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Gay Pride is a place where scores of people set up camp in a parking lot, pitch shade tents and place beach chairs in small circles near the bumpers of theirs cars, and tailgate all day. As I quickly learned, this celebration is not for the faint of heart. Which made me wonder, if I couldn’t even say that I was going to Gay Pride, did I belong there? And to further complicate the issue, my conflicted feelings only ratcheted up a notch when I arrived at the event for the first time.
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#WHEN IS GAY PRIDE IN BALTIMORE FULL#
I did this regardless of whether my work environment was friendly or hostile, full of open or close-minded people and even regardless of whether I was in or out of the closet at work. For instance, at one point, if during the week leading up to Pride a coworker asked my plans for the weekend, I’d find myself spouting a vague laundry list of things I’d be doing, never once mentioning the thing I would actually be doing. Gay Pride weekend has always posed something of a challenge for me as it causes throngs of contradictory feelings to well up deep inside. Perhaps the most telling marker of my personal growth is the fact that I’ve attended Baltimore’s annual Gay Pride celebration during at least six years since coming out. The good news is that this diagnosis wasn’t fatal.īut that was 13 years ago and thankfully I have evolved, if only incrementally. I tried to tell myself that I’d get used to being perpetually introduced as my girlfriend’s “friend” or “roommate” in a whole host of awkward situations… There were going to be things I’d always envisioned for myself that were no longer possible, at least not in the traditional or legal sense - big things, like getting married and having a nice, neat nuclear family. So while it was nice that things made sense in this whole new way, more than anything I understood that living with this diagnosis was going to take a lot of adjusting. Sure, there was a small but inevitable sense of relief because I finally understood what had been causing the symptoms I’d been experiencing for most of my life (the super-close friendships with girls that mimicked relationships right down to the dramatic breakup, that fact that in college I loved taking naps with my girlfriends much more than I ever liked sharing my bed with any guy, and the way that I sometimes felt shy and nervous around certain girls). In fact, when I think about it, coming to terms with being gay felt more like getting diagnosed with some kind of non-fatal disease. None of the conversations began with my saying, “I have some really great news to share…” The notion that I would ever feel proud of being a homosexual was laughable. With great reticence, I began to tell people about my sexuality. In that moment I knew that I was going to be gay because nothing had ever made me feel the way that her kiss did. It was an important distinction that seemed perfectly logical, until many months later when the manager at the restaurant where I was waitressing put her hand on my knee and leaned in to kiss me. I might be gay, I thought, but I’m never going to be gay. On the contrary, the moment I realized I was gay I swore to myself that I would never tell another human being and I promptly went out to a bar and made out with a boy from the Naval Academy. Proud seemed like the last word I would ever use to describe my feelings surrounding the discovery of my sexuality. It was a phrase similar to those such as random order, small crowd, alone together, definite possibility, a phrase that got thrown around often, but in reality was impossible. Which is why, when I began the process of coming out 13 years ago, the idea of gay pride seemed like nothing more than an oxymoron. It’s an emotion that always connects to some sort of accomplishment, something that calls for celebration, something you can’t wait to announce to the world, to scream from the rooftops. Pride is a word that has always evoked certain images in my mind: a father looking on after he’s let go the back of his child’s bike seat for the very first time or a teary-eyed mother watching her son or daughter walk across a stage to receive a diploma. In this week’s creative nonfiction essay, Baltimore writer Danielle Ariano says she wasn’t always loud and proud about her lesbian status - even now, 13 years after coming out, she admits to a few mixed feelings.