Pride is a protest, baby, and it happens all year round. But in the meantime, summer is here and so is pride season, so here’s some queer essays I’ve loved reading recently…

🌈 Stonewall means riot right now: this Crimethinc analysis of the parallels between the Stonewall riots and the George Floyd protests of 2020 is from three years ago, but remains as relevant as ever, exploring why and how violence, chucking bricks and starting fires can be a potent and needed force for change.

🌈 Here’s another essay that’s years old but still brilliant: the history of lesbian bars. So much queer history and culture – and so many stories – have been incubated in spaces like these, and there’s something so mythic and romantic about them that we need to document and protect.

I made a self, and since then, I have struggled to make sense of myself. The meaning I found in my coming-out story — in repeating it to my family, friends, professors, therapists, anyone who asked me to coffee at my college, and the anonymous cloud of blog readers — the story and its meaning came to feel final, resistant to reinterpretation. In coming out, my life ended. It was a personal apocalypse of many smaller revelations. The struggle that had defined me had reached its denouement of freedom — and what comes after freedom?

🌈 Music as a gateway to discovering and claiming sexuality; the messy interplay of sexuality, identity and religion; the restriction and liberation of coming out — this personal essay by Samuel Ernest hits all my long-term obsessions in its exploration of how “every testimony, every coming-out story, attempts a transformation of life. But narration is not life itself, exactly, or its transformation; it is a cocooning.”

🌈 Huw Lemmey is one of my favourite writers on Substack, and Ride or Die is a brilliant, bittersweet, urgent piece of writing on sex, psychedelic therapy and masculinity that I really loved.

The act of being heard – however dangerous and vulnerable it sometimes seems – is the thing that keeps me from tumbling into an existential abyss of fear. It is the thing that reminds me of my own small power, the magical thread that keeps me connected, engaged and creating. I do it for me, for the strength and resilience it gives me, and I do it in tribute to that entire artistic ancestral lineage that came before us, to honour their courage and determination to be heard in the face of oppression and adversity. I do it for my community, to renew and re-spell and strengthen the bonds between us. I do it for the writers and artists still battling with everything they’ve got against themselves, their circumstances and their conditioning. I do it for all of us, and the web of protection and solidarity we weave when we advocate for ourselves, our writing and each other.

🌈 Is it cringe to share one of my own essays too? Maybe, but that’s its own practice, innit. My piece, Fuck (Your) Demons, Find Community, Become Incandescent for the Dear Damsels anthology So Long As You Write is all about queerness, community, the safety, vulnerability and practice of sharing your voice, and the long, twisty road to honouring my desire and drive to write about shagging supernatural creatures. (Doing it with demons is also well gay, fyi, just ask Laura Westengard).

Got a queer essay that needs to be on my radar? I’d love to know your favourites, you can share ’em with me any time over email.

You can also explore other posts here on my website with the queerness tag.

Originally shared in my newsletter in June 2023