Hello all,
Hey it's June!
It's Pride Month, and I hope you are doing something to help celebrate Pride and the people you know who deserve and need to feel included in our lives and in our workplaces and in our communities.
Members of the gay community- in all the variations and nuances that exist - are to be celebrated and lauded this month, for their achievements, strength, and beauty, and protected from isolation, dismissal, ignorance, and hate.
Check out the SUNY Pride website: Educate, Empower, Embrace. You can learn more about campus resources and SUNY's commitment to equity.
There are so many issues that are still considered too private to discuss, too personal to share, or too gender specific to be widely known by other genders. We are often scared to ask, and then scared to tell. I came of age in an era when gay and lesbian people were hiding in the US, but I'm happy to have outlived that and hope that I will always live in a US that values a diversity of sexuality, love, and personhood. In my time, we learned about puberty through terribly embarrassing class films and had to ask our older siblings or friends what the heck those films were talking about...and was it real? No-one spoke about LGBTQIA + issues in my community or school until much later- unless it was as a slur.
Can we finally stop that now? Let's get ourselves ready to let people be who they are!
Getting ourselves ready means learning more about the issues and lives of people a bit different from ourselves. And learning fact from fiction as in this great website from Case Western Reserve. Read a book!! You know I had to include that as a librarian! This list of 41 books has lots of options
And just for fun, not specific to Pride month, but speaking to women and feeling unknown and misunderstood...please listen to this funny little song about the time before 1984 when NASA was getting ready to launch Dr. Sally Ride into space for a week and they planned to provide her with...100 tampons. Yup, you read that right- 100.
"BELSKY: She was the only woman in a super male organization, and I think that's where the song connected with a lot of people, too, is - I had tons of women messaging me from all sorts of professions being like, I'm the only woman at my job. I really connect with this feeling because it's more about that, as well. It's more about all of these little things that happen when you're working with men who just don't even know that they don't know about women's lives."
All the best,
Holly
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