A Pride Moment
There was once a woman who had three sons, each more handsome than the next.
It sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, doesn't it? In fact, it's a true story, and one of my favorite Pride moments: up there, in fact, with my first dorm-room kiss from my first boyfriend.
Scene: The community Beltane Pancake Breakfast.
(I live in Paganistan; things like that happen here.)
I'm sitting at a table, talking with the woman with three beautiful sons. Across the table from us, her youngest sits in his boyfriend's lap. They're kissing.
The room is filled with festive pagans. No one even notices the passionate same-sex lip-lock.
A bubble of happiness expands to fill my chest. “I've worked my entire life to get us to a place where two boys can make out in a crowded room, and no one so much as blinks an eye,” I think. “And here we finally are.”
Of course, in the gold of the human heart, there are no unalloyed emotions.
Oh, that lucky, lucky boyfriend.
Out of the blue one night I get a call from my first boyfriend. We haven't spoken since our explosive break-up decades before.
(A convert to Catholicism, who would eventually enter the priesthood, he told me once, “I love you more than I love God,” and then promptly freaked, because it was true. Poor benighted Christian, it never occurred to him that one best does the one precisely by doing the other.)
As we reminisce about our times together, he confirms something that I had long thought I remembered about that very first wine-fueled kiss.
There really were fireworks going off in that room that night.
He saw them too.
Even as I write this, some lucky boy somewhere will be getting his first kiss from another boy.
It will have been something that, like me, he'd always wanted, perhaps without knowing it, but also something that he feared that he could never, ever have.
In that very moment, a world will change forever.
Happy Pride, folks.
We're come a long, hard way to get here.