Pride Month: Where Are You and Where Are You Headed?

As the month of June fills with celebrations of Pride and authenticity, we celebrate the remarkable progress that has been made over the past decades. That progress is visible not only during Pride Month but throughout the year.

On television, in movies, and across social media, we see beautiful same-sex couples, families raising children, people openly celebrating their identities, and individuals speaking candidly about their sexuality and relationships.

With the advent of PrEP and PEP, many gay and bisexual men, in particular, have experienced a degree of sexual freedom that would have been almost unimaginable during the height of the AIDS epidemic.

It is a world of freedoms that generations before us fought to achieve. But are we all living in that world?

For every person who is able to live openly, there are countless others whose reality remains very different.

Many have not come out to those they love most, fearing that revealing such a fundamental part of themselves could irreparably damage those relationships.

Others have come out but continue to live with conditional acceptance rather than genuine affirmation. They are tolerated but never fully embraced. Their partners are never quite considered family. Important conversations remain forever unspoken. Family gatherings become exercises in careful self-editing. At work, they remain silent in environments that are openly hostile or that subtly communicate that authenticity still comes at a price.

Perhaps some have not yet come out even to themselves. The process of hiding can become so opaque that the person no longer experiences it as hiding. Others defend themselves differently, directing toward openly LGBTQ+ people the very hostility they cannot tolerate within themselves.

Yet even for many who appear to be living openly, the past often remains an open wound.

As a psychiatrist, I see how frequently LGBTQ+ patients initially describe their childhood as devoid of any trauma or adversity. They describe supportive childhoods and loving families and classmates. Yet as psychotherapy unfolds, another side of their story gradually emerges. Parents who never truly accepted them. Years spent hiding relationships. Partners who were never invited into family life. Conversations that never happened. The constant effort not to disappoint the people whose love mattered most. A lingering hope that one day they might finally receive unconditional acceptance.

It is true that many of these experiences may not resemble what we traditionally call trauma. There may have been no violence, no dramatic confrontation, no single event that forever divided life into a "before" and an "after." But how can one regard these years of concealment, invalidation, conditional acceptance, and chronic vigilance as "a happy childhood"?

Like many forms of chronic adversity experienced by minority groups, these experiences are often accepted as simply "the way things are." Many LGBTQ+ individuals grow up believing that love will always come with conditions, that certain conversations are better left unsaid, that some relationships will never be fully recognized, that hiding parts of oneself is simply the price of belonging. Hypervigilance becomes second nature. Self-censorship becomes ordinary. One adapts so thoroughly that the adaptation itself becomes invisible.

That normalization may be, in part, precisely what makes these wounds so difficult to recognize, both for those who carry them and for the clinicians who care for them.

What are the consequences of this injury?

The consequences extend far beyond psychiatric diagnoses such as depression, anxiety, or suicidality. While these outcomes are well documented in the scientific literature, they represent only part of the picture.

When a part of ourselves becomes the target of hate and appears incompatible with love, the consequences may be devastating and enduring. The effects extend into several aspects of one's identity and self-regard, our pattern of thinking about others and the world, how we experience our emotional lives, and how we relate with others.

One wonders, "Who might I have become had I been free to be myself from the beginning?" How many invisible losses hide behind that question? First relationships that could not be lived openly. Adolescence spent hiding instead of exploring. Family milestones experienced with secrecy rather than celebration. Years devoted to survival and hypervigilance rather than curiosity, spontaneity, and growth…

Where does hate go?

To live as the target of hate is not merely a matter of losses. Perhaps one of the most perverse consequences of these experiences is internalized homophobia or transphobia. The voices that once judged, rejected, or shamed eventually become our own.

We hate ourselves and we may also hate others.

In fact, belonging to a minority does not make anyone immune to prejudice against that very minority. Some of the harshest hate directed toward LGBTQ+ individuals may come from members of the LGBTQ+ community themselves as they have inherited and internalized the same messages that once wounded them.

"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness."

— Attributed to Alejandro Jodorowsky

Where are you headed?

Wherever you are in your process of self-discovery and acceptance of your identity and sexual orientation, I hope you are walking toward a place where you are free to become—and to love—your authentic self.

If, along the way, you find yourself struggling emotionally or mentally, please don't hesitate to reach out for help.

Helder Araujo MD PhD