Pride Month Statement and Reading List
Due to a confluence of factors, Room Magazine is posting this statement in acknowledgment of Pride Month later than planned.
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The first Pride was a riot. Despite banks and cops getting floats at Pride parades–despite plastic rainbow merchandise disguising consumption as praxis–despite homonationalistic and pro-assimilation tactics that have consistently sold out the global majority–the first Pride was a riot, initiated by Black trans women and drag queens, the Stonewall Uprising. In so-called Canada, some of the earliest recorded pride demonstrations took inspiration from Stonewall and happened in the traditional and stolen territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sʔəl̀ilwətaʔɬ, (Tsleil-Waututh) nations (colonially known as Vancouver). Now Pride has spread across the country thanks to rural and urban organizers, setting hopes alight everywhere it lands.
This Pride season, Room Magazine prompts its readers, writers, artists, and creative community to remember: no pride in genocide, be it in Congo, Palestine, Canada, or Sudan. With trans rights under attack worldwide and here in so-called Canada, we must move with fury, with love, and with creativity, to protect each other and to actively harm any government that seeks the annihilation of LGBTQ+ communities’ human rights, here and abroad.
We mustn’t be lulled by banks proclaiming “love is love” while funding weapons manufacturers, by pinkwashing campaigns to manufacture consent for neo-imperialism; rather, we must support each other transnationally, across national borders and through prison fences, and uplift individuals and organizations fighting for change.
Pride Month Reading List
From Sister Outsiders: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Lorde
I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. What are the words you do not have yet? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
From “NDN Homopoetics,” by Billy-Ray Belcourt, via poets.org
I hoard dirt in my ears; months later, I pull out a summer dress. The dress is not a dress to be worn but to be hung, like a flag on a wobbly pole that is noticed only when crowded in the mouths of those near it. The dress is not a dress to be worn but to be hung, like an NDN condemned to death by the judiciary of historical ignorance, an enactment of white fellowship and care. We all bear the dress, not as an article of clothing, but as an ontological imprint. To bear is not to wear, of course. To bear and to birth, however, are from the same neighborhood of experience. It is there, in the neighborhood of experience, that my childhood home is nowhere to be found. And so, my childhood home could be anything, even a dress made out of dirt.
From “alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity and Queers in Palestine are “Reflecting on Our Queerness in Times of Genocide” – June 2024,” by alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity and Queers in Palestine, via Queers in Palestine
It is time to disengage from any Western framework, including LGBT and queer political and organizing frameworks that are complicit with the genocide in Gaza, and to resist colonial Western domination forced on our movements through complicit funders and global allies whose interest ends in our queer identities. Resist hollow human rights frameworks, commercial and depoliticized pride and visibility, and homophobia and identity politics organizing, and connect to our local wisdom and power.
From “Femme Futures” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, via Poets.org
When I hear us dream our futures,
believe we will make it to one,
We will make one.The future lives in our bodies
Touch it.
“Exploring Black and Asian American Lesbian Archives: Aché and Phoenix Rising” by Jaimee A. Swift via The Margins
However, when we interrogate the archives of and by the most marginal in our communities—not as objects or property but as materials written and authored from their own perspectives—what can these archives tell us about the fortitude of Black and Asian American queer women who recognized the urgency and necessity to tell their own stories? What about archives that speak to what scholar Tiffany Florvil examines as a politics of queer belonging, but more specifically a Black and Asian American queer belonging? What about archives that speak to Black and Asian American lesbian self-determination and resistance?
From “Trans Visibility Does Not Equal Trans Liberation,” by Kai Cheng Thom, via Them
We have already seen how neoliberalism has, largely, subverted the mainstream queer rights movements of the 60s and 70s. LGBTQ+ rights was once a radical political movement based around the concepts of free love, socialism, and solidarity with other marginalized groups. In later decades, however, it became increasingly focused on the narrower goals that primarily served the interests of white, middle-class, cisgender gays and lesbians: the right to marry, adopt children, serve in the military, and work in prestige professions.
“Poet George Abraham Is Crafting Worlds of Palestinian Futurity,” by Colleen Hamilton and George Abraham, via Them
George Abraham: Sometimes queerness is a gesture. Sometimes it’s a moment of encounter and not some “coming out.” There’s a discretion to queerness in these spaces that I’m interested in. It’s not about exposing, but exploring. How can we expand our imagination of what queerness looks like in one’s own right to privacy, one’s own right to opacity?
