Your thread title asks for help understanding gay pride, but you really don’t seem interested at all in understanding it.
Does coming out as gay mean you can marry the person you love? Mean you can be seen holding hands with that person and not lose respect. If your boss sees you, not losing your job? Buy a house together? Raise children together? Make medical decisions for the person you love.
Not get totally screwed if the person you have lived with for over a decade dies and her “family” swoops down and takes everything that she willed to you?
Think of it being a culture, OP. The Irish have parades because they’re Irish. Latinos have Day of the Dead festivals because they’re Latino. DragonCon attendees have parades because they like to wear costumes. I doubt many of them will attribute their life successes exclusively to being of that culture. Even if they did, it enforces their cultural identity. Plus, they’re all having a good time. They just want to celebrate. Isn’t that good enough?
But it’s not really, Pride is a celebration, of course, but it’s also a protest. People shouldn’t forget why pride is important. It may look like a party, but it’s not just a party. It’s about visibility.
You know, understanding something doesn’t mean agreeing with it.
You may have views on whether gay people should be ashamed of their orientation or not; you may have views with whether their orientation should be kept private or not. Neither of those should keep you from understanding why pride is something that people feel is important. As others said, you don’t seem to have any interest in understanding that.
And, having read this far, it’s confirmed my suspicion that this question was not asked with a sincere desire to understand the answer, but merely to repeat superficial homophobic talking points.
Even if it were nothing but a celebration- what is so hard to understand? Does the OP just “not get” 4th of July celebrations? Is he confused by St Patrick’s Day parades?
But being comfortable with you are and not afraid to live your truth IS something to be proud of, IMHO . Certainly more worthy of pride than “being American” or “being Irish.”
There are right now queer* children** living in households where they are being told that being queer is sinful, an illness, or just Wrong.
Pride is for them, as much as it is for the people who are in the pride parades. It’s as much for visibility as it is for partying. It’s about telling the world at large that they don’t have a problem with being themselves.
BTW, queer people? From this cishet person - y’all have come a long way just in my lifetime and I am effing proud of what y’all collectively and individually have accomplished.
You deserve all the P R I D E y’all can muster.
*I’ve been following queer vs. gay discussions elsewhere, and while I am cishet, and don’t need the LGBT spaces, as a spectator I think that the queer term is better than gay, because it is more inclusive all around. One of the things I have admired about the movement is how y’all took a slur and said “Fuck yes we are, and if you have a problem with it, go eff yourself”
** Yes, children. When I was in kindergarten, I was chasing the boys trying to kiss them. I was having romantic daydreams about James Kirk. And no one objected. If my straight sexuality was manifesting that early, I know that there are children who are gay that are having gay feelings that young.
I am under the impression that “queer” is used as a short version of “genderqueer,” which in turn is used as a synonym for “asexual” or perhaps “nonbinary.” Then again, I always thought the Q in LGBTQ stood for “questioning” (as in, “Am I homosexual/bisexual or not?”; I think the “new” letter for that is U, for “unsure”), so what do I know?
Again, from the outside looking in, but I’ve been watching this for 35-45 years (since I’ve been aware of the issues since I was at least in high school, probably more like middle school)
My perception is that queer was originally a slur as in “You’re not normal”*, and thus covered anyone who didn’t conform to the cis-hetero standards. Same sex attraction, bisexual, asexual, men dressing as women, women working to look like men (because women have more leeway in clothing, so a guy who puts on a dress going to get more flack than a woman dressing as a man, until she gets to the point that she could pass for a man)
Most discourse - college courses and research - use “Queer studies” as an umbrella term, and one of the original power phrases was “We’re Here and We’re Queer”
I would say that the term “genderqueer”, queer is an adjective modifying gender and was taken from the broader term queer, not the other way around. In fact, that use looks like it dates to the late 19th century per wikipedia
*my brother in 4th grade - 68-69, I believe - called another kid “queer”, and his teacher made him write out the dictionary definition of queer (x times, because that was how you punished kids those days). But he was insulting the other with the primary definition, i.e. he was calling the other kid strange. He’s still salty about that.
Is that what you’re doing is called now?
Getting here might have been for some. The rest is no more of an “accomplishment” than getting your driver’s license.
You seem to have a shifting definition of “pride/proud.”
Here, you criticize a political candidate for not being proud of being a lesbian because she didn’t put it on her campaign website.
Here, you note that English people are proud of things that they didn’t accomplish, like being born into wealth, without a hint of criticism.
Here, you note that Americans are proud of their country and wouldn’t be if it were a worse place.
Here, you say you are proud of something you did not accomplish, in that you had no say on your German heritage (but it’s pretty awesome anyway!)
Here, you talk about how dudes should be proud of getting erections upon seeing “a woman’s hot body” because boobs are amazing.
Perhaps you’d like to explain to the group why you think being proud of looking at strippers (or whatever) is a reasonable thing, but being proud of being gay is unseemly.
Really, I’m all ears.
I passed on my first try. 
Ouch.
I drove by Sharice Davids’ office today for the first time since the election.
It was SO nice to see her name on the front of that place instead of Yoder; I damn near stopped to go in and say so.
Urbanredneck. I’m replying to you in the hope you might actually have posted in the hope of learning something instead of just spouting off. Ready?
You seem to be basing your entire perspective on the basis of ONE gay person you know at work. You don’t seem to know him all that well. Maybe you don’t care to. Maybe NOT knowing him well lets you use him as a convenient example to voice your uninformed opinion. If that’s true, you’re probably not proud of yourself.
You say those who have to work hard to become citizens have reason to be proud of being American. I agree. My mother and her parents were those people. But does that mean YOU are not proud of being an American because you’ve done nothing to earn it? You’re just plain not proud of being an American, huh? You don’t sing along with Lee Greenwood and never complain about people who, in your eyes, don’t show enough pride in being American?
Suppose your son came home and said other kids have always made fun of him for being Urbanredneck, Jr. They say because he’s an Urbanredneck, he must be ignorant, weird, disgusting. Wouldn’t you tell him being an Urbanredneck is something to be proud of?
People can be proud of who they are, not just what they do. But you already knew that.
Which includes all sorts of gender stereotypes, it’s the kind of insult that’s tossed at anybody who refuses to let themselves be stuck into a pigeonhole smaller than my size-4 fists. I’ve been called (muy) rara ((very)queer/weird), rarita (queer) or weird for liking videogames, for my taste in men being independent of what the marketing people say, for saying I didn’t like wearing skirts, for considering that pencil skirts in particular and my ass should never get within reach of each other… and that’s being a cishet woman, but apparently not sheep enough. If I, a professionally successful woman who’s spent most of her life in countries that nowadays have SSM, have run into that shit, I don’t want to think of the crap my petite, prim Polish coworker may get simply because some ass has decided that petite, prim men are sure to be fags and bashing fags is OK.
Gay pride: Being LOUD and IN-YOUR-FACE about your pride in being gay.
This is commonly seen as a good thing.
Black Pride: Being LOUD and IN-YOUR-FACE about your pride in being black.
This is commonly seen as a good thing.
White Pride: Being LOUD and IN-YOUR-FACE about your pride in being white.
These bigots should be crucified. Literally if possible, otherwise at the minimum on the altar of public condemnation.
Oooh, ooh, I know: “False equivalency!” What’s the next fallacy on your pop quiz?
Good answer, but the panel would also have accepted “blatant strawmen”.