In our Pride Month Statement for 2025, we at Room Magazine emphasized the importance of not allowing corporate interests define Pride, but rather the people to whom Pride belongs: the queer Black and brown people who bleed for it, riot for it, and care for their communities. We especially must defy pinkwashing in light of the physical, social, and semantic violence that this year alone has seen LGBTQ2S+ communities face: across over 30 countries worldwide, homosexuality remains criminalized; south of the border, barely a fifth of the New York Times’ hand-wringing coverage of trans people quotes trans people themselves; in so-called Canada, cities’ police budgets go up as quickly as does their disproportionate violence against, and neglect of, LGBTQ2S+ people and especially, especially LGBTQ2S+ people of colour.
This year also brought resistance against that violence, as always has been, as always will be. Botswanan activists fought for the government to formally repeal the penal code criminalizing queer relationships and continue to advocate for further gains for the communities they serve better than the government ever did. In Alberta, grassroots libraries such as the High Queerdness community library push back against book bans targeting LGBTQ2S+ and especially trans writers and their life-saving books. Worldwide, research into curing HIV/AIDS continues at a promising pace, affirming that those who live with HIV/AIDS deserve to truly live, despite the necropolitical neglect of various states.
In writing this statement, Room hopes to draw attention to some of the dangers queer communities face, the frequent erasure of those dangers, and to those activists, lovers, fighters, trans so-called ideologues, and healers who dream and act toward better worlds every day.
Reading List:
Excerpt from “Parallel Lives,” by Eman Abdelhadi, from Homosexual Intifada: A Queer Palestinian Anthology, via Literary Hub
Organize! Organize! Organize!
We can only win together!
Collective liberation!
Do I believe me?
2025 Pride Month Statement and Reading List
Writing about survival: Crucial reads for the times
30 Books by 30 Queer Canadian Writers
Get a digital copy of Room 41.3 Queer
The New Quarterly’s 2026 Pride Month Reading List
Resources:
- Trans Rights BC, which disseminates human rights information relevant to the safety and well-being of trans and gender-diverse individuals across British Columbia.
- 2 Spirits in Motion Society, a national organization that supports 2S kin through community, ceremony, advocacy, and youth leadership across Turtle Island.
- Toolkit by Black Femme Legal, which is dedicated to Black queer femmes, gender diverse folks and Black trans femmes who had and continue to have limited means of support navigating intersecting forms of anti-Black harassment, discrimination, violence and misogynoir in their respective workplaces.
- ArQuives, an independent 2SLGBTQIA+ archive with the mandate to acquire, organize, and preserve materials by and about 2SLGBTQIA+ people in “Canada” and to provide public programming
- Read research from Egale Canada, which aims to improve the lives of 2SLGBTQI people by informing public policy, legal advocacy, and education
- Check out this list of resources from JusticeTrans, which provides Two Spirit, trans, non-binary, and gender diverse (2S/TNBGD) communities in Canada vital legal resources.
- Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run library that specializes in the literary, political, and artistic work of trans, non-binary, and Two Spirit authors.
Actions to take and organizations to support:
- Donate to the Trans Lifeline, which provides trans peer support, run by and for trans people.
- Donate to the Vancouver-based Urban Native Youth’s Two-Spirit Collective, a program for self-identifying Indigenous youth ages 15 to 30 who identify as Two-Spirit and/or LGBTQ2S+.
- Donate to Qmunity, a Vancouver-based organization which offers slow-barrier mental health and social services for queer, trans, and Two-Spirit people.
- Donate to or volunteer with AVI Health and Community Services, which offers HIV testing, community-led crisis responses, an Indigenous Wellness Program, and harm reduction services. Locations in Victoria, Nanaimo, Comox Valley and Campbell River.
- Donate to Friends of Ruby, a Tkaronto-based organization which supports Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and all gender non-conforming youth.
- Donate to Brite Line, Edmonton’s first mental health and wellness helpline dedicated to supporting people in Edmonton’s 2SLGBTQIA+ community.
- Donate to PEI Transgender Network, which provides support, education, resources, and more to Two-Spirit, transgender, gender diverse, non-binary+ (2STGDNB+) in the PEI.
- Donate to Metonymy Press, which publishes award-winning queer, trans, and feminist literary fiction and nonfiction by emerging writers.
