Magazine, The Immigrant Experience
In our deeply polarized society, what role does PRIDE play in shaping identity and forging community? Or has LGBTQ life become so normalized—“so over the rainbow,” as some declare—that it has lost relevance? What does it mean to be LGBTQ at this juncture, when many in the community are under attack?
Those questions framed American Community Media’s virtual press briefing, “Personal Perspectives on PRIDE,” where journalist Helen Zia, author Richard Rodriguez, and parent-organizer Aruna Rao traced decades-long journeys toward visibility and safety. “Speakers shared their stories and perspectives on this moment in time,”
Helen Zia: From “triple jeopardy” to full-spectrum Pride
Zia, the Chinese-American activist who helped galvanize Asian-American politics after the Vincent Chin murder, opened with a memory she calls her “lesbian trial.” In the mid-1970s, fellow Asian, Black, and Latinx organizers formed a semicircle around her and demanded, “Helen, tell us, are you a lesbian?” If she said yes, she risked excommunication; instead, the twenty-something replied no and felt herself “stepping into the closet and slamming the door shut” .
That experience crystallized her sense of “triple jeopardy”—race, gender, and sexuality entwined so tightly that “as human beings, we can’t separate them” . She reminded reporters that the slogan born in the AIDS era still holds: “Silence equals death. We cannot afford to be silent.”
For Zia, Pride remains urgent precisely because hard-won rights feel newly fragile. She pointed to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade as proof that “civil marriage for same-sex couples could be reversed,” while queer asylum seekers are already being detained and deported to places “where they could be killed for who they are” . Pride, she insisted, “is not past tense; it means bringing all of myself—lesbian, woman of color, daughter of immigrants—into the picture.”
Richard Rodriguez: Books as passport, parades as afterthought
Rodriguez followed with a confession: “I’ve never been to a gay pride parade.” He has only “accidentally gone across the street on Market” while one passed by . Growing up Catholic in Sacramento, the first inkling of difference came via a movie scene featuring a shirtless cowboy—he felt he had been chosen rather than choosing.
Literature became a refuge. “Being gay gave me the world… It taught me to imagine myself in large ways, beyond a Mexican-American working-class family,” he said, recalling seventh-grade trips to read James Baldwin at the local library. Yet AIDS darkened that discovery. Rodriguez described phone calls announcing friends’ diagnoses and the “colonialism” of urban gay men who, before the disease was widely understood, carried HIV into Mexican bars “because the boys did not know of AIDS.”
Even today, he worries that queer characters remain comic relief and that “there are still no gay football players… we’re much less advanced than we think we are” . Pride’s task, he suggested, is to let LGBTQ people be taken seriously—as writers, athletes, and believers—rather than reduced to symbols.
Aruna Rao: Building Desi Rainbow in the age of “gender refugees”
Rao’s story began at her New Jersey kitchen table. Ten years ago her South Asian child came out as queer and trans; when she attended PFLAG, she was “the only brown face” in the room and felt unseen. Determined not to be alone, the longtime community organizer launched Desi Rainbow Parents & Allies, now a national network that helps immigrant families move “from fear and bias… to supporting their child.”
Rao turned the briefing’s spotlight on the U.S. Supreme Court decision U.S. v. Skrmetti, which allowed Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors to stand. Families with means are becoming “gender refugees,” she said—forced to relocate for treatment—while even the country’s oldest pediatric gender clinic, at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, has shuttered under federal pressure. Short-term travel is no solution, Rao added, noting that many rural families lack funds to cross state lines and that insurers may soon restrict adult care as well.
Her husband’s first response to their son summed up the acceptance she hopes other parents will reach: “I love you. I don’t understand any of this… but never doubt that I love you.”
What tied the stories together
- Intersectionality is reality, not jargon. Zia’s layered “lesbian, daughter of immigrants, woman of color” identity, Rodriguez’s Catholic-Latino lens, and Rao’s Hindu immigrant motherhood all showed that attempts to separate race, faith, gender, or sexuality “dehumanize all of us.”
- Legal volatility shadows every gain. From marriage equality to passport gender markers, the speakers mapped a landscape where federal rulings and executive orders can redraw daily life overnight.
- Family reactions change trajectories. Whether it was Rao’s husband, Zia’s late-life wedding witnessed by her mother, or Rodriguez’s siblings “converting” their parents through love, acceptance—or its absence—emerged as the pivot point.
- Stories move opinion. Zia noted that support for same-sex marriage flipped when Americans realized someone they loved was queer. Rao urged reporters to surface pre-colonial queer histories within immigrant cultures to counter claims that LGBTQ identities are “a white disease.”
Where PRIDE stands in 2025
For Zia, Pride is a living survival strategy, not a marketing month; for Rodriguez, its power lies in depth of storytelling, not spectacle; for Rao, it’s the scaffolding that holds families together when laws fall apart. Their combined message answered the briefing’s opening questions: Pride still shapes identity and forges community precisely because attacks on queer existence have intensified.
And so, as Pride flags flutter across storefronts, these immigrant voices remind us that the rainbow’s promise is unfinished business—a collective vow to keep every color visible, audible, and safe.
#Pride2025 #LGBTQWriters #ImmigrantVoices #Intersectionality #GenderJustice #QueerStories #EthnicMedia
