Pride 2011

This weekend was the Twin Cities' Pride festival and I felt heavily pressure by, surprisingly, my straight friends to go. So I did. Yay.

For those of you who don't know me well, I've never really felt much of a connection with the gay community. It's generally because I really don't have many things in common with other gay men aside from my love of Lady Gaga and, honestly, I find them pretty annoying. Gay men are everything I dislike about men (which, granted, is pretty much everything) combined with everything I find unattractive/dislike about women.

Lesbians, on the other hand, I love. Seriously, they rule. They're the few things I like about men combined with the very many things I like about women... and, best of all, there's no physical attraction from either direction so things never get weird! Woo hoo!

Anyway, so I went to Pride this weekend and it was kind of fun I guess. I did some volunteering and met some awesome lesbians. However, if I never see glitter or hear music that could easily serve as the soundtrack for a porno, I'd be completely okay with that. There was one story in particular that I wanted to share because I think it teaches an important lesson.

It's no secret that I'm a pretty hardcore agnostic and am not a fan of religion and especially Christianity as it seems to be obsessed with denying gays rights... or at least that's how many of it's followers choose to interpret it. I was pretty much expecting there to be tons of those crazy religious people with their "Stop sinning!" signs. Surprisingly, I saw none all weekend. What I did see, however, was a ton of Christians handing out free water and just generally being accepting and telling everyone there that they accepted and loved them regardless of their sexual orientation and that they just wanted them to be happy. It's been a while since my Catholic school days and I've been using my Bible as a paper weight, but I feel like that's what Jesus would want, as well as a supposedly all-loving God.

The take home lesson is to just accept others and also to act in (positive) ways that break stereotypes. You might have, at the very least, a slightly less negative opinion of that group.

That's all I wanted to share. Now, I'm going to go back to having nothing to do with the gay community for the rest of the year.