Pride in a Time of Anti-Queer Madness
On celebrating ourselves despite petty Pride-month attacks from our fascist government
Hello, fellow bugbears! I want to say “Happy Pride” to all you queer readers and allies out there, but to be honest that feels a little trite right now, the same way it doesn’t feel quite right to ask “How are you?” to anyone who falls into a demographic the Trump dictatorship is actively persecuting. That being said, we LGBTQ folks need the uplift and affirmation that comes with celebrating Pride this year. The slogan we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it is sadly as relevant as ever, because we must once again fight for the right to simply exist. Just to be, and to have our sexualities and gender identities taken for granted as a normal part of the background of human life.
Administrative Matters and a Personal Note
Amid Pride Month this year, I and my little found family unit will be moving—just within the area, so I’ll still be in Pacific Northwest near Portland, Oregon, the city I lived in until about a year ago. But even though we’re not going far, moving will still be the huge pain in the ass that moving always is, so after today The Bugbear Dispatch will be taking a brief hiatus so I can focus on the move. In what free time I can find over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be getting some work done on a book project that I’m finally getting into in a serious way—you’ll hear more about that in the not too distant future. In any case, I’ll be back delivering the thoughtful essays you expect hear at The Bugbear Dispatch in the week beginning on June 22.
In fact, it should get easier to deliver good essays, because the new place is going to be a big improvement. For the last year, I’ve been living in a small apartment with no in-unit washer and dryer and no garbage disposal. It’s a two-bedroom, so my chosen sister and her partner share the master bedroom, and I have my own (tiny) room, but constant road noise is a real problem. At this point I suppose I’m mostly used to falling asleep with it and sleeping through it alright, but it’s still a distraction and a bother.
The new place will not only have in-unit laundry and a garbage disposal (until this current place I’d always taken having a garbage disposal for granted), but also a small fitness room. I have been very bad about getting to the gym that’s about a twenty-minute drive from here, but with the fitness room in the new complex, I’m confident I’ll get into a routine in which I’m taking better care of myself. That healthier lifestyle should translate into more resilience in the face of American authoritarianism and a greater capacity for research and writing.
Along with my mental health, my productivity and creativity have slumped since January. The coming quality of life improvements with the move should help counter that. And I’m glad we’ll be in a first-floor apartment, since our adorable aging doggo has started to have some knee pain. The new place will also be much nicer for walks—for both the dog and the humans—than the place we currently live in, which doesn’t have a lot of common outdoor space and is very much in the, well, hick town part of Vancouver, Washington. This town has got some pretty great neighborhoods and features. It also has way too many Cybertrucks and neighborhoods where beat-up pickup trucks sporting multiple American and other cringe flags are not uncommon sights.
But seriously, folks, Vancouver is the kind of place where they might be playing country music in a McDonald’s and my CVS pharmacy, which is located inside a Target, proudly displays a tacky portrait of young Elvis Presley. Well, I suppose it’s redundant to call an Elvis portrait “tacky,” but anyway. Vancouver also offers a beautiful riverfront area, a great downtown park and farmers market, and plenty of lovely queer-friendly businesses. You can be in one part of Vancouver and think “Geez, I’d never guess this place is right across the Columbia River from Portland,” and then you can go to another part and almost forget that you aren’t in Portland itself.
It is what it is. And I look forward to the Pride festival in the major local park, which has also hosted some pretty impressive anti-Musk protests.
Of Pride and Prejudice
The Trump regime is, of course, full of petty trolls, sadists, incompetents, and evil clowns who like to spout off about making Canada “the 51st state”—in short, it’s full of fascists. And while I’m somewhat encouraged by the open split between the Elon Musk Republicans and the Donald Trump Republicans—the more they eat each other, the better for the rest of us—I’m also feeling the hate as they take passive-aggressive aim at the LGBTQ community during Pride.
For example, the not-so-functional alcoholic and FOX “News” personality serving as our secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has ordered the renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk. Milk himself was not only the first openly gay politician elected to any office in California, but also a Navy veteran.
There have been other provocations as well, including former pro-wrestling executive Linda McMahon’s Department of Education declaring June “Title IX Month” while stripping the Title IX nondiscrimination protections from transgender Americans like myself that had been explicitly recognized under President Joe Biden.
The Trump regime has also amped up its already devastating attacks on healthcare for trans youth by launching an FBI snitch line for citizens to report medical practitioners and institutions that offer gender-affirming care to minors. I have already written about how authoritarian governments foster cultures of denunciation on more than one occasion. A culture of denunciation is, in fact, a key authoritarian disciplinary mechanism, and it is particularly important to resist.
On that note, I am encouraged that people are calling the line to gum up the works with insults to the officials implementing these cruel, draconian policies. Rolling Stone just published some excellent, and literally laugh-out-loud funny, reporting on this matter. I took out a monthly subscription just to read this, and I’m glad I did. I know we all have limited subscription dollars to spend, but I’ve canceled some of my subscriptions to legacy media outlets like The Washington Post that I used to consider worth monitoring for media criticism purposes, but that I now find a complete waste of time to read. While I strongly encourage the spending of subscription dollars on new indie media (like The Bugbear Dispatch and the worker-owned feminist publication I cofounded, The Flytrap!), Rolling Stone is one of the vanishingly rare good national legacy media outlets.
In the face of efforts to transform our society into one of compliant authoritarian subjects, defiance is critically important. Gumming up snitch lines (and encouraging others to do so, so long as they carefully avoid saying anything that could be perceived as a direct threat of violence) is an example of the kind of good trouble we need in times like these. The United States has already largely fallen into the kind of post-truth information environment that favors authoritarianism, and it is going to be very difficult to claw those losses back. But we can still resist succumbing en masse to the culture of denunciation that authoritarian leaders depend on to keep people distrustful of one another, thereby eroding anything resembling civil society.
This Pride Month (and indefinitely until we are able to reach a place of healthier, more democratic politics), we also need allies to show up for LGBTQ and particularly transgender individuals and communities. You can all reach out to queer folks in your lives and offer support in one way or another. But some of you can also do more, for example showing up to Pride events not only to buy from queer vendors and express solidarity, but also to put that into action by putting yourself between queer folks and any aggressive anti-LGBTQ agitators who may show up. Or maybe you can reach out to local queer leaders and ask what they need, or you can for example show up to those school board or public library meetings to fight against book bans and other anti-queer policies and in that way help to protect queer youth.
Please don’t feel like you have to do everything—that’s always a recipe for feeling overwhelmed and not doing anything. But please consider that you can do something, and pick that one thing and do it.
I also find myself wondering how Juneteenth—the holiday that celebrates the last enslaved Americans hearing that they were emancipated on June 19, 1865, will go this year. It was only made a national holiday in 2021 under the Biden administration, and I’m certain the Trump regime, which has been making absurd attacks on “DEI” since Trump took office in his second term, will do anything its members can think of to undermine the holiday and punish Black Americans. So I’d ask my readers to think about ways to support the Black Community this June as well, as I’ll also be doing as a white American.
That’s all for today’s Bugbear Dispatch. I’m grateful to all of you who read this, and particularly to the paid subscribers who make this work possible. I’ll be back with more essays in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I wish you all well, and I wish for all my queer readers in particular that you will find support, comfort, and joy this June despite everything our fascist government is throwing at us.
If you’d like to read more of my thoughts on Pride, here are some links to previous pieces I’ve written about it:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/us-pride-month-anti-lgbtiq-laws-celebration-joy/
https://religiondispatches.org/a-note-to-churches-during-pride-if-youre-not-lgbtq-affirming-keep-your-water/
I plan on sending Scott Bessent some mustard he can spread on the pretzel he's twisted himself into by agreeing to back up Donald's lies & blatherings. Happy Pride month, Scott!