"Pride," to me, is not just about my LGBTQ identity. While the word 'pride' has been powerfully rendered a symbol of our community by the decades of struggles - which are nothing short of heroic - on the parts of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, I believe that it means more.

I was born in Seattle, Washington, to a white upper-middle class family with moderately liberal politics. I attended a private prep school for high school, where diversity and global community were emphasized only second in importance to academic excellence. Coming out was a relatively easy task for me. It is my coming out process, however, which led me directly to the work I have done in the LGBTQ community since I was fifteen years old. I lost my first friend to suicide a year after I came out. He had come out to his parents and been kicked out of his home, and months after that, had moved back in under the stipulation that he begin electroshock therapy to 'cure' his homosexuality. About a month later, he killed himself. He had no safe haven. Not at home, where he was a faith-project, and especially not at school, where he was verbally and physically assaulted on a regular basis.

It is through this experience that I devastatingly saw, first-hand, how lucky I had been. I sought not to save the world, not by any means, but I threw myself into activism all the same. If my friend had felt safe and accepted somewhere in his life, I can't help but feel that he would have spared himself. As a result, for my years in high school, I worked as a student leader with GLSEN (The Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network).

Currently, I am a third-year theatre student at Columbia University in New York. Here, I continue to honor my long history of educational activism within the LGBTQ community. I was active in the Columbia Queer Alliance for my first two years of college, and I am now a student facilitator with CUSpeakout - a training program geared toward educating campus groups (administrators, athletics, housing and dining staff, etc...) on creating safe spaces for LGBTQ identified students on the Columbia University campus. I am also working with our LGBTQ advisor and the Columbia College Office of Multicultural Affairs to create and implement a student mentoring program between New York-based college students and high school students.

To me, there is no fight more important to our community than creating safe spaces. I have found my own sense of 'pride,' not only in my work with the LGBTQ community, but also in my theatre and my identity as a student. I am deeply committed to combating homophobia and transphobia through education and theatre (two fields, which I think, ideally, are not too disparate from one another). Pride, to me, is having a space (even if it is inside one's self) to feel safe and supported. I am proud myself, and I think few have that luxury. There are hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ folk worldwide who cannot afford to be proud, and it is this that we must remedy.