June is Pride Month, and straight people who consider themselves allies to our queer neighbors need to understand the implications for us in this iteration of America.

Yes, allyship is about rainbow flags, social media posts, and parade events, but it’s about a hell of a lot more than that.

To be a true LGBTQ ally right now means visibly and forcefully pushing back against the quickly metastasizing hatred throughout this country; the toxic flood of intellectual ignorance, archaic dogma, phobic fear, and inherited stupidity all being curated by the MAGA Republican Party.

The ACLU is currently tracking 530 anti-LGBTQ bills across the United States.

They range from healthcare barriers to school sports bans to curriculum censorship to forced outings in schools to so-called religious exemptions to drag bans to attacks on expression and visibility for the queer community.

These proposed draconian laws amount to a government-sanctioned, legislative legitimizing of discrimination, designed to silence, erase, and punish human beings for their gender identity and sexual orientation. They represent a rejection of science, a discarding of common sense, and the complete, perverse consummation of the sickening marriage between Church and State.

As with other historically marginalized and oppressed populations in this country (people of color, immigrants, women, Muslims), LGBTQ human beings are seeing their hard-fought legal protections vanishing in recent months. Long-decided laws protecting them are being furiously challenged. Malicious theology targeting them is taking hold in churches. They are being painted as immoral existential threats and bathroom-lurking monsters for gullible, easily-manipulated, hate-addled Americans who have abandoned the Golden Rule, discarded the Constitution, and rejected the call to love their neighbors.

At the highest levels of leadership in our government, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, non-conforming human beings are being slandered and dehumanized, fomenting the mindless rage of their cultic base.

And it is into this swirling storm of prejudice, disinformation, and rising violence that we who imagine ourselves friends and advocates of queer people are being called to step this Pride month. We are being invited to do far more than simply throw on a t-shirt, attend a drag show, or share a think piece on social media, as nice as those things are.

In these perilous days for LGBTQ human beings, to be a straight ally is to risk profound turbulence within our circles of influence. It’s intentionally stepping into the path of verbal and physical violence. It’s loudly outing oneself as a human being who will not permit hatred in their midst. It’s being willing to make bigots uncomfortable.

If we end this month without finding ourselves in a difficult conversation with an uninformed family member, without experiencing a coldness from our transphobic neighbors, without bringing tension to our churches, without facing the insults and threats queer people sustain just for waking up and living, we will have failed as allies.

The fight against LGBTQ discrimination is not the fight of the LGBTQ community alone. They should not have to continually make the case for their humanity, or incessantly fight to be treated with dignity and decency, or to brave the taunts and brutality of the deceived and dumb around them. We should be fighting alongside them.

Straight allies need to be a fierce, steadfast, unflinching obstacle to those who still somehow believe that anyone else’s gender, orientation, body, or marriage are any of their damn business.

In our churches and schools and workplaces and town halls and neighborhoods, we need to show up for our queer friends by placing ourselves between them and the emboldened bullies who think that they will face no resistance.

It’s time that would-be LGBTQ allies in the United States stood up for the people we claim to love by making their hateful assailants know what it’s like to be outnumbered, to be reminded that they are not going to drag this nation back to the Stone Age on our watch.

Pride has always been a protest as much as a celebration.

And for those of us who truly aspire to stand with the queer community, it must be a clear declaration of war against the emboldened bigots who believe they can erase queer human beings from this nation, a war they will not win.

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