Honoring Pride Month: A Personal Reflection By Virgil Emily, City Year Silicon Valley

Celebrating & Honoring LGBTTQIAP+ Pride Month with a Personal Reflection from Virgil Emily, Student Success Coach for City Year Silicon Valley

I’ve identified as non-binary for about a year now. Almost nothing has changed for me. I dress more or less the same, save for some feminine additions to the wardrobe, I listen to a lot of the same music, I still yearn for approval I’ll never receive.

Nothing has changed, except for how fearful the headlines often make me.

During my waking hours, I feel forced to grapple with the unavoidable fact that queer existence in America always has been and continues to be dangerous.

Our nightclubs are subject to attack, hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community are at a staggering record-high, and our very ability to exist in spaces such as bathrooms matching our chosen gender identity and classrooms is being legislated out of existence by lawmakers distinctly unopaque in their hateful motivations. Access to essential health-care, and especially gender-affirming care, is much worse on average, and is being made even harder to access depending on which state one resides in.

The thing about queer existence is that it’s an overtly revolutionary act. It is a mode of being that serves to posit that the chains of history, of religion, of socially-constructed views regarding sex and gender, need no longer apply. It serves to suggest that we need only be beholden to the dreams laying upon faraway horizons and the tender exhilaration of the love and joy found along the way there.

It is unknown, and thus very frightening for those not in the know.

Queer existence is thus most often lived amongst the margins. It means to consume affirming literary works in seclusion, seeking to feel comfort in a lived experience frequently deemed improper at best, and damning at worst.

It means to look for solidarity not in open dialogue, but in the styling of hair, in subtle allegory, in the slightest of smiles whispering wordlessly yet sonorous all the same.

It means to mirror Ophelia from Hamlet, sitting by the riverbank in deep contemplation of one’s own mortal coil, ruminating on souls swept out to sea in days not long past.

Still, for every moment of despair I have in regard to queer acceptance, I remind myself of Obergfell v. Hodges, of the growing numbers at the pride parades every year, of the boom of movie-stars and pop singers living harmoniously in the spotlight. There is still much work to be done, but a lot of progress that has been made in recent times.

As we enter June once more, I remain cautiously optimistic for the day where everyone, children especially, can partake in their truest selves. I hope that this day is soon to come, that victory for compassion above all else is all but inevitable in the long-run.

“I wait with unabashedly awed suspense for this very fateful moment, like a sunflower, proudly basking under the palest of moonlight.”