While Pride parades are an important part of Pride Month, they aren’t the only way for you to celebrate it. Many queer people may still be closeted, or live in unsafe environments, preventing them from access to these events. Sometimes, people prefer not to come out, simply out of their own accord, and that’s okay too. If any of these factors describe your experiences, here are other ways to celebrate Pride Month!
Find your people: This might be the most important and possibly, the most exciting way to celebrate Pride Month. The queer community and online spaces have been best friends for a long time. If you are the only queer person in your surroundings or your biological family, finding your people online and interacting with the community on social media is a comforting, validating and liberating experience. Being the only queer person in your immediate surroundings can be an isolating experience because you might not have people who understand you or your experiences. Simply search “LGBTQ+ Discord servers” on Google if you use Discord often, or simply follow queer people online on social media. You can make the effort to text them first and then start a conversation.
Once you find your own queer tribe, you can organise movie nights, book club meet-ups, trivia quizzes, get on video calls together and talk to each other about your experiences—the possibilities are endless. Also, if you want to see what a Pride event looks like, you can watch a YouTube livestream of one with your new friends! You can not only watch and feel included (albeit from afar), but also interact in the comments and potentially find even more like-minded queer people to include in your circle.Â
Support queer creators: So much of what makes up Pride is community, and there’s no better way to reinforce this idea than supporting fellow members of the community. Start supporting queer content creators, if you have the opportunity to do so. You could join someone’s Patreon or merely click the follow button on Instagram. It’s difficult accessing local bookshops in India to buy or borrow queer books (any books for that matter) but reading them alone is enough support. Further, India’s first exclusively-queer publishing house, Queer Ink, has a range of queer titles, even in Hindi and a plethora od vernacular languages. They also conduct archival work, recording and preserving queer oral histories, and help emerging queer writers write queer stories and publish them.
LGBTQ+ History Month. Learn. Educate yourself: Well, it’s called LGBTQ+ History Month for a reason. Before you celebrate Pride, understand where it all came from. We weren’t taught queer history in school, we can rectify that by relearning and re-educating ourselves. In fact, Pride was never just about the flags and flamboyance; it started as a protest movement by a Black transgender woman.Â
Queer your existence in the subtlest of ways: Queer your existence, in other words, add something queer to anything and everything you can think of. If it’s unsafe for you to be out, you can still celebrate Pride by making the smallest of changes to your life. For example: using Pride-inspired wallpapers as your lock screen, painting a rainbow on your phone case, and putting up fanart of your favourite queer media on your pinboard/wall. These little queer additions to your life can help you get into the spirit of Pride, without being physically present at a parade. No matter what, you’re still celebrating you and your community’s very queer existence.
The notion that Pride month is only about Pride parades is a very Western and commodified look at queerness. By following these steps and branching outside parades, we can expand our celebration of queerness during Pride Month and beyond. Although said multiple times, Pride is and deserves to be celebrated every day, through the smallest of objects and in the smallest of actions.