Don't Let Them Take Our Pride

humiliate queer people and folks back. Marsha P. Johnson, a black trans woman, fought back against the police and said no more, No more harassment, no more closets, no more criminality, no more abuse. When you look up the definition of pride, Miriam Webster defines it as this reasonable self esteem or confidence and satisfaction in oneself. Oxford defines it as this a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one's own achievements. Consciousness of one's own dignity. That's the one

I like the most, consciousness of one's own dignity. We're living at a time where dignity and respect are almost non existent, not in politics for sure, not in sports, not in entertainment, where we see through policies, through rhetoric, the assaults on any number of communities, but it always begins, for some reason, with black people and then LGBTQ people to make the targets of the radicalized right, because I don't even want to call these folks the religious right anymore,

because their religion is bullshit. Their religion is white supremacy, their religion is racism, their religion is patriarchy, their religion is read. Their religion actually disrespects the very text that they love to recite, but only portions of so pride. Pride is about not giving a fuck what the outside agitators and haters say, even if those haters happen to occupy or have occupied the White House, occupy governor's mansions,

occupy police departments, Senate seats, congressional seats. Pride is something that comes from the inside out. This month and this year has been testing the LGBTQ community in ways. I don't even think that we have expected the amount of anti trans, anti LGBTQ pieces of legislation, well over five hundred plus the indignities that so called representatives want to write into law make it that much more important to have and create reasonable self esteem. Pride Month used to

piss me off. I'm gonna be honest, as a black queer woman, initially I loved Pride. I loved the marches, I loved the rainbows everywhere, I loved the parties. Let's be honest. I loved it when I was younger because it just felt so free. There's a free that comes

with Pride, a liberation. When you look at all of the people that intersect inside of the queer community, it's everybody, and it's everybody learning to love themselves and each other despite what embedded homophobia and transphobia tries to tell us that we're unworthy, that we don't matter, that we should go away, or worse, we should be locked away. The reason why I started to hate Pride over you know the last several years, was because it became so corporatized. Right.

You see, all of these companies just for this one month put up their rainbow flags and their rainbow icons, put out their merchandise because capitalism. But then the other eleven months of the year put their resources behind politicians and policies that work to take away our rights. So they're good with taking our money, but they're not actually good with the follow through of what it means to be a real ally And it doesn't just happen in June.

If you care about LGBTQ equality, you should be giving to this community all year, not just one month and then patting yourself on the back. So it was never the fact that I hated Pride. It was the way in which capitalism and corporations decided to weasel their ways into our communities expression of freedom of joy. I don't

know if I've ever spoken about this before. Maybe I have, but I'll speak about it explicitly today on wokf's first real official day of Pride, because that Trump trial fucked me up and I had to talk about it on Monday. But for me, you will hear me say, and have heard me say throughout the years, that I am queer and a black queer woman, a black queer woman child

of immigrants. I often say this, and I say it at the beginning of conversations, I say it in interviews, and the reason for that is because one I see my queerness as a political identity as well as an orientation, a political identity, in the fact that I am deeply progressive, deeply believe in equity and queer because lesbian for me just never sat right, because I think that there are all different ways in which you can love and fall in love with an array of people, and so I

never wanted to necessarily feel like I was boxed in, and I think that that is important. What I love the most about this younger generation gen Z is that a lot of them identify as non binary, as queer, as just living on the spectrum where they understand that sexuality and identity is fluid, and that it is patriarchy and religion that has put us all in varied boxes

and forced us to comply to their rules. When I say, when I'm talking about abortion, for instance, and I say women and people with uteruses, it isn't just to be quote unquote woke, even though I am and flucking happy for it, but it is to acknowledge the spectrums of identities of people who can in fact become pregnant that don't all identify as women. What queerness requires is really an exercise in intellectual expansion. The idea that we are

forever learning and growing. And if we see the world in that way where I'm not stuck just with the information that let's say I graduated from undergrad or grad school with as the only right way it it is that I am nimble and I avail myself of new information, of new perspectives, of the friction that does come with expansion. It's not always easy, right. People would tell me, you know, it's so difficult to you know, to do the pronoun

thing quote unquote. And I say, why if I walk into a room and tell you that my name is Danielle, but you tell me that I look like a Patricia? What the fuck gives you the right to call me Patricia? When I've told you what my name is. It goes back to dignity, right and respect. I respect you enough to challenge myself in ways that usher in a wider way of thinking, that challenge what I have been taught never to question. And now I'm asking why. It isn't

all this quote unquote new fangled stuff. It's people gathering more information and recognizing that in many ways they've been forced to adapt to society's whims and ignore themselves. So pride is really about self trust. I am trusting myself to know myself so that I can show up as my full self, and that I am so rooted in the truth of who I am that whatever wind, whatever storm you try and bring my way, will not knock

me over. And there are some people that hear that statement and they want to dig down to the roots and pull it out, and sometimes they win, because, as you all know, the LGBTQ community has higher suicide rates

than any other community. So what pride gives us, particularly young queer people who may sometimes travel great distances to experience what it's like to be in community with people who accept them for who they are, and just that that sense of knowing that another world exists, even if it isn't right outside your front door, is what helps these young people helps all of us deepen and strengthen

our roots, our dignity, and our esteem. So when people, you know, like the Rondescantises of the world, who pass legislation that said that no building could light up in rainbows, because my god, what would happen if people were to see a rainbow? I guess they're going to what spontaneously combust So we must protect the eyes and the egos of those fragile, fragile heterosexuals. These people go out of their way to try and make queer people ashamed of themselves.

And because they're so busy banning books and denying history, they don't know that queer people have always existed. This ain't new. So what's new is that over the last decade the LGBTQ plus community has made significant advances in equity, in dignity written into policy. Which is why you see these motherfuckers working over time to condemn to shame, to silence, because at the end of the day, they are afraid of Generation Z. They're afraid that they know themselves more

than the right wing ever will. They don't need prescriptions on toxic masculinity. They find it abhorrent. And so when you see acceptance happening and having a ripple effect, you know that the pushback is inevitable. But what I refuse to do, and I hope what my fellow LGBTQ plus community refuses to do, is to ever let them take away our pride, our joy, all your love, I say, all your love. Aud your Lord said that self love is a revolutionary act, and it is when you really,

really really think about it. If you are from or identify with a marginal community, a marginalized community, a community that has been oppressed pushed to the margins at one point in time or another, or you're from a group that exists at the intersections of multiple marginal communities, then loving yourself ferociously from the tips of your toes to the top, top top of your head when everything around you is saying to hate yourself. I can think of

no greater revolution than that. That's why when black folks we're saying in the nineteen sixties, I'm black and I'm proud because white supremacy would have us be ashamed. When I name the show Woke as Fuck, that was a declaration of consciousness. I love when I see signs that say loud and proud, because they want us to be

silent and ashamed. They talk about silencing us because everything apparently that comes out of a mouth that is not white, that is not man, that is not sis, is indoctrination. But we can't talk about the indoctrination that we've had since birth, since the blue beanie or the pink beanie. Now it's multicolored, that's nice, but you can still walk down a clothing store aisle, a toy ale and see the gender separation happening from jump you want to talk

about indoctrination. Girls play this way, boys play this way. So it's this realization that I don't have to gender my kids. I can let them like what they like. I can love them for who they are and how they show up. You know, when marriage equality passed in twenty fifteen, the Supreme Court, which this current Supreme Court

is getting ready to overturn it. But when it passed and the White House lit up in a rainbow, I was actually in San Francisco, so I missed running down because I had at that time, I was still living in Washington, DC. Running down the street to the White House. That image was so powerful because in the most powerful building in this country, not only did they see us as queer people, but they celebrated us. I don't want

people's tolerance. I never understood that to be tolerated. Who the fuck wants to be in a relationship with somebody, whether it be a person or a country that fucking tolerates them. I don't even want to be quote unquote accepted, because still that requires some type of exchange, like I have to give up something in order to be accepted. I want to be celebrated. I want to go where

I am celebrated. And so this prime month, I just ask us all queer or not to really think about self love as a revolutionary act, joy as a revolutionary act, and think about the ways in which we are actually in the midst of a revolution right now. Change great changes upon us. We see it, we feel it, and

we can choose to embrace it. We can choose to thank right give gratitude for the great shakeup that we've had over the last decade, because now we don't we need to smile in people's faces that we know don't like us. We don't need to pretend. But it is a reminder consistently that we won't find dignity and respect outside first, we must find it inside. And in this climate, we have got to grow deep, strong roots so that nothing that they can throw at us will have us

uproot from ourselves. Wishing all my queerdos in this country around the globe the happiest, most joyful, beautiful, peaceful and loving pride sees in this month. Unwokay f we will do what we have done for the last couple of years, which is sit down, be in conversation with queer folks around the country. What does it mean to be queer in twenty twenty four, How are we preparing ourselves for this election? What does it mean to have honest conversations

in the media and hold the media to account. What does it mean to be queer? And in education? Right now? We're going to be digging into all of that throughout the month of June. That is it for me today, dear friends on WOKF As always, power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.