On the Other Foot.

Throughout my life I have been a part of this culture that has an opinion on the issue of homosexuality. As for a little background of my own, I was raised in a southern mega church in Griffin, Georgia. As a bible belt southern Christian, I was raised to believe that being a homosexual was considered demonic and an abomination to God. With many people in my church community, we knew very little of the LGBT community and therefore we feared them and labeled them ungodly. As I grew up and entered adolescents, the LGBT community began to gain momentum and began to be shown as a large movement across the country with the famous slogan, “come out of the closet”. This slogan was to express the LGBT community to not fear their sexual orientation and to take pride in their sexuality. With such a wide spread movement, the issue could no longer be pushed aside as it did in the beginning. My church had to finally voice their opinion as support or against The LGBT community. Like many other churches in my community, we strongly were against the LGBT, once again labeling them as wicked people of the earth. Throughout my high school years, I began to judge the people on their sexual orientation and viewed them as under me. I believed that is what my God wanted for me. Only when my senior year of high school I began to question how I should treat my fellow peers and friends in my community that had a different sexual orientation. The bible does state that we are to love our neighbors, and that was the one issue I was struggling with when it came to the LGBT community. In the Christian belief, we are to love everyone no matter what that person is in life. Christians are called to have an unconditional positive regard towards all the people on earth. This began to change my outlook upon the LGBT community. I did not put aside my Christian ideology on homosexuality, but just treated the LGBT community with love and compassion. Even though, I was not the only one who had this enlightenment, many people still have hatred and despise the LGBT community. The LGBT community is a minority, especially in Georgia. With our heavy religious backgrounds in the southeastern area, many people are still, “in the closet”. To be viewed as straight is considered the majority, and in most areas the, “right” type of person. This will be completely changed when entering into this environment. My entire lifestyle of being the majority will be removed and I will be viewed as the people I use to judge and avoided. To do research, I dove into Herek’s, The Psychology of Sexual Prejudice, this article that could help me with my topic to show the cautions and dangers that I could have faced in the community I was placing myself into when attending Gay Pride. Herek discusses that when viewing stats from 1997, law enforcement counted up 1,102 hate crimes in America. Herek begins to explain that many hate crimes were not reported, and believes that there were many more hate crimes than just 1,102. This is even drawn deeper when Herek dives into more of how sexual prejudice has always been an issue, with the 1960’s having higher open gay communities, and in 1973, removing homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. With such a large homosexual movement, the changes for “normal life” could cause a higher rate of hate crimes towards sexual minorities by anti-gay people. This can shed some light on my topic when viewing the risks, since no one actually knows my sexuality when I was at pride. Luckily, Herek discusses that America is moving towards more tolerance for the homosexual community. Herek says that America is moving in his article which was published in 2000, and now attending pride in 2014, I can sense that hate crimes are rarely going to happen to me or other people attending the parade. Another large issue that I wanted to research was on the article, America's Changing Attitudes toward Homosexuality, Civil Unions, and Same-Gender Marriage: 1977-2004. In this article, one large issue with the LGBT movement is the constant struggle for equal rights in everyday life in society. Avery views the slow movement towards the LGBT community. With Massachusetts being the first state to legalize marriage in 2004, every state has to answer the large of legalization of same-gender marriage. Another issue is then sprung of LGBT community in the workplace, school systems, and same-gender adoption plans. With opportunities now being open for the LGBT community, this can point them in the right direction for equality. Gay pride parade’s main point is to raise awareness for equal rights in the community, to be prideful of your sexual orientation. When attending the gay pride parade, I will have to find a common theme for why the people are marching in the parade. They want to express their desire for being accepted in the community. The main issues is no longer allowing homosexuality to be in our community, but rather the equal rights that are affiliated in their personal community and to be treated as a human being in the society. The final article I did research on was teaching equality with Imich, Bayley, and Farley’s, Equalities and Gay and Lesbian Young People: implications for educational psychologists. This article is hitting again on the topic of equality, more specifically towards the younger community. Unlike race, sexual orientation is not as clearly seen and is usually hidden in the person; this can be due to the ability to hide it from judgment of being the minority. This is mainly in schools where youths will wait until leaving that school before coming out and expressing their sexual orientation. A study by Walker in 2000 discovered that 43% of his sample of lesbians and gays had contemplated suicide at one point in their life. This is valuable information for understanding of living in a society where someone who is homosexual feels as if they don’t belong and therefore want to take their own life. The gay pride parade is trying to eliminate the feeling of being unwanted. One of gay pride is to not fear being unwanted. This is a study that shows that youths in these communities need a hand to reach out to them. Youths that could be taken to where I was would have a complete changed outlook on hiding their sexual orientation.    

Method

The method I am using is to attend the Gay Pride event and to walk in the back of the parade to show the support for the Lesbian, Gay, Bi, and transgender (LGBT) community. I plan on recording my entire experience and to view and observe the people for and against the Gay Pride Parade. This is an action research of me having no label for once in my life, which indeed will make me feel as if I am the minority in a community that has always been viewed in a negative light due to their sexual orientation. The people that judge them will also have to judge me, for as I walk with them, I will be considered as one of the LGBT community. I also want to observe the culture difference from my own. My friend will be accompanying me at the event for safety reasons. I also am planning to stay completely observant and will not engage in any activities that could provoke or cause issues of anyone specifically. Finally, I will not engage in any activity that could cause harm to a person or a group of people, or any illegal activities while participating in this event.

Results

When my friend and I first arrived to our parking area in Atlanta, we were about two miles away from the parade. As we walked the side streets to reach our destinations, we began to notice many local shops having rainbow flags hanging from their windows and doors to represent their support for the LGBT community. The further we walked down the more and more rainbow flags hanged from the sides of buildings to stores having rainbow stickers covering the side of their buildings. When we reached a mile from Peachtree Street where the parade was taking place, we began to hear music and people shouting. Once we arrived we began to see police cars and people walking on these side streets that were blocked off due to the parade. Once we arrived I began to see a community of different people shouting with excitement and jumping around as the people hanging on the floats waved to the people in the crowds. As I looked down Peachtree Street, I saw just a long stretch of people and floats marching down the street ready to show their support and pride for the LGBT community. As I watched people begin to line the sides of the streets I realized that I have never seen such a high amount of people coming to show support for the people in the parade. The parade had very colorful floats that were full of people waving and throwing out rainbow flags, rainbow stickers, and colorful beads. The Gay Pride Parade had a large diversity where high school kids came to pass out candy, to people wearing leather. One of the biggest impacts to me was the amount of churches that marched in the parade to show support to the LGBT community. All denominations were present in the march including the Baptists, Lutherans, Methodist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Mormon, and Catholic Church. Even other religious groups, such as the Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu groups marched to show their support for the LGBT community This was a huge impact to me personally as it really changed my whole view on the churches representation towards the LGBT community. After I counted the 30th church marching in the parade I realized that I was not the only one that knew that discriminating the LGBT due to their sexual orientation or gender identity was never socially acceptable, especially due to one person’s religion. As the more people began to walk down the street, the more I realize that it was not only the support of the LGBT community, but the equality of all types of people. The only downsides were the amount of businesses, such as Fed-Ex, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Home Depot, and other big corporations were spreading their support, which began to seem a little more of a business strategy. As we got all of the company’s bumper stickers and items with their logos all over them, it made it felt like they really just want this community to buy their products. This was even more relevant when the politicians started passing out their logos to us that I began to wonder what their real motto was for being in the Gay Pride Parade. After the final float passed we began to follow behind the final float and walked down the busy streets. At first it was just my friend and I with a few other people, but after a while, I began to notice more and more people pouring into the street alongside us. This was the first time where I began to feel as a part of this community. Even though I felt as a minority, I know no one else treated me as a minority. In such a diverse enriched culture having many different beliefs and views on life all walking down the same street with no judgment from each other having the same views of equality the LGBT community was very powerful. After a while, the street was full of people following towards Piedmont Park. Before the crowd and I made a turn to another street I began to notice on the corner of the street had protesters. The protestors wore black with large signs reading, “Homo sex is sin” and “Homosexuals are toxic”, along with many other very discriminating signs. A man with a megaphone was screaming that, “God hates homos”. One of the most fascinating observations was that many people at Gay Pride were walking around with vibrate colorful bright outfits, even the many religious groups wore white. With that being stated, I notice the protesters were wearing primarily black outfits is some yellow, orange, and red to represent fire on their clothing. This can be viewed as a contradiction to the religious belief of Christians to show compassion. I noticed that no one really lashed out to them who was supporting the Parade. I also noticed people with large flowers blocked out the signs of the protesters. I thought that this was a very good way to show peaceful protest and how to block out people discriminating in a safe and peaceful way. After we walked down the street I realized that we had thousands of other people walking along side towards Piedmont Park. After we reached Piedmont Park I observed the crowds of people dispersing out into the open grassy fields towards the events that awaited them on the other side. Tents were set up among the field with rainbow flags hanging on them to show their support for the LGBT community. For the rest of the day, people gathered around for concerts and events.

Conclusion

This experience was very eye opening for me. I have never been into an area where I have seen so many happy people, all expressing their pride for their sexual identity of gender identity. I felt totally emerged as a minority, for once being on the other side of the fence walking among people supporting the LGBT community. This was very difficult to swallow at first, with me first going back and thinking that all of this was wrong. It took me time to view all the people and realized that there was nothing wrong with these people in the Gay Pride Parade. Having felt as I did not belong changed when these people did not judge me once they were the majority. Another interesting observation was how the western cultures have an independent culture; the subculture of the LGBT community has a more interdependent culture. The LGBT communities all live and support one another to get through their discrimination, and therefore have codependents with each other. This minority group is slowing growing and the Gay Pride Parade shows their true numbers. This could be the first step for equality among the LGBT community. I now can say that I know how it feels to be a minority of a group that is constantly being discriminated, but if we have more events like Gay Pride, maybe being the minority isn't be so bad.