Queer is a word I didn’t always feel comfortable using.  Sometimes I still don’t, its other meaning being ‘strange’.  

Growing up, it seemed that queerness was something okay for other people, but less so for myself.  It took a long time to accept and embrace my queerness – to see it as a gift.

Pride Month started as a way to commemorate the US Stonewall riots, which occurred at the end of June 1969.  (How often we celebrate or remember protests of the past, while rejecting movements of the present…).

Pride is born out of rebellion and rage.  It’s born out a refusal to conform, to ignore the truth of our experiences and feelings. A refusal to lay down in the face of injustice.  It is a commitment to radical and inclusive joy, an honour to the wholeness of our experiences, and a refusal to diminish them in the presence of others.

Queerness, beyond my sexuality, is my ability to orient to a world that I cannot see yet. Toward wholeness, toward truth, and away from what culture has conditioned in us.  To see beyond who and what I am supposed to be or do, to who and what I am actually called. 

Queer – and particularly trans – activists have a long history of envisioning a new, more imaginative world, before it is born to reality. 

This month, as we celebrate queerness in our communities, friends, children, *ourselves*, let us also honour this through playing and discovering new ways of orienting to a more beautiful world.  Orienting toward wholeness. 

And of course, let us support and celebrate the LGBTQ+ activists who continue to fight for liberation in the many parts of the world where queerness is not yet celebrated. 

What does queerness mean for you?