Maybe we (and I) have always been here

On resistance, Pride, history - and things I have learned about myself

Happy Pride!

Pride feels different this year. Obviously, among all the nonsense society and the government are throwing at trans people, it’s going back to its roots as a protest. There’s an edge to it that, while I wish it wasn’t needed, is quite reassuring to this disabled queer gal. It shows that marginalised people have never and will never give up the fight for our rights. Maybe I needed the reminder.

It feels different personally, too. The first Pride I had while knowing I was queer, in 2023, was when I came out publicly. It felt heady and joyous and deeply, terrifyingly unsettling. I went to events that were not at all my scene because that seemed to be the thing to do. I didn’t know anyone or really myself; everything felt woozy and unstable. I had a lot of fun and I was completely overwhelmed.

Last Pride was different. I’d made friends, found events that were more about community than partying, and even threw Disabled, Queer and Here, which remains a life highlight. But everything still felt new. I was trying to work out so many things: which labels I wanted to use, how I wanted to dress, how I wanted to date. I spent possibly an unreasonable amount of time worrying about a) whether my new friends found my naivety annoying, b) how to integrate who I had been with who I was becoming, and c) the most ridiculous one of all: whether the fact I hadn’t known I was gay until I was 28 meant I was somehow a fraud. I was happier than ever, having more fun than ever, and I was so, so confused about what the hell was happening.

This Pride, though, I feel settled. I know who I am. All those questions have faded into the background; some have just lost their urgency, some I simply don’t feel the need to figure out anymore. And some have actually been answered. And so, I think, has something more existential: a feeling I carried around that something unnameable was wrong. This sounds dramatic, which makes me feel icky, but I don’t know how else to say it. I used to say to the girls that it often felt like everyone knew something I didn’t; like I’d missed a crucial maths lesson in year nine and hadn’t been able to make the sums add up since. X never equalled the right thing. I was pretty convinced the missed lesson was about dating but actually it turned out to be about me. What a learning curve it’s been!

My second family gave me this little light and it sits on my bookshelf as a reminder: be proud

Perhaps the last bit of the jigsaw has been answering that question about integrating old and new versions of myself. When I first came out, things felt so radically different that for a while I felt a sort of thrilling-but-scary compulsion to be a totally different person. Which was, you know, a bit much. Luckily, this feeling also settled down enough that I could work out how the new parts of myself I was discovering fitted in with the old version of me who I still quite liked. Not everything had to be thrown over board. And it turned out that the stuff that did need to be jettisoned was all the things I’d been hiding behind, in a myriad of different ways (very few of which were actually about sexuality or dating; weird). The good stuff could stay.

This all clicked into place in my brain only a few weeks ago, when I was invited to the opening of a new exhibition celebrating how disability and gay rights activists came together in the height of the HIV/Aids crisis to campaign for better healthcare and against stigma. It was a lovely, sombre yet uplifting night, where a group of queer people broke bread together and reflected on those who came before us. For me, it was made even lovelier by the fact I got to go with two brilliant friends I’ve only made since coming out. All those buzzy (and, let’s face it, anxiety-fuelled) questions that filled my head last Pride pale in comparison to the fact that I now get to experience queer culture and queer joy with queer people I love and who love me. Happy bloody Pride indeed.

But there was something deeper. In the exhibition, there was a display of clippings about the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN) with the famous photos of the Campaign For Accessible Transport. Everything in me lit up when I saw them - as this history is so often missing, so often ignored, and yet has been so fundamental to society as a whole and my own understanding of my place in the world. Of course, before long I was telling my friends about DAN and the DDA and Barbara Lisicki and that time we invaded Parliament (thanks for humouring me, pals). What a thrill to share the story of how one of my communities fought for our rights with people from the other, with whom I am now fighting newer if familiar battles. That history is one of the few things that feels like it belongs to new Lucy and old Lucy in equal measure. Maybe we’re not as different as I feared.

And then there were the wider lessons, taking us back to where we started: the coexistence of resistance and Pride, how integral they are to each other. As we demand a more accessible and inclusive Pride - and world - what a thing to see that disabled and queer people have always fought alongside each other and that many brilliant people have existed and campaigned at that intersection. That, in the famous campaigning adage, no matter how new it all has felt to me in the past few years, we have always been here. And when we’ve treated Pride as a protest, we’ve always found a way through.

With solidarity always,
Lucy