Everyone deserves to be loved.

It’s that time of the month where you’ll see rainbows, unicorns, and ‘PRIDE’ everywhere, even on the timelines of people who can’t tell the difference between agender and genderfluid. I hope they mean well though because we need all the allies we can get.

But what makes Pride Month so special?

For centuries, the queer community has been treated like we’re some broken people waiting to be saved. We’ve been mocked at, shunned, disowned or worse, killed. Why? All because we identified and loved differently from the rest.

Pride Month is held in June every year. Initially, Pride Day March was held on 28th June to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, when police exercised brutality towards a trans-woman after raiding a gay bar in NYC. The dates changed, the story changed and the Pride Movement turned into a month-long series of marches of remembrance, celebration, and awareness.

It’s 2022 now and nothing has changed. No efforts have been spared to silence us and take our pride away.

Enough is enough.

It’s high time we come together with our allies and ask for our rights. We deserve to love and to be loved the way we choose, with consent and respect. We deserve to be identified the way we feel is right, even if our pronouns don’t match what we were assigned at birth. We deserve to have our gender recognized and our identity established.

Our voices have been suppressed for far too long for us to stay quiet any longer. As said by Luvvie Ajayi Jones, in a world that expects us to stay silent, we need to yell.

I wanted to yell too, but writing felt impersonal and using a camera felt impossible.

This is the major reason I began working for Aural in April 2022. The only way I could speak out was by voice and Aural seemed to make it happen. I fell in love with the idea of being able to express myself, loud and bold, without having to compromise my safety.

Everyone deserves to be heard. I know I have a long way to go when it comes to accepting and loving myself the way I should. But I still have a right to make a choice and voice myself.

And I choose to yell with pride.

Anonymous (because you know why)

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