Queer as In: A Love Letter to Joy, to Us, to Now
A Celebration of Queer Radiance Beyond the Binary, Beyond the Frame
A joyful, defiant meditation on Pride that rejects binary containment and centres queer radiance. Not a reaction, but a reclamation. Not deviation, but the spectrum in motion. We are not the problem—we are the possibility.
Pride is Joy
It’s Pride Month, and everywhere I look I see the scramble to respond—to policy rollbacks, rising hate, violent legislation, and tired talking points designed to make us doubt ourselves. But this year, I’m not centring them. I’m not handing over my heart to panic or letting reaction set the tone. Queerness, for me, is not a response to power—it’s a practice of it. It’s a way of living, knowing, and loving that refuses scarcity. And so I come back to what grounds me. To the affirmations that don’t apologise for their existence. To the kind of joy that threatens systems because it doesn’t beg for permission.
Queer as in... I’m attracted to vibes.
Not boxes. Not scripts. Not the echo of someone else’s definition. Queerness, in its most honest form, is relational. It’s a current, not a category—a pull of resonance that can’t always be explained but is always felt. I fall in love with gestures, with voice, with the way someone makes space for others in a room. My body knows before my brain does. It’s not about decoding someone’s “type” or fitting into one. It’s about connection that slips through the cracks of taxonomy and still feels like truth.
Queer as in... not being gaslit into believing anyone knows who I am better than I do.
I have spent years collecting fragments of myself from diagnostic reports, interrogations masked as interviews, and “support” that came with strings. I’ve been told I was too much, too confused, too young to know, too late to change. But I’ve stopped handing over the map. I am not a riddle for someone else to solve. I don’t need to be translated into something palatable to be valid. My self-knowledge is not up for peer review. And queerness—at its heart—is the refusal to be misnamed.
Queer as in... if you were happy you’d want us to be.
Some people look at our joy and see threat. See delusion. See indecency. But really, they see a mirror. And it unnerves them. Because to witness queer people choosing love, pleasure, community, and self-determination in a world designed to crush those things is to be reminded that compliance is not the same as contentment. If they were truly at peace, they’d never need to legislate our erasure. Our existence wouldn’t bother them. But it does. Because we’re not supposed to be this free.
Queer as in... joy isn’t optional, it’s sacred.
I don’t celebrate in spite of the pain. I celebrate because I’ve survived it. Because my people have survived it. Joy is not decoration—it’s a demand. It is ritual. It is resistance. In a world that profits off our exhaustion, choosing delight is a refusal to be ground down. I wear glitter like armour. I laugh loudly. I tell stories where we live. Where we thrive. Because they already know how we die. What they need to see is how we live.
Queer as in... I dance even when they tell me not to.
I dance not to provoke, but to remember that I am alive. That I am here. That my body is mine. For so long, embodiment was a battleground—something to dissociate from, to apologise for, to edit. But not now. Not anymore. Movement brings me back to myself. To rhythm, to breath, to pulse. Dancing is not a metaphor. It is my nervous system trusting that it is safe enough to exhale.
Queer as in... I built a life I don’t need to recover from.
There is a difference between endurance and ease. I used to think survival was the goal—but it was just the beginning. I want friendships that nourish, not drain. Love that expands, not confines. Work that aligns, not consumes. My queerness taught me to imagine otherwise—to design a life that doesn’t require constant repair. A life I don’t have to escape from to feel whole.
Queer as in... love louder than their hate.
They have policies. We have people. They have rhetoric. We have rhythms. We don’t need to match their volume to overpower them. We just need to keep showing up—braiding each other’s hair, holding each other through hormone shifts, dancing in parking lots after mutual aid runs. Our love doesn’t need to be understood to be unstoppable. It just needs to be chosen. Again and again and again.
Queer as in... I still believe in magic.
Not the kind in fairy tales. The kind you make when your friend brings you a snack after a hard day. When someone calls you by the name you gave yourself. When a kid sees you and smiles because you look like freedom. That’s the spellwork of survival. Of not going numb. Of staying tender when the world wants you tough and small. Of still believing in softness as strength.
Queer as in... nothing about me is a mistake.
This body. This voice. This desire. This neurotype. These rituals. This refusal. This joy. None of it is wrong. None of it needs fixing. I will not contort myself to fit their frame. I exist exactly as I’m meant to, and I won’t apologise for loving this version of me—not because I arrived at some endpoint, but because I learned to stop running from myself.
So no, I’m not reacting this Pride. I’m remembering. Reclaiming. Rooting. In joy, in vibe, in self. In every glittering gesture that says: I was never the problem. I am the possibility.
Because the dominant culture keeps trying to frame Pride as something it can explain back to us—flatten it into celebration or protest, sanitise it for corporate alignment or sensationalise it as provocation. They keep circling around it with labels, mandates, and definitions, hoping that if they package it just right, they’ll neutralise its power. But Pride was never meant to fit inside a parade permit or a marketing deck. It was never theirs to contain.
They keep reaching for binaries because binaries are the grammar of empire. It’s either/or, always. Man or woman. Normal or deviant. Good or bad. Assimilate or be punished. But queerness doesn’t play by those rules—not because it’s their opposite, but because it rejects the premise altogether. Queer isn’t the inverse of the binary. It’s the refusal to accept that the world can be understood through such narrow lines. Queer is not the other side of the coin. Queer is melting the coin and planting something new where it used to be.
Nothing in nature is binary. Cells don’t ask permission to split. Light doesn’t choose between particle and wave. The sky is never just one colour. Spectra are not theoretical—they are the architecture of everything alive. Queerness honours that. Queerness is that. Not a static point on a scale, but a movement, a shimmer, a pulse.
Queer is a spectrum, yes—but not one that sits still. It’s a spectrum that flows, that glows, that loops back on itself and births something entirely unexpected. It radiates, not because it wants to be seen, but because it is—because queerness cannot help but emit. We’re not here to mirror culture’s rules back to it in softer hues. We’re here to remind everyone that the rules were made up—and that we’ve always been the proof.
So this Pride, I’m not asking to be tolerated. I’m not waiting to be understood. I’m not shrinking to survive. I’m expanding, dissolving, lighting up every edge I was told to trim away. Let them stare. Let them legislate. Let them try to draw borders around something that was never a country but a constellation. We’ll be over here—living, loving, dancing, glowing, becoming.
Because we are not the deviation. We are the radiant refusal.