The Bi in BIPOC: Understanding the Intersectionality of Pride this Year

When I woke up on July 1st, two things hit me at once. In a blink, June had passed and I still had not posted anything on Instagram to celebrate Pride or my identity. Days in quarantine have been passing quickly, especially when I don’t need to be checking Google Calendar for Zoom meetings and time out with friends. This was no different.

June was over. In previous years, I had spent hours deliberating over outfits at the mall to wear to the parade, but this year I spent the entirety of Pride on social media. Instead of browsing Amazon and adding mesh shirts and rainbow flags to my wishlist, I spent my time browsing Twitter and signing petitions. Instead of posting an impromptu portrait-mode photoshoot on Manhattan streets with my new subtly pan flag-colored Vans, I posted infographics about issues facing BIPOC. Yet, the performative activism I saw this year didn’t come in the form of a hike in likes on posts related to my coming out story; it was a flood of black squares on Instagram.

I have been voluntarily self-isolating in New York since the pandemic broke out in the U.S. back in March as universities quickly emptied their campuses. I moved back home under the same roof as my parents much earlier than I had expected. My independence had been cut short by two months. Yet, back in March, I was still hopeful that my spring semester would go back to normal and I would be seeing my high school friends at the latest by summer.

However, by May it became abundantly clear that was not going to be the case. This also meant that Pride 2020 was not going to include parades running down Fifth Avenue with streets blocked off nor spectators waving flags up against barricades and the more daring ones hanging off fire escapes and construction scaffolding. I would not be painting my nails on the ferry with carefully chosen pastel pink, blue, and yellow. I would not be leaving Greenwich Village with an armful of rainbow memorabilia to carefully hide away in my small backpack while young teens wiped off their faint paint and glitter on the subway ride home.

In the last few years, June has been a time for companies to sell rainbow merchandise and change their logos to include bright ROYGBIV variations. But more importantly, it is a celebration of queer folk, allowing them to be unabashedly themselves before they’re told to dial their sense of individuality and “queerness” back for the other eleven months of the year. This is why it was especially hurtful to hear a friend say, “Oh, it’s July now, back in the closet you go.” Even as a joke in passing conversation, it hit too close to home. Not enough time had passed between my coming out and the joke landing. I don’t think enough time will ever pass for it to be okay.

Last year, Pride 2019 was a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. This year, as a member of the queer community, we focused on the “riot” aspect of Pride. The start of this new decade has brought with it agents of change and upheaval, for better or worse. The LGBTQ+ community showed up virtually and came together at protests to carry the development of the Black Lives Matter movement into June.

And to some people, these two movements may seem to be adjacent, but don’t directly overlap. However, I’m here to say that race and sexuality do intersect. As someone who is Asian-American and pansexual, my experiences as a woman are colored by these lenses. How other people interact with me might also be impacted by this. While I can try to hide my sexuality and “pass” as straight (which is sometimes thrown at me as a compliment, though I can assure you it is not), I can never hide the color of my skin or the way that people automatically judge and see me because of it (now heightened in a xenophobic COVID-19 world).

Intersectionality theory, developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, claims individuals who identify as anything other than white, cisgender, heterosexual, and male automatically have less privilege, and each facet of identity that is different brings them further away from those advantages. This theory then demonstrates why Black and Brown people in the LGBTQ+ community disproportionately experience homelessness, face workplace discrimination, and are statistically more likely to be victims of hate crimes (FBI). The Human Rights Campaign reported that last year, 91% of the trans and gender-nonconforming individuals who were fatally shot were Black women.

It is the resurgence of intersectional ideology that made Pride 2020 special. For potentially the first time since Stonewall, we saw strong recognition for the group that helped ignite the gay rights movement, Black trans folk. From Marsha P. Johnson—whose middle name is so badass that I have no choice to stan (“Pay it no mind,” as she would say)—throwing the first brick or shot glass at Stonewall Inn 51 years ago, the LGBTQ+ community has now been thrown a brick it cannot ignore.

Support for Black Lives Matter is not conditional, and we cannot forget that Pride would not be what it is without queer Black folk. We cannot turn our backs to this and say that it’s not our problem to deal with. It’s for this reason that rainbow flags have been modified this year to include a stripe of black and brown to acknowledge BIPOC who have been marginalized and had their voices drowned out by their white counterparts.

Even though Pride month is over and people are not posting about BLM as fervently, the tide of change must not be dismissed as a trend or performative activism. The tide must not be pulled back and forgotten.

Instead of marching in the pan-colored Vans I bought to celebrate last year, I’ll wear them on a masked stroll around my neighborhood and listen to a playlist with Girl In Red, Rina Sawayama, and MUNA. I will continue to be unapologetic about my existence and use all the platforms I have to support the Black community and other marginalized groups. I will not stop being proud of my identity as a queer Asian-American even though June is over, and I will not stop talking about the injustices inherent to intersectionality.

We are looking not at a moment, but a movement.

By Ivy Fan

Playlist maker, houseplant collector, coffee drinker, and poet exploring the intersectionality of identity.