What can disability pride learn from queer pride?

Celebrating World Pride and Mardi Gras from the haven of their family home, Jasper Peach reflects on two facets of their identity – how far the LGBTIQA+ community has come, and their hopes for the disability community.

Image credit: AAP

Over the weekend I very much enjoyed the visual feast scrolling on my social media addiction platforms. There was Harry Styles and all the beautiful people who dressed up in so many sparkles to see him, and the other shiny spectacular of World Pride and Mardi Gras.

I don’t go out to things much. It’s a COVID-based decision as much as a fatigue-related one. A ‘putting shoes on is hard’ decision. I may be queer, but I tend to stay – and slay – at home.

On Saturday night I was cooking rainbow orecchiette pasta for my family and telling my young kids about the protest origins of the parade and why a rainbow flag means we belong.

This sense of belonging is one I also feel as being part of the disabled community. I can define what my labels are, my categories, the way I embody my identity in my creative expression. I celebrate who I am and so do a lot of my friends in both the LGBTIQA+ and disabled communities. There’s a massive contingent of us who belong to both.

Is there a social model of queerness? I suppose so. We embrace newbies and help them find their way, direct them to services and community members they may share values with. To belong to the LGBTIQA+ community – to be queer – is a radical act, just like being a disabled parent or lover, artist or committee member is. We don’t sit snugly in the boxes those outside our group put us in.

There is liberation in breaking free from lateral and literal violence. We need to remember and respect our roots while looking ahead to what’s coming our way, to the ways we want to emerge in a position of power and autonomy.

We have fought hard for marriage equality, but we can’t go on our merry way without also fighting for the people who are consistently marginalised and disempowered. In particular, the First Nations, trans and asexual members of our community. 

In the disabled community we have the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), but it’s not a fair and equitable system and never will be until applicants no longer need to outsource applications to access the scheme. If you don’t know the traps and pitfalls to avoid, you wind up disempowered, wrung out and worse off than when you started. That isn’t equity and it’s not acceptable. It’s inclusion and dignity worth fighting for, which should have been given to us in the first place.

What I love about queer pride and seeing the media coverage recently is just how beautiful everyone looks. It’s not merely a cosmetic beauty – it’s an absence of shame and an increase in belonging that shines through the beaming smiles of all included. In a world that isn’t always (or even often) inclusive, these times just for us are a chance to drop our guard and simply be the beautiful people we are. The people deserving of celebration and feeling justly proud of all that we represent.

I think we can take a leaf from the book of queer pride and use the pride we feel as disabled people to speak up for our rights, protest the wrongs and make this world kinder and more inclusive than the one we found. It’s not an overnight outcome by any stretch of the imagination, but one we need to work on together to achieve.