“I’ll never forget the first time I marched in a Pride parade. I was in my twenties and a teacher at a language school with students from all over the world, mostly young adults just out of high school. I hadn’t come out to my students, but I didn’t see myself as in the closet either. It just hadn’t come up.
I was marching with my boyfriend and the non-profit he worked for at the time, the Positive Resource Center, which provided career services for HIV-positive people. I didn’t really have a special Pride outfit, just jeans and a Positive Resource Center t-shirt, and my job was to walk alongside the tire of a car carrying a local TV celebrity whose name I can’t remember, a straight but flamboyant woman who did movie reviews on the local news and was known as a strong ally of LGBTQ people.
Along the parade route, I heard shouts of my name and looked over to see a huge group of…
