The people who tell you diversity is dividing America are the same people who’d have told Rosa Parks to wait for the next bus. Pride Month didn’t start as a parade. It started as a riot. A bunch of drag queens and gay kids and trans women at a bar in Greenwich Village got tired of getting arrested for the crime of existing, and one night in 1969, they threw the cops out instead of going quietly. That’s the origin. Not a corporate logo in June – a brick.
And the wild part is how many times this exact scenario has already happened in this country. Women weren’t supposed to vote – too divisive. Black Americans weren’t supposed to sit where they wanted – too dangerous. Workers weren’t supposed to organize – a threat to the natural order. Every group that ever got told to know its place got called the thing tearing the country apart, right up until the moment they made it bigger.
Diversity is one of the greatest strengths of the United States. It is truly our superpower. When you let everybody participate, you don’t just get more people – you get more ways of seeing the problem. The kid who grew up with nothing notices things the kid who grew up comfortable never had to. The nurse, the soldier, the small business owner, the immigrant, the person who had to fight for every inch – they all understand how the world actually works differently. We can all benefit from seeing the full picture. That’s not a feel-good slogan, it’s just how good ideas happen – somebody sees the angle nobody else in the room could see. Tell a whole group they don’t belong, and you don’t just hurt them. You throw out every idea they would have brought, and you make the country dumber and smaller for it.
I’ve spent a big chunk of my life in queer spaces – music, art, the friendships that got me through the years I don’t talk about much. The most resilient, hardest-working people I’ve ever met were the ones who had to fight to be themselves before they could do anything else. They learned early that nobody was handing them anything, and still, they persisted. That’s about as American as it gets.
My favorite show of all time is Drag Race, I’ve watched every episode multiple times. It amazes me what these people can do. They have to do their own makeup. Their own hair. Design and sew their own costumes. Sing, dance, act, and be funny – all at once, all at a professional level, usually on a deadline that would break most people. And they learned how to do all of that while growing up in places that didn’t want them, after going through things that would flatten many people. A lot of them had every reason to give up. They chose to make art instead. It made them grow bigger instead of smaller, and I have an incredible amount of respect for that.
I’m taking notes from them as I start my own fight. It would be easy for me to walk away – to not put myself somewhere I can be criticized and judged and picked apart. I’m choosing to walk toward the light and build the bridge anyway, because I want to be bigger too. Not in name – but in heart.
Today is the first day of Pride Month. My hope is that everyone – all of you – lets yourself feel the joy of it. The joy of being exactly who you are, and of living in a country big enough to hold all of us at once. Celebrate the people who make this place what it is. Celebrate that you get to.
I’m running for Congress because every person in this country deserves the freedom to build their own life. To love who they love. To be who they are. To make their own choices about their family, their future, and how they move through the world. Those decisions belong to individuals – not politicians.