Pentecost and Pride

As my church marched in the Pride parade today, we did so with a strong focus on fiery justice and intersectionality in the midst of so much marginalization and oppression in the world today. While we were unfortunately not able to have the worship service around the parade float like we had planned, I still wanted to share my message on the intersection between Pentecost and Pride and how we find strength in the fire.

Protest Message

In the first century, the disciples gathered in fear of the Roman occupation and its backlash to Jesus’s movement and the persecution of those who dare speak out against the Empire in the name of love. In 1969, drag queens and trans people, gays and lesbians, Black and Latinx queer folk huddled in gay bars in fear of the police who would raid and assault our community for dressing wrong, for holding hands, for dancing. In 2025, we stay afraid of ever-increasing new laws and acts of violence, persecution and genocide. Fear has always been a cornerstone of our community. But so is what comes next. We hear the rushing wind, and we see the fire of the Holy Spirit burn through the upper room, pushing the disciples out onto the streets to speak justice in every language, for every people. We hear glass shatter as bricks and Molotov cocktails fly and we see fire spread through the Stonewall Inn. We hear the cries and the songs of the queer community, from every generation, rise up again today and I see that very same fire, the fire of Pentecost, the fire of Stonewall, burn in an unquenchable inferno within each and every one of you.

          To be queer is to be born into both fear and courage. We are born into a fight that started long before we arrived and will continue long after we are gone. It is our job to keep that fire burning and build it bigger and louder and brighter than before. Our existence is inherently political. By this, I don’t mean that Pride is defined by those running for office and passing out campaign flyers. I mean that, to be queer, is to exist in a space where our safety, our careers, our daily life is debated openly in school board meetings and supreme court decisions and congressional bills. The love that we preach is the same love that Jesus preached, the same love that he commanded his disciples to preach, the same love that the flame queens of Stonewall preached. This love, should we embrace it, will get us in trouble because it is a love that threatens systems of power. It is a love that tears down the heteronormative building blocks of prejudice and colonialism that our world powers are built upon. To exist as a queer person in a world built on gender inequality and power dynamics and socioeconomic standards of marriage and family is to exist in opposition to the empire. To ignore government matters is a privilege reserved for those unaffected by the legislation of the Roman empire or the quotas and tactics of the police or the court cases and bills of the House and Senate. The goal of Pride, the goal of the queer justice movement, is not to get to a place where the government has given us all the different human rights we ask for. No, the goal is to get to a place where our humanity isn’t even up for debate, where our existence is not a political platform or a theological doctrine but rather a fact of life. How did the church get from a place of hiding in the upper room and fighting to speak truth to their faith to a position of privilege where they feel comfortable making other people hide away? More importantly, how do we get back? How do we get back to Pentecost where the church is out on the streets, caring for the marginalized, dirtying their sandals on a dusty road? How do we reach a point where we no longer care about rising above but only care about rising as one?

          This is the mission of those of us who are both queer and Christian, to reimagine church as it was originally meant to be, a sanctuary for the marginalized and oppressed. We work to turn a people huddled together in secrecy, in their upper room or in the closet, into a people of diverse languages and genders and sexualities, telling their story to the whole world because that is where our community lies. Before the church became enamored with power, became a state-sponsored institution, it was a movement to protect the marginalized. It is our responsibility to make sure that Pride does not lose sight of this mission as well. It is not enough to stay safe and it is not enough to stay quiet. We are made to be like the rushing wind. We are made to burn. To accept the state-sponsored safety of parades and police protection and corporate sponsorship cannot come at the expense of the marginalized. We cannot allow Pride to be toned down and whitewashed and made into a spectacle of fit, able-bodied, cisgender gay men when our community is so much bigger, filled with so much more beauty than one standardized image can hope to capture. There is no Pride that trades truth for tolerance, that tames itself into just a rainbow parade at the cost of intersectional communities. To seek our own wellbeing and acceptance from the empire at the expense of others was never how the church was supposed to grow and it is not how the queer community thrives. If we don’t have a parade with permits and floats and barricades, then we will still march. We will still gather and shout and protest, not as individual groups but as one voice! We can have Pride without the approval of city council. The children of Stonewall know that we are more than capable of resisting without the help of police protection. We are a community known for our courage and resilience and we will fight no matter what comes our way.

The only thing necessary for Pride is justice. There is no Pride if gays and lesbians try to distance themselves from the trans community or if the white queers forget the Black and Latinx queens that started this riot. There is no Pride without trans justice and anti-racism work. There is no Pride that doesn’t fight for the unhoused as so many queer kids are runaways or forced onto the streets. There is no Pride that doesn’t fight against sexism because what is homophobia if not for antiquated gender norms? There is no Pride that doesn’t fight for immigrants and refugees who cross every boundary to protect one another and find safety like we do, as so many queer migrants have in the past. There is no Pride that doesn’t fight for Jewish and disabled people as we remember the Holocaust and how our communities were imprisoned together and how it is only together that we will find liberation. There is no Pride that doesn’t fight for Palestinian justice and liberation because there is nothing more infuriating than people pushing for Apartheid and genocide against one population while trying to use my queer identity to justify it. We, as the queer community, will not rise on the backs of others. We will not push Palestinian or Muslim or Latinx or Black or trans people down simply to appease those who only act like they care about queer justice when they can use it to harm someone else. Pride is about standing up for the freedom of all people, especially those who face unimaginable oppression and violence, not because they will support us or can give us something in return, not because we can find something relatable in them, but because we see the injustice that others face and it is our job to do something about it. For those of us who are Methodist, our baptismal vows require us to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves. That is what the rioters of Stonewall did. That is what the disciples at Pentecost did. That is what we will do at Pride. We will stand up for all people and we will fight for justice and we will burn with the brightness of a thousand flames because we are here, we are queer, and that fire is what defines our community.

          Pentecost has always been a day of empowerment in the church. It is a day when we take our fear and our diversity and our compassion for the weak and oppressed and we forge it into our strength. It is a day when we speak out with courage and march forward into brave new spaces. It is a day when we find our voice and we use that voice to shout justice far and wide. It is a day when we give new meaning to the phrase, “flaming homosexual.” There are so many different forms of protest but ours has always relied on this fire and noise. We come together for a parade every year but we must remember that this parade does not belong to the city or the corporations or the permit office. Today, we, the queer community, we own these streets. In the midst of the joy and the rainbows and the glitter, we can sometimes lose sight of why we protest in this way. We don’t hold parades so we can gather more sponsors or so we can use our queerness as a performance for allies. Rather, Pride is a rebellion that allies have the privilege to witness. We celebrate and sing and dance because that is how we remind ourselves that we are alive. The point of protest is to disrupt, to annoy, to unsettle the comfortable to such a degree that our oppression is far more of an inconvenience than our existence will ever be. As long as efforts to sweep queer existence out of libraries or schools or the military or even the internet exist, then we will never stop reminding them who we are. Pride comes in the form of joy and happiness and, even sometimes risqué expression, because that is the last thing that society wants to see from us. If children or fat people or the Black or the Muslim or the trans or the kink or the disabled or the Palestinian or the neurodivergent or the Latinx or the migrant are not fully embraced in Pride, then where else can they be embraced? To exclude any of the identities that are currently being silenced is to play into the hand of the empire. And if the inclusion of any of these communities seems too political, too controversial, too inflammatory, well, welcome to Pentecost! Welcome to Pride! Welcome to the rebellion!

In a world that pushes for queer silence and subjugation, Pride brings noise and chaos. In a world that pushes for queer sadness and death, Pride brings happiness and life. In a world that recoils at anything that reminds them of our existence, of our differences, Pride terrifies the bigots and infuriates the fascists so let’s make them squirm. The only homo that is not welcome today is homogeneity. It is our job at Pride to resist boring conformity, to remind everyone that we are not a people to be normalized, theirs is a world that is begging to be queered, to be disrupted, to be reminded that it is not just our similarities that make us beautiful but every single one of our differences because each color of the rainbow is a different reflection of the image of God. Pride is a rebellion because this, this life, this joy, this queerness and abnormality and diversity and flamboyance and camp, is our strength, our power against those who prefer the bland and mundane. It is our job as people of Pentecost, as children of Stonewall, to show how much brighter the world can be and we do that by burning as bright as we can.