Pride and Pandemics
Can Hope, Pride, and Pandemics Mix?
The last time I joined Pride was June 2019, just as Stonewall turned 50 and 100,000+ people marched with me through the NYC streets while millions watched along the sidewalks and around the world.
It was a pinnacle moment for everything I held dear and one of the major reasons for my running for Congress; embracing and supporting the inclusion, equal rights and protections of a community that had done the same for me. It was also the same year my dear friends Drew and Peter launched their “Thoroughly Gay Thursdays” at the Broadway Comedy Club in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen.
At the time, I knew the City was at a critical turning point. Homelessness was up, the subways were decaying rapidly, along with the roads and morale of small businesses and everyday people trying to get to work on time. On the flip side, super-talls kept growing taller, and climate change was top of everyone’s mind given Grete Thunberg’s arrival at the UN. The inequity across New York City was staggering,
But no one was thinking about public health and safety during Pride. They were celebrating love and unity. Who knew one year later Pride would be put off the streets by a pandemic, my Thoroughly Gay Thursdays would disappear, and instead of people lining the streets that summer, we had refrigerated morgue trucks and field hospitals taking in the sick and dying. It had a horrifyingly similar feeling to when AIDS arrived in the 80s. But this epidemic was not hidden away in secret hospital wards, it truly did shut down the city and world as a whole.
These memories flooded back to me as I once again returned to my Thoroughly Gay Thursday festivities last Thursday, this time at the Greenwich Village Comedy Club. I was SO EXCITED and HOPEFUL to be back, to be vaccinated, to see and hug Drew and Peter and little Robert Ima. To celebrate Pride again. To join the misfit laughter and love that I fit so well into. But that excitement quickly turned into complete confusion and overwhelm as I saw what Greenwich Village had become. Garbage had piled up next to homeless people while unmasked revelers ate food in each other’s faces and packed into outdoor restaurants everywhere. Had no one heeded the first warning? Did they really believe the fake news that we were “post-pandemic”? The majority of the world still remains unvaccinated, including the USA. There are still strains and variants developing and spreading from India and much of the developing world where COVAX (Bill Gates’s mass vaccination effort) has failed miserably because India can’t produce the vaccine when much of their population is dying, and the vaccines we do have other than Pfizer and Moderna are too questionable to give to younger populations who might develop blood clots. I wanted to vomit, scream “SUPER-SPREADER”, and cry, all at the same time. But I didn’t. I kept my self-control, tried to enjoy the show and quickly retreated home to fast before the PET scan I had the next morning at Sloan Kettering and recover from my panic attack.
My friends, we are nowhere near “post-pandemic”. We can only try to learn from our past mistakes to hope to make wiser decisions and set smarter intentions for the future. But if New York is any indicator for the future of Pride around the world, I’m concerned we are setting a poor example and can only hope a wiser and more capable leader is elected to the mayoral seat in November and
Pride month 2021 brings only love and joy and HOPE back to New York.
Happy Pride!
Holly Lynch is a 20+ year communications veteran and life-long social impact advocate and strategist who has helped individuals, educational leaders, and companies tackle the toughest challenges in their worlds.
Having survived countless life setbacks and two rounds with terminal cancer, while seeing the country-wide collapse of the systems and safety nets for the most vulnerable in and outside our communities, she is now shifting her life and career trajectories to focus on coaching those facing down fundamental shifts and transitions as they try to navigate and rebuild their lives, institutions and businesses during these unprecedented times.