When I lived in Albany in the 1980’s, I went to a NYC Pride march with a young man from Schenectady, a neighboring city but less cosmopolitan than the state capital.

He was amazed. He muttered, “I never knew there were so many gay people.” That daytrip was special; it gave him a glow of self-confidence. This sense of solidarity, of normalcy, is essential to the LGBTQ+ movement. It makes us stronger and better advocates for our cause.

It is no surprise; the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights had a similar effect on the coalition of white and black supporters of civil rights. This coalition formed before the Civil War and continued even during the dark days of Jim Crow. But the March confirmed that full citizenship was a national issue and prompted President Johnson and Congress to act.

“Pride” describes the solidarity that unites queers. In NYC when I grew up in the 1950’s, being queer was far from unusual. Cities across the world have had queer populations. Certainly, queers were a visible part of Shakespeare’s London and New York City during the Revolution. But as was true in 1950’s NYC, they were the butt of jokes and objects of contempt.

Their pain was greeted with indifference. “What do you expect? If they’re going to live like that, they’re asking for trouble.” Being gay was wrong, even a sin, but in a world of few choices, cities offered relative tolerance, and the crazed moralists were never trusted. Before pride, the LGBTQ+ community was tolerated but not accepted. In every city, many people had queer friends who helped create safe spaces. Hostility was by no means universal. But even the accepting joined with their friends in preserving secrecy and shame.

It was a culture of duplicity, and the 1950’s was a period of unusual hostility. Federal government employees lost their jobs for being gay, an extreme aggression that made even straight people uncomfortable. It was a gross violation of civil liberties.

My mom was an actress, and my father worked in women’s fashion. They were surrounded by gay people. They were competitors; my parents thought heterosexuality was healthy, while their gay colleagues were dubbed sick.

When I was 12, the Senate investigated Joseph McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin whose ravings about “unamerican activities” threatened liberals in general and gay people in particular. McCarthy’s counsel was an obvious gay man, Roy Cohn. McCarthy’s fulminations brought him into conflict with the Army, and that created an opening for General Dwight Eisenhower, the U.S. President, to back a Senate investigation of McCarthy. Attorney Joseph Welch led the investigation in 1954 and at one point in the hearings he made a remark about pixies, leading Senator McCarthy to walk into a trap and ask Welch to define the word “pixie.” Welch’s riposte that a “pixie is a close relative to a fairy” brought gales of laughter from my parents and their friends watching the hearings on television. They giggled uncontrollably and their amusement lasted for several days.

At twelve, I was already sexually active and enduring savage comments from other children about being a fairy. My parents’ reaction to the McCarthy hearing chilled me to the bone. With more stubbornness than intelligence, I decided that I knew the truth about my parents; no matter what they would say, I knew, really knew in my heart, that they didn’t like homosexuals and, of course, ME. Since I kept this dark secret and never talked about it, I failed to learn that this was an unreasonable conclusion.

Homosexuals were sick, and in an era where educated people quoted Freud as gospel, it was common to offer diagnoses about other people’s behavior.  This view offered a false sympathy. Saying homosexuals were sick disparaged them. On the one hand it allowed my parents to respect the civil liberties of homosexuals but on the other hand, and more significantly for me, express their distaste. I concluded that even if they said they loved me, I knew, really knew, what in their hearts they really thought. I shut up and never told them. And mistakenly I concluded that almost everybody despised homosexuals. A rigid view that remained undisturbed, even when my sister introduced me to gay students from music and art high school, I was unable to realize that she was letting me know that it was okay to be gay.

In fact, in my old age, a dispassionate look at my high school years convinced me that I fooled nobody. My fellow students at Elisabeth Irwin, a progressive high school in New York City, were all expecting me to come out. They couldn’t have cared less, but I, traumatized by my experiences between 10 and 12 was convinced that if I told anyone I would be mocked and ridiculed.

I lost a chance to have boyfriends and a “normal” dating life. Pride is not a political statement. Pride is a deeply personal decision that is one reason a person becomes politically active because they are just as good as everybody else. Had I accepted it, my whole life would have been happier.

Pride has fostered a new reality; the LGBTQ+ community is no longer sick. There have always been same-sex preferences and in fact animals from dolphins to monkeys have formed couples. Far from sick, homosexuality is natural.

Today, we are repeating this mistake by thinking we are being tolerant when we say gamblers, drug users, and sex workers are sick and need treatment.

Undoubtedly, there are troubled souls who have these habits, but anybody who has roots in the drug culture knows that you cannot make a blanket statement. People with no problems who meet their responsibilities demonstrate daily that these prejudices are false. They make good neighbors, interesting friends, and hold responsible jobs. What is missing in their lives is pride and the public recognition that these activities are normal and have existed for centuries.