We were never just a month

There are mornings I open my news feeds and have to set my phone face down on the desk and just breathe.

I know you recognize that feeling. The bills, the ­headlines, the legislation — it accumulates. It is designed to accumulate. Exhaustion is not a side effect of these attacks on our community; it is often the point. And yet.

And yet, somewhere in this very red state, right now, someone is planning a parade. Someone is ordering more folding chairs because more people showed up to game night than expected. Someone is texting their teammates about Saturday’s game. Someone is planting tomatoes next to a neighbor they met at a community dinner three months ago, and now cannot imagine life without.

That is the story I want to tell this Pride Month.

Utah is not what people outside it imagine. Across this state — from Logan to St. George, from Moab to Ogden — there are roughly 20 local Pride festivals flying their flags in communities that the national narrative would have you believe are hostile and barren. They are not. They are complicated, yes. But they are ours, and we have built something incredible inside them.

And in Salt Lake City alone, the infrastructure of queer life is genuinely stunning. There are dozens of active ­organizations, from LGBTQ+ sports leagues to hiking clubs, gardening circles, naturist groups, book clubs, line dancing groups, dinner clubs, lunch gatherings, professional networks, and spiritual communities. People who simply want to sit across a table from someone who sees them fully and says: I’m glad you’re here.

This is not small. This is everything.

Politics moves like a pendulum. We know this because we have lived through its arc before — through decades that felt like free fall — and we watched it slow, stop, and begin its return. The pendulum has swung hard against us in recent years. Legislation in this state and across the country has targeted our families and friends, our healthcare, and our presence in public life. It is real, and it is painful, and I will not minimize it by wrapping it in a tidy bow.

But pendulums do not stop mid-swing. They come back.

What sustains us until they do is each other. Not the idea of each other — the actual, physical, loud, laughing, grieving, gardening, bowling, pot-lucking reality of each other.

Pride month is a beautiful, vital, joyful amplification of that reality. But the reality itself does not require a month. It does not require a stage or a parade permit. It requires only that we keep showing up — to the dinner, the game, the ­meeting, the garden bed, the book group, the barstool next to a stranger who might become a friend, and yes, most definitely to Pride.
The community is not waiting to be built. It is already here.

Come find it. Come be it.

We are so glad you exist.