I just don't really need to know or care about a persons sexual orientation.... It just doesn't matter to me at all.

I can understand this point from the outside, but maybe I can help you understand why we (as gays) feel the need to put it out there anyway. I'm not by any means an activist, or a huge contributor to the gay community. By all standards, I'm just a normal guy who likes guys.

While it's great that sexuality doesn't matter to YOU, what you need to understand is that it DOES matter to a surprisingly large number of people.. When a gay person decides to start coming out of the closet, it's a terrifying process because we all know and understand that we all will inevitably lose friends over it, be told we're sinners by others, miss out on potential job opportunities that we're more than qualified for, deal with the backlash of showing our significant other's off to the world.. As an early teenager, I was jumped outside of school solely because a group of kids decided that I was a disgusting fag, even before any of us really truly understood what it meant to be gay.

If you meet a girl that you love and decide after a certain amount of time to propose, when she say's yes you're able to post about it on social media and tell your friends at work, etc. And you WANT to, because you're so excited to share the person you love with the people you're close to. We, on the other hand, have to carefully consider the real life consequences that can come from sharing our love with those to whom we're connected, for fear of either losing loved ones or facing other forms of repercussions.

So how does one combat that? How does one choose the "right" kind of friends that "will love you no matter what?" The simple answer is to choose friends like you, who don't care whether or not we're gay. Unfortunately, people don't wear signs around their neck explaining their particular stances, and so the alternative is for us to throw it out there at the very start of any interaction we have with new people, because then we know their stance from the beginning. Instead of losing friends or opportunities later, those individuals that will discriminate just choose not to associate with us from the beginning. Choosing to put it out there from the start is a way of choosing not to live in fear of loss, and in fear of making real connections with other people. It's a way for us to feel like we can safely bond with another person. These pride events are similar for us, because it's a chance for us to have one day of the year where we're surrounded by people that we KNOW won't hate us just for the person that we love, and that's a pretty powerful feeling.

So I hope that even if you don't like it, and you don't have to like it, you can at least understand how the behavior came to be. It's not foolish pride, or a need to be at the center of everybody's attention. It's a defense mechanism developed in response to very real societal issues that you as a straight person will never experience, or have to go through. You may not even have awareness of it, and that's honestly great for you, because it can be a really shitty way to live. But try to see it from another perspective and you may realize that, while maybe annoying, it's really not that unreasonable, and it's not about you - it's about trying to save face in an unfair society.