Pride isn’t for everyone

Growing up in the liberal gay haven of Palm Springs, California, you’d think that I would be used to gay pride. I never really knew why I wasn’t.  In June of 2016, I went to my first Pride Festival in San Francisco with my best friend and a couple of her queer friends. It didn’t leave me feeling any more comfortable with Pride festivities. Long story short, there was a lot of nudity that made me uncomfortable and an overwhelming amount of loud music and crowds I didn’t want to be around. The people I went with thought I was being overdramatic, but I didn’t have the right words at the time to explain why such overt sexuality made me so uncomfortable. If I had known more about asexuality at the time, perhaps I would have been able to help others understand that this particular Pride Festival just wasn’t for me.  

I realized I was on the asexual spectrum (a queer identity that does not experience or rarely experiences sexual attraction) sometime around 2017 and 2018. I didn’t come out until early 2020 before the Pandemic occurred. In Fargo, a friend invited me to walk with her employer for the Gay Pride Parade in August of 2022. This parade was miles better for me as it wasn’t overly loud, nobody really touched me since I wasn’t in the crowd and kept moving and best of all, I saw zero body parts that made me uncomfortable. Still, it wasn’t really something I wanted to do again. Something felt off about Pride to me. 

Since 2022, I started researching about the asexual experience and queer studies. I also downloaded free ebooks and audiobooks from the Libby app (an app we get for free through the NDSU library) to learn more about popular culture surrounding asexuality. The more I learned, the more I felt connected to others like me. I didn’t feel like the difficult-to-date freak that my toxic ex convinced me I was when I initially came out to him. It was during this time of reflection and research that I finally understood why I don’t particularly like Pride.

Truthfully, I have some internal battles I need to work out regarding my asexuality. Part of the reason why it took me so long to come out publicly is because of those ongoing battles. These battles include having a love/hate relationship with my asexuality, dealing with various people not willing to listen to me when I talk about my experiences and attempting to overcome my fear of dying alone due to my asexuality. 

My love/hate relationship depends on the situation I’m in. Now, I try to be very open about who I am instead of hiding it like an ashamed person. However, I also don’t like bringing it up unless it is relevant to the situation. While I am actively working on my shame, shame is the opposite of pride. I feel like this is one of the root causes of why I don’t like Pride much.

Before coming out publicly, I tried coming out to loved ones first. My ex took it very personally, as if it meant he was bad at pleasing a woman (which he was, but I won’t go into that). He tried various things to make me change my mind about who I was, all things except just accepting my newfound identity and listening to me. When I tried to tell my mom, she thought I was coming out as genderqueer and started talking about cells reproducing asexually. I decided to not bring this up with her again. Lastly, I told a friend at church who was out about her asexuality. We were instantly connected. I decided not to come out at church after a parent of one of the teens in the youth group my friend volunteered at complained about her being out as asexual and she lost her volunteer position. These reactions made me worried about unintended consequences for being honest about who I am. 

While it doesn’t matter to me anymore if most people accept or reject me based on my asexual identity, my main concern is how my identity influences my interactions with partners or people who I want to date. A lot of this comes from trauma dealing with my ex. I often fall down the rabbit hole, wondering if I’ll ever find love who accepts me as I am. I also wonder if someone seems fine with it in the beginning and then one day flips out because I am not enough, will my no’s become yes’s to them like it did with my ex. I often worry that my asexuality will be the main factor responsible for whether or not I die alone. Of course these internal webs of complication make it difficult for me to feel proud of my identity. I am at odds with myself. If I could change, I would. 

Overall, these issues are what cause me to not really get Pride. When I found out about National Coming Out Day on Oct. 11 each year, I felt more connected to that. Part of it is because I don’t have to be full of pride or lie about feeling proud. National Coming Out Day instead of celebrating the identity itself encourages and supports people who are coming out, which I have done and honor as a difficult thing to do. It also is close to Asexual Awareness Week at the end of October. I am fine spreading awareness. That feels like a better cause than Pride to me. In fact, I’m open to talking about it and spreading awareness to teach people about what asexuality truly is. Organizations and companies aren’t turning everything rainbow. There are no large events such as parades to expose me to nudity or big crowds. I just get to tell people, “Hey. I exist. More people like me exist. This is what life is like for me as an asexual person.”  Even if my internal battles rage on, I can still feel like a part of Coming Out Day without feeling like a fraud because of my lack of pride.