Pride in the Thunder: Why We Can’t Just Celebrate Pride Month Anymore

This Pride Month, the glitter’s fading, the rights are slipping, and it’s time we remembered what the hell we’re actually fighting for.

It’s Pride Month. Flags are flying, playlists are thumping, and somewhere in a sanitized rainbow float is a corporate logo pretending it ever gave a damn. But above all that glitter? There’s thunder. You feel it too, don’t you?

Something’s off this year. Like milk in July.

Because while we’re dancing in the streets for Pride Month, rights are being rolled back behind closed doors faster than a straight guy deleting Grindr after his “one-time curiosity.” And it’s not just happening in the places we like to mock from afar. It’s happening right under our smug, rainbow-drenched noses. In courts, classrooms and bills dressed up like “parental rights” and “traditional values.” Gay pride is being weaponised, dissected, and erased by politicians who grin like game show hosts while doing it.

This is not the time to get comfortable. It’s the time to get loud, messy, and deeply inconvenient.

A History Lesson They Don’t Teach in Schools

LGBT pride didn’t begin with vodka seltzers and Instagram captions that say “love is love” under a gym selfie. It started with bricks. With bruises. With drag queens getting slammed into police cars and trans women telling the world to fuck off. If we forget that, and if we let Pride Month become a marketing scheme instead of a war cry? We’ve officially turned rebellion into a reusable tote bag.

There’s thunder in the air for a reason.

So dance, love and shake your ass on a float. But don’t forget who built that float and what it cost. This year, Pride isn’t about being seen. It’s about being heard. Loud, angry and extremely unapologetic. And preferably wearing less clothing than usual.

We’re not going backward without flipping every table on the way.

The Bloody Roots of Pride Marches

Let’s have a little history lesson. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it trauma-light. Just your standard rainbow-coloured PTSD with a side of righteous indignation.

Pride marches didn’t start with brunch and bottomless mimosas. They started because cops treated gay bars like crime scenes and queer bodies like contamination. The Stonewall Pride riots in 1969 were not a glitter-filled weekend of twinks yelling “Yass Queen” in crop tops. They were a violent, furious rebellion led by trans women of colour, street queens, and the kind of people your HOA (Homeowners Association) would call the police on before you even finished lighting a cigarette.

Imagine trying to celebrate who you are while praying the newspaper didn’t publish your name so your boss wouldn’t fire you by Monday. And yet somehow, these absolute legends sparked a revolution while most of us today can’t even decide which photo of our ass to post for Pride content.

When Silence Was Death

Then came the AIDS crisis. Or as governments lovingly treated it: “That thing happening to the people we’d rather ignore until it goes away.”

Queer people were dying in the streets while politicians threw prayer breakfasts and clutched pearls about “morality.” Real compassionate stuff.

ACT UP and Queer Nation weren’t writing press releases. They were marching, screaming, handcuffing themselves to buildings, and saying “Do something or we’ll make your life hell.” These weren’t activists. These were queer Avengers, minus the billion-dollar budget and heterosexual PR stunts.

Enter: Corporate Pride™ (Now With Extra Hypocrisy)

Fast forward. Sodomy laws? Check. Section 28? Oh yes. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? Iconic repression. Marriage bans? A whole era. And just when we thought maybe, just maybe, we’d clawed our way into a slightly less dystopian existence, suddenly every company wanted to get gay for Pride Month.

June rolls around and suddenly the banks are gay. Arms dealers are gay. Supermarkets, toothpaste, petrol stations… everyone’s dripping in rainbow.

Even the missiles are gay now. Which is great. Nothing says “we see you” like a guided missile wrapped in a pride rainbow.

Let’s talk about Corporate Pride. That magical season when companies pretend to love us. For about three weeks. Maybe four if their intern really leans in.

You get the rainbow trainers. The Pride merchandise. The “Love Wins” branded chewing gum. Your bank posts a boomerang of a bisexual intern holding a glitter sign and suddenly they’re Stonewall 2.0.

And then, like clockwork, July hits. The rainbow logos vanish. Bios go back to beige. Campaigns end and those same companies quietly resume funding the very politicians who want to erase us. It’s Cinderella, but instead of a lost shoe, it’s a deleted diversity campaign and a forgotten promise to care.

Pride Month isn’t a costume you wear for a week.

This isn’t a seasonal marketing tool, or something you borrow when it’s trendy and return like a library book.

It’s a legacy built on bricks, blood, and blistered feet from marching until the soles fell off.

So unless you were standing with us when the cameras weren’t rolling, maybe don’t show up in June expecting gratitude. We are not your brand extension. We are the reason you even get to pretend you care.

And don’t even get me started on the rainbow Oreos. So crunchy, so brave and so utterly, completely full of shit.

While the World Burns, They Dance for Likes

Meanwhile, actual rights are being yanked faster than a shirtless guy at a foam party. Trans people are being legislated out of healthcare. Schools are banning books again like it’s the 1950s, only with influencers. And you want me to cheer for a gay pride dog biscuit?

LGBT resources are drying up while we drown in glitter. And yet, for some reason, Pride merchandise still gets delivered faster than trans kids can access basic medical care.

Queer kids are getting harassed in schools and trauma survivors are trying to heal from narcissistic abuse in a digital age that won’t let them breathe.

Pride was born from protest, from rage and from people getting their faces smashed for simply existing. Not from beige influencers spinning around in sponsored jockstraps acting like they invented resilience.

Pride Month: The Rot Inside the Rainbow

But here’s the part no one wants to say out loud. The rot isn’t just coming from the outside anymore. It’s leaking from within.

We hit a peak, just like feminism did. Got some wins, took a victory lap and then got comfy. Too comfy. Now it’s gym selfies, petty social cliques, bromance confusion and arguing on Twitter over who gets to sit at the front of the float.

And some of the gays? Honestly? Not helping.

The image of gay pride today is being sculpted into something clean, bland, shredded, cis, and marketable. We’ve gone from fight club to fashion week. We’re not activists anymore. We’re models with brand deals and ring lights, slapping #Pride on posts and pretending that counts as visibility.

While queer kids are getting harassed in schools. While rights are being stripped like they were never ours to begin with. But don’t worry, some guy in Mykonos just dropped a rainbow thong collection, so the revolution’s going great.

You Are Not the Main Character, We All Are

If you’re lucky enough to live loud and proud, great. Good for you. But don’t you dare forget who died for that right. And don’t you dare waste your voice while others are begging to be heard.

We are not your content, we are not your TikTok trend and we are definitely not a fucking hashtag.

We are the revolution you keep forgetting you’re part of.

The Pink Dollar Hits Harder Than You Think

Here’s the bit the politicians and culture-war keyboard warriors always forget. You don’t mess with the gays. Not just because we’re loud, glittery, and have an uncanny ability to turn trauma into memes, but because we’re fucking expensive.

Enter the Pink Dollar.

We are the tastemakers, the fashion whisperers, the cultural curators of everything you secretly love but pretend you came up with first. That outfit you wore to the office party? A gay man approved it four cultural layers before you even clocked it. That hit TV show you binged last week? Queer-coded. That moisturiser that actually works? We found it and you’re fucking welcome.

And let’s not forget one other fabulous little detail. Disposable income. While a lot of us have been disowned, ignored, and sidelined by society, we’ve also built empires. From kitchen tables, from underground clubs, from startup dreams and drag queen side hustles. We turned marginalisation into millions.

The Pink Dollar is not just powerful, it’s lethal when pissed off. We shop, travel, support brands that get it, and we abandon the ones who don’t like a bad ex with a blocked number. Entire industries have been built on queer money, queer taste, and queer influence. You think you’re just losing votes when you attack us? Try losing luxury markets, tourism, hospitality, film, skincare, streaming, tech and everything with a pulse and a Pinterest board.

So during Pride Month, when they come for us, remember this:

We throw the best parties, write the best scripts, sell out arenas, run half the West End, and make brunch a religion.
We are the trend before the trend.
The beat behind the anthem.
The reason your economy isn’t already in freefall.

Pride isn’t just protest. It’s power.
And anyone who forgets that?

Loses. Every. Single. Time.