“My Body, My Identity, My Life” was this year’s theme for Berlin Pride also known as the Cristopher Street Day Parade. It’s an event that I look forward to every summer. Supporting and showing love for the LGBTQ community is one of the causes I truly believe in.
Despite the unforgiving heat (it said 32 degrees on the weather app but it felt so much warmer), Kurfürstendamm was jampacked and there were lots of people on the sidelines showing their support. My heart swelled three times its normal size. There was so much love. 💖🌈
Some of my closest friends belong to this community. The struggles they faced through the years from coming out, to discrimination coming from various groups, down to the stigma they have to live with were unimaginably difficult. I will never claim that I know exactly how they felt but I hope that someday they wouldn’t have to go through such things.
Celebrating each other’s differences in gender preference and accepting the way people want to live their lives are things that I hope would be normal in the next couple of years. It’s been four decades since the first Pride March in Berlin started. Seeing the community come together to express themselves in a city that’s one of the most open and accepting of them in the world is such a joy to witness.
I come from the Philippines – a country that is not perfect (yet) when it comes to accepting and empowering the LGBTQ community. I (and my friends from the said community) do believe, however, that it’s actually doing better than others. There’s no death penalty for being different and some top-ranking executives are open about their gender preferences. We even have a lawmaker, elected in 2016, who’s trans!
We’ve come pretty far but there’s still a long way to go. Some measures are being taken back home to ensure that we keep moving forward when it comes to acceptance. I rarely get political in public spaces. And, I do most of my work to push for causes I believe in in private. Just this once, however, I want to post here that if you’re someone from the Philippines who believes in equality, check out the SOGIE Bill and see how you can help get it passed.
With that said and before this becomes too long, here are the photos I took from the parade!
Some notes before anyone nitpicks to find fault in any of the photos and then goes ballistic: 1.) I blurred out some body parts just to keep the post SFW. 2.) Photos of politically-inclined slogans or photos of floats/trucks by political parties/religious groups don’t necessarily represent my personal beliefs. 3.) Our corgi, Juancho, is used to loud noises. However, we still put him a little further away from the action just to keep his ears a-okay. He also wasn’t stressed by the activity going on around him. He loves people so he was happy getting attention the whole time we were at the event.
More later.
Love,
Carol
