To the editor:

“Consider flying a banner for straight pride,” Barrington’s United Veterans Coalition just asked the town council. I’m married to a man, proud of our marriage, and we live in Barrington, but we don’t get “straight pride”—our picket-fenced house flies the rainbow flag. 

I’m bi and was in lesbian relationships all 30 years before I met my husband. He gave me the flag in 2016 after the political party that wrote discrimination against LGBTQ citizens into its national platform won control of the country. A pretty flag representing equal rights for everyone didn’t make it all better but it helped. 

While we don’t fly a straight pride flag, I can tell you what is totally awesome about being straight, or perceived as straight. The absolute best thing, hands-down? It’s the absence of fear. 

I still remember holding hands with a particularly publicly affectionate girlfriend. She’d grab my hand and my pulse would start to race. The panicked feeling would hit my throat and my eyes would start darting. Would we get harassed? Jumped? 

No matter, I’d think, standing up straighter. We should have the right to hold hands! Keeping my hand in hers was a political act, dammit—so I’d keep it there, swallowing the fear. I have to ask: Do y’all proud straight people have all this going through your heads?

I had reason to be nervous. After graduating from Brown, my then-partner and I were moving, strapping a mattress to the roof of our station wagon on Lloyd Ave. A carful of men started shouting anti-lesbian invective, then one of them got out of the car and started after us. We ran, just making it to the lobby and locking the door. We weren’t holding hands or anything; we were just two women, apparently looking dykey as we performed the manly task of knotting rope.  

A couple of years before that, a previous girlfriend had arrived mid-afternoon and we kissed in my second-floor apartment on Waterman, not bothering to lower the shades since it was daytime. When I finally reached for the shade, I saw four faces staring at me from across the driveway. They started yelling insults and epithets, and kept it up for weeks, whenever I entered or left my house. It was humiliating and terrifying. That happens to straight people all the time, right? Thus the need for those straight pride flags and parades?

On a trip to an all-inclusive LGBTQ resort in Mexico, a fellow vacationer, a mail carrier from Lansing, Michigan, said to her longtime partner, “Pass the sunblock, honey.” Then, with a sense of wonder and delight, she exclaimed, “I can call you honey!” She meant, in public. Safely. For the very first time in her life. 

It’s been nearly 6 years since I’ve been with my husband and I still can’t get over how easy it is to be out. Far from being threatened, usually someone beams at us. There’s no sense that we don’t belong, that we don’t have the right to hold hands, and there’s never any fear. No fear at all! What a relief.

In fact, the whole of society—every advertisement, every book, play, movie, Hallmark card—celebrates my straightness. Strangers, acquaintances, and coworkers bond with me over husbands and marriages—fairly basking in our shared, declared heterosexuality. Do I need to tell you this didn’t happen to me when my partner was a woman? 

So, no, I don’t even remotely feel the need for a straight pride flag. It’s my gay side and my many LGBTQ friends that still need to fly flags and hit the streets to fight against the fear and shame that society wants them to swallow, and to defiantly carve out a space for the kind of celebration and acceptance that I get every day of the year, now, just for being “straight.”  

Louise Sloan

Barrington