June is Pride Month at the theater, even though the official Pride march for Portland is in July, which means all of summer is gay now, especially August. You know why. The sun—so hot right now—gay. The river? Super gay. You, reading this newsletter? Probably gay.

Oregon gets to claim the mantle of gayest state, but only because D.C. is denied proper representation. Does that make the cause for statehood an LGTBQ+ issue? Uh, yes. It’s called intersectionality, honey. Look it up.

But as Jinkx Monsoon so elegantly quips, our little theater isn’t so much gay, as in “brunch with the girls,” but queer as in, “Feed me, Seymour! Feed me now!”

All joking aside, sexuality is a spectrum—it can be fluid, like gender. Some people are born gay, others find it. Some days you’re gayer than others. The heart wants what it wants. And it’s really no one else’s business unless you want it to be. The right to bodily autonomy, from how you present yours to who you share it with to what comes in and out of it, is the most fundamental condition for freedom. Liberation is not possible if we all cannot be who we want to be with the people we want to be with.

The alarming rise of modern fascism has targeted anything outside of the very narrow band of Western Christian heterosexuality and cisgender standards to distressing ends with everything from book bans to laws attempting to eliminate our trans families. It is not hyperbole to say that there are far too many people in this world who want to kill us because we want nothing more than to simply exist.

And yet, the point of Pride is to celebrate in the face of such adversity—to not deny ourselves the pleasure of community, to be joyful when possible, even in such sorrow. Queer culture, like all culture, can be messy. The point isn’t to wash over the flaws, but to grow and learn from them. To look back at the past with a bit of embarrassment at times, but also with, well, pride.

Those who came before us fought for so much. It’s up to us to keep fighting with tears in our eyes and smiles on our faces. To quote ally Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”