Each year June rolls around and we celebrate Pride Month. As a pansexual woman, I am proud all day and everyday. There is never a moment that I do not fully support all members of the LGBTQ+ community.
But Pride Month is important for so many reasons. June 1969 saw the start of huge changes within the LGBTQ+ community with the Stonewall Riots, a catalyst for LGBTQ+ rights.
Pride Month is for celebrating, accepting, educating and raising awareness. We have come a long, long way since 1969 but we still have a long, long way to go. We must continue to teach acceptance and raise awareness of all the issues that those in the LGBTQ+ community still face.
We are powerful because we have survived.
Audre Lorde
So how do we support the LGBTQ+ community this Pride Month?
Whether you are an active part of the community or an ally, there are so many ways to show your support to the community.
Everybody deserves to feel safe and loved, to be truly and unapologetically their authentic self. So here are a few ways that you can show your support:
Get Educated
Read books. Watch films/documentaries. Ask questions. There is so much to learn about the LGBTQ+ community. There’s long and important history to tell how people fought for their rights, how the LGBTQ+ culture evolved to be what it has become to today.
Familiarise yourself with the different terms used by those in the community and what they all mean. Learn about the different identities and how to use the right pronouns and be inclusive of everybody.
Find out about all of the struggles that are still being faced- discrimination and exclusion. What are the problems being faced, why is this happening, what can we do to help?
Be There
Fly a flag. Wear a badge. Show up and speak up.
It doesn’t need to be a huge grand gesture, just allow people to see that you are there. Not everyone has support around them and just seeing that they are not alone and that there are people that understand and care can make a huge difference to someone’s life.
You may never face the issues that the LGBTQ+ community do, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t stand out against them. Speak up. Call out your friends. Use your platform. Show your support by using your voice to amplify the voices of the LGBTQ+ community.
Acceptance
I am an active member of the LGBTQ+ community. I’m volunteering to help out at Bude Pride this year. I have a non-binary bestfriend, a Queer sister and couldn’t be more accepting of everyone and their differences if I tried… but that doesn’t mean I always understand.
When I first met a non-binary individual, I didn’t get it. I had so many questions about how someone could be neither male nor female- it wasn’t ignorance, it was lack of understanding. Now, two years on if we’re being totally honest… I still don’t understand. But that’s okay. I don’t need to understand their experiences and feelings for them to be valid.
I made mistakes. When I first met my bestfriend, they weren’t open about how they identify. So once they were, there were lots of mistakes. There were lots of pronoun slip ups, and many intrusive questions. I didn’t want to cause any emotional upset, I wanted to understand, so that I could get it right.
Mistakes are okay, ignorance is not.
Others don’t always get it right, sometimes we don’t know how to approach things. Not everyone is as lucky as I was in the sense that they were willing to hear my questions and that they understood I wasn’t deliberately being offensive- I was trying to learn so that I could do my best to be supportive.
During my fight for the LGBTQ+ community I have found that the most basic peace of advice I can give to anyone wanting to support the LGBTQ+ community is:
You don’t have to understand something to respect it.
Here are some important resources to help LGBTQ+ find support for them:
The LGBT Health and Wellbeing Helpline is 0300 123 2523.
LGBT Health has some amazing resources for a variety of different things and is worth checking out as an active member of the LGBTQ+ community or as an ally!
LGBTQ+ History Month has a list of different sources for some amazing information such as books, TV and film.
Itís nearly impossible to find educated people for this subject, but you sound like you know what youíre talking about! Thanks
Good post. I learn something totally new and challenging on blogs I stumbleupon on a daily basis. Its always useful to read content from other authors and practice something from their websites.