We’ve hated lesbians since Regina George called Janis Ian a d*ke. In locker rooms, girls shielded their exposed bodies from the suspected girl-liker, men get angry at women who aren’t attracted to them, and some think that two girls dating is an opportunity for them to insert themselves in their relationship. I’ve heard arguments in the middle-school gym locker room over whether lesbians should be allowed in the locker room. I’ve seen news stories of women who refused to kiss on public transport and were beaten as a cause. The history of secrecy that stemmed from survival. Lesbians have been through so much as a community and yet we are still here. There is a great amount of discourse in present-day media regarding the celebration of LGBTQ+ identities. Shock-value political influencers claim that they aren’t homophobic, but then turn around and say that we don’t need whole months, parades, or Target sections to ourselves. Random Twitter verified anchors or podcast hosts tweet about how gay characters in Children’s shows are “sexualizing” our kids while simultaneously gushing over the subliminal flirting between Ellie and Carl during the flashback scene in Up. The sole purpose of the pride movement exists is to decrease the stigmatization of marginalized identities. By criticizing our happiness in our identity, these individuals are inadvertently adding to the need to have these celebrations of them.

My grandparents had long claimed that their distaste for the LGBTQ+ people was founded in their Catholicism. They insisted that “Dios no hace a la gente de esa manera” (God doesn’t make people that way), and passed their beliefs onto my father. I don’t blame them for thinking this way, they come from Mexico which was colonized into being a majority Catholic country. Despite the innocence of their beliefs, it still hurt me as a child. I thought that I was going to be damned for all eternity for loving who I was born to love. My grandparents used the same defense that most homophobic people use to defend their discriminatory actions, their faith. Faith has been used to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people for centuries, from shunning gay people from society in the 1700s to the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in 2017. The faith-based argument against gay people has recently been falling apart. The word “homosexual” didn’t appear in the Christian bible until 1946, the interpretation of “man lay with man” has been turned now to pedophelia, and now progressive Christians are beginning to accept gay people. Churches now recognize the harm they have done to the community, and acknowledge the importance of the pride movement for our healing and incorporate that into their churches. They put pride flags outside their doors, created slogans such as “All are Welcome”, and preach how everyone is equal under God’s eyes. The fallacies that used to dominate in religious contexts have faded and the pride movement dims a bit more as acceptance bleeds through.

The mass majority of the straight community thinks that being a lesbian is as simple as they believe their sexuality is. Being a lesbian is not just the “Interested in Women” button on Tinder, the girlfriends, or the gay bars, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to sexual orientation. It’s an entire community of non-men who have similar life experiences and struggles with their identities. It’s the oppression and struggles that create such a tight-knit community and that gives the underlying understanding between lesbians. When you meet another lesbian, it’s almost like you’ve met someone from a past life, a distant relation but you still have the faint string of knowing between you two. When I was a child, my best friend at the time had a lesbian aunt. When I met her, I became invested in her. I asked her all sorts of questions that would have been considered invasive being asked by anyone else. She was the first openly lesbian person that I had met in the short years of my life. For the thousands of straight people I had met in my early years, I had met one that matched how I identified. For straight people, they can look around and easily find someone that coincides with their identity. Whether it’s through the media, parents, teachers, or public figures, it’s not an honorable feat when a straight person says they found a heterosexual couple. For homosexual people, it’s almost like finding a needle in a haystack.

The misconception people not in the lesbian community or even the LGBTQ+ community hold is that they think that the term “community” is used lightly. They think that the only thing that holds us together is that we have the commonality of liking the same gender. Like an awkward Christmas Eve party where the only thing that links you to an old cousin twice removed Joe is the slightest bit of blood connection, you might have. Or straight people think that we have the same relation to our sexuality as they do to theirs. To straight people, their sexuality is something that is a fleeting feeling in their minds. A rush that comes when they see someone cute walking down the street, or the happiness that comes when thinking of walking down the aisle. To us, it’s trauma, crying, and self-hatred. The concept that straight people cannot seem to grasp is the extreme chokehold our identity has over us. For heterosexual people, the scariest concept that relationships have is rejection. It’s going up to a boy’s locker and the worst that can happen is him saying, “Sorry, I don’t really like you like that.” This fear is soul-crushing, but I ask straight people to take a step in lesbians’ shoes. The worst thing that could happen for a homosexual person asking their crush out is violence. For my brother when he asked his crush out, it resorted to one of the worst outcomes. He was outed to his entire grade and was brutally bullied. I heard him crying through our thin connected walls and had the deepest sense of dread in my stomach. If this could happen to my own brother it could happen to anyone, including myself. I deeply suppressed my identity and decided I could force myself to be happy with a man. It was a means of survival, not comfort.
When same-sex marriage was legalized, I saw the cheering on the TV, the rainbow flags flying throughout the crowd, and two girls kissing each other. I didn’t know what was happening. I asked my father, “Why are they so happy?” to which he responded, “Two girls and two boys can get married now. Isn’t that weird?” I took his thoughts into account. If he thought it was weird, therefore, I should as well, “Yeah that’s weird.” Years have passed, I’m in my middle school band room. I looked to my feet and my heart was pounding as my crush smiled at me. I wanted to be so close to her. Closer than our physical bodies would conform and contort per the laws of physics. I had thought every girl looked at her peers like this. Every girl looked at the face of her female friend and couldn’t find a single flaw to it. I crumpled these thoughts into a ball and shoved them down my throat where they dissolved in my stomach acid. A never-ending stomach ache began that day. Freshmen year, the queer community was introduced to me. I scrolled through endless videos on social media of lesbians sharing their journeys and struggles with their identity and queerness. I was so interested in the content and couldn’t figure out why. Ever slowly, the crumpled thoughts were unfolding and the stomach ache was resolving as if I had been drugged with a painkiller that night. I read articles, Instagram posts, videos, took quizzes, anything to get the puzzle pieces to align themselves in my brain. Months later, I looked in the mirror. My bags had grown into noticeable “U”’s and my hair barely formed itself in its usual curl. I said in a quiet voice, barely audible, “I’m a lesbian.” My story is merely one of the thousands, and it would be considered one with a happy ending. My struggles, however valid, were still “happy” because I wasn’t killed or kicked out of my home because of how I identify. We need to celebrate our identities so these false “happy” endings turn into real ones.
Movements die out once their purpose has been served. Our goal should be to get rid of these movements in the sense that we no longer need them anymore. Once the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the Abolitionist party died out because everything they were fighting for was achieved. With the legalization of homosexual marriage, we are one step closer to getting rid of the pride movement, but at the rate we’re going it doesn’t look like we will get a break from the vibrant colors of the pride flag. Whereas straight people might think they’re getting more and more tolerant, they might not realize the sheer amount of homophobia that is ingrained into our society. In daily conversation, it’s assumed that you are straight whether it’s a clerk asking, “do you know if your husband would want a rewards card of his own?” or even telling young girls, “you’ll understand when you get married to a nice young man one day.” It’s hard for straight people to face that their everyday language is laced with the unsavory flavor of heteronormativity, but these conversations are supposed to be uncomfortable. Accepting the LGBTQ+ community isn’t just captioning a post #Ally on Instagram, it’s dismantling society’s norms to accommodate those who were born at the bottom of the social hierarchy. I’m not going to sugarcoat it, being an ally is hard, but if you don’t contribute to the change, you’re continuing the silence of queer people. Even if you are a part of the LGBTQ+ community there are still ways that you can speak up for other members of the community. Speak up for the letters that don’t pertain to you, for disabled queer people, LGBTQ+ people of color, etc. Knowing you are harming the community is the first step to growth. If you realize that something you’ve been doing has been continuing the oppression of queer people, now’s the time to change. It’s okay if you don’t get it right away, all that matters is that you’re trying your best to be a better ally and person.