Pride on a Tuesday in November

Something curious happens on the first of July. The brands that painted their logos in rainbow colours in June go back to their usual colour, almost all at once, as if someone had given the order. The flags vanish from shop windows. The adverts change. And LGBT people carry on exactly as they were the day before, with their lives, their boyfriends, their exes and their neighbours.

I'm not complaining about June. I adore June. Streets packed, the party, the feeling that for a few days the whole city is on your side. But every year it makes me think the same thing: if pride only lasts a month, it looks an awful lot like a seasonal sale.

The pride that never makes the photos

There's a pride with no float and no date. It belongs to the boy who holds his boyfriend's hand on the metro on a Tuesday in November, at eight in the morning, half asleep. To the two women who introduce themselves as a couple at the parents' meeting at school. To the guy who pulls up a colleague over a tasteless joke, even though he's shaking a little inside.

That pride doesn't appear in newspaper photos. It has no soundtrack, no applause, nobody handing you a wristband. And it's the hardest kind. In June, going out with a flag is easy, because thousands of people are doing the same. In November you're on your own.

I'm far more interested in writing about that second pride. Pride is one of the themes of PLANETA GAYFOLK, but almost never the parade version. It's mixed in with gay love, exes, self-esteem and everyday life. Which is where it really lives most of the time.

Self-esteem as a daily job

I think pride, on a personal level, is more like a habit than a party. You work at it. Some days it comes on its own, and some days you have to fake it a bit until it becomes real. Some days you see yourself in the mirror and like what you see, and others you'd rather be someone else.

That's why it matters to me that there are songs for all those days, not just the celebrating ones. A song like «No quiero otro novio cojín» (I don't want another cushion boyfriend), going by the title alone, already suggests someone who's decided they deserve better. That's pride, even without a single flag. Knowing what you don't want in a relationship is a way of loving yourself.

Songs with no season

In about two years I've released 273 singles and more than 280 music videos. To me, none of those songs has a season. I don't write with June in mind or save lyrics for when the flags come out.

There's something of a statement in that. If my music is about everyday queer life, it makes no sense for it to show up only when queer life is in fashion. People don't stop falling in love, rowing with their ex or having a nosy neighbour in October. The songs shouldn't stop coming either.

The GAYFOLK trilogy is similar. The third album is called «El día de la liberación» (Liberation day), and it's true that the title sounds like a specific date. A day circled in red on the calendar. But the story the three albums tell, from discovering a place where you can be who you are, to longing to get there and, at last, liberation, doesn't happen in a month. It happens over years, sometimes over a whole life. And liberation, when it comes, doesn't end on the thirtieth of June. You have to keep living it the rest of the year, with everything lovely and exhausting about it.

A doubt about June

Now, an honest contradiction. Even though I criticise one-month pride, I understand perfectly what it's for. For lots of people, June is the only time of year they dare to go out, go to a party, wear a T-shirt they wouldn't wear the rest of the year. That month works as a permission slip. And for someone living somewhere they can't be who they are, a month of permission is a huge amount.

So I don't want to play June down. What I'd like is for June to be the beginning, not the whole thing. For the boy who wears the T-shirt in June to be able to wear it in September too, even if it's under a jacket. For the brand that paints itself in colours in June to hire LGBT people in January. For pride in the street to become pride at home.

There's something I like to think about everyday pride. It doesn't need heroic courage. It needs consistency, which is less spectacular and harder. Going to buy bread with your boyfriend. Putting his photo on your desk at work. Saying "my husband" at the doctor's without lowering your tone. None of those things makes the evening news. All of them together change a country, even if nobody notices while it's happening.

Songs can keep that company. They don't replace anything, but they're company. A funny song, heard on any old Tuesday on the way to work, can be the small dose of pride someone needed to make it through to the evening in one piece.

The three albums of the trilogy are free to download, no sign-up, at mikesaintlouis.com/descargas, any month of the year.