Happy Pride! On Cultivating Joy for the LGBTQ+ Community

Happy Pride, everybody!

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about celebrating Pride this year, most of which go something like this:

“With everything going on in the country around anti-LGBTQ+ movements, should we even be celebrating Pride?”

The short answer is, yes. Absolutely. Celebrating Pride does not take away from our ability to respond to the moves we are seeing against the greater LGBTQ+ community. In fact, it enhances it.

This quote from adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism sums it up best:

“There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy.”

While the history of LGBTQ+ Pride came from protest, it wasn’t in lieu of celebration or joy. It was alongside it. Community ancestors like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson spoke up for the needs of TGX+ (trans and gender expansive) communities at protests while finding joy in the creativity of drag performance.

We can take a great lesson from this legacy and ask ourselves, how does my allyship with the LGBTQ+ community allow the opportunity for LGBTQ+ joy?

Disney has set a great example of this. While they’ll be participating in Pride Parades and contributing to LGBTQ+ celebrations, they are also standing up to anti-LGBTQ+ legislation by divesting from states that are enacting the most harm on LGBTQ+ communities.

While that’s a big example of how companies are supporting LGBTQ+ communities, there are smaller everyday actions that can be taken at all levels of organization as well. It’s these sorts of topics and issues that we dive into in more detail during our monthly TGX+ Inclusion Roundtable. Sign up to join the conversation!