Not Bursting with Pride this June? Maybe you should consider a move.

If you are not bursting with Pride in Tampa Bay in June, you may be living in the wrong city.

Our LGBTQ+ month of Pride is once again upon us. June is the one month each year when Rainbows and Unicorns are real. It is a fantastical display of our individualism, our community, our Pride and our unwavering quest for full equality. We seek not the rights to be unique, but we seek the simple courtesy of being able to blend into the fabric of society without being persecuted.

Yes, we are fabulous (I tend to think we are super-fabulous, in fact). And, yes, we can be colorful, and loud, and rambunctious. And, yes, we can even be flamboyant, God forbid. And who should care? Absolutely no one as long as we are not hurting anyone else. So, we like to have fun, have a few cocktails, maybe expose a little skin and have more than a little sex. Who should care? Once again, absolutely no one as long as we are not hurting anyone.

We feel unique; in fact, many of us are fabulously unique. But our uniqueness is not what we fight for, nor what we come together each June to celebrate. We fight for our right to walk down the street past people of our every other walk of life without being noticed. We do not ask anyone for anything other than to be exactly who we are and to be able to exist in society without others pointing , gawking, staring, catcalling, bullying and being able to organize legal ways to discriminate against because we live our fabulousness out loud and in ways that most wish they had the nerve to do.

This June put a little extra pep (or twerk) in your step, rejoice in our sense of community and the things that bond us together and simply laugh to yourself that the people that don’t understand are actually merely jealous of our fabulousness.  They simply wish that they had the moxie to live their lives as exactly who they are also.

Also, remember that there are differences amongst everyone, but more things bind us than separate us and if you chose not to celebrate Pride this month as some sort of stance against how the bookend of this month, St Pete Pride, has been organized then you will be only one missing out. No one else will even notice you weren’t there. We will be far too busy being fabulous.

Happy Pride!