Surprise Pride Morning and a Tourist Beach Afternoon

Our third and only ‘free’ day of our long California weekend dawned with most of us still on east coast time. Breakfast consisted of strawberries, pan dulces for larger humans and olallieberry pie for the littlest. We decided to take advantage of the early hour and sneak down to Pacific Garden Mall to beat the weekend crowd and get some of our Santa Cruz apparel shopping done.

Feeling very satisfied with ourselves and expecting empty avenues and just opening shops. We all stared in awe as we were greeted by closed side streets, tents and TONS of people.

“Wait, is it June first? Ryan asked.

“PRIDE!” I almost screamed.

“What’s pride?” PJ said in a voice that conveyed her thinly vailed opinion that her mother had once again, lost what little mind she had left.

“Oh, you’ll see” I said grinning ear to ear.

Since we were early we still managed to get easy parking and made our way down the roped off streets to the middle drag of the downtown area. A huge crowd was assembling and parade participants were queuing up. This would be PJ’s first parade of any kind, and I thought that was pretty magical. Santa Cruz is 70 miles south of San Francisco and like our northern neighbor has a large LGBTQIA+ community.

This smaller community is loved, celebrated and supported by the larger central coast community. Seeing the whole town decked out in rainbows made my heart swell with a happiness that is hard to articulate.

Lining the streets of downtown there were so many families with kids, some obviously commemorating their first “out” pride. I watched as their friends and family showed up to share in the celebration. This was such a contrast to many of the children who grew up in my generation and those before me, where gender identity and sexual orientation that differed from the norm were deep dark secrets that carried fear, shame and threat of ostracization and violence. I don’t mean to imply that this isn’t the case now, but it is no longer the default. Which I believe to be a vast improvement.

(Side note- gender identity and sexual orientation are two different distinct things, that develop at different times and should not be conflated or confused. Also, being transgender (a gender identity that differs from sex assigned at birth) does not imply any particular sexual orientation. For example, a transgender person can be straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc.)

I have watched so many loved ones grapple with publicly living their identity. I have had many conversations about the deep despair of an inauthentic existence because of the very real fear of harm to their body and soul from an unaccepting larger public. I have lost dear ones to suicide and witnessed the recovery after unsuccessful attempts to end their lives because of the despondency of what living their truth in society would be like. At those times all I could do was to hold space for their feelings, knowing that this is just a little pocket of safety and acceptance in a larger landscape where their terror was completely and empirically justified. At those times all I wanted was to be able to give them the hope I feel at events like pride. When the center of town holds space for a smaller faction and everyone shows up to celebrate the many shades of human existence.

All valid
All loved.

My thoughts were interrupted by cheering as the festivities began. I have difficulty being next to any event like this. The emotion and rawness of these types of gatherings is overwhelming for me. As the parade started, so did my tears, running into the corners of a grin that stretched across my whole face. Remembering beloveds gone too soon and rejoicing that events like this exist for all those who survived traumatic childhoods and now have a better option for their own children.

Since this was the 50th anniversary of Santa Cruz Pride the grand marshal was joined by all previous grand marshals to kick off the festivities, there were memorial posters proudly displayed of past marshals no longer living. Many were noted to have died in the AIDS epidemic of my youth. The whole thing was joyous, colorful, irreverent and just lovely. It was also crowded and loud; as all such things are. After the first waves of floats we made our way back to the car and the other side of town.

This was our designated tourist day. Though we avoided the Beach Boardwalk and most of the other places that my father would have proclaimed “tourist traps”. We did walk down to the beach near the rental. My Godparents came over again and we all spent the day making castles-

Sitting in the sun.

burying each other…

and for some reason un-burying a large rock that the oldest decided must be excavated.

The adults watched the kids, and not so kid play in the sand. We mused about our surprise pride experience. I love that the larger community is not just tolerant of its smaller constituents, but how the whole city holds meaningful space for everyone. We contrasted the experience of our three generations represented in our little knot of sand covered people, from my godparents to our youngest. We talked about how the tired old rhetoric of LGBTQIA+ people being “unnatural” is when even the most haphazard google search can provide evidence to the contrary. Homosexual lifestyles have been observed in more than 1,500 other species of critter; insects, birds, reptiles, fish and mammals. While these behaviors are often couched as aberrations in a religious context there is no such stigma in nature.

Many species of fish crustaceans and mollusks go through a sequentially hermaphroditic state called protandry where they switch from one sex (sex and gender are distinct; sex is biological and gender is a social construct) to the other over a lifetime. Sometimes this change is triggered by situational events and sometimes not. Nature doing natural stuff. Species like Wrasse, a family of fish comprised of over 600 species, exhibit protogynous hermaphroditism changing from female to male. While Clownfish and Garabalidi can change from male to female over their lives. My Godfather and I discussed that these numbers are likely understated since an observer must keep track of a single organism over its whole life to even see that a change has occurred.

Mostly, we talked about how much better it is for my children that these topics are no longer hidden and taboo. For the younger generation and their peers someone’s sexual preference or gender orientation is not the singular defining trait of that individual, it is not seen as all encompassing or even a very interesting aspect of that person.

Just another bit of what makes that everyone unique.

The spectrum of LGBTQIA+ people has been noted in indigenous cultures around the world for tens of thousands on years. In North America, people identified as “two spirit” folk were embraced, accepted and held positions of spiritual importance. They were thought to have a broader view of the human experience. The aberration about this aspect of existence it is the recent persecution of these populations in modern times. The argument that children need to be kept ‘safe’ from their transexual peers only works when you do not consider the trans-child one of those children in need of protection. These communities are not an existential threat to anyone, in fact it is the other way around. Transgender people are four times more likely to experience violence than cisgendered people.

The recent backslide into judgment and needless fear mongering about such things has been daunting in a way that it is also hard to put into words. All I know is that it breaks my heart. It seems like a persecution of a vulnerable minority that poses no inherent hazard to anyone, and confounds non binary sexual identity with sexual deviants or predators.

I understand that for many people who did not grow up in a place with large integrated populations of LGBTQIA+ folk that the whole thing might feel strange. It may seem like a brand new occurrence, when it is ancient as the pyramids. Moreover, the gender identity or sexual orientation of another poses no threat to the whole, rather it makes that population more diverse. I’m not sure when or why that became a bad thing. In nature the more diverse a pollution; the more likely they are to adapt change and avoid collapse, both in terms of genetics and behavior. The world is not black and white, but many shades and colors of existence. I completely acknowledge that there are aspects of systemic integration of LGBTQIA+ that are yet to be worked out. I also know that demonization and discrimination only hold us all back, and are a death sentence to these marginalized communities.

Plus, it’s just fucking unkind.

As the sun drew closer to the horizon, we packed up our gear along with a large portion of sand and headed back toward the rental via the taqueria a block away. We needed to rest up. The next day would be our last on the Pacific and we had a plans to hit up every beach we loved on our way up the coast to San Francisco and then back to Maine.

We walked slowly back, sun soaked, happy and full of pride.

Thank you for reading. Be well!