Is Pride Month Dead?

Or are we just getting started?

The saloon doors creak and sway. Tumbleweeds bounce across the vacant sand strip. The theme song from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly plays. My eyes sharpen. It’s quiet… too quiet.

That’s how Pride Month has felt this year – a hollowed-out shell, a story told by its absence. When did Pride become a Khia holiday?! Why is it giving Groundhog Day levels of cultural influence?

Allow me to explain. I went to Le Bain last night – the Friday of Pride weekend in New York City. The party was fab, with a lineup including two extremely fierce dolls I love. But on my international voyage from Bushwick to Meatpacking, the city felt dead. Not a creature was stirring, not even a rat. On the streets of Manhattan, I felt ridiculous in my dramatic smokey eye, curvaceous SKIMS bodycon, and chainlink necklace… well, I was drunk, so I was living for the fantasy of being a spectacle for straight people, but that’s not the point.

The look

I expected to walk outside to a rainbow road, greeted by bounds of faggots and trannies skipping with glee. Instead, on my way home, the L train was stalled at 8 Avenue, and I was sandwiched. To my right, a drunk guy taunted the old man across from him. The old man’s son stepped in, “cut it out, asshole.”

The drunk exploded: “I WAS JUST LOOKING OUT FOR YOUR POPS BITCH MIND YA FUCKING BUSINESS AND KNOW THE CONTEXT BEFORE YOU GET FUCKED UP. I RESPECT YA OLD MAN, NOT YOU, ASSHOLE. WITH YOUR STUPID GLASSES. DUMB FUCK..” ad nauseum.

To my left, two pairs of 18-year-old girls and boys, who clearly met that night, made small talk:
“Do you use TikTok?”

“Yeah, I make grindset videos.”

“Oh. Cool.”

I genuinely felt like I somehow was portaled into the Upside Down. In the midst of this hurricane of heterosexual nonsense, I lock eyes with the only other fab bitch on the train – STUNNING in her black fur coat and statement necklace. We both crack a smile, and I have to look away before I start laughing, scared that the drunk guy will set his target on me. This is not Pride Month, this is Shame Month.

Over the past few years, I would have told you June is my favorite month, even though my birthday is in July (Cancer baddies, I see you.) That’s partially because the weather is a reprieve between winter’s frostbite and summer’s ass sweats. But, mostly, it’s because of Pride Month. Pride is special to me, and most gay people, though we might be a little embarrassed to admit it. It’s a bit cheugy, campy. Like, aren’t y'all loud enough the other 11 months? But Pride Month is the only month where we scream to join a chorus, not as a shrill plea to be heard. I’m libbing out a little, but y’all forget that inside that icon, there’s just a young boy from North Carolina who wanted to be accepted.

I have so many memories of being overwhelmed with happiness during pride parties, high off the collective feeling of community and acceptance. Pride used to be LIT. I felt free to dance on the street with my ass out and no one could tell me shit, besides “PERIODDDD BITCH.” June was the one month when the wider world said, okay, we get it. Y’all have struggled under our boot for literal millennia. We’ll give you 30 days to queen out. It’s like the purge, but with breaking the rules of polite heterosexual society.

I had hoped, naively, that this month would bring the resurgence we so desperately need, a defibrillator for my depressed outlook on the world. Instead, it was a harsh spotlight illuminating what I've been trying not to see—the massive, unmistakable presence that I've trained myself to look around, to step carefully past, to pretend isn't taking up all the oxygen in my small corner of queer New York. That crushing weight is the dismantling of transgender acceptance, and it's gaining momentum with each passing day.

I don’t need to explain why Pride is flopping this year, but I will, because the alternative is to cede to the normalization of our dehumanization. It’s so exhaustingly routine that it's easy to ignore. This is by design, part of Trump’s ‘Flood the Zone’ strategy to overwhelm the public.

Every day that passes, I have to update this paragraph with a new infringement of our rights. The Supreme Court recently ruled that parents can opt their children out of LGBTQ+ content in school. Republicans are systematically stripping children and adults of gender-affirming care – a death sentence, as hormones and puberty blockers lead to a 73% decrease in self-harm or suicidal thoughts among youth.

Many of the adult trans people I know are nervously filing papers to get gender affirming surgeries – one of the most consequential decisions in their lifetime – before access is further eroded. Transphobia has pushed us to move like we’re on The Amazing Race: Fish Edition, trying to get our ducks in a row before this totalitarian nightmare swallows us whole.

It’s not just healthcare. Public support is declining for trans rights on nearly every measure. Trans women are being arrested and jailed in men’s prisons for using the bathroom. They are forced into solitary confinement because the risk of rape and murder from their cellmates is too high, a gutting illustration of who women’s – cis and trans – real enemies are. I’m sorry if this is depressing to read; it’s uncomfortable to write. It’s really fucking hard to live through.

In these circumstances, yeah. I’ll admit it. I miss pinkwashing a little…Like I need to get my life in a decked-out Walmart Pride section with rainbow tutus and t-shirts exclaiming “LOVE IS LOVE IS LOVE.” Now they got us rifling through the clearance bin, girl. What’s funny is how conservatives recoiled at rainbow capitalism as an overreach, despite the fact that it meant nothing materially. Can you at least let us dress our coffin in pink?

Okay. I don’t actually give a a huge fuck about Chase Bank’s plastered rainbow prints on their floor-to-ceiling windows. I give a fuck about why they are no longer there: the incentive structure has changed, and supporting LGBTQ+ rights is now a liability. That sums up how it feels to be transgender in this political moment — a liability, a setback, something to handle with humility bordering on shame. Which is tragic because trans people are third-eyed, supernatural deities gracing the planet with our cerebral presence and prodigal electronic music production abilities… but I digress.

Two teenagers were shot at Stonewall during this year’s Pride. My only hope is that the public will see our humanity in our blood on the concrete. The pendulum is at the uppermost right point, but it must come down.

I’m willing to admit I was gullible. Same-sex marriage was legalized when I was 15. My adult life has paralleled the peak of LGBTQ+ acceptance. I was resting on my laurels, blanketing myself in the truism that “it’s not my job to educate you.” I still don’t feel a moral responsibility to walk straight people to acceptance, though I may, with gritted teeth.

However, I do feel angry. I feel resolved, defiant, and insurgent. If there's one thing gay people hate, it's being underestimated. For that reason, I don't think Pride Month is dead. Girl, we are just getting started.