So, I wear my BE SEEN t-shirt a lot, and I remember the sound of the crowd supporting the right to be alive and free. We have to keep that energy and motivation pulsing through us as we confront the myriad of challenges facing us individually and as a community. Thousands of people cheered each other on in countless Pride parades across the country. We are a community brimming with hope and life for a future where we are not suppressed by ignorance and brutally inhuman policies. Many somber truths about this current period in American and social history face us, but events like Pride celebrations are reminders that we have strength and vitality in numbers. Also, the concept of “religious freedom” is becoming a battle cry from the alternative right to condone discriminatory practices. Efforts to penalize transgender men and women for the simple need to use a public restroom matching their gender are strengthening in some parts of the country. He also decided to impose a looming end to the DACA program, promising to set in motion plans to deport an estimated 800,000 undocumented people who have been in the United States since they were children of course, many of them are part of the glbtq community. Our President arbitrarily sent a tweat out basically relegating transgender individuals in the military in to a realm of fear and concern about their immediate future as members of the armed services. ![]() Glbtq Americans face discrimination from a WhiteHouse administration bent on seizing every opportunity to engage in damaging and antagonistic policies. I experienced a sense of melancholy after the march ended. I could have marched in this glow of pride and festive fervor all day. The entire march, people cheered and celebrated simply being out and proud. I turned to my friend, who has known me through many positive and awful times and told her that this was indescribably spectacular. My guide had a friend’s child sitting on her lap during the route, and her mother, a woman who convinced me to move to California 15 years ago, walked on my right. The human guide assigned to me is a wheelchair user, and I held on tight to the back rest of her chair, my guide dog Vander on my leftside. From that point on, my feet hardly touched the ground. Just when I thought my feet might be stuck to the pavement forever due to immobility, we got the cue to march. As we anticipated our time to move, morning fog rolled back, sunshine enveloping all of us. Wearing my BE SEEN T-shirt, offered to all LightHouse marchers, I waited over 2 hours with hundreds of other people in front of and in back of our contingent to begin walking the parade route. This celebration is so gigantic that I feared participating in the past due to its sheer size, but the LightHouse of San Francisco assembled a contingent to march this year, so I decided it was time to be part of an annual San Francisco tradition that always seemed elusive and somewhat scary to me. 2įor the first time in my 15 years as a California resident, I marched in the annual San Francisco Pride parade in June. President’s Message: BPI: Success in Moving Forward. Please limit articles to 500 words maximum.īlind LGBT Pride International (BPI) offers advocacy, education, programs, alliances and support for persons who are blind or vision impaired and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer. ![]() Or, you may write an article and submit it for consideration. Please include the source of each article you forward. If you find articles that you think might be of interest, please forward them to the newsletter editor at. We are always looking for articles of interest to our LGBT community. Inside Out is published four times each year, in March, June, September, & December. ![]() Catch up on all the news, articles, and information from the most recent issue of our newsletter.
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