Our Kids At Pride

Heute, am 2. Juni 2014,  ist International Blogging Day – organisiert von Dana Rudolph, der Betreiberin von Mombian. Deshalb postet RFN heute fremdprachlich.

June and July are the major Pride Parade months in Germany. Hannover, Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich – every weekend you can join a Pride Parade in a different city. They’re called Christopher Street Day celebrations – CSD for short –  in Chancellor Merkel’s country, commemorating the Stonewall uprising. Almost every parade has its rainbow family contingent. Some family groups are really huge since the German gayby-boom has been thriving for years.

At Pride you can meet kids of all ages. All ages? Actually this is not quite true. I miss seeing teenagers. Last year I was looking for Max, the 15-year-old son of Rebecca and  Franziska. „Oh, it is hard for us to motivate him, and actually he was invited to a barbecue at his friend’s house,“ Rebecca explained. „So we let him go“, added Franzi.
Angelina (13) was at a music weekend, Daniel (11) and Sara (14) joined a hockey camp and Marvin (12) could not see himself among all the rainbow youngsters and stayed home.

The older kids are invisible during Pride. This makes me sad. I know that it’s the parents who really need this feeling of „Today the streets are ours – at least once a year“. But people should see us as proud lesbian, gay, queer or trans families.

Our visibility can cure  a narrow-minded society, but what if our kids are bored and don’t want to march with us? How should we handle that?
How do we deal with such conflicts in other areas? Do we force our kids to join us for dinner with our adult friends? Sometimes yes, mostly no. Do we ask our kids to join a sports team if they don’t want to? Definitely not.

But Pride is different. We are proud to be a rainbow family. The lesbian and gay family networks have helped us build our strength and pride as lesbians and as lesbians with kids. Two decades ago, we were completely invisible, now we are a part of society that can’t be ignored anymore. Pride is an opportunity to celebrate our success and the victories we have achieved and to show others that life can be rich and full, with or without children. Pride is our holiday. It is a holy day. For the entire family. It is not a question of „Is this really what I want to do today?“, it is a ritual we have chosen. So far our daughter has gladly gone along with that, even if she’s one of the few teenagers. We always laughingly tell her it’s like the Corpus Christi procession for the catholics by whom she’s surrounded. But it’s really only half a joke, for us it’s actually true.