I am a queer, trans masc, non-binary co-executive director of a small regional non-profit.
I’m tired.
Tired of pretending that my queerness is safe when the world is not.
Tired of trying to make myself easy to digest in order to be heard and respected.
Tired of watching so many people choosing to walk in place instead of stepping up.
Tired of wondering where the line is for some folks —
If you are not standing up for trans folks, when will you stand up?
If you are not standing up for the children of Palestine, or the children of America,
What will finally be too much?
Because there will be a next,
Until we say: no more.
This does not end without a fight.
Oh, this is a blog about Pride Month by the way.
Pride, if it means anything this year, must mean resistance with memory — love with fire.
Because here’s the truth we need to say out loud during Pride:
- There is no queer* liberation on a dead planet.
- There is no trans safety in an exploitative white supremecist system that upholds genocide.
- There is no freedom on stolen and colonized land while people, languages and ecosystems are being disappeared.
There is no Pride that does not hold grief in one hand and a brick in the other.
Pride without abolition?
That’s rainbow-washed fascism.
Our tiredness is proof that we have carried each other through violence.
Some of us are tired from marching. Others are tired from hiding. Others are tired from the endless onslaught of oppression and abuse. And some — right now — are being held in detention centers, labeled “illegal” for crossing borders created by the very empires that stole and colonized the land in the first place.
We can see this tiredness as a sign that we are still connected. That we have not gone numb.
We were not meant to hold all this alone. Our ability to see and feel the pain and discomfort and refusal to go numb is a practice of collective integrity. I have been in spaces with other tired queer folks and I usually leave those spaces feeling better for having spent time in a community that centers care.
Collective tiredness paired with collective integrity is a form of power, a fuel, especially during Pride Month, when the dominant narrative often flattens queer struggle into a celebration of visibility and resilience, without tending to the roots of the ongoing exhaustion that so many are holding — especially two spirit folks and queer people of color. The weariness that builds up when you are constantly grieving systems that refuse to grieve you back is heavy but we carry it decade after decade.
So — we show up.
When our tiredness synchronizes, it becomes a slow earthquake beneath the noise of business-as-usual.
This tiredness reminds me that our survival as queer folks is not an accident. Despite all the efforts to erase us we continue to survive and to celebrate with each other.
And that is powerful.
I’m here with those still breathing in the rubble.
I’m here with the trans teens on hormone waitlists.
With the farmworkers feeding us while ICE stalks them and their families.
And for the lands, waters, and climate on which we all depend.
Pride can be a moment where something bigger, older, and more honest can come through.
A place to pause. To rage. To build power.
To remember that visibility is not the same as safety,
And resilience is not the same as consent.
No one is free while others are caged, displaced, or disappeared.
Our Latine neighbors are being targeted, kidnapped, detained, and disappeared in camps and private prisons. Many are queer. Many are Indigenous. All are surviving the violence of a border they did not draw. A border that is a technology of white supremacy, not safety.
Let’s be clear: justice for immigrants is food justice is climate justice is queer justice.
There is no Pride worth having unless we all make it through.
This is not the work of a month. This is the slow work of staying with the trouble. Pride is a time to come together with love and fire and continue to lead on the work of the shift from individual resilience to collective restoration and from corporate allyship to earth-aligned commitment.
Pride doesn’t erase tiredness.
It dances with it.
It puts light on the scars.
It sings when there are no more words.
It builds altars from the fragments.
It says: I’m tired, and I’m still here, and I am ready.
Because there is no queer future without a livable planet and we will not be safe until all of us are free to be our full selves without violence.
*I’m using queer in this blog as a container term for LGBTQIA2S+