Participants take part in the NYC Pride March as part of WorldPride's commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, on June 30, 2019.
Washington CNN  — 

The mood of the coronavirus pandemic is the precise opposite of the mood of a Pride celebration. The former is defined by monotony, isolation, and anxiety; the latter by movement, touch, and joy.

These dueling atmospheres make the fact that the pandemic has largely thwarted Pride Month – exactly five decades after activists assembled New York City’s inaugural Christopher Street Liberation Day March, held to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots – feel all the more profound.

LGBTQ Americans, however, are no monolith. While many have found little more than sadness in a season of canceled floats and flags – and seized by agents of the state who are pummeling the very tradition of protest – others have detected an opportunity to reimagine an event that, for a variety of reasons, can sometimes divide the family.

Grief

For 22-year-old Em Panetta (who’s nonbinary and takes the pronoun “they”), this June would’ve marked a consequential moment: their very first Pride.

“The past year, starting last summer, has pretty much been a big coming out for me, so this summer was supposed to be a really celebratory time for me – a time to travel to New York City (from the Philadelphia area) and be out with my community, instead of sitting on the sidelines like I’ve been doing for the past several years,” Panetta told CNN.

Panetta continued: “Since in-person Pride celebrations were called off, there’s been a bit of a grieving process. It’s just hard knowing that you almost had this special experience.”

Grief. It’s a notion that Ethan Johnstone, 38, the founder and lead community builder of Pride Link, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the quality of life of LGBTQ people in South Carolina’s Upstate region, also used to describe Pride’s absence this year.

“Pride offers me an opportunity to be my true self and be freed from worrying about whether I’m going to be looked at a certain way or have to respond to comments or harassment,” Johnstone said. “The first Pride I went to was in Spartanburg, after I came out as trans. So for me, it’s an event rooted in authenticity.”

“Not having that this summer,” Johnstone added, “makes it feel as if a big part of my year is missing – the excitement of getting ready and figuring out what I’m going to wear and meeting people. There’s grief in missing out on all that.”

Missed political opportunity

At times, the season can be more overtly political. It isn’t difficult to see why: Though early in his tenure President Donald Trump attempted to cast himself as a custodian of LGBTQ rights – “(I am) determined to protect the rights of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community,” he said in a January 2017 statement – his administration has hardly been friendly to this group.

A 2019 ProPublica report on the Trump administration’s track record on LGBTQ issues “found dozens of changes that represent a profound reshaping of the ways the federal government treats the more than 11 million lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.” These changes include reversed, dropped, removed, and withdrawn LGBTQ protections in areas ranging from employment and health care to criminal justice and public life.

“Pride is a key part of the political outreach we do,” Kit Malone, 45, an advocate and educator at the ACLU of Indiana, said. “It’s where we make connections with other organizations. It’s where we make connections with individual LGBTQ people who just want to know more about their rights.”

In places like Mike Pence country, honeycombed with conservatism such that queer experiences there often look different than they do in more progressive enclaves, Pride’s significance may increase dramatically. Particularly for those in small towns, the single month can bring to life, in a secure manner, that watchword of so many civil rights movements: visibility.

“We track close to 20 rural Pride celebrations in Indiana. They go from a small potluck at a shelter in a park to the Spencer Pride Festival, which has been featured in national news and attracts thousands of attendees from throughout the region,” Malone said (due to Covid-19, the festival has been postponed). “These gatherings help us to locate queer people who may be underserved, who may not have spaces where they can safely celebrate themselves.”

“When I think about the toll of Pride cancellations,” Malone continued, “those are the folks I think about – the folks who don’t live near a major city, who may not have access to gay bars, who may suffer from greater levels of isolation.”

Away from welcoming environments, the simple presence of Pride can have political valence. The avuncular Todd Leslie, 71, reflected on the 1980s, when he traveled with university-age LGBTQ people to marches in Florida, where he lives, and beyond.

“I know that it sounds silly today, but these kids, as I call them, had to gather a good deal of courage to do this,” Leslie said. “One year, I took a group to a march in Jacksonville, which is very conservative. We were in a park, and there were lots of people protesting our being there. The kids were nervous and uncomfortable – and they stayed that way until Dykes on Bikes showed up.” (He told this last part with a warm chuckle.)

As Leslie sees it, anything that can be taken away from you is political: “The core of Pride is the idea of not taking for granted things that were hard-won.”

Pride, reimagined

Outdoor activities have been called off. But that doesn’t mean that the spirit of Pride has been foiled completely. As has become common during the pandemic, some festivities have moved online.

For instance, in May, New York City Pride announced that there will be a three-day virtual drag show from June 19 through June 21, featuring more than 100 performers, including alumni of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” In addition, “Schitt’s Creek” actor and co-creator Dan Levy will be one of four grand marshals, and singer Janelle Monáe and “Pose” actor Billy Porter among the performers, for a special June 28 broadcast.

Notably, the pandemic has forced another conversation on how to improve the observation of Pride.

Fifty years later, the event has “evolved into something impossible to untangle from many of the most insidious aspects of consumption and capitalism,” the writer and Northwestern University professor Steven Thrasher tweeted in April, following announcements of nixed in-person Pride celebrations.

“We need something new to address the labor, environmental, anti-racist and economic challenges of LGBTQ folks,” Thrasher said.

Over the decades, critiques of Pride – how it tends to elevate only a narrow range of LGBTQ experiences, how it’s overstuffed with cops – have inspired alternative celebrations.

After flagging for years, DC Dyke March, which was first held in 1993 to embrace activism among queer women and to underscore the distinct power of dyke as a political signifier, returned last June. It’s unaffiliated with Pride. The aim is “to center trans people, queers, lesbians, and other dyke identities” overlooked by the mainstream LGBTQ movement, as the Facebook page for this year’s online convening, Dykes Go Digital, puts it.

“When I think of Pride, I think of multiple Prides,” Preston Mitchum, 34, the director of policy at the Washington-based nonprofit URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, told CNN. “We have Black Pride. We have Trans Pride. We have Youth Pride. It breaks my heart not to see the joy, the outfits, the friends. But since we can’t have these this summer, I’m hoping that people will understand that corporations don’t make Pride great. Communities do.”

Indeed, it seems to be this communal spirit that some organizers are tapping into as they reclaim Pride’s activist roots to support the current Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality.

Mitchum added: “Nothing good will come from a deadly pandemic that was preventable. At the same time, people have the opportunity to reevaluate what, exactly, they need from their communities – and for themselves. They have the chance to dream differently.”

One way to think of the pandemic is in terms of theft. In just months, it’s robbed people of so much: careers, lives, pleasures that are small but also big. In all that is a dark intimacy, especially for some. To be queer in America is to be familiar with an analogous sort of loss, owing to years of state-sanctioned bigotry and neglect.

Yet to be queer is also to be acquainted with what can come after that loss: kinship and connection that can transcend almost anything.