Image by Jamey Christoph. Book by Rob Sanders. Purchase at a Black-owned bookshop.

Last weekend, our family of four attended Montclair, New Jersey’s first ever Pride Festival, the theme of which was: “Be You. Be Heard.”

Vendors and organizations set up colorful tables, gave out freebies featuring their logos and brands, and handed out a plethora of pride flags emblazoned with the colorful stripes and symbols of various identity-groups within queer community,including many that helped folks share their pride as vocal and visible allies.

The day was a joyous success. I witnessed middle schoolers wandering the festival in groups, sporting unique outfits and tie-dye hairstyles, introducing one another to their girlfriends or boyfriends or “joyfriends” (a non-binary, gender-inclusive word for “someone-you’re-dating”) from nearby towns. I heard straight-appearing parents teaching their young ones what “LGBTQ pride” means, saying, “Pride is about everyone being accepted, no matter who they are or whom they love.” I saw multi-generational families of all hues walking down the street together, smiling and dancing. Many people (and dogs and birds, for that matter) displayed this slogan on their shirts and bandanas: “Love is Love.”

I loved being a part of Montclair Pride, just as I’ve loved being a part of every other Pride event I’ve attended, since the first time I marched with my college contingent in the summer of 1996. I love that so many people wore pins or stickers sharing their various pronouns: he, she, they, ze… I love that Out Montclair managed to bring together a town, a community, that was diverse and celebratory. I love that local businesses and national sponsors wanted to be a part of sending the message that everyone deserves love and dignity.

At the same time, I fretted over whether to share the images of our family sporting the logos of businesses who may or may not advocate, in their politics and policies, for the concrete rights the queer community continues to need. I worried that that celebratory line, Love is love, might too easily be interpreted as, “It doesn’t matter who you are, provided you’re just like me.” I worried that I was sending the message that pride is about commercialism and cupcakes.

After all, it’s pretty easy to assert that Love is love, but slogans do not protect anyone from violence, or from laws that censor speaking about queer identities and lives in school classrooms, or from policies that bar transgender children from playing sports, or from marketing that perpetuates gender stereotypes, or from parents who protest that teaching children to use non-binary pronouns for their non-binary classmates constitutes some sort of “political indoctrination,” or from both the codified and the unconscious bias that costs folks jobs, or promotions, or positions of leadership.

And so I turn tonight to the intersection of Jewish tradition and queer history to ask: What is pride?

Spoiler: Pride is not a rainbow. Pride is not a logo. Pride is not an image, but an action. A series of actions, in fact.

Pride is a riot.
Pride is a trans woman who resisted arrest.
Pride is a rageful scream at the police enforcing an unjust law, multiplied and amplified.

Pride began just a few river-crossings from where I live, in a place called The Stonewall Inn.

If you’ll indulge me, I’m actually going to recommend a children’s book. It’s called Stonewall: A Building. An Uprising. A Revolution.

It traces the tale of a little building in the West Village of Manhattan that began as a humble stable and became a major landmark, a place of pilgrimage, for queer folks from all over the world.

It describes the night when the community refused complacency. When at least one person asked, “Why don’t you do something?”

“Immediately, the spark of anger grew into a smoldering resistance.”

What I love about Stonewall, the picture book and the historical legacy it encapsulates, is that it does not force us to choose between anger and celebration, but allows us to lift up both. It reminds us that pride ought not flatten our fabulous differences into conformity.

Sure, Love is Love, but equality should not require sameness. Stonewall was about welcoming all those society labeled “queer,” different, Other, odd, left out, weird, strange, abnormal.

And all those words can carry the weight of a fist in the face.

But they also carry the weight of a brick thrown through a window:
The shattering of the glass that kept the queer community hidden behind the darkened windows and shuttered doors of what many of my ancestors called the gay ghetto.

In fact, on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, at the very first New York City Pride, there was no festival, no friendly police advocates, no citywide street shutdown. There was a group of motivated, angry, revolutionary queer and gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender people marching out of Greenwich Village and onto Fifth Avenue.

Those queer ancestors of mine, of ours, were decidedly not polite. They were not begging, or even asking, for tolerance. They were demanding. Demanding dignity. Rights. Workplace protections. Economic opportunity. Healthcare untethered to marital status. Bodily integrity. And end to the fear of being ridiculed, murdered, or beaten.

And all this without having to change one thing about themselves.

I heard a few folks report that the Montclair Pride Festival was great… until later in the day, when, and I am quoting here, “Some of the outfits and attitudes got… a little out of hand.”

“Out of hand” in this case meant flamboyant. “Strange.” Unconventional. “Weird.”

As far as I’m concerned, pride isn’t prideful without those things. Without the unfettered, free expression of queerness, difference, diversity.

One of the organizers of the first Pride march in New York City reflects, “The cops turned their backs on us to convey their disdain, but the masses of people kept carrying signs and banners, chanting and waving to surprised onlookers. […] the question of a chant was endlessly discussed —
the winner: ‘Say it clear, say it loud. Gay is good, gay is proud.’”

What a difference from some of the precursor events organized around the United States prior to 1969 that sought merely tolerance. In Philadelphia, for example, gay rights advocates stood silently outside Liberty Hall. They required a dress code for protestors: Jackets and ties for men. Dresses for women. Conform, fit in, and perhaps we’ll be tolerated. Stand here quietly and maybe “they” will pity us enough to toss us some crumbs.

Friends, this is not pride.

And, as far as I understand our sacred tradition, it isn’t particularly Jewish, either.

What’s that joke about Jewish holidays… How each and every one of them can be boiled down to this: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.”

How do we, as a Jewish community, “do” pride?

We embrace and elevate the struggle and the survival. We even have a special prayer that we recite, aloud, recalling not only the victory, but the oppression as well. It’s called al hanisim, “for the miracles.”

On Purim, this prayer includes the following text: “Haman, the wicked, rose up against [us] and sought to destroy, to slay, and to exterminate all the Jews, young and old, infants and women.”

Our tradition does not shy away from reminding us of the hardship. Our tradition encourages us, even, to wail and mourn, to mark tragic days like Tisha b’Av, the day of the destruction of the Temple.

As queer folks and allies, we want celebration and protection. We want to lift up our comfort and our anger. We want to express gratitude for the changes the LGBTQ+ movement, and the Jewish people, have worked hard to achieve, the rights we have gained.

Simultaneously, we need to recall that the work is far from finished. Today, right now, the national LGBTQ+ advocacy organization called the Human Rights Campaign is suing in four states to reverse some of the twenty-four pieces of state legislation that curb and curtail the rights, dignity, and pride of queer folks. More than two hundred and fifty such bills have been introduced this year to date. Those discriminatory laws that have passed include Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, as well as many laws that deny transgender students, faculty, and staff in public schools “access to the bathroom, locker rooms, and other sex-segregated facilities consistent with their gender identity.” These laws are an attempt to deny the existence of diversity and variation when it comes to human sexuality and gender. They are, on the surface attempts to force queer folks to “blend in.” But if you look just slightly below the surface you will see that they are, in actuality, attempts to eradicate us.

Let’s do pride Jewishly. We Jews blot out the memory of tragedy by repeating the stories of our resilience. We are proud not despite our past struggles, but, in part, because of them. And the lessons we take from so many attempts at our annihilation cannot be capitulation to the dominant culture, cannot be the erasure of our specificity, our Jewishness. Rather, it is the embrace of the struggle that allows us to be ourselves.

So, too, at the Stonewall Inn, which proudly and prominently displays the sign left behind by the police: “THIS IS A RAIDED PREMISES.”

I once asked my child’s seven-year-old friend, “Why do you think the Stonewall Inn keeps that sign visible?” She immediately answered, “So everyone can remember that we fought.” Amen. Amen.

I love that Montclair Pride spoke to so many people, that it was well attended, that queer folks and straight folks, trans and nonbinary folks and cisgender folks, all joined together in celebration and visibility. And, at the same time, I vow never to forget that pride is a riot. That pride is “Why don’t you do something about it?” That pride is advocacy and rebellion, revolution. That pride does not require me or anyone else to say “LGBTQ+ people deserve rights only to the extent that they can act, seem, be ‘normal.’”

Pride is a brick that shatters the illusion that we are all the same, turning the opaque glass we hid behind into a kaleidoscope of weird hairdos and strange outfits that some folks call “costumes” and loud slogans and “confusing” pronouns and new terms and bold loves. Pride is difference without hierarchy. Rights without conformity.

And so, we pray, on this Pride Shabbat, in acknowledgement and gratitude for the truth that, indeed, Love is Love. And pride is a riot.

Many thanks to Rev. Ciaran Osborn for the image of the brick.

Rabbi Nikki and her wife at Pride Montclair 2022