I want to start with something Audre Lorde said, because she said it better than I ever could. She wrote that our silence will not protect us.
She wasn’t talking about Pride specifically. She was talking about the cost of shrinking. The cost of waiting for a safer moment to show up. She knew that the safer moment rarely comes on its own. Someone has to build it.
That is what St Pete Pride does. Year after year. We build the safer moment.
But right now, building that moment costs more than it ever has, and the resources to do it are more precarious than most people realize. So I’m asking you directly: donate to St Pete Pride. Not someday. Now.
Let me tell you what’s actually happening.
The political climate in Florida is not abstract. It is a policy environment that has spent years systematically targeting the existence of LGBTQ+ people, especially young people and more pointedly trans people. It shows up in classrooms and in legislation and in the quiet ways people learn to make themselves smaller.
That’s the world our community is navigating every single day. And into that world, Pride shows up and says: you don’t have to be small here.
The philanthropic landscape has shifted too. Corporate sponsors who once showed up reliably are pulling back. Foundations are recalibrating. Some donors have gone quiet not because they stopped caring but because the pressure to stay low is real.
The organizations that depend on that support, organizations like St Pete Pride, the largest Pride organization in the state of Florida, are left doing more with less while the stakes go up.
This is not a moment to let that gap go unfilled.
Bayard Rustin built the architecture of the March on Washington while being pushed to the margins because of who he loved. He did not let erasure stop him from doing the work.
James Baldwin wrote from exile about a country that had not yet decided whether Black queer people were fully human, and he kept writing anyway.
These were not people who had the luxury of waiting for conditions to improve before they contributed. They brought what they had. They gave what they could. And the movements they built outlasted the resistance they faced.
We are their inheritors. That is not a metaphor. It is a responsibility.
St Pete Pride is a living institution of community survival. The parade, the festival, the Royal Court, the flag raising, the programming, the visibility, the sheer radical act of gathering in joy in the middle of a climate designed to discourage it. None of that happens without funding. None of it happens without people deciding that this organization is worth investing in.
Pauli Murray, the queer Black pastor and civil rights attorney, said that true community is built on equality, mutuality and reciprocity. Reciprocity. That word matters.
If this community has ever given you something, a sense of belonging, a moment of visibility, a reason to believe that joy was still available to you, then this is the moment to give something back.
And if you’re an ally reading this, I want to speak to you directly. Your role is not ornamental. Showing up for Pride is meaningful. Donating is how you show up when the cameras aren’t there and the flags aren’t flying. It’s how you demonstrate that your support is structural, not seasonal.
This year’s theme is Here Comes the Sun. That is not wishful thinking. It is a declaration borrowed from everyone who came before us and chose to build something beautiful anyway.
Marsha P. Johnson threw parties in the middle of a crisis because she understood that joy is not the opposite of resistance. It is resistance. Sylvia Rivera said we’re still here until the world had no choice but to listen. The sun in that tradition is not passive. It does not wait for permission. It rises.
But the sun needs infrastructure. It needs an organization that can hold the space for the light to land.
I have the privilege of serving as the first Black board president of St Pete Pride. I do not take that lightly. I carry it with gratitude and with urgency. Because what I know from this vantage point is that the work is real, the need is real and the window to protect it is right now.
So here is the ask, plain and direct. Go to the St Pete Pride website and make a financial donation. Whatever you can. Small donations add up. Large ones change the trajectory. But every single one sends a message that this community is worth protecting, that joy is worth funding, that we will not let the darkness outlast us.
They built this for us. We build it for the ones coming next. The sun does not ask for permission to rise. Neither do we. Fund the fight.
Dr. Byron Green-Calisch is board president of St Pete Pride and founder of Justice Over Everything, a justice-centered leadership coaching and organizational development practice based in St. Petersburg. Learn more at StPetePride.org and JusticeOverEverything.com.
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