Better than a calendar, a dependable way to be alerted to the start of Pride Month is to be on the receiving end of an inbox filling up with communiques from that sock company you ordered from one Christmas, or that place where you sometimes purchase scented candles, serving as the first trickle of a quick to follow deluge announcing the current year's all-caps PRIDE COLLECTION. And with it, a social media feed peppered with lingering gay content from recent months past, and announcements for a new selection of upcoming films and TV shows made for and centered on happy, rich gay men, with just an afterthought of tiny, nibbled upon bones tossed down for the "L" in LGBTQ+, which usually have something to do with criminally insane nonmonogamous lesbians who have terminal cancer and star someone who recently made it known on TMZ that she kissed a girl once when she was drunk, alongside a straight actress who has, for one reason or another, been nominated as an honorary lesbian. But this year, something feels just a tad bit different. This year, in a rare twist, the #PRIDE scale seems to be moving a bit on the side that holds lesbian and lesbian coded content and, as far as I can tell, none of the characters in these upcoming sapphic offerings are being held in a mental institution or are candle-holding robed ghosts haunting their former homes — hand in hand — having died after just a page of dialogue between them.
As someone who identifies as a lesbian — and I do realize that’s a rather vintage label, these days, with more and more members of the community preferring queer, or no label at all — Pride Month has always felt like something not entirely for me because the majority of events scheduled for it, shows and films released during it and even marketing campaigns shoe-horned into the intended relevancy of the month are historically catered to gay men. Thinking back to the Pride events I’ve attended over the years, in various cities, they’ve matched the “we’ll take what we can get” energy that many lesbians are used to, where I spent many sweaty hours drinking warm, cheap beer concealed in a commuter mug, cheering in the street as float after float of shirtless gay men paraded by like a slap in the dewy face followed by a handful of chucked glitter and a reminder that, after the parade, lesbians on the sidelines could shuffle off to the nearest coffee shop or whatever and huddle over a shared alt-weekly or, when those ceased to exist, a cell phone, to hunt and peck for when the month’s sole lesbian event was taking place, and in what feminist bookstore or sports bar that stuck a rainbow sticker on the window to “welcome” us in for a select number of hours until the space shifted back over to something specifically for men when it would then be made known, either directly or via cold looks, that it was our time to leave.
