"WHAT IS GAY PRIDE"?

Rembert Truluck
http://www.truluck.com
January 26, 2001

GAY PRIDE means accepting yourself and celebrating who you are as a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, or Transsexual person. Gay Pride means coming out. When you accept your own sexual orientation and believe in yourself enough to come out to yourself, you have experienced gay pride.

Often the hardest person to come out to is yourself. You can't come out to God. God already knows! God made you the way you are. "It is God who has made us, and not we ourselves. We are God's people." (Psalm 100) The hardest person to accept is yourself. Gay pride always begins with you.

God accepts you because you are made in the image of God. Genesis 1:31 says that when God made you, God said, "That's good, very good."

Self-acceptance is the foundation for extending gay pride into accepting and affirming others. "Accept one another, just as Christ also accepted you, to the glory of God." (Romans 15:7) Are you moved with compassion towards your LGBT brothers and sisters who may be struggling with self-acceptance and are trying to find love, joy, peace and hope in an alien and hostile world? "Compassion" means to feel the stress and pain of others.

GAY PRIDE doesn't just happen. It is hard work to overcome the profound effects of abusive religion and cultural abandonment that afflict all minorities. Self-esteem is the greatest achievement that you can reach in life. Your sense of self-worth is so valuable, that you work hard all of your life to find and express it. To reach your goal of self-esteem and happiness requires knowledge and positive experience.

Part of Gay Pride is learning to think for yourself. My friend Mel White says that we as well as our opponents are "victims of misinformation." I agree. The reason for my web site and book on "Steps to Recovery from Bible Abuse" is to provide accurate relevant factual information to everybody about homosexuality and about spiritual issues that concern all of us.

The Internet is truly an information explosion. The problem is that all sides of every issue are being given in convincing form. Over 55 million web sites are on the Internet now, and over a million new sites are added every month. In 1993, when Bill Clinton became President, there were only 25 web sites on the Internet! Now every "hate group" and every political and religious interest has a web site.

The Internet is filled with "ex-gay" propaganda financed by the conservative religion industry. A steady flow of new books by "ex-gay" forces and other anti-gay organizations is flooding bookstores. You have to be selective about what you read and let into your mind. Know the source of information that is given to you. Question everything. Think for yourself.

Religious bigotry and "the oppressor's wrong, the law's delay, the arrogance of office" plague GLBT people at every turn. Our sense of pride in who we are and our acceptance of ourselves as the children of God in the image of God is not arrogant. Gay pride is basically intense realism. It is humbly facing and accepting our personal truth about who we are. It is denying the homophobic lie that we are an abomination against God and unworthy of the rights and protection enjoyed by everybody else. Gay pride is not

Gay pride is active involvement in politics, community and social action. It can also be active involvement in religion if you do not compromise your truth in order to be accepted and included. Gay pride is resistance to injustice and ignorance in the churches, not a quiet acceptance of prejudice and the unfair use of abusive religion to control you. The method of your personal activism is up to you. Remaining quiet and submissive to abusive religion is negative activism that hurts you and others and erodes pride and self-esteem.

Gay pride is positive. You can speak out for love and truth and demonstrate your acceptance of yourself and others without fighting anybody. Our enemy is not people. Our enemy is ignorance and homophobia. Out-love your enemies. Live the Spirit of Jesus in all of your relationships. Jesus did this and changed the world. So can you.

Rembert Truluck