What Pride Means in This Moment

How can we celebrate when we feel like the walls are closing in?

The confluence of this particular moment — encompassing the unrelenting, multifarious attacks on the LGBTQ+ community and the many celebrations and events happening during this month of Pride — may feel disorienting to many within the community.

Nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills — the most in U.S. history — have been introduced in states across the nation, targeting our health and health care, our freedom of self-expression, and our education. Gender-binary hysteria has morphed into genital witch hunts in bathroomsand on sports fields. Heightened threats of violence have even forced communities to cancel their Pride-related events.

This compounding cruelty carries the broader cultural and psychological motive to force LBGTQ+ people back into the closet through our own self-policing. Conservatives hope that structural forms of discrimination will trickle down and saturate the zeitgeist, infiltrate our mindsets so effectively that the structural forces become secondary to our willful submission to the hetero- and cis-normative traditions that undergird the white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy.

The purpose of these efforts is to make us feel the opposite of pride: shame.

Yet the exceptional confluence of this moment also offers great clarity both about the meaning of pride and about how, by fully embracing the meaning of pride, we can subvert and even resist the mounting forms of discrimination.

“This march,” Gay Liberation Front founder Michael Brown said, speaking to thousands who marched in the first Pride parade in 1970, “is an affirmation and declaration of our new pride.” Yes, Stonewall was a riot. But the origins of Pride — as the highly organized and corporatized event it is known as today — lay in riots occurring years before 1969, including, famously, at Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966 and Dewey’s restaurant in 1965. Each event has become history because of the pride expressed through resistance to police brutality and intimidation — acts of violence that the police justified by leveraging discriminatory laws targeting LGBTQ+ people, from masquerade, or cross-dressing, laws to those prohibiting queer and trans people from congregating in public. From hot coffee and purses at Compton’s to bricks and Molotov cocktails at Stonewall, the fight for queer and trans lives was a fight against dehumanization, colonization, and incarceration of the body, mind, and spirit. These were far more radical than the actions of gay groups that picketed and marched for rights from government institutions; the latter were long-strategized efforts for inclusion based on arguments of sameness. Rather, these were acts of liberation; retaliations against the culture of violence enacted by a state and society intent on eradicating difference. Whether exacted by the state or the media or conservative nonprofits or Proud Boys, these attacks, then as now, are multidirectional from all facets of society but are all focused specifically on our freedoms, of self-expression, of personal and collective movement, of self-determination. The decision to riot, however instantaneous and fleeting in those moments before throwing that coffee or brick (or, according to Sylvia Rivera, all the pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters people could muster), was the activation of the impassioned will to live, to live fully and queerly and joyfully with each other.

Pride is a personal and social feeling. According to Merriam-Webster, it is both self-respect — “confidence and satisfaction in oneself” — and the “pleasure that comes from some relationship, association, achievement, or possession that is seen as a source of honor, respect, etc.” In a way, pride is the dignity each person finds in our creative self-determination and the pleasure and joy in sharing in the self-expression of authenticity with others. Collectively, it is a powerful quality — no wonder a group of lions is called a pride.

Pride is a feeling that emerges through our creative self-determination, or what I call self-creation to emphasize the significance of creativity in the process of our self-fashioning. My definition of self-creation is rooted in Black feminists’ concept of self-determination — the process of decolonizing and decarcerating the self after centuries of dehumanization and enslavement. “Black self-determination,” bell hooks wrote in Killing Rage: Ending Racism, is how “African Americans, across class, create radical liberatory subjectivity even as we continue to live within a white supremacist capitalist patriarchal society.” This creation is a collective process, she explained, “by which we learn to radicalize our thinking and habits of being in ways that enhance the quality of our lives despite racist domination” so that “we live lives of sustained well-being.” The effort to determine oneself is nothing short of a willed survival for oneself as well as for one’s community. As Audre Lorde said in “Learning from the 60s,” “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

This self-creation is constituted by the choices we each make to design our lives, from our style to our identities, to who we build family and community with. It is in this latter sense that self-creation reveals itself to be fundamentally a mutual co-creation with others. And our relationships and communities are built on this work of celebrating our full, diverse, and complex lives, regardless of rigid social identities or norms. “Style is such an integral part of queerness because I think it’s how we find each other; how we tell the world who we are in lieu of predetermined boxes to fit in,” writer Gabrielle Korn said in her interview with dapperQ editor-in-chief Anita Dolce Vita, in dapperQ Style: Ungendering Fashion. “It’s about inventing and claiming your place in a world that has failed to imagine the possibility of you.”

The freedom, dignity, and pride found in acts of self-creation, specifically concerning gender and sexuality, have reached a new pinnacle in our society. Younger generations are rejecting traditional gender and sexual binaries more than their elders and instead choosing their own journeys. This is mirrored in our mainstream culture, as queer celebrities and public figures, from Kristen Stewart to Lil Nas X to Janelle Monáe are open — and openly playful — about their lives. Monáe has made the freedom and pleasure of self-creation the centerpiece of their latest album, The Age of Pleasure, released this month. “It took me a long time to realize that it’s not my responsibility to adjust my freedom in order to make you comfortable,” they said in an interview with StyleLikeU about the visual aesthetics for the album and especially the first video, for “Lipstick Lover.” MSNBC columnist Evette Dionne called the album a “reminder to queer people, during Pride Month no less, that our experience is full of obstacles but it’s also steeped in joy,” because, as Monáe shows, queerness “can imbue us with a freedom to simply exist, as we are, without explanation or guilt.”

Those seeking to prevent our self-creation base their arguments in the gender binary as the architecture upholding the social divisions of our society. Body constraint writ large is social control — in this context, laws restricting gender identity and health care access very much operate to reinforce the gender binary and the social hierarchy established by it. By denying our freedom to self-creation, they seek to destroy our source of pride.

Despite all the corporate pinkwashing and rhetorical rainbows, these 30 days of June can remind us of the real meaning of pride, as a riot against police violence and, more expansively, against societal oppression. A riot to stop getting “eaten alive.” A riot, as Lucian K. Truscott IV wrote in The Village Voice just days after Stonewall, “to assert presence, possibility, and pride.” Pride is found in the powerful decision to liberate oneself and community through the joy and pleasure we experience in our mutual co-creation — of witnessing and honoring each other’s journey.

Let the force of LGBTQ+ history, celebrated by this month’s designation, fortify and guide us in our days ahead.