Coming Out as an Ally

June has just started and it’s the most rainbow colored month of the year. Yes, June is Pride month and I am beyond excited to celebrate this year.

As I wrote about after my March visit to Orlando, I spent time with friends in the LGBT community and got to spend time in their very welcoming clubs and learned that there is more out there than my small town upbringing.

While in Orlando, I got to experience my first drag show and have since taken to loving the amazing RuPaul’s Drag Race show and have been binging all the seasons I can get my hands on.  There’s just something so amazing about these people who find their inner voice and creatively channel and share themselves. These queens carry themselves with so much confidence and femininity, humor and glamour- I can’t help but love them.

In the past few months, I wrote about how Katy Perry’s experience growing up was the story I needed to hear. In a nutshell, she grew up really conservative, found this whole new world that’s out there of the LGBT community and that experience has changed her life so much for the better. Her experience is very similar to my own and being shown that others have been there as well is what I needed to become more bold. It might upset some people that I know to say this outloud, but I agree and take the role of an ally to this community. That’s just how it’s going to be- it’s time to stand up for what I truly believe in.

RuPaul has done more than just offer up hours of a fantastic reality show for me to devour, through hours spent listening to him and his bff Michelle Visage on their podcast, What’s the Tee?. The more I’ve listened, the more I’ve learned about Michelle and how she relates to the LGBT community as a straight, married woman with kids.  She speaks very openly about becoming an ally and standing beside all of her friends in every and any way that she can.

With June being Pride month, I want to come out as an Ally. I want to proudly say that I support and love and stand behind all of the LGBTQ+ community. While I don’t know even a quarter of it all yet, I am proud to call myself an Ally and want to do good for all of my friends and people I’ll never even meet who want nothing besides the rights seemingly everyone else has been alotted and allowed.  My goal is to spread love and acceptance, happiness and friendship.

I’m here to be an Ally and I’ll shout it from the rooftops. We have to remember: Love is Love is Love is Love and I love you- June or July or December or whenever.