Part of what makes Legal Counsel for Youth and Children (LCYC) an effective organization is the focus on recognizing and celebrating the unique qualities each of our staff members possess. This month’s blog post will be quite different than our past posts as it will be an entirely personal reflection offered by myself, the Office & Legal Assistant aka the Unicorn. As I am generally the first voice you hear when you call our mainlines, I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself in an authentic way. This month was also the perfect month for me to share as it holds LGBTQIA Pride and Juneteenth in its boarders, two significantly connected events that are a part of who I am and what inspires my work with LCYC.
Though still in the throes of the dumpster fire that was left by 2020, it is honestly my favorite time of year! Not only do I get to enjoy Juneteenth aka “BBQ Day,” but the whole month is also devoted to LGBTQIA PRIDE! There is a general sense that we’ve made it through something, which can either inspire us to continue moving forward or we can get stuck in the “nostalgia” of the late 1900’s. (P.S. I heard this phrase used by a young person, it made me realize I have moved into the vintage section.) Moving forward into this post-pandemic era, the opportunity to reshape how we connect is more present than ever before and the space do it in continues to expand.
During this special month I have set the intention to be even more authentically present with every person I get to engage with. The idea behind my intention, is to connect with people in the unabashed fullness of who I am. Think if you will, “Dropping the Mask” of conforming to “societal norms” and engaging with the people around you with complete vulnerability. This audacious boldness is inspired by the icons of the LGBTQIA movement who simply stopped adapting to what was expected of them, which created incredible changes throughout the world in less than 100 years. In “coming out of the closet” this experience is shared among my fellow LGBTQIA community and often leads to impactful self-expression that is celebrated more in pop culture than ever before.
We can dig into the all the ongoing struggles, discrimination, biases, etc.; but we can also focus on creating the future we desperately want to see by living fully like it has already happened in this very moment. When thinking of how to communicate this, I kept seeing the beautiful fully inclusive LGBGTQIA Pride Flag. As it has evolved over the years, so has the opportunity for the diverse groups represented by it to be seen and heard.
When first created in 1978 by Gilbert Baker, the Pride flag represented the bold statement of the mere existence of the LGBTQIA community. In 2017, Philadelphia based artist Amber Hikes, directed a team to add in colors to represent and make a public declaration that Black and Brown lives and experiences are a foundation to the LGBTQIA community’s ongoing fight towards equality. This first “update” was received with trepidation but has quickly become widely accepted and supported. In 2018, Daniel Quasar redesigned the flag to include the Trans community and called it his redesign the “Pride Progress” flag. This validation of the Trans community created a visual signal that has now opened the door to significantly more platforms for trans persons to speak from. This year, designer Valentino Vecchietti has created a design to include the Intersex community with a mission to bring more visibility to persons who do not fit societal or medical norms for male and female definitions. These many evolutions and the work to bring visibility continues to bring about tremendous growth in societal acceptance of the community as a whole. Even more important than the visibility is that creating spaces for marginalized people saves lives, for myself it was at 12 years old when the Pride flag saved my life. Imagine the many lives that these new evolutions are saving and how those saved lives may one day save more lives; until we reach a point where no one needs saving from danger because of who they love or how they dress.
The intersectional connection of being a Black LGBTQIA person is accentuated by the Juneteenth Day celebrating which is a celebration to the end of federally sanctioned enslavement of Black people in the United States. This will be the first year that Juneteenth is a recognized state holiday here in Washington state, which speaks to the endurance of the fight for racial equity. This celebration has long been associated with the Southern Black church, where it was often referred to as “Jubilee Day” and due to that connection was not widely celebrated in the Black LGBTQIA community. I remember this celebration as “Church BBQ Day” which involved tables of food and beautiful “old” hymns that expressed the belief that we would “cross over Jordan, into the Promise Land.” This year the connection between the LGBTQIA and Black experience seems so much more fused into my view of the future, as I reflect on the incredible work that has been accomplished in just the last few years.
The ways in which my skin color and sexual identity collide used to feel like a burden, especially when navigating the criminal justice system as employee or defendant. The idea that I was “other to otherness” led to a lot of self-focused internal dialogues that were rarely productive which always resulted in some personal commitment to change my personality to make the “ugliness of my otherness” less repulsive. This continued for years and even to this day, this reductive thought process can invade my self-evaluation, though with far less frequency or intensity. Over the last 7 years, the attention given to the struggle of LGBTQIA and Black equality has created such a new vision of my otherness, that I have taken to calling myself the “Unicorn” at work. The unicorn designation is in celebration of all the ways that I am completely unique and a little bit magical. I have never felt prouder of my roots to each community/identity as I watch the impressive societal changes occurring at the direction of the young people now taking the helm.
The results of my reflection are that given this opportunity to celebrate this Summer in a new way, we can do it as new people. We have the space to enter back into our day-to-day world, more authentically, boldly, and brilliantly than every before. This month you can celebrate not just your own unique identity, but those connections you may have within the LGBTQIA and Black communities, in a completely authentically connected way. This month, I encourage you to find ways to be audaciously bold and vulnerable with those you meet. Even more so, I encourage you to live the world you want to see as you’re preparing to re-enter into a more opened society.