My first Pride was mostly plastic. I walked along rows of corporate-sponsored booths in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, indiscriminately accepting all the rainbow tchotchkes that were handed to me: bracelets, keychains, frisbees, probably a thumb drive or two. Someone from Chipotle gave me a coupon that said “¿Homo estás?” It was the only thing I kept; I could at least turn it into food. Everything else was useless: monomers combined into polymers, then extruded, melted, and molded into multi-colored trinkets destined for the dumpster. But they at least represented some sort of power — a symbol that we finally mattered enough, at least as a marketing demographic, for companies to pander to us.
This Pride, many years later, we are seeing firsthand how hollow that corporate outreach was all along.
We are living through an unprecedented burst of homophobic and transphobic outrage that has taken hold of state governments, media outlets, and school boards. Hundreds of bills threaten our rights to healthcare, inclusive education, school athletics, and basic privacy. And now, when our community could use meaningful displays of public support, a slew of companies are caving to an outlandish, disinformation-fueled moral panic that paints our mere existence as a conspiracy to “groom” children. Target has pulled products from shelves and Anheuser-Busch seems to have gone back to the Bush era, folding in the face of conservative outrage over a single can of beer dedicated to a trans woman. Other companies are sticking to their Pride plans, but many in a more muted way, likely terrified of having their products splashed on Fox News: “Don’t ask, don’t tell, but we do have bisexual flip flops available for purchase.”
It may seem surreal, after a half century of Pride celebrations, to be at a point where drag queens are creating safety plans ahead of their shows and Floridians are risking criminal charges just to hold a parade. Queer people are literally putting their lives on the line; meanwhile, the same companies that once put out weepy, gay marriage-themed ads have fallen suspiciously silent. The good news, though, is that corporations were never the arbiters of our humanity, as any queer elder can tell you. And if they’re not behind us, good riddance; because we have this: the irrepressible realness of our lives and our love for each other.
That year of my first Pride, I had spent most Tuesday nights attending a small support group at my school for transgender students. It was held in a featureless sub-basement office with the blinds pulled down for confidentiality. What took place in that room was sacred, without exaggeration. Many of us were addressed by our chosen names for the first time in that group; hell, we workshopped them together. Even more meaningful were the networks of support that grew around the group: I drove a fellow trans woman to her electrolysis appointment. I seem to recall teaching a younger trans guy how to tie his tie, drawing from my days as a closeted Mormon missionary. And I’m sure they both have their own fuzzy memories of the things they did for me.
As queer people, it’s the care we provide for each other that matters. It’s friends giving each other hormone injections because they’re too scared of needles to do their own. It’s a hand-me-down binder given new purpose. It’s a bathhouse on a busy day. It’s a picnic, a movie date, or a day at the beach. Bank brochures with pictures of smiling lesbians on them can’t comfort you while you cry. Rainbow socks can only hug your feet. No one can protect us as fiercely as we protect each other. That has never been clearer than it is now.
My challenge to myself this Pride, which I extend to you, is to suppress the noise and embrace each other. Ignore the plastic and seek perspective. Twenty percent of Gen Z adults are LGBTQ+, up from 10% of Millennials and 4% of Gen Xers. That trend line is not going anywhere, no matter how painful our opponents try to make our lives in the short-term. In an era of abbreviated attention spans, when all the headlines in our feeds are starting to look like right-wing word salad — “Ron DeSantis Drowns Gay Disney Adults in Bud Light” — we should remember that we’ve been around a lot longer than the 24-hour news cycle, and we’ve outlasted plenty of moral panics.
The anti-LGBTQ+ crowd can throw temper tantrums in the nearest Barnes & Noble. They can write a thousand scurrilous think pieces “just asking questions” about our very humanity. But they can’t stop queerness itself, and deep down, they know they can’t. They are damming a river with plywood and, in the grand view of history, only buying themselves a little more time before the water bursts through. All we need to do is make sure our friends make it to the next Pride Month, and then the Pride Month after that, and the one after that.
Because as hollow as my first Pride felt, what is truly remarkable is that it happened almost a decade ago. And I’m still here, thanks to people who were there for me when I needed it most. This June, try to forget about the front-facing camera losers filming their faux outrage in the aisles of Target. We don’t need to compete with them for hate views; we’re playing a numbers game that is much longer-term and generationally stacked in our favor. Whether this is your first Pride or your seventieth, keep being the reason we will win. We are our own best allies — and we always will be.
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