June arrived and left as a lion. Woe be unto the lamb. 

Some of my earliest encounters with Pride  events occurred in Washington, D.C., which traditionally marks the occasion on the week before the Stonewall anniversary to better accommodate intra-municipal participation with New York, thus colliding in some years with Juneteenth celebrations. Having lived briefly in Texas, I was vaguely aware of Freedom Day, although I don’t remember being taught any of its history in my Mississippi public schools. But living in my Southeast Washington DC neighborhood on Capitol Hill, where I first heard the day called “Jubilee”, I couldn’t have avoided my neighbors’ raucously joyous front yard barbecues and block parties even if I’d wanted to. And who would want to? 

That this confluence of love-filled festivity also concurred with the peak pagan heat of the summer solstice had no small effect, either, overlaying, as it did, the entire District, from Anacostia to Georgetown, with a liminal geography, and transforming L’Enfant’s plan de la ville into a compass of possibilities, the laylines of a vast jumping-off point to a fairer, more forgiving future…  and yes, a Blacker, queerer future too.   

For all this, for me at least, DC Pride earned benchmark status, the measure against which I’ve experienced every other Pride since. I’ve been to “bigger” Pride events, and nothing will ever overshadow my memories of marching down Fifth Avenue with ACTUP or dancing on the piers under a firework-lit sky with comrades from Queer Nation, but neither will anything ever match the magic of a June in D.C. 

These three seemingly separate events — Juneteenth, the Stonewall anniversary, and the summer solstice — experienced together, and with open hearts and minds, can sometimes transcend their mere calendric coincidence, expressing a deep truth about earthly life and freedom that, like the surging Green Man, feels somehow closer to the surface during these longest days of the year, just as the veil between the quick and the dead is said to thin and shred between the autumnal equinox and Samhain.

And the deep truth is this: earthlings, including humans, derive their rights neither from a divinity, nor a nation-state, nor a constitution. Rather, our rights are inherent to our status as creatures of earth. They are not granted  but emergent, springing as they do like April flowers from the individual’s value, both intrinsic and extrinsic, as “wholes” that are are at once both composed of and comprising other “parts”  that are likewise comprising and composed of “wholes” in an infinite, ever-evolving holonarchy (cf. Ken Wilber). In other words, a creature or eco-system has value to itself and to others that attach to its place in this interconnected system. Our rights derive from our attachments, another way of saying they eminate from nature itself.  Means may derive from the self,  but meaning derives from connection to others. 

To be oppressed is to feel one’s value diminished, one’s connections and importance to the whole “dismissed,” and the rights emerging therefrom denied. Means limited. Meaning damaged. And it does follow that the upsurge pulsing power of Green Man’s heat, and light, and growth that is summer would lend itself therefore, to struggles against domination. So no, I don’t think it’s just random chance that the history of summers is a history of riots, unrest, rebellion, uprising, revolution…. and at its best, evolution. Just as the trees seize the long days to overcome the domination of place, scattering seed to the warm winds, so people often find the strength to resist their would-be oppressor’s at the season’s climax. 

And all of us who stand on the wrong side of the looming straight-white-male Christian theocracy, needs must now gather our strengths indeed. Are we not always our strongest together?

In the face of a difficult election, an extreme court, an opportunistic Trump, and an ascendant Christian nationalism, our coalitions matter more than ever, and for those to succeed, we white people just have to do better. We have to see our own privilege, check our own fragility, learn to recognize racial micro-aggression, and earnestly strive to meaningfully remediate historic wrongs. I know queer white people can do this. Our experience prepared us for this. Empathy is the salve and solidarity is the bandage —  the urgent care that carried us through the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic — and such is the first aid our shared future demands of us now.

Sarah Schulman, in her unmatched history of ACT UP New York (1987 -1993) Let the Record Show, argues convincingly that ACT UP NY’s secret sauce was its unity around its singular mission, documenting all of the fracture lines along which the coalition should have faltered long before it did; that is the secret sauce we need to stir together once more to resist this real and immediate danger.

Remember, autocrats specialize in doing the unthinkable, and Trump and his supporters have told us what they mean to do. Much of it is unthinkable, and none of it is good for women, BIPOC, immigrants, asylum seekers, non-Christians, and LGBTQ+ people. Only together can we stop them. 

Failure will exact a mighty ransom. We will pay with the freedoms we’ve rightly come to take for granted.  We will pay in tears shed for the ruined lives of our friends, our lovers, our allies, and ourselves. Many will surely pay with their lives. 

While it’s certainly cliche, if not trite, to say, “our greatest strength is our diversity,” we have no choice, in these turbulent days, but to put those words, and our selves to the test.