Pride is for Family.

Written by Niko Nelson. Their Collective member and Master Practitioner in Clinical Counselling - Provisional.

Pride through the eyes of a child.

Imagine being 8, 10, or 12 while:

• Sitting front row at the historic SK Ballroom Kiki Ball.
• Being called by name from the parade and given stickers by your teacher.
• Having your first Sapphic Saturdays bandana tied by THE Ivanna Beer, a beloved and respected Drag Queen from your home province.
• Dancing in the rain after Annalynne Mokho promised (and delivered) your favorite candy; and 
• Somehow everywhere you go, everyone knows and loves your parents.
  

How would that have changed things for you?

This year I was able to experience Pride through the eyes of my children. They experienced
their queer parents’ world come alive in ways they haven’t before. They clapped and cheered and delighted in the talented, vibrant, enduring joy of being in community.

It left me grateful and reflective, wondering:

• How would it have felt to see queerness celebrated so openly?
• What might I have understood about myself sooner?
• What would it have meant to know that my family belonged, not quietly or conditionally, but joyfully, loudly, visibly, as a majority?
• Who might I have become if I had grown up surrounded by this much possibility?
• What becomes possible for children who get to experience that belonging now?

I share these reflections and questions in the hope that they bring forward something important. For some, they may affirm the value of giving children opportunities to see themselves, belong, and grow into who they are from an early age. For others, they may bring into focus the pain that can come from delay, denial, or the absence of that affirmation in their own experiences.

Yet for many of us, our identities were postponed, questioned, or hidden away. And somehow, we still found our way back to ourselves. That is the enduring power of authenticity: it persists, even when it is not nurtured, and it calls us home to who we have always been.

This Pride, I was reminded that Pride is, and always has been, for family: the families we are born into, the families we create, and the communities that help us become ourselves.