What is Pride For?

Down with corporate Pride! Pride is a protest! Stonewall was a riot! Pride month has become as much about social media discourse as anything else, and in this episode, we try to look beyond posturing slogans and history-distorting morality tales to confront the many possible meanings and feelings one might have about Pride. We read Andrew Holleran’s 1984 Christopher Street essay, “We Must March, My Darlings,” which suggests a cultural politics of Pride that preserves it as an annual ritual with shifting audiences and meanings, one that need not always be stridently political but which can gather a solidaristic charge in particular political moments. Chapters(00:00) Intro(03:34) What we’re doing for Pride(05:40) David’s ex-wife took his first Pride photo(10:18) Twitter gays trying to improve Pride discourse(14:31) Andrew Holleran’s Proustian Pride essay(23:59) Blake’s high horse about Bernie Sanders(29:11) How “normie” gays feel about Pride politics(36:01) Who is Pride addressed to?(43:00) Why Holleran is a deeply political writer(52:00) Bernie and David’s crisis of being a left intellectual(55:00) How 2020 rewrote the Stonewall narrative(59:43) Why gays being “normal” is what we’re fighting forSourcesAndrew Holleran, “We Must March, My Darlings,” Christopher Street, November 1984.Walt Whitman, “Pioneers! O Pioneers” (1865).Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (2016).Andrew Holleran, “In the Age of Christopher Street,” Gay & Lesbian Review, May-June 2026.Carmen Maria Machado, “What Does Pride Mean Today?” New York Times, June 16, 2020.Andrew Sullivan, “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way,” New York Times, June 26, 2025.David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (2004).