June is National Pride Month in the United States, and it's a perfect opportunity to spotlight the work for justice in many areas of challenge on our campuses and beyond. Take a look at a few of our Coalitions and Commissions, each dedicated to justice!
Feature:
From Executive Director, Dr. Cindi Love, Ed. D.
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart… by Vaclav Havel
For my family and me, the meaning of PRIDE has evolved over time. In 1995, my partner, Sue, and I were just coming out, following my son's example. He was much clearer about who he was and braver than we were and started his truth-telling as a teenager.
This month is the 20th anniversary of that day when Sue and I first publicly spoke our truth to the world. We marched in the Denver PRIDE Parade together with our son and were stunned and delighted to see how many LGBT people there were. We lived in the third most conservative city in America. Needless to say, the LGBT movement had not made it to our part of the world yet.
All of the PRIDE participants in Denver seemed bigger than life to us--so proud and loud. Over the last two decades, the meaning of PRIDE has also evolved within the lives of LGBT people and in society as large. Some debate its efficacy in a post Don't Ask, Don't Tell World. People within the LGBT movement for human rights disagree with one another on its validity, reputation and more.
I understand and respect these perspectives and invite you to read about them and decide for yourself.
Courageous members of ACPA have a long history of bringing PRIDE to our association through their cutting edge work on campuses, identity research and scholarship and at our annual Convention through Cabaret, a fund raiser for the Paul Hart fund. We are proud to release the mini-documentary (above) of the 2015 Cabaret to you in recognition of the amazing contributions of the founders and sustaining supporters of Cabaret at ACPA. Our friend and ally, Brock Cravy, produced this for us and we want to express our appreciation to him.
For me, PRIDE celebrations are the translation of current reality into hope. My son, Joshua, will participate in Denver Pride again this year. I wish I could be with him. As we talked about the last 20 years of faith, hope and love shared a reading with me that I want to share with you.
It is by Vaclav Havel, a Czech politician instrumental in bringing democracy to Czechoslovakia. In 1986, three years before becoming president of his country, Havel was asked, “Do you see a grain of hope anywhere in the 1980s?” He answered,
“Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart…
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed…
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out…
It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”