35 Pride Month Quotes to Share With Your Community
These empowering messages from LGBTQ+ icons, activists, organizers and celebrities can help you celebrate.
This year, being out and proud may be feeling more vital (and intimidating) than ever, due to legislative attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, especially transgender and nonbinary people. If you’re posting about your identity and your Pride celebrations with friends and chosen family, these Pride month quotes can help start conversations and make clear the urgency of Pride as a protest not just a celebration.
While for many people, modern Pride festivities are a time to wave a rainbow flag and celebrate with friends and community, it's important to remember Pride is also a time of resistance and protest. Pride marks our community’s history of fighting back against persecution and oppression. The rights and opportunities that LGBTQ+ people have to live openly today are a direct result of the LGBTQ+ people, and in particular transgender women of color, who literally put their lives on the line fighting for the rights and protections we have today. This year, Pride has taken on a new urgency. The current administration is no longer recognizing Pride month, and is systematically working to strip away the hard-won rights that the community had obtained.
These empowering messages from queer icons, activists, artists and LGBTQ+ celebrities provide thoughtful reflections, and inspire you not just for June but all through the year. These quotes are great for shouting out your Pride month excitement on Instagram with a fun party photo of you and your besties. Or, you can use them as text posts on Facebook or LinkedIn to inspire conversations amongst your colleagues or family about being allies and standing up for LGBTQ+ people in our current frightening political climate. No matter how you’re celebrating, we’ve got a quote that will speak to and for you.
Pete Buttigieg
If you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me – your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.
Patrick Califia
If you live in a society that wishes you didn't exist, anything you do to make yourself happy disrupts its attempts to wipe you out, or at the very least, make you invisible.
RELATED: Inspiring Quotes From Transgender and Nonbinary People
Leslie Feinberg
Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.
Janelle Monae
One of my mantras is, ‘Embrace what makes you unique, even if it makes others uncomfortable.’ I keep that with me in my back pocket. Shoot, I keep it in my front pocket! I keep it in my hair.
Gracie McGraw
So many people out there don't have the support, love or understanding from their families when it comes to sexuality or gender identity, but just know that there is a beautiful community out there that loves you and cares about and for you
Gilbert Baker
The rainbow flag is a symbol of freedom and liberation that we made for ourselves.
RELATED: The History of 21 Common LGBTQ+ Pride Flags and What They Mean
Chappell Roan
I just truly want to live in this dream world that I've created. And I want everyone else to live in it with me, on stage, or in the music videos or listening to the music. I just try to be the girl that I really needed when I was fourteen.
Carl Nassib
I just want to normalize things. I really don't think too often going through life as a gay man. I just hope one day that won't even have to cross your mind, because it barely crosses my mind.
RELATED:
Alyssa Edwards
Don't get bitter, just get better.
Alison Bechdel
What would happen if we spoke the truth?
Kate McKinnon
Progress, real progress, makes me cry harder than anything. When the world itself grows.
Cynthia Erivo
Think of those who have not been seen, think of those who sit in the dark and wait their turn, hoping and waiting for a light to light their path. I ask every single one of you, with the spaces that you’re in, and the lights that you hold, to point it in the direction of someone who just needs a little guidance.
Alice Walker
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
Bayard Rustin
To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true.
Billy Porter
For years I tried to put myself in a box, and it frustrated me, so I had to let go and let the universe take its course.
Cherrie Moraga
Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.
RELATED: Honor the Heroes of the Stonewall Riots, the Birthplace of the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement
Dorothy Allison
There are two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.
Gilbert Baker
The rainbow flag is a symbol of freedom and liberation that we made for ourselves.
Harvey Milk
We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets.
Janet Mock
This pervasive idea that trans women deserve violence needs to be abolished. It’s a socially sanctioned practice of blaming the victim. We must begin blaming our culture, which stigmatizes, demeans and strips trans women of their humanity.
Sassafras Patterdale (ze/hir) is an award-winning author and freelance writer. Sassafras’ work has been honored by organizations ranging from the American Library Association, and the Lambda Literary Foundation, to the Dog Writers Association of America and the Cat Writers Association. Sassafras’ work has been published widely, and ze is the author of twelve books. Follow Sassafras @SassafrasPatterdale and at SassafrasPatterdale.com.
8 Facts You Never Knew About Pride Month
The Best Pride Songs and LGBTQ+ Anthems
Meet the Heroes of the Stonewall Riots
20 Transgender Movies to Watch Right Now
