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Why I don't do Pride Month

 

(Image from Aloyisius, wikipedia)

I'm still very suspicious of the idea of "Pride Month." Intuitively it makes very little sense to me. Pride is a protest, an event when I march through my city (over the years it's been Birmingham, Boston, Manchester, Bolton, Cardiff) and stand up for the rights of LGBT+ people, and for liberation from all forms of oppression. You can't have rights for LGBT+ asylum seekers unless there's immigration justice. LGBT+ people are more likely to suffer homelessness and poverty, and so LGBT+ liberation requires economic justice. A protest is not a season. Liberation doesn't have a season. It either happens on one particular day or it's for every day.
"Pride Month" is a commercial capitalist season. It is the way of marking time that suits institutions and corporations. Like secular Christmas, or barbeque season, or pumpkin latte season, it's there to put up a new display and sell a new product. It's there to take our natural tendency to mark time, and exploit it so our instincts of anticipation, enjoyment, and reflection become associated with the buying and consuming of product.
It's a way for corporation and institutions to do lip service towards a cause to the extent that it serves the institution, rather than the institution in any sense acting sacrificially for a greater cause. It's painting itself in rainbows rather than putting it's money into where there are needs and putting bodies onto the street.
I'm not interested in "Happy Pride Month." Trans people are under attack right now like never before. It's not happy. We're in danger and unless you're actively opposing the EHRC, actively opposing the Supreme Court, actively opposing Wes Streeting, you have no claim right now to say you're celebrating or supporting LGBT+ folks. If you're not standing up for us then you're just exploiting us.
It's not a happy Pride Month. It's a get on the streets and fight for existence and freedom and flourishing month. Like it is every month. Yes there will be Pride parades, yes there will be protests, yes we will be visible and angry and thankful for Marsha P Johnson and all the prophets and foreparents who threw bricks and marched and put their bodies on the line. And yes we will party and dance, and put on our finery and be fabulous, because damn it we're alive and that's because our ancestors fought to make it so, and yes we're not miserable and that's because our ancestors fought to make it so.
I will march and I will party and I will mourn and I will celebrate when it's Pride in my city. But I'm not doing Pride Month.

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