PARTICULARISTIC INTERSECTIONALITY.

It's impossible to make stuff like this up.  "June and July are about queer joy and resilience. It’s crucial we use the month and its festivities to fight for liberation."  Wait, what, wasn't it only in the past few years that June went from being dairy month to being fairy month?  But one month is not enough.

June’s Pride Month and July’s Black Pride Month serve as more than a celebration. They are a necessary corrective to the nation’s revisionist history, selective memory, and deliberate attempts to erase the struggles, achievements, and contributions of LGBTQ+ people.

Pride is about more than a single day or month of celebration. Without a commitment to justice, restoration, and lasting social change, our celebrations risk becoming merely performative. While Pride is undeniably a celebration of our lives, resilience, and achievements, it has always also been a public declaration demanding equality and justice. For many, like myself, celebrating Pride and making a political statement are inseparable, because the freedoms we celebrate were won through activism and continue to require vigilance and advocacy.

But views on Pride are deeply divided—and not simply along the lines of race, class, gender, or sexual identity. Some LGBTQ+ Americans feel that activism, such as protests against police brutality and in support of Palestine, has made Pride too overtly “political,” and would prefer it serve primarily as a celebration where queer people can simply gather and enjoy themselves. Others, like religious conservatives and rightwing Republicans, see Pride as sinful and indecent behavior on public display. They dismiss Pride as a month-long bacchanalia of drugs, alcohol, and sexual excess, believing it desecrates the legacy of the Stonewall Rebellion and diminishes the political significance of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

I wonder if author Irene Monroe got a Minimal Publishable Unit out of that, or if The Progressive isn't peer reviewed enough to claim academic credit.

As far as that two-month long "bacchanalia," dear reader, judge for yourselves whether the Peru pride float brought the side-show to the circus parade.

The past weekend was Peru's Circus City Festival, highlighted by the community's long-running youth circus, and it included a street parade that had most of the elements of a small city summer street parade, including the fire apparatus, and the high school marching bands, plus civic organizations and more than a few horse-drawn circus wagons.

The culture studies stuff that the Reverend Miss Monroe invokes in her essay are implicitly present on that float.

Pride need not be reduced to either a political protest or a carefree party; such an either/or framework creates a false dichotomy. Throughout LGBTQ+ history, political resistance and joyful celebration have always been inseparable. Our celebrations are acts of defiance, and our activism is sustained by the joy, resilience, and hope we share with one another.

Pride Month also lays bare division among the queer community on the fault lines of race, gender, and class. Celebrations in many cities and towns remain predominantly white events, leaving revelers of color to experience social exclusion, alienation, and cultural invisibility. In response, events have emerged centering people of color, such as Twin Cities Black Pride in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Southern Fried Queer Pride in Atlanta, Georgia.

Black Pride grooves to a different beat. Black LGBTQ+ people use these events not only to celebrate, but also to define and advance their own priorities. The Center for Black Equity, formerly known as the International Federation of Black Prides, organizes performances, parties, gatherings, and getaway weekends rooted in affirmation and belonging for Black LGBTQ+ folks.

Sunday gospel brunches, Saturday-night poetry slams, Friday-evening fashion shows, bid whist tournaments, house parties, the smells of soul food and Caribbean cuisine, and the beautiful display of African art and clothing are just a few of the cultural markers that make Black Pride distinct from the dominant queer culture.

Health and wellness are also central. At Black Pride events, attendees often encounter health booths offering screenings for sexually transmitted infections, vision care, hypertension, and HIV/AIDS. Black Pride often addresses broader social determinants of health affecting the community, including unemployment, housing insecurity, gang violence, youth homelessness, mass incarceration, prostate health, trans health, domestic violence, and depression.

But in the media, our stories and our agency are too often erased, marginalized, or misrepresented. Too often, white-dominated mainstream and queer outlets only focus on Black LGBTQ+ struggles, including our communities’ transphobia and homophobia, HIV/AIDS, homelessness, and conflicts with the Black church. While those issues are important and deserve coverage, they should not be the only lens through which Black LGBTQ+ lives are seen. Our struggles, then, become the only stories told about Black LGBTQ+ communities. Left behind are the proactive, community-led efforts to confront and reduce these challenges. Our resilience, leadership, creativity, and contributions deserve equal visibility.

Who knew how problematic a few white folks marching in a circus parade could be?  I wonder if the Miami County Democrats, riding along on the following float, sufficiently claimed that visibility.

Isn't it just like the Donks to scold people?  That "Everybody Deserves to Be Under the Big Top" might not be enough for the good reverend.

We must network, forge coalitions, and embrace an intersectional vision of social justice that strengthens our cities and towns and creates healthier, more inclusive spaces for everyone.

There is much each of us can do to help usher in a more tolerant and equitable society. It’s up to us to organize our neighborhoods, encourage civic engagement, educate others about the issues affecting our freedoms, and protect each other. That means protecting LGBTQ+ youth from bullying, homelessness, and suicide. It means ensuring that transgender people have access to health care, housing, safety, and dignity. And it means speaking out, because, as Audre Lorde reminded us, “Your silence will not protect you.”

Although Pride events continue to reflect the diversity—and sometimes the divisions—within the LGBTQ community, at their best they invite us to unite political activism with celebration. Through music, dance, art, and public witness, Pride affirms the multicultural richness of LGBTQ+ life. It celebrates not only our individuality but also the many ways our communities embody resilience, creativity, and belonging.

Whatever.

Fortunately, anthropologists have taken up that cause.

Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, will offer students the opportunity to study the “white gaze” next spring in order to undermine “white supremacy and racial capitalism.”

“Unsettling the White Gaze” appears on the school’s anthropology course schedule for spring 2027.

“White supremacy and racial capitalism structure our world, setting in motion the systems of domination that Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly describes as a ‘racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation,’” the description states.

The professor sounds like a walking sideshow act.

During the class, students will be instructed to turn their “anthropological gaze upon whiteness itself” in order to understand “its insidious modes of self-and-other construction,” thus “destabilizing its ocular power to define others.”

“We will pay special attention to how the white colonial gaze has operated in the liberal discipline of anthropology and explore ethnographic methods for studying whiteness and white supremacy,” the description explains.

Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, an assistant professor of anthropology, is teaching “Unsettling the White Gaze.”

Eisenberg-Guyot’s profile describes the scholar as a “white, disabled, trans anthropologist whose work focuses on how criminalized people who use drugs envision and experiment with abolitionist horizons of transformation, healing, self-determination, and solidarity beyond incarceration and forced-cure.”

The assistant professor also “participates in abolitionist, harm reduction, and transformative justice organizing projects in NYC and beyond.”

Do you ask yourself, dear reader, why the culture studies types have given the academic enterprise a bad name?