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 a form of rebellion.
PRIDE is not just about being out. It is about being whole. Not just rainbows, but the full spectrum—fear, flair, fatigue. The faith it takes to keep showing up. The families we make when our own can’t see us. The softness we learn to protect. The sex we had to unshame. The silence we turned into music.
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 their truth in journals. Who’ve never marched. Who are still learning how to say “I love you” without shrinking.
It’s also for the tired. The ones worn out from the fight, from being the lesson or the hashtag. PRIDE means you get to rest. Lay it all down and still be enough.
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’ve always been here. And we are not leaving.
