Notes On… PRIDE

PRIDE is not a party. It is a pulse.
It is not a month. It is a memory. A movement. A muscle memory of defiance written into the body of a people who were told to disappear.

PRIDE begins in the places where shame once lived; in the locker rooms, the pews, the bedrooms where we first learned to hide. It begins in the voice that trembled when we said, “This is who I am,” and found, to our surprise, that the world didn’t end.

We forget, sometimes, that PRIDE was born from grief and fury. That it was not corporate. Not glossy. Not digestible. It was bricks at Stonewall. It was Sylvia Rivera’s voice cracking in exhaustion. It was Marsha P. Johnson’s body in the river. It was a funeral every week during the plague years. And still—still—we danced.

To be queer and alive is already a miracle. To be queer and joyful is rebellion.

PRIDE is not just about being out. It is about being whole. Not just rainbow flags, but the full spectrum of our lives, the fear, the flair, the fatigue. The faith it takes to keep showing up. The families we build when our own couldn’t see us. The softness we hold sacred. The sex we had to fight to de-shame. The silence we turned into songs.

As a therapist, I’ve sat with clients who still whisper their truth like it’s a sin. Who apologize for how they love. Who carry generations of disapproval in their nervous systems. And yet, I have also seen those same clients take their first full breath. Stand taller. Reclaim joy not as decoration, but as a therapeutic necessity.

PRIDE, in this way, is not just symbolic. It’s somatic.

PRIDE is not only for the ones who are loud. It is for the quiet queers too. The ones who write poems in journals. The ones who’ve never been to a march. The ones still learning how to say “I love you” without apology.

PRIDE is also for the exhausted. For those who are tired of the fight, tired of representation that flattens us into slogans, tired of being the token or the teaching moment. PRIDE is the sacred right to rest. To lay down the armor and still be seen as whole.

To the elders: thank you.
To the youth: keep going.
To those in the in-between: your timing is not too late.

We are here. We have always been here. And we are not leaving.