Pride 2025 And Why It Matters
Go to TRADE! To Crush! To a Ball! All of it
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Pride means everything to me. Absolutely, positively, undoubtably, unwaveringly, and completely, everything to me, and that will be until the end of my days, now and forever, world without end, amen.
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The history of Pride (click here to learn more) is very much based on the fact that my
LGBTQ+ community was sick and tired of being treated so horribly for centuries to millenia by a society that valued sameness, exclusivity, religiosity, and permanent lack-of-self as the
cornerstones of their imprint upon the world, so we decided to go against the idea that we should be ashamed of who we are and, instead, be downright
proud of who we are (click here to learn more).
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But enough history for now (though you should study it); let's talk about my personal Pride experience, starting with June 2020. This was the year where there
were no Pride parades, no Pride festivals, no dandies like me out and about showing lewks to delight others, no hot guys in gold lamé booty shorts, nothing. To a whole lot of us it
was either resetting or depressing; for me it was nearly life-ending. I was openly fearful of increasing racial reprisals taking place in light of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna
Taylor, and many, many, many more, and I vocalized those fears openly through social media only to receive a tremendous amount of backlash from almost exclusively yt people whom I thought
were my friends, calling me everything from inaccurate to dramatic to stupid. The attacks from
people whom I thought were my actual friends, alongside being deprived of my ability to celebrate who I am and why I matter, culminated in a massive downward spiral that led to daily
contemplations of ending my life. This is why, five years later, I still say that Pride saved my life!
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Fast forward to June 2025, the 5-year anniversary of that fateful month and year that, thankfully, is in the past. I am having the time of my life with a new job with better pay, beautiful
friends in my community who, while being awful danged pretty on the outside, are unfathomably gorgeous on the inside, love, acceptance, inclusion, and the ability to further my dandy
agenda beyond my local reach. This is the extreme opposite of five years ago, and I couldn't be happier.. and prouder. It happened to coincide with this year's
World Pride in my little town, so it was quite grander than usual. I won VIP tickets at a Memorial Day
event at TRADE and was able to go backstage for free during the Street Festival to see the one and only
Cynthia Erivo up close and personal, along with tasty food, chairs, couches, and some
equally beautiful people. I went to Flower Factory which happened to also be
the same place that hosted my favorite Ball, where I came in 2nd place for Best Dressed category walk.
Weeks later I won Best Dressed at a different ball, The Orpheus Ball: Divas and Disco. I spent weekends admiring the ginormous size of the new TRADE (seriously you should go) with my wonderful friends. And I
completed my own web content application web portal in a language I absolutely hate to further support this glorious website.
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At the same time I had wonderful, amazing moments this Pride month, I unfortunately also had events that were awful and harmful. When I mentioned on social media, jokingly, that it tends
to rain during the Pride Festival on Sundays, a yt straight cis woman whom I have known for over 20 years snarkily chimed in with "And?" (She has had a long history of belittling me and
dismissing my agency, and I have had a long history of sadly tolerating it) I retorted back that this is not her place as a straight cis woman to interject so coldly and unnecessarily
during Pride; she further verbally abused me, calling me further names, including "playing the victim". I blocked her. Weeks later someone else whom I have known, a yt Christian
"ex-gay" (click here to learn more), whom I have
also known for over 20 years (what was up with me 20 years ago? Geez..), made an offensive and ableist comment, using the R word. I retorted back to him saying how offensive the word is
to disabled people like me; he returned with a volley of anti-abortion statements and how I was living "in sin" (notably never apologizing nor even acknowledging his ableist slur). I
in turn defied him and said that I was proud of who I am. He then proceeded to tell me he "loved" me and "prayed for me to repent". I told him to save his prayers, because I don't need
them nor want them. He basically defied my wishes and prayed for me, openly, via DM. I blocked him. For many of us in the LGBTQ+ community, we're equally subjected to love, acceptance,
and inclusion, alongside intolerance, abuse, and hate. Unlike 5 years ago, I am a lot stronger now and was able to block them and move happily and dandily forward in my art, my
intelligence, my creativity, my friends, and, most importantly, my true self.
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Pride itself is not just a parade or a festival or a ball or a party or gatherings at your best friends' penultimate penthouse apartment for hors d'oeuvres and parade watching; it's that
and far, far more. It's the idea that you don't have to live in shame anymore about who you truly are; that you don't have to follow others' personal rules of conduct for their lives;
that you know who you are, embrace who you are, discover more of who you are, and you want everyone else to share the same sense of happiness, joy, freedom, and fulfillment of being
their authentic selves not just June 1 - 30 but all year long, all the time. For me it is more than just showing off pretty looks and winning (or almost winning) balls; it's being proud
and happy that I can. (Here comes the heavy part) Not everyone wants that for me or for us. Other than those two absolute jerks I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of others who are
doing everything in their power to stop Pride. There are people stopped by police or security for carrying weapons into pride events. Two people were shot in front of the Stonewall Inn,
the source of it all, during this year's Pride weekend in New York (click here to learn more). A prominent indigenous voice actor from "King of the Hill" was shot and killed, along with his dog, and had his
house burned down, by his neighbor, all for being gay (click here to learn more). And there's a lot more (click here to learn more). On the flip side, reports of over 100,000 people showed up in the streets of Budapest, Hungary, to celebrate
Budapest Pride in absolute defiance of an order to have such events banned (click here to happily learn more!). People are trying to stop Pride from happening because of what it has done to others, to me: freed us.
It freed me from living a lie; it freed me from living by impossible draconian rules; it freed me from dressing poorly for Jesus; it freed me from June 2020.
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Pride is everything to me.
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