A Pride Poem for Queer Graduation Ceremonies
- A Pride Poem for Queer Graduation Ceremonies1
I always wanted to write a poem about writing a poem.
No, I really wanted to write a poem about a Black gay man writing a poem2 for a queer graduation ceremony;
a pride poem, a prideful poem, a queer poem.
A poem that would pivot on the pride-filled occasion of graduations as celebrations of completion and academic accomplishment but also a poem directed to GLBTQ identified folk and those allies—friends, family, and fellow students—who gather to show their many colors.
A poem that would celebrate their particular academic accomplishments as people who are smart, savvy, articulate, and queer.
Not just queer as in some reductive identification of sexual preference or embodied presence but also queer as a political position, as in those who Michael Warner would say are resistant to the regimes of the normal;3 those who redefine normal and live it, boldly.
This particularity of being queer is integrated in the midst of all else that they are, that we are in the world, and all else that they (we) bring to the world. [End Page 199]
A poem that would celebrate the fullness of their beings (of our beings), in spite of the still segregaytion4 and cloistered celebration of our particularity under the rainbow umbrella of cultural graduation ceremonies:
Black graduation Asian Graduation Chicano Graduation Pride Graduation; or maybe just Gay Graduation.
This is not so much a critique of this tradition, but an acknowledgement of the lingering separate but equal and not so equal nature of such engagements and also the needed recognition of particularity in such engagements that gives such celebrations meaning.
For you see I like the idea of “Gay Graduations.” Not just a graduation for gays (mind you), but a graduation in which, only momentarily, the particularity of our being is overshadowed by the joy of the occasion;
the joy of accomplishment and completion, the joy of persistence and survival, the joy of the presence of family, children and friends. the joy of seeing lovers and partners, publically embracing and kissing each other in mixed company without shame or fear of reprisals. To show joy, to show care, to show pride, in public.
For that is what all graduations should do. And all graduation poems should acknowledge just how fabulous the graduates are, how fabulous you are! How brave you have been. And encourage you in your consistent success and persistence in being, particular.
Graduation as a celebration of your accomplishments and commitments:
Your commitment to being who you are is important in the world. Your respect for diversity of being is important to the world. Your pride-filled self is important to the world. We are the world.
It is important for you, for us, to continue to establish the standard for others—not just other GLBTQ identified folk, who definitely need to know of our out presence in [End Page 200] the world; to know who we are and what we do, and how we do what we do, and they are not alone; and that It Gets Better.5 But we must also establish ourselves as templates of sociality6 for all others—of living our lives with dignity and pride.
And here I offer a poetic utterance within a poetic utterance—a phrase often attributed to Marianne Williamson that I want to reframe in this queer graduation address as a charge for living our queer lives boldly—in essence, I am coopting her language as a redefinition of pride. Williamson writes:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?... Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine.... And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are...
