Celebration & Resistance: Let’s Talk About Pride Month!

What this episode covers

It’s Pride month and we’re sharing some of our thoughts about it in this week’s episode. There are a lot of complexities with Pride Month and we especially want to explore the dual nature of celebration and resistance within the LGBTQ community. With recent funding cuts to arts organizations, the challenges of sustaining movements without corporate support, and the importance of balancing joy with activism, it can seem like there isn’t much to celebrate. But sometimes you have to mix that joy with the hard work and really lean into community engagement.   Takeaways Pride Month embodies both joy and exclusion. Funding cuts to arts organizations threaten queer activism. The nonprofit industrial complex complicates funding for movements. Local and small-scale initiatives are crucial for sustainability. Joy can be a form of resistance against oppression. Celebration and activism can coexist meaningfully. Spirituality provides grounding for activism and community. Historical context enriches our understanding of current movements. Art and community are essential for resilience. Collective joy fuels the fight for justice.   Highlights: (02:25) The Impact of Funding Cuts on Arts and Activism (05:41) The Complexity of Funding Movements (08:02) Balancing Joy and Resistance in Activism (12:45) The Dual Nature of Pride: Celebration vs. Resistance (16:18) Spirituality and Activism: Finding Balance   Resources:.  Join the Queerness Everyday Challenge Join our online community at  Sanctuary Collective Community  If you want to support the Patreon and help keep the podcast up and running, you can learn more and pledge your support at patreon.com/queertheology   This transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors or omissions. Welcome to the Queer Theology Podcast. I’m Brian G Murphy. And I’m father Shannon, T l Kearns. We’re the co-founders of Queer Theology dot com and your hosts from Genesis, revelation. The Bible declares good news to LGBTQ plus people, and we want to show you how Tuning each week on Sunday for conversations about Christianity, queerness and transness, and how they can enrich one another. We’re glad you’re here. All right, y’all. It is June 1st. It is the first day of L LGBTQ Pride Month, and there’s a lot going on in the world and with pride and in our little brains, and I’m sure in your brains and in your hearts, and we, as we were getting ready to record, we just we’re like noticing that there are like lots of truths that are all true at the same time. 00:00:54 That like, for many of us, pride month is a time of joy and Celebration and inclusion and sort of like festivities and partying. It’s also true that for many of us, pride is a place where we have felt excluded or unsafe or unseen for. It’s also true that like corporations have been sort of throwing money at Pride to sort of use the LGB, the LGBTQ community as consumers and to sort of get us to buy their business. And maybe there’s this sort of pinkwashing and corporate washing of pride that’s like not great. It’s also true that lots of corporations pulling out all their support from L-G-B-T-Q people and organizations is not a great sign. 00:01:38 It’s also true that Pride got its start over 50 years ago as a remembrance of the Stonewall Rebellion uprising. It’s a protest march. So there’s like this history of, of resistance that is part of pride. It’s also true that pride oftentimes features artists and musicians and creative types of all sorts that like come together to create beautiful political soothing, subversive, entertaining art. And that was all sort of like swirling around in our heads as we’re like getting ready to head into pride month and thinking about like, what does Pride Month mean now this year in 2025 with everything we’ve got going on in our local lives, in the USA globally wit