Hope will never be silent.

“It still strikes me as strange, that anyone could have any moral objection to someone else’s sexuality. It’s like telling someone how to clean their house.”

River Phoenix

Happy Pride month beautiful people! 🌈

This month we celebrate all things queer. Pride month is all about togetherness in love and friendship and to commemorate how far gay rights have come.

Pride month is about educating people on LGBT+ history and communities and continuing to move forward with equality. It also calls for people to remember how damaging homophobia was and still is.

Can you believe that it was only made legal in 1967 to be gay in the UK? 1967? That was literally 2 years before my mom was born. To think that you would be called a criminal for loving who you wanted to, only 54 years ago is absolutely mind boggling.

Who the hell has the right to tell us who to love? Who has the right to make us feel unsafe and at risk if we don’t love who society expects us to? It’s wild to think that you’re born how you are and you can get penalized for it.

When I was young, my mom used to take me to gay pride because she loved the atmosphere and from early, I absolutely adored it. I would get my mom to take pictures of me and the drag queens on her phone and stare at the picture after, in awe of their make-up.

Pride is such a fun time however, it has such a deeper, more liberating meaning to it. The first gay pride started back in 1972 in London, and it was the first celebration of being able to exist in society without persecution or so you would think…

I saw a picture on Instagram the other day that I re-posted onto my story. It was of a 19 year old young man, who had been physically attacked by an individual in Liverpool town center. The attack was completely unprovoked and it was all down to the fact that this young man was not straight.

Not only does this picture make me very angry, but it also makes me so so sad. Have we not learnt anything since 1967? Have all of the LGBT communities efforts been in vain? How are we now in 2021 and people are still being attacked for being who the f they want to be?!

Arguably, I understand that 1967 is quite recent in comparison to a lot of milestones in history, so there is still much embedding to do in a great deal of people. With that being said, it does NOT give the right for anyone to go out and abuse people for their sexual preference.

When you live in a world where individuals think that this is OK to do, it makes sense why people would rather stay living a double life than being true to who they really are.

Humanity reside in a world where we judge, shame, be-little, intimidate, dissociate and abandon the LGBT+ community, because it doesn’t fit in with our ideals, whether that be religion, race, class or anything else that we haven’t grown to evolve around.

Growing up, I knew that I was somewhere on the rainbow spectrum and in retrospect, I’ve known this since about the age of 10. We were away on one of our family holidays to Spain and my mom had made friends with another family, who had a daughter the similar age as me. It was night time and our parents were drinking (shock horror) and we were playing in her hotel room.

It’s fuzzy to remember as it was years ago and even reminiscing now it sounds a bit strange. The girl suggested we take our pants off and jump on each other? So we took our pants off and she stood there and I would run and jump on her and she would catch me with my legs wrapped round her and then I would be the one to do the catching.

So we did that for a while and then one of the times she caught me, she kissed me and I liked it… *Que Katie Perry*. As you can imagine, I was only young so I didn’t really think anything of it at the time and we continued to play as normal for the rest of the holiday.

In my early secondary school years, I had learnt to suppress my feelings. I went to an all girls school and so I found it difficult to open up and the one time I did, I really regretted it. I remember telling one of the girls at school who also had an incline that she liked girls, and so we grew quite close and would speak on the phone most nights, having inappropriate conversations until the early morning.

A few weeks later she had told our whole friendship group that I fancied her and had tried to touch her at one of my sleepovers. I had never felt more mortified. Of course one of the nights on the phone she had jokingly dared that I do this, but had completely changed it round to make it seem like I was some raving, rapey lesbian.

I didn’t even bother to clear my name as she was one of the main “leaders” of our group and some of my friends had already made me feel so ashamed, so I just wanted to forget about it.

For so long I had tried to overpower my feelings, by pushing them to the back of my mind. I told myself that I was trying to get attention or that I wanted to be different to everyone else. I had convinced myself that I only liked men and the only reason I thought girls were attractive, is because I went to an all girls school. I could not have been more wrong.

In my early to late teens I really started to experiment and put my feelings into physicality. At the age of 14, I had properly kissed a girl and at the age of 16, I had my first sexual experience with a girl and although it felt like someone had taken the shackles of my feet, I also felt very guilty.

It saddens my heart to think that 16 year old me, felt guilty because society had shamed me to think that this was wrong, when in actual fact I was being the truest i’d ever been to myself.

I have kept this part of myself hidden for years, as a lot of my friends and family don’t know that I am bisexual and I’ve never felt like they have provided a safe space, for me to feel comfortable enough to come out.

I am not by any means throwing shade on any of my friends, as I don’t think they were exposed to gay or bisexuality growing up either and so it just didn’t really come natural for them. I did mention it to my mom in the past as a throw away comment, but she didn’t take any notice and I suppose because she’s never seen me with a girl, she hasn’t really taken it seriously.

There hasn’t been any coming out story from me and I’ve lived a part of my life concealed from my loved ones. Like with most gay or bisexual people, I find it a lot easier to tell acquaintances or strangers about my sexuality, as they don’t already have an idea of Elle and who she is supposed to be.

Majority of my friends are going to find out from reading this blog and although I feel apprehensive, I feel that it’s time. I find that through writing, it is the easiest way to express myself and I’ve been so worried for the longest time about what people may think, I just don’t care anymore!

Over the years, I’ve been inundated with thoughts thinking that when I do come out, my friends won’t believe me or just think I’m “going through a phase” and will try to invalidate who I am, which is what I think I’ve been scared of the most.

For any readers reading this blog that are going through the same thing, ask yourself this, if your friends act differently once you come out to them, then why would you even want friends like that? Those people are not your friends.

Pride month is a supremely colossal month for the LGBT+ community. For we have had to fight and fight for justice, just to be equal in society. We have had to take the abuse and threats and the physical assaults and bounce back from it all, still fighting for the rights that we whole heartedly deserve.

Just like BLM and all the other important social causes that we push for, the LGBT+ community, deserve to be treated the same. One does not deserve equality more than the other and no one in their right mind should make anyone feel guilty, for being who they are.

A few things that girls who like girls want their friends to know:

1. Being bisexual does not mean that we all of a sudden fancy you or would like to have sexual relations with you in ANY WAY.
2. You do not have to leave the room when you’re getting changed, we don’t look at you in that way, EVER.
3. If you feel uncomfortable with us talking about a girl in your presence, that means you need to look within, not us.
4. If we ever feel comfortable to come out to you, do not try to down play our sexuality by joking it off or saying”just it’s a phase”.
5. Please have the exact same energy when we are talking about a potential girl we like, like you would when we are talking about a guy.
6. Just don’t be a dick to us – if you need to research or do what you need to feel comfortable, then please do because we are SO comfortable in our skin.

National Pride Day is Sunday 27th June and this is the first year that I can wear my sexuality proud and encourage others to do the same.

I feel honored to be a part of a community who have never given up fighting and have gone through so much hardship, just to be considered normal in society. We aren’t normal! We are flamboyant, colorful, loud, quirky and peculiar and it’s society that has something wrong with them, not us.

Take PRIDE in WHO you are and if society doesn’t like it, fuck them.

E x