Pride is our family history. Pride is taking on the weight of all that courage, realizing we are what they hoped for,
Pride is a group of girls in 1922 dancing in the basement of a Parisian gay bar,
Pride is Gavin Grimm standing in court day after day for the sake of all the trans kids who just want to use the bathroom at school,
Pride is Marsha P. Johnson walking down the street with flowers in her hair, wearing a dress that’s going to get her arrested,
Pride is all the lesbians in the pews at every gay kid’s funeral in 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985,
Pride is Harvey Milk repeating You gotta give em hope. Smiling at the cameras, waiting for that bullet to find its mark,
Pride is Magnus Hirschfield and the WhK showing up to lobby for gay rights day after day in 1898, getting the police to hand out gender passes to the trans kids in the streets, collecting 100,000 queer people’s stories for posterity, We were here,
Pride is a Victorian priest marrying two men in the sight of God and several dozen noisy friends. Pride is a dried bouquet kept on display in two men’s front parlor,
Pride is Edward Carpenter holding George’s hand while they walk around the garden and the village police refusing to give a damn about it because George and Edward are ours, they take care of us and we take care of them,
Pride is a hundred generations of indigenous queer tradition held onto in defiance while the colonials make straightness the way of the Lord,
Pride is Lili Elbe waiting in the hospital with her wife for a surgery brand-new to history,
Pride is a butch girl putting her arm around her girlfriend’s shoulders outside a drag show while the police kick and push people into the back of a van one by one,
Pride is identity, Pride is family history, Pride is holding onto other people’s memories, Pride is us.