Live and Let Live: One Straight Man's Take on Pride

As a cisgender, heterosexual, and white man (I'm Scottish-Italian, so not palest ever, but still white), I often feel that it's not really my place to say anything. But, still, I can't just sit on my hands and not say anything at all.

The struggles of LGBTQIA+ people are not my struggles. Though I’m not exactly rolling in it myself, I am aware of the easier run of life I've had than others who don't sit in my bracket. The bracket that has had the easiest run in the history of the human race.

Still, I don't want there to be any interpretation that reads as "Paul Stewart doesn't care about people, LGBTQIA+ or otherwise."

I do care about people.

I’m selfish. An asshole. I make mistakes — I’ve done terrible things in the past, even to my own flesh and blood. But, at my deepest core, I am a live-and-let-live person.

There are lots of things that annoy me, make me angry, make me sick to my stomach, make me want to hate the human disgrace.

Do you know what doesn't bother me at all?

• When someone is a member of the LGBTQIA+ community.
• People with different religious beliefs as my own.
• People with a different class background as my own.
• People with a different colour of skin as my own.
• People who identify as a different gender to the one they were assigned at birth.

I try to approach all people—LGBTQIA+, disabled, immigrants, anyone—with the same baseline of human respect.

I do not see the reason for the hate. I understand in principle why the hate is there, but don't understand and accept that it is a reasonable reason to pursue such tiring and energy-sapping energy as hating people for who they are, whether by nature, identity, or personal truth.

Someone being LGBTQIA+ doesn’t threaten or diminish me in any way. I can’t fathom why it would anyone.

Do you know what matters to me?

If anyone is doing something that makes them happy, is not hurting anyone else or themselves (within reason) and is not breaking any sensible laws — not the garbage ones written by bigots.

I judge people on an individual level, not based on their societal grouping. If you're an asshole and hateful person, I might have a problem with you, but not because you are a woman that likes men, or a man who likes women who used to be men but are now women.

So, while I don't really have any stakes in your fights and struggles, I see you and hear you and support your right to be who you are, the who you want to be.

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Thanks for reading!

Author's Notes: I recently fumbled badly with my ABCommunities Challenge. A challenge I set myself. I missed a few deadlines, and in the end the deadlines I was racing to meet and the projects I was working on outside of that self-appointed challenge, became more important.

Still, I want to continue posting in some of the communities on Vocal I have yet to, so this is my offering to the Pride Community.

Here are other things: