The bus driver I rode with this afternoon wasn’t happy to find out that Pride was this weekend.  I assumed it was the traffic he had a problem with until he derisively spat “faggots!”

People rarely look at me and assume I’m a lesbian, but I froze, irrationally terrified I would be singled out in some way.  I spent the rest of the bus ride and the walk home angry at the driver and angrier at myself for feeling hurt.

Do you wonder what the point of Pride is?  It does seem to bring out the nastiest in the homophobes.

But I don’t celebrate Pride to try to convince people like my bus driver that queer people deserve better than the disgust in his voice; I celebrate Pride because the seemingly endless hatred still hasn’t made me bitter, because dancing is more fun than crying, because drag kings make me weak at the knees, and because nothing makes a homophobe angrier than an out and happy queer.

Drag kings, photographed by Fred Koenig