Queer all year
Thoughts from a lovely Pride Month
After a slate of disappointing Prides in 2023 and 2024, I’m happy to report that Pride 2025 broke the curse. This June was the first time in three years that Jessie and I weren’t dealing with the aftermath of a whole-house move, and wow did it feel good to not have to shuffle our entire lives once again.
For those who don’t know, we had a disastrous move from Texas to Colorado in May 2023, which lead to a slog of a June spent fighting with our moving company and bank, dealing with our terrible landlord and homophobic neighbors, and adjusting to the reality that we would be stuck in the Hell House for an entire year. In May 2024, we moved to a much better rental house 25 minutes from the first one—a welcome change! But that meant our June was a blur of catching up on work, unpacking and organizing, and completing a variety of big indoor and outdoor improvement projects.
Two years of non-celebratory Pride Months in a row had me itching to make the most of this one, though I was worried yet another June would be ruined. Not by a move this time, but by all of the issues and attacks the LGBTQ+ community has been facing, including from the Trump administration, SCOTUS, legislatures across the country, corporations backtracking on anything “woke,” and the continued rise of transphobia and homophobia.
While navigating all of those things was woven into my June both personally and professionally (f*ck the Skrmetti decision, seriously), I still managed to have a lovely Pride Month overall. Jessie and I went to a great outdoor Pride kick-off event at Cheesman Park in Denver (until a torrential downpour rolled in, forcing us to sprint 15 minutes to the car in cold rain). We vacationed in Provincetown for their Pride weekend and had so much fun in one of the gayest little towns in America. I got a Pride manicure for the first time in ages! And lastly, I flew to New York City for work and had a whirlwind of a Pride weekend there, including getting to be in the NYC Pride March.
If I had to sum up the queer warm fuzzies I’m feeling after Pride Month, I’d quote my friend and coworker, Philip, and say, “I love gay people.”
Now that it’s July and I’ve had a little time to absorb and process my Pride Month experiences, here are some things that have been on my mind:
As queer and trans people, we are the light, the blueprint, the permission slip. We are the resounding “Why not?” amidst a din of “Why?”s.
Walking around on the streets in P-town where queer people are the majority and straights are handily outnumbered was a breath of fresh air. There’s a reason so many of us make jokes with our friends about creating an LGBTQ+ commune away from the rest of civilization. It’s rare for us to have opportunities to let our guard down in public. And yes, I did hear about the series of homophobic incidents that happened in P-town at the end of June, and honestly, that makes my point for me.
Something else I noticed in Provincetown was how beautiful it was to see LGBTQ+ people and couples of different generations hanging out. We do not have nearly enough intergenerational spaces in the queer community, and I hope that’s something we see steadily change in the decades ahead. There is so much our queer elders can teach us, and vice versa!
I know it can feel like we have so far to go when we’re still deep in this fight, but it’s important to look back at how far the queer community has come too. When I was in NYC, I had the privilege of being around a lot of queer youth, many accompanied by supportive and proud family members. PFLAG, where I work, was formed in the ‘70s precisely because of how rare that was then! Those parents would be so proud of how much better things have gotten. I also get to live in an era and country where Jessie and I are legally married, though I easily could have been born into a time or place where we would have been severely persecuted for our love. That’s not nothing.
Spending quality time with queer friends is a balm for so much of what ails me. Brunch is sacred. Laughter is a heavenly chorus. I’ll take you to church at a drag show, and you’ll be swept up in a congregation of believers. Homophobes and transphobes need not enter unless they’d like to be sacrificed at the altar.
True friendships are not about convenience. Rather, they are about inconveniencing yourself in the name of love and care. My absolute angel of a friend Jesse James Rose not only let me sleep on her couch while I was in NYC and freely shared her resources (clothes, contact lens solution, food) and time (every night felt like a delicious sleepover), she also took the subway and a bus to meet me at the airport so I didn’t have to find my way to her place by myself after midnight and carried my heavy-ass suitcase up a gajillion flights of stairs. My friends helped me navigate the city, walked to train stops with me, taught me how to use Apple Pay instead of a physical transit card, and invited me to events. I felt so held and adored by everyone’s thoughfulness. Be generous with your friends, y’all! Offer to help them move. Share things with them that make you think of them. Get them gifts and mementos. Send them mail. Take a million photos of them from a variety of angles. Connect them with other people. Have the hard conversations. Repair intentionally and tenderly. Celebrate the shit out of them. They’re worth it.
There is more than one path and one strategy to get to collective liberation. If someone is on a different path than you, you can wave goodbye and wish them well. You don’t have to try to convince them they’re wrong or obstruct their way. Just because we’re all trying to get to the same place doesn’t mean we all have to walk arm in arm to get there. You have your comrades, and they have theirs. Learn to let go.
Pride 365 or die. Queerness and queer community just may be the best gifts I’ve been given in this life. I’m still in my feels about death and mortality, but if this is all I’ll ever get—a blip of time as floating consciousness in a skin sack—I thank the universe that I’m gay. I thank the universe that the love of my life is a gorgeous goddess of a woman. I thank the universe for my hot, smart, funny, and radical trans and queer friends who make life worth living. All of this love and magic cannot be contained in a single month. It’s a year-round commitment, baby.
I hope you also got to experience moments of tenderness, joy, and community during Pride Month. But if you didn’t, take it from me that there’s probably a better one around the corner next year or the year after that. No matter what, you’re queer all year.
Queerly yours,
Shohreh
p.s. I would love to get some new submissions for my advice column, Dear Shohreh! If you could use some tailored guidance, please fill out the submission form (it’s anonymous). You can check out past Dear Shohreh posts here to get a sense of how the column works.