Soon I leave for the Minneapolis Gay Pride Celebration. This gay grandmother will proudly accompany my beautiful lesbian daughter, daughter in law, and their new baby girl, and spend my day with many other young beautiful, loving Rainbow Families, and thousands of powerful gay and lesbian sisters and brothers.
I will spend the day breathing in the power of freedom that fills Loring Park every year. Because this year, more than ever before, I am aware that it IS the energy of freedom itself, that is liberated when these thousands who refuse to be silenced, refused to hide, refuse to be maginalized , refuse to be oppressed and controlled come together for this celebration.
I want to gaze hard at all the powerful young faces I will see, because it is that kind of power, that kind of strength that will keep all of us, gay and straight, free. to live lives of our own choosing. I want to soak up that power for myself, so I can keep on fighting the forces that would take personal freedoms away from all of us.
I want to watch the children, the rainbow children of all ages, raised by solid, stable gay and lesbian parents, who are growing up free of the burden of bigotry, and imagine how they will contribute to their adult world to come.
For this short time, I will set aside everything but the sheer joy of seeing my own children able to live in a freedom I couldn’t even imagine in my day, and the certainty that I sometimes forget, that positive chance in not only possible, it also can be permanent. Because no one I see today is every going to go back to any closet. Ever.
Freedom. This is a celebration of the very freedoms being threatened now in America, by those who will, if allowed, chip away at all personal freedoms, until all that are left are those they deem to grant us.
Its not just about celebrating the freedom to be gay. It’s about celebrating the hard won rights of all Americans to personal freedom and equality.
That’s what I will be celebrating this weekend.
