Happy Pride Brood X
Seventeen years ago, when the brood x cicadas last came out en masse as they will again this year, I was fourteen. Specifically, I was at the end of my 8th grade school year, traveling with my classmates in a caravan of buses to DC via an endless number of sweltering historical battlefields. At each stop masses of cicadas covered the monuments and cannons and as we stepped off of the bus they settled into our hair and picked their cautious way across our tank tops and sports jerseys. Their song was deafening and unflagging. It amped our teenage adrenaline up to a gallup- our hearts thundered in our chests as the bugs roared in our ears and we learned very little in the way of history.
When I remember that trip it is the cicadas that come to mind. For seventeen years I have let them be the star of that story, the unexpected shock of them drowning out everything else. But the truth is that we untangled the cicadas from our hair, climbed back on our buses, and traveled away from the battlefields and into the city. That night in DC my heart thundered in my chest and the blood roared in my ears as I told my friends for the first time that I was gay. My admission prompted one of my best friends to swap beds- you understand, right? she said as she shuffled her suitcase across the room to safety. And I did understand, or I thought I did. As I lay down that night and looked at the unfamiliar sleeping face of the girl who offered to take my friend’s place next to me I felt that I had gotten off easily.
Our president just declared June “Pride Month” and the blood roared in my ears and my heart ached in my chest. This June brood x is beginning to emerge once again. In the seventeen years that they have been subterranean I have lived each day above ground a gay, queer, lesbian, out and striving for proud. As the president gives us this month, and corporations froth with rainbows and temporary representation, above ground it is still incredibly hard to be gay. As the brood x cicadas emerge and live out their final lifecycles among us I am saying prayers over them, whispering hope that their offspring will emerge to a kinder world, seventeen years from now, where no queer child aches from being and thinks they got off easy.
Jennifer Finney Boylan’s got some brood x pride thoughts as well- NYT essay