This year, and the last, felt quieter. Fewer rainbow logos. Less corporate fanfare. But the #pinkwashing? It never left.
🎤 I’ve given a lot keynotes on this, often well received, with some awkward pauses. The audience can be receptive to hard-won joys, yet the underlying truths are harder to swallow.
—> Pride didn’t end when *insert company who loves us from June 1st to 30th* packed up their float
—> Pride didn’t begin in the early hours of June 28th 1969, outside the Stonewall Inn
—> Pride has never been just a month - but it’s always been a fight
Pride all year must remember its roots - and its pre-history.
📸 Ancient Sumer (modern-day Iraq) around ~3000 BCE celebrated ‘gala priests’, people assigned male at birth who lived as women… seen as sacred in rituals.
Before the parades, there was resistance. Before rights, there was erasure (which continues). And this matters today more than ever.
🌎 Sexual & gender minorities existed - and were celebrated - long before the West entered our story. But often empire rewrote our past. Colonialism tried to erase entire cosmologies of queerness.
🧱 Queer history is world history - it has always been about civil disobedience, joy, uprising… about refusing to disappear.
🔊 To paraphrase a quote echoed by Marsha P. Johnson, Nelson Mandela, and Maya Angelou:
“None of us are free until all of us are free”
We celebrate movements after the fact - once they’re safe enough to sell. But every liberation is entangled. From Palestine to the Congo, from Sudan to our streets.
Queerness can’t be just about individual visibility, it must be about solidarity too. 🏳️⚧️ P.S. Londoners better be at Trans Pride this weekend.