memes

Depends on your context of "proud". Pride movements for instance aren't nessisarily about being specifically proud of your gender / sexual orientation in the same way one is of your accomplishments. The movement co-opted the word to mean something subtly different. When some says "I am a proud gay man" for instance the statement does not imply "I think I am particularly special given this trait and am worthy of praise because of it" what is actually being implied is "I am not ashamed by this trait and will not be treated as if I should be. "

The movement has it's own language and "Pride" specifically was chosen as being the opposite of shame which was the affect people were expected to have by society. The people who created the idea did so out of participation in gay support groups at the time where the social norm was always that you had to perform a performative regret like being gay was a habit akin to a drug addiction. You were reinforced to adopt a narrative that you were unhappy and struggling - even when actually your partner and community might be a source of great joy. Gay Marches were shirt and tie events where one soberly asked for people to see you as a human that passes for straight, all the culture and actual proclivity tucked behind a neat mask where that undercurrent of shame was still at play.

True Emancipation, according to the Pride movement, was fighting the narrative that there was anything shameful about being happy. They decked themselves in rainbows as an allusion to the joy they wanted to show the world, modeled Pride events on Independence day events and affected instead of performative shame performative pride. Something that would allow them to be unapologetic in their fight for actual rights to exist in the light of day as opposed to the former affect of shame that turned them into pitiful beggars asking for scraps of patchy tolerance to exist in the shadows as people who would treat their own way of being as a failure state.