Why I Can’t Celebrate Pride This Year

If you’ve read more than a few of my rants, then you are probably already painfully aware that I am a Queer person and that I take this identity pretty seriously, some of you may even be forgiven for saying annoyingly so. However, you have to understand that I really didn’t choose this shit, at least not all of it. I didn’t choose to be born into a body that makes me physically Ill. I didn’t choose to have a gender identity so complicated that I need a goddamn Venn diagram just to explain it. And I sure as fuck didn’t choose to have to deal with all of this shit in a conservative Catholic diocese loaded to the gills with pedophile priests and fire-breathing conformist imbeciles.

What I did choose was to fight back, to maintain my mutant otherness and take pride in it. I chose to be an anti-puritanical individualist in league with other biologically bizarre people who would rather fight than fit in and this is what makes me Queer. I am a neurodiverse genderqueer lesbian, and Queer anarchism is the martial art that I practice to defend this existence. Queer is my culture, Queer is my tribe, Queer saved my life and it will probably save it a few more times before sundown. With all that being said, just because I am very proud of my people doesn’t mean that they don’t occasionally piss me off and it is this dichotomy that has long led me to have a very uneasy relationship with Pride Month.

What began as the revolutionary celebration of a riot waged by an irate mob of largely Black and brown gender outlaws against the police state has slowly transformed into a Disneyfied and heavily policed parade replete with soulless corporate sponsors and opportunistic Democrats. In fact, the entire month has become one big vanilla cash grab for monster machines like Blackrock and Raytheon who drape themselves in rainbows and get their pictures taken with weird people to throw us all off the scent of the latest war crime they manufactured in some dead-end corner of the third world. Crucify me twice for being presumptuous but something tells me that this was not what Marsha P. Johnson had in mind when she picked up that first brick.

On the other hand, I have found-family that includes actual Queer children, and I have long sucked up my bitter discontent just to see their faces light up like Molotov cocktails when it becomes theatrically undeniable that they are not the only ones. If I had even the slightest idea of that fact when I was their age it might have saved me from decades of therapy and a lifetime of suicidal ideation. So, every June I pick up the youngins and make the hour-long trek to the nearest college town to plug my nose while I uncomfortably coexist with pink capitalism, that is until this year.

In 2025 I can’t do this anymore and it’s not because I’m afraid of the bullseye that Donald Trump has put on every rainbow within shooting distance of the nearest federal building. It is because of the lengths that I have seen Pride organizations go to keep the straight corporate sponsors that MAGA is scaring away. I had a front row seat to this grotesque display of Queer servitude this year and I have seen firsthand how the Pride parade is now running over the Queer kids that they’re supposed to be saving.

The return of Trump to the White House has been pretty harsh for most Queer people but it has been downright traumatizing for anyone growing up trans as well as those of us who still carry the scars from growing up trans. During Trumps first couple of campaigns, he largely left culture war bullshit on the back burner, preferring a xenophobic populist schtick instead. But by 2024 this was running a little thin, largely because Trump had already exposed himself to the rural isolationist set as just another fellatious cuck for the Israel Lobby.

So, Donny did what Republicans have always done to win back the trailer park; he doubled down on bashing the Queers next door. In 2024, Trump essentially ran on a promise to eradicate the toxic ideology of “transgenderism” from the face of the planet by handing over the sledgehammer of the federal government to the Zionist gangsters in the Christian Right and it didn’t take him long to make good on that promise once he was back in the Oval Office, with a slew of executive orders directing the compulsory school system to police the biology of their captive student body.

Throughout this horrific election circus, I had been volunteering for one of the largest LGBTQ non-profits in the state, one largely responsible for throwing the annual Pride events in my region. I won’t use their name because I still know a few good people over there who still provide a few good services, which is actually what led an anti-assimilationist Queer anarchist like me to work for such an organization in the first place.

By mid 2024, I had already spent months pushing these people to provide more rural communities like mine with the kind of youth groups they run in the college towns. We had gotten a grant, hired a facilitator, and I had personally found an off-campus location willing to host the program, but months went by without further action. I was told repeatedly to be patient while this organization ran galas and fundraisers for their next parade, and I tried hoping that maybe just a sliver of that money would go to my kids. Then Trump got elected in a landslide, and I lost my patience.

I also lost all contact with my boss, who seemed to have locked herself in her office on November 6 and never got off the phone. I harassed her and her board members with a storm of emails first asking and then begging for a simple face-to-face meeting with anyone who could tell me why we couldn’t pull the trigger on a rural youth group even with a loaded gun in our hands. We had the cash, we had the location, we had a licensed facilitator, I even offered to drive the kids of my little backwoods tribe to the spot myself, but nobody seemed to have fifteen minutes to put it all together. It didn’t make any goddamn sense until I discovered that my boss had been spending every waking minute since Trump’s reelection on the phone with corporate sponsors, trying to convince them to keep their floats in the parade.

I was livid but I was still determined to get some kind of support system in place for my kids who were receiving death threats and had friends in and out of the psych ward after failed suicide pacts. I tried to track down the actual facilitator who I was told was attempting to hold this youth group at the local non-profit bookstore I had gotten them in touch with. It turned out that they weren’t there, they weren’t even showing up, they were just cashing the checks and going home, and no one had even noticed. When I brought this to the attention of my boss’s boss, the chairman of the board for this organization, they fired the scam artist, replaced them with an old white straight woman, and informed me that they didn’t even want me alone with the kids because of my diagnosed neurodivergence.

They managed to get enough money to throw their fucking parade this year, but the rural youth group remains a shell, a single poorly paid breeder with no youth to bore. I left the big non-profit to volunteer at the bookstore so I could at least still make the group happen even if I wasn’t allowed to be an official part of it, but they moved the group to another closed location after getting too many questions from me and the bookstore that they refused to answer.

I am now attempting to run my own youth group out of the same location with zero budget, but my adult transgender support group, one run by my former employers at the big non-profit, very recently and very suddenly decided that after seven years with me as a member they no longer want me to bring up my multiple personalities out of fear that my neurodivergence might somehow be spooking away new members. So, now I’m left trying to build yet another support group from scratch at a time when I have never felt more abandoned by my own community.

This is what Pride has become. LGBTQ groups across the country who used to throw a little parade once a year and then actually fucking help people have converted themselves into veritable parade industrial complexes, spending the entire year raising money for a parade so they can raise more money for the next parade. In the process, they end up spending more time trying to shmooze with big corporations run by cishet billionaires then they do with the young people who have always defined our movement, leading them to become completely out of touch with their own community, one which is becoming increasingly brown, radical and neurodivergent while those corporations begin to bail because they see bigger dollar signs with MAGA than they do with LGBTQ.

I can’t be a part of this. I won’t be a part of this. I refuse to hold the IV while a handful of old neurotypical white cis lesbians facilitate the suicide of a movement that saved my life while they chase parade floats. I really do hate to rain on the parade, but I will not be taking part in any corporate Pride events this year or any other year but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a silver lining to this storm cloud.

Across the country, while corporations are pulling out of Pride parades left and right, activists are stepping up to take their place, using grassroots funding while shifting focus from celebration to confrontation. In other words, the weird people will inherit Pride after all.

I am proud to say that the non-profit I currently organize with is a part of this trend and I fully intend to take part in any march against the police state that doesn’t conflict with my youth group just so long as the only corporate float is a flaming Venmo.

The post Why I Can’t Celebrate Pride This Year appeared first on CounterPunch.org.