Last month I had the tremendous honor of being able to give a speech at our first ever, Pride celebration. Even though I have given speeches before, I still get a bit nervous and can tend to babble. Babbling so much that I realize I've talked so long that I have to skip half of my speech, and what I considered the heart of the speech, so I decided to included it here.
My speech started with me telling my story of growing up as a product of assimilation, because I was a black kid in mostly white surroundings. When I came of age, I realized I was gay and had to navigate my own cultures bias and prejudices against a hidden minority, at least more hidden than now since these were the eighties. What follows is the rest of the speech that I had prepared where I have actually learned about where my Pride comes from.
"By writing this speech, I have realized how lucky I am to have been born in these current times, where outdated beliefs have been challenged and found to be wrong and unfair. Think about it, just 200 years ago, in the land of the free, I would have been a slave, owned as property, and only worth 1/3 of what a white man was worth. Women didn't have the right to vote, and Native Americans were seen as savages to be shot on site. Only 60 years ago, in this great nation of ours, blacks and whites couldn't go to the same schools, or couldn't even get married. Gays and lesbians could be arrested and outed in newspapers as "sexual deviants", just for going to a club where others like themselves could congregate and have fellowship. And just before I was born, the psychiatric community removed "homosexuality" from the books as a mental illness.
Guess what? I'm running out of time again, so I guess that means I need to work on my typing skills. I promise to do that by continuing to write here. For now I'm done, and I hope you enjoyed my babble. I'll be back soon with more :)
Signing off for now,
Corey also know as "That Guy"
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