A Rainbow is an Internal Reflection

My Pocketful of Pride

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose. Thank you for being here. Pocketful of Prose is free for everyone, but you can support this publication by becoming a paid subscriber. If you like what you read, please click the heart at the bottom. This pocket is all about love.  

I have what they call in the printing business, the business that my dad was in for pretty much all his life, an oc, or office correction. My dad would like it stated for the record that he doesn’t always park closest to where he is going. When he goes to the supermarket, he parks where he can protect his car from getting hit by shopping carts. If you are not catching this reference, check out last week’s post on my foibles learning to play music and the two men I love most in the world.

Photo by Carlos de Toro @carlosdetoro on Unsplash

I listened to a poem this week that moved me to tears. It is called “What Love Is,” and it’s from Andrea Gibson’s book, You Better Be Lightening. You can listen to Andrea read the poem here. It is about the night Andrea met their girlfriend’s parents. It is about a night where they desperately tried to use love and poetry to bridge the divide that separated them from these two people they hadn’t even met yet. Andrea says in the poem that it had been “two decades since (her girlfriend) had come out...two decades since her heart was something her parents sincerely asked about.” Andrea’s girlfriends’ parents had shown up to see Andrea perform, to meet the person their daughter loved, and this was a huge fucking deal. Andrea was feeling tremendous pressure to reach them, to let her girlfriends’ parents see what was in their heart. Andrea realizes that they “better be lightning,” and of course, because they are Andrea Gibson, they are.   

I am not Andrea Gibson, and I am not sure that I can be lightening in this post. Fortunately, the stakes are not as high as they were for Andrea on stage that night, but this one is important to me, so I’m going to do my best to try.  

I wanted to do a Pride post this month, to support the LGBTQIA+ community, to champion the idea that people have a right to love who they love and that those same people deserve to be treated with love and respect.   

My plan for this post was to include some of my students’ stories along with my daughter’s story. Anna, though, who is normally pretty enthusiastic about my posts, just kind of shrugged when I shared my plan with her as I dropped her off at her high school. 

“Okay,” she said, I guess you can tell my story. 

When I was in college, I took a mission trip to Belize. We visited orphanages, painted decks and fences, played with kids and shared our stories about how God worked in our lives. These stories were called testimonies. Everyone going on the trip seemed to have one, but I didn’t know what to say. When we were asked to practice our testimony, I felt stuck, so I told my mom’s story.  

In my mom’s story, I came out looking pretty good.  

My family and I watch a show called Kim’s Convenience. In a recent episode, one of the main characters, Janet, starts volunteering, teaching photography classes in a program for disadvantaged youth. To gain approval from her students, Janet tells them about her teenage years when she ran away from home and joined a gang. Her students love listening to her tell her story. The only problem is, it isn’t her story. It is her brother’s.  

In the Poetry Unbound Substack this week, Padraig posed one of his infamous questions. This week it was “What helps you see things in a new way?” Thankfully, there are many things that help me see things in a new way... reading, talking, listening to kind, empathetic, intelligent people, gardening, running. This week it was running. On my run, I realized that I was about to make the same mistake I made years ago. I was about to pull a Janet.  

I was going to swoop in and steal Anna’s story, voice frustrations at the ignorance of others and position myself as an ally and a supporter. I was about to come out looking really good. But thanks to the kind, empathetic, intelligent people in my lives, I am seeing things in a new way. So, in this post, I am not going to tell Anna’s story.  I’m going to tell my Pride story, and it’s one I’m not that proud of. I don’t think I’m going to come out looking that good.  

But Jesus said the truth shall set you free, and Elizabeth Gilbert says, “At the center of grace is just this integrity of great truth telling.”

So here goes. Without further ado, today’s pocket.  

I know someone who once asked why gay people needed to adopt the rainbow as a symbol. “The rainbow is a promise from God,” they said. “Couldn’t they choose something else?” People sometimes say awfully ignorant things.  

So many kids have come into my classroom over the years, told me that their parents do not want to call them by their name, that their family doesn’t accept them for who they are, that they can’t tell their parents that they are gay. 

But I’m not going to tell their story. 

I’m going to tell the story of the ignorant ass person who made the comment about the pride symbol because that ignorant ass person was me 25 plus years ago.  

I wish I could say that my comment about the pride flag was my most ignorant one, but it wasn’t. When I first started teaching, I also believed gay people shouldn’t raise children. I remember debating this with fellow Teach for America teachers on a NY city bus. I clutched my faith like a handbag somebody might steal and spoke of ideas rather than actual people.  

I can’t pinpoint exactly what led me to those beliefs. I don’t feel like I was raised in a family where anti-gay messages were prominent. But while I know for certain that we embraced people of every color and creed, sexuality was the one thing I was less sure of.  

I didn’t think I had the freedom to explore my sexuality when I was a teenager. I thought being straight was my only option. I sometimes had thoughts about women, but those thoughts shamed me. In high school, I thought being attracted to women would be world ending.  

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

While I don’t remember being specifically told that it was not okay to be attracted to other women, I feel like these messages were in the air I breathed, just like other messages about how I should fit myself into a cultural container.  Be straight. Be thin. Be beautiful. Be perfect. Be in this box. The box limited and confined me, and it limited and confined my view of others. It made me small.  

In response to Padraig’s question, “What helps you see things in a new way?” one of the Poetry Unbound commenters said something this week that is still sticking with me. They wrote, “I have a lot of friends who are performance artists, dancers, drag queens and kings, burlesque performers. They’ve taught me a lot about accepting what’s in you, letting it breathe and looking out at the world through your own eyes. They have access to a freedom I’m still learning.” 

There are people who put us in boxes and people who help us break out of them. 

My students broke me out of my box.  

I think it was a light hammering over time rather than an explosion. It started with Toni, my fifth-grade student who wore dresses instead of pants, who asked us to use they/them pronouns. It was Toni’s parents who sat beside them beaming with pride and love. How could I not love Toni? How could I not do anything but protect, honor and respect their voice? How could I not listen to their story and hear their truth? 

Because of the gentle tapping of my students, I learned a new way of seeing. I see so much more than I did 25 years ago. I even see rainbows differently.  

Rainbow over Spokane fire station

A rainbow is an internal reflection. Literally. We see rainbows because light reflects fully within another medium, such as water.  

A rainbow is a complete reflection of light.  

My students taught me how to be a more true, loving version of myself. I love myself, and I love my students. Love is an internal reflection.  

We can learn to see things in a new way. We can change. I did. Change doesn’t happen from yelling across the divide. Change happens when we try to be lightning, when we speak of love. Change sometimes begins with gentle questions. It happens when we sit with each other at the table and listen, when we are willing to have hard conversations with people we care about, people who love deeply but may need a little help getting out of the box.  

Thanks for reading and listening. 

I am including a few book, show and Substack recommendations in this post to celebrate Pride and spread the love.  

Pride Recs

1. “GOD LOVES YOU GAY GAY GAY,” by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. Danya writes the Substack Life is a Sacred Text, “an expansive, loving, everybody-celebrating, nobody-diminished, justice-centered voyage into one of the world’s most ancient and holy books.”

2. The Poet X, by Elizabeth Acevedo. This is a novel written in verse, and it’s a great choice for teens who are trying to find their voice and themselves. I may have read this entire book during a pretty boring professional development. The truth shall set you free, right?

   

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3. The House on the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune. I read this book last summer, and it was such a good escape read. It is a fantasy book about a case worker who works for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. I suggest it here because representation matters. People need to see themselves in books. People need to see people loving who they love in books. I heard T.J. has a new book out. If you have read it, please give us the scoop.

   

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4. Fortune Feimster’s Netflix show, Sweet and Salty. All of Fortune’s shows are amazing and hilarious. Again, representation matters. But this one is really special as Fortune is introduced by her mom, and at the end of the special, the Carolina Voices, who perform mostly gospel and church music and which I believe Fortune’s mom belongs to, come out singing and wearing pride scarves.

Speaking of moms, last week when my mom visited, she told me that I always had to have the last word when I was a kid. I told her I did not.

But to prove her wrong. I’m going to close with a quote from Gilbert Baker, friend of Harvey Milk and the person who designed the original pride flag.

“Our job as gay people was to come out, to be visible, to live in the truth, as I say, to get out of the lie.” Gilbert Baker

Rainbow Right at Home (View from my balcony)