What You Love

This is the final post in the Pride 2026 Series.

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My wife’s cousin called on a Saturday afternoon. Her voice had the particular urgency of someone who has just realized that something is about to happen and that you need to be there for it. Her son, Richard—known on stage as Elle Blue Nouveau, Boise’s reigning drag queen and, by general community consensus, its nicest—was performing at Seattle Pride in an hour. Capitol Hill. Get there now.

We got there. Finding parking on Capitol Hill during Pride is its own form of spiritual trial—and we found a spot a block from the stage, which felt less like luck than like the universe insisting we had no excuse not to be there. My wife had been looking forward to this—it was her cousin’s kid performing, her family on that stage. I was there because she is my family, which makes her cousin’s kid my family too, even if we had never met. That is how it works. We pushed toward the front of a small crowd gathered close around the stage just as the act before Elle was beginning: a drag group performing for maybe a few dozen people, all of us close enough to the stage to see the construction of the costumes. One of the performers came off the stage into the audience. She was wearing a rainbow dress made entirely of individual zip ties, structured like a weirdly modern flapper dress, and she found me—the slightly bewildered cis/het white guy near the front—and pulled me into the dancing.

I am not a good dancer. And I was self-conscious and felt (and looked, I’m sure) awkward. It was also, somehow, fine. Not because anyone was being polite about my dancing, but because nobody was particularly focused on whether I was doing it right. The performer was joy in a zip tie dress and she was sharing it, and the small crowd was sharing it, and I was standing near a stage on Capitol Hill on a June afternoon doing something awkward and joyful among strangers who were also, by some logic I hadn’t fully worked out yet, my people. When the performance ended, I found the stage, I found my wife, and I watched someone I had never met perform in a city he had traveled to from a state where being queer has never been without cost—and where, now, the cost is rising.

That is what Pride is. Not the softened version of something harder. Not the parade that replaced the riot. The riot, the parade, and the awkward dancing are all the same thing: people refusing, in public, to be ashamed of who they are or who they love.

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Sappho was writing on the island of Lesbos in the seventh century BC—roughly 2,700 years before the performer came off that stage on Capitol Hill. She wrote about love between women with a directness that took centuries of scholars by surprise and that the institutions of subsequent millennia found deeply inconvenient. The early Christian Church ordered her work burned. Most of it was lost. What survived did so in fragments—scraps of papyrus discovered in Egyptian rubbish heaps, quotations preserved in the margins of other people’s texts, pieces of poems that scholars have spent careers trying to reassemble.

She is still here. In fragments, yes. But here.

The research on what makes queer people resilient in the face of everything documented in the previous three posts in this series is not complicated. Family support—biological or chosen—is the single most consistent protective factor identified across the literature . Community connection, peer relationships, the presence of people who reflect your experience back to you without flinching: these are not soft additions to clinical care. They are measurable predictors of mental health outcomes, buffers against the cumulative harm of minority stress, the reason a Pride celebration is not merely a party but a public health intervention. The cousin who calls and says get there now is doing clinical work without knowing it. The crowd on Capitol Hill is doing clinical work. The performer in zip ties pulling a stranger into the dancing is doing clinical work.

Chosen family is not a consolation prize for people whose biological families failed them. It is a distinct and documented form of social support with its own protective properties—one that queer people have been building, out of necessity and out of love, for as long as there have been queer people. Which is to say: always.

For the queer reader who was raised in faith—who has been told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, that God’s knowledge of you stops at the door of who you love or who you are—I want to say something directly: the tradition I was formed by, and the scripture it shares with much of the Christian world, records God saying to the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the womb I knew thee” (Jeremiah 1:5, KJV). That knowledge is not conditional. It does not have an exemption clause. Chosen family exists, in part, because too many faith communities have forgotten that—have decided that the people God knew before they were formed are somehow unknowable now. The cousin who calls and says get there now is correcting that mistake. So is the crowd on Capitol Hill. So, I would argue, does the scripture itself, if you read it carefully enough.

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The four posts that preceded this one documented an extended campaign of erasure: the Stonewall monument, the Pulse crosswalk, the federal surveys, the 988 crisis line, the DOJ’s own hate crimes page—including the page dedicated to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, now marked archived content, its funding proposed for elimination in the same budget that erased his name from the agency website that bore it. The argument running through all of it has been that the memory hole is real, that the pattern is deliberate, and that bearing witness to it is not optional for those of us who claim to care about justice.

But this post is the one I wanted to write, because documenting what is being destroyed is not the same thing as telling the whole story. The whole story includes the off-duty and former NPS rangers who called themselves Resistance Rangers, who built an archive of the deleted Stonewall pages within weeks of the government erasing them. They were not alone. On Reddit’s r/DataHoarder, a community whose stated purpose is preserving digital content of all kinds, individual members were already moving. One built CivicArchive.org, a searchable database of 450,000 government tweets from 600 federal accounts, on the grounds that public records paid for by public money shouldn’t simply vanish. Another archived the entire CDC public dataset and distributed it via torrent before it could disappear. A third thread catalogued government website scrubbing across agencies—Jackie Robinson’s military history removed from the DOD, Navajo Code Talker pages gone, Black and female service members erased from Arlington National Cemetery’s educational materials. The queer community is not the only community being disappeared from the official record. It is one of many. And the people archiving what is being removed are not members of any of those communities specifically. They are people who believe, as one commenter put it, that you cannot erase history—and who act on that belief regardless of what the record contains. The whole story includes the lawyers who went to federal court and won the Pride flag back at Stonewall. The whole story includes a drag performer from Boise, Idaho, winning a competition in a state that would prefer he didn’t exist, and then performing at Seattle Pride while his family scrambles to find parking.

Queer people did not begin to exist when the government recognized them. They did not stop existing when the government stopped recognizing them. They were at Stonewall in 1969 because they had been there, in some form, since before anyone was keeping records—since Sappho on Lesbos, since the people the Hebrew Bible called strangers and the New Testament called neighbors, since always.

The government can remove a checkbox from a federal survey. It cannot remove what the checkbox was counting.

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The tradition that formed me grounds its theology in what it calls the premortal existence—the teaching that souls were present before birth, that identity precedes mortality, that who we are is not created by the circumstances we enter but is something we carry into them. The doctrine goes further still: intelligences, the eternal core of each person, were not created or made and cannot be (Doctrine and Covenants 93:29). They have always existed. They always will. I no longer hold all of that theology in the same way I once did. But I find myself returning to the structure of it—and sitting with one of its tensions. In its orthodox form, the same doctrine that insists on the eternal nature of the soul also frames mortal sexuality and gender identity as trials, conditions of a fallen world that the resurrection will lift. Even the most affirming Latter-day Saint, one who loves their queer family member fully and without condition, may hold quietly that the trial will one day be resolved. I cannot say whether that framework is right or wrong. What I can say is what it does: it tells the person who prayed and found God not despite their queer identity but through it—as David Archuleta described—that what they received in prayer is provisional, that the self they know most surely is the self that will not survive death. That is its own form of erasure. And I find I cannot read the doctrine of eternal intelligences—souls that have always existed, that were never created, that will exist beyond every attempt to count or erase them—and conclude that what someone knows most deeply about themselves is a trial to be corrected rather than a truth to be honored.

You were here before anyone decided to count you. You will be here after they stop.

This is not a promise I can make on behalf of any government or institution. It is something more durable than that. It is a fact about the human record.

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Sappho’s Fragment 16, in Anne Carson’s translation If Not, Winter, opens with a list of the things that some people believe are the finest on earth: an army of horsemen, a force of infantry, a fleet of ships. The poem then turns, in the way that the best arguments always turn—quietly, without announcement—and offers a different answer.

Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is

what you love.

She wrote that on Lesbos in the seventh century BC. The Church burned her books. The papyrus rotted in Egyptian sand for two millennia. Scholars recovered the fragments and kept copying them. Here they are in June 2026, in a blog post by a Mormon-formed clinical psychologist in Seattle, because what one loves has a way of surviving what tries to destroy it.

That is what Pride is for. Not to declare victory—the fight is not over and this month’s posts have documented how far it is from over. Not to pretend the memory hole doesn’t exist—it does, and people are being harmed by it, and bearing witness to that harm is part of what this series has tried to do. Pride exists to insist, publicly and without apology, that the most beautiful thing on the black earth is what you love—and that no executive order, no edited webpage, no overnight crew with gray paint has ever managed to make that untrue.

Queer people were always here. They will be here still.

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Pride month ends. The fight does not. Neither do we.

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If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or contact the Trevor Project directly by texting START to 678-678 or calling 1-866-488-7386.

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If you are looking for ways to act, or for support for yourself or someone you love, these organizations are doing essential work: PFLAG supports families and loved ones of LGBTQ+ people with resources, community, and advocacy; the ACLU is tracking anti-LGBTQ legislation state by state; the Trevor Project provides free, confidential crisis support to LGBTQ+ young people twenty-four hours a day; GLAAD monitors and responds to anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in media and government; and the Human Rights Campaign works toward full legal equality for LGBTQ+ Americans.

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This post was written by the author. Claude (Anthropic) assisted with verifying current‑event details, refining the structure of the series, supporting revision and editing, and generating ZotPress and WordPress shortcode syntax for citations and formatting. All positions, interpretations, and personal statements are the author’s own.

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