Look, I love Pride season. I am a pretty critical person, and while I’m working on being less critical of myself and the people around me, I still think it’s possible to both love something and think it can be better. And I think Pride could be better. My day job is in HIV prevention, so I’ve tabled at Pride the last few years, and I love tabling. It’s fun to be surrounded by people with trans/ace/pan/bi flags slung over their shoulders like capes, rainbow stickers on their cheeks and shoulders. I love the baby queers holding hands with their partners in public like it’s revolution. I love the rainbows everywhere. But it’s not enough. I don’t just want companies to slap a rainbow on their logo during June, rent a booth for the weekend, or order matching t-shirts and march in the parade. I want us to recognize that capitalism isn’t going to sustain us and business can’t keep expanding forever. I don’t just want a world where I can marry a woman, I want a world where marriage isn’t the default. I don’t want cops marching in Pride parades, I want a justice system that doesn’t disproportionately target black and brown people, trans people, and poor people. I want true safety, where trans people aren’t murdered, where cops don’t get away with whatever they want, where white cis queers recognize and use our privilege to lift up others who don’t have the same privileges we do. I want companies to stop donating to anti-LGBTQ politicians while they fly rainbow flags. I want to be more than a marketing demographic. I want all of us to support queer makers and small business owners instead of helping the rich get richer. 

What do you want from Pride? ​

Hi everyone!

​​Now that Pride Month is well underway, I want to encourage you to queer up your social media feeds! I follow several pages of queer content, and I like learning about our history whenever I check social media. What are the best pages you've found? Let me know in the comments!

Here are a few of my favorites: 

• LGBT History is a good place to start, and a great page to follow year-round. They share photos of moments in queer history, with lots of shots of marches and clever slogans everywhere. 
• Another good one to follow all year is Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution. They share articles about bisexuality, obvs, and a lot of quality queer content in general. 
• Ren is a Portland illustrator who is doing a cool series for June called Millennial Lesbian, which gives a little snippet about a different real person's life and perspective each day. 
• Lucky for us, lot of  artists create and share portraits of LGBTQIA+ people and include facts about their lives. One of the first pages I found was Hello World, It's Eli. Eli draws a very cute comic series called People of Pride each June. Michele Rosenthal draws crisp, brightly-colored Queer Portraits,  and Ruben Guadalupe Marquez shares beautiful, celebratory photo collages on his page. Queer Women to Know includes info and portraits of more modern women.  
• If you're looking for something a little more radical, might I suggest Black and Pink? This organization is working to abolish the prison system and support LGBTQIA+ and HIV-positive prisoners. They have a pen pal program if you want to sign up to write to someone who's incarcerated, and they share a lot of radical queer content on their page. 

Do you follow any pages I should know about? Let me know below!