happy to meet new people and not only are they always super chill, I can tell that most of them are not even worked up about the deep-voiced dyke standing in front of then! It really makes me feel so safe, and so hopeful that things will be alright for a good while.