The design of this new version of the Pride flag includes a wider spectrum of our identities. The pain expressed so openly during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations-why didn’t others see that pain earlier? The new Progress Pride flag is flying over City Hall this month, as Kansas City, Missouri, became one of the first governments to fly a Pride flag. So, how do we see all of each other? I’m learning more and more about seeing others fully. Hernandez and colleagues with the cast of Queer Eye As a former TV news reporter, I’m all too guilty of using the easiest category, or the most visible part of a person. Words are important, but most people want to boil it down to one or two words.
#Rainbow gay bar kansas city skin#
It’s easy and convenient to identify people by their job, where they live, their name, their skin tone. I often laugh about that episode but as we celebrate Pride this month, it’s a reminder that we need to accept all parts of ourselves. Later I realized I was actually enabling the group to separate my identity into different buckets.
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You could practically hear the wink, wink, nudge, nudge in her voice, and a sparkly rainbow suddenly appeared over my head in the conference room as I realized: “I’m here to be the gay guy on the board!” I quickly code-switched to gay guy, instead of brown guy. (There’s usually only one person from each ethnic group is in the room.) Then when I was introduced, the woman who recruited me made quite a point of saying “and he sings with the Heartland Men’s Chorus!,” which is Kansas City’s gay men’s chorus. I was surprised when I walked into my first meeting and there was already a Hispanic person sitting at the table. I was once recruited to join the community advisory board of a local organization. The wider community rarely acknowledges this intersectionality, even though I’ve literally had a couple of parties at my house filled almost exclusively by our group of gay Latino friends. People have focused either on my identity as a Latino or as a gay man. As in “please mark all that apply” on the demographic survey.
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My entire life I’ve been a double check mark.