PRIDE and Conservation: Notes from an Inbox in June

Before every June, I send a round of emails to contributors and friends, asking if anyone wants to write something easy and fun for our Pride issue at SEVENSEAS. The replies follow a pattern I know and understand well. We always publish a bunch of great articles, then a few others always trickle-in past deadline and get published in the coming months. And solid handful of people write back to say they would love to but cannot. Even though they are publicly out. Also married or in a relationship. Their families know, their neighbors know, the people at the salon, gym, barber, grocery store know. What they cannot have is their current employer, or their future employer, or the field office in the country they will rotate to next year, learning it from a byline. So they thank me, and they wish the issue well, and they ask if I can hold the invitation for when their situation changes, which, depending on the country and the institution, may or may not ever happen.

This is the part I find hardest to explain to people who ask, sometimes politely and sometimes less so, some version of: why do you still need a Pride month? Why does it have to be so insistent? The argument tends to go that gay people have full legal equality in many countries now, marriage included, the job has been done, and the holiday could afford to dial itself down a few notches.

I have my own answer to that question, but it is worth being clear about whose situation I am answering from. Between fieldwork, postings, and the slow accumulation of an international life, I have built a world and career in places that have, for the most part, welcomed me and my husband. Living in the United States, Italy, Thailand, Germany, and the many of the countries across the globe where the friends, colleagues, and host families we came to know either understood exactly what we were and didn’t just accept us, but they celebrated us. We are, in this respect, among the most fortunate people in the world. I have no interest in dressing that up. I know plenty of people, including some of the contributors whose declined emails are still in my inbox, who have been thrown out of their parents’ houses, fired by employers who used a different word for it, abandoned by friends, and physically hurt for the simple fact of being themselves.

The reason a Pride issue is still needed, in my reading, is more or less procedural. It is the easiest available proof that gay and trans people are not a category of stranger. They are colleagues, neighbours, relatives, friends, the woman in the next office, the man in the next field camp, the cousin who never married. Once that is plain, the political weather changes. Not because anyone has been persuaded by argument (argument rarely moves these things), but because it becomes embarrassing to be the loud objector when the room has filled up with quiet evidence to the contrary.

There is a more interior version of this argument I would rather not dwell on, but I will gesture at it. Every gay person of my generation, and most generations before, had to do some serious reconciling with themselves first, usually in private, usually for a long time, mostly hoping the whole thing would silently resolve itself by going away. It does not. Coming out is the easier part; the work after it is the rest of your life. The shape that work takes, for many people in many countries, is professional.

I am not talking about the right to host a drag brunch in the conference room of a remote field office. I am talking about what to say at the dinner when a host or a counterpart asks, conversationally, if you have a wife and kids. When do you lie. When do you hold true. The answer changes from person to person, country to country, sometimes from week to week, and I know there are activists who would be ashamed of me for treating it as a question at all. They are usually not the ones working cross-culturally on a small grant to protect a species, in a country whose government has views about people like me, and whose colleagues need to be able to talk to me without thinking about my marriage so that the work can proceed.

Most of us in this line of work are doing other things on top of the work itself. Beach cleanups. Food banks for refugees in countries we do not live in. Fundraisers for local schools we have no children in. Memberships at botanical gardens in cities we visit twice a year. Removing graffiti from neighborhoods that are not ours, getting stray animals adopted, donating to museums and to whichever small humanitarian operation has caught us that week. The small civic accumulations of someone who cares about a lot of things and can be maximal at none of them. In environment, humanitarian, and development work, we have already chosen a lower salary, a longer travel schedule, and a hand-to-mouth relationship with whoever might give us our next grant. Pretending to be someone I am not, on top of all of that, is the part I am decreasingly able to do.

At the end of those days, whatever country I am in or more frequently these days my husband, we send each other the “I love you” text before we crash for the night. How that is threatening to someone else, I find it difficult to wrap my brain around.

The job of a Pride issue, at a publication like ours, is not to lecture anyone. It is to make sure the people who can be visible are, and to make room for the people who cannot be (yet, or ever) to be seen by proxy. The contributors who could not write under their own names this June will, when they can, write louder. Until then, the publication does what it does, the ocean is still there, and the last thing I have the patience for, at the end of one of these days, is pretending otherwise.

Happy Pride.