“Glad I'm Gay / Shame”
by: Pierre Monnerville
Digital Photo — 42cm x 29.7cm
“Pride, to me, is the moment shame stops being the loudest voice.
Growing up gay taught me to scan rooms, to shrink, to translate myself into something ‘acceptable.’ Pride is the refusal to keep doing that. It’s not just celebration of the gay experience, it’s repair. It’s owning my experience and choosing to be seen on my own terms, with pain, softness and strength at the same time.
Those two pieces represent Pride as a shift from hiding to inhabiting, from carrying fear in my body to letting my body be my home. They hold the tenderness of what it costs to live in the margins, while also honouring what the margins can give: resilience, depth, humour, creativity, community, and a sharper understanding of love and life.
As a Black gay man in Europe, I often exist as a minority within a minority. That layered identity can come with extra silence, extra projection, extra loneliness. I do my best to remind myself that it can also be a source of richness. Pride is where those layers aren’t a burden I apologise for. They’re my full story I’m allowed to claim.
My work is a portrait of that claiming. Not perfect confidence, but an honest, hard-won and continually renewed self-acceptance.”
