When Pride Becomes Dangerous
From celebration to calculation: the new cost of being seen
The past few weeks felt like watching dominoes fall in real time.
Liverpool Pride cancelled due to financial and organizational challenges. World Pride attendance down as visitors feared harassment. Tel Aviv's parade scrapped due to geopolitical instability. Vienna's Rainbow Parade opening with a vigil for victims of violence. Two thirteen-year-olds hurling fireworks and slurs into a Pride crowd in California. A man arrested for threatening to execute a school official over Pride flags.
Multiple weeks. Two continents. One brutal message: queer visibility still comes with consequences.
As a therapist working with LGBTQ+ clients across the globe, I've spent many of my sessions listening to something I haven't heard in years—the calculus of fear returning to conversations about Pride. Not the garden-variety anxiety of being seen, but the bone-deep question of physical safety. The kind of strategic thinking we thought we'd moved beyond.
The most common thing clients say is, “I’m actually scared to go this year.” Another frequent remark: “When did showing up become this complicated again?”
When Safety Becomes a Moving Target
The map of safety is shifting faster than we can track it.
Cities that felt secure just months ago now require threat assessments. Corporate sponsors backing away quietly showing their true colors. Local organizers finding venues mysteriously unavailable. The infrastructure of visibility being eroded not through dramatic raids but through a thousand small acts of withdrawal.
One cancelled event in Liverpool sends tremors through Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle. When Vienna opens its parade with a vigil following a tragic shooting in Austria, LGBTQ+ communities across Europe start calculating their own risk levels. The interconnected nature of our community, usually our strength, becomes the mechanism through which fear travels.
This isn't paranoia. This is pattern recognition.
When teens weaponize fireworks against Pride celebrations in liberal California, when a man threatens execution over rainbow flags in suburban communities, when major metropolitan Pride events vanish from calendars citing "hostile climates"—these aren't isolated incidents. They're data points in a larger story about what happens when political rhetoric gives permission for violence.
The Weight of Strategic Visibility
For those of us who came of age when Pride felt safely celebratory, this return to threat calculation hits differently. We'd moved beyond the exhausting mathematics of visibility—where to hold hands, which pronouns to use, how much authenticity the room could handle. Many of us thought we'd graduated from those calculations permanently.
Now we're watching younger queer people adopt the same hypervigilance we fought to unlearn.
In my online practice, I've witnessed the particular strain this creates. The cognitive dissonance of living in supposedly progressive times while feeling increasingly unsafe in public spaces. The guilt that comes with privilege—being able to retreat into invisible safety while trans and gender-nonconforming community members cannot.
A colleague described it as "emotional whiplash." One month celebrating marriage equality milestones, the next month reading headlines about Pride events under siege. The psychological adjustment required to pivot from celebration mode back to survival mode doesn't happen quickly or cleanly.
Queer Strength Shouldn't Mean Silence
The most insidious pressure isn't external—it's the expectation from within our own communities to remain unshakeable. To treat every threat as motivation rather than trauma. To transform every setback into a rallying cry.
But what happens when we're too tired to rally?
When Liverpool Pride organizers cite spiraling costs and hostile climates as reasons for cancellation, the response isn't just disappointment—it's relief mixed with shame. Relief that someone finally named what many were feeling privately. Shame that we couldn't push through one more year of proving our right to exist.
This isn't weakness. This is the natural response to chronic stress. The nervous system doesn't distinguish between physical and political threats. When the environment becomes consistently hostile, our bodies respond accordingly. Sleep disruption, hypervigilance, emotional numbing—these aren't character flaws. They're predictable responses to unpredictable safety.
Yet within queer spaces, admitting this exhaustion often feels like betrayal. So we perform strength we don't feel, smile through interviews about our "unbreakable spirit," and privately wonder when showing up became this difficult again.
The Ripple Effects of Cancelled Visibility
What gets lost in headlines about cancelled events is the cascading impact on individual lives. Pride isn't just parade and party—for many, it's the one day they plan to come out to family, introduce their partner to friends, or simply exist without editing themselves.
When those opportunities disappear, the psychological consequences extend far beyond disappointment. The young person who planned to bring their parents to their first Pride now has no venue for that crucial conversation. The couple who saved money for months to attend World Pride finds themselves not just out of pocket but questioning whether their relationship deserves public celebration.
These aren't abstract losses. They're the theft of moments that can't be recreated. The specific courage required to attend Pride events doesn't transfer easily to other occasions. The community permission to be fully visible doesn't exist in many other contexts.
I think about people who planned their entire coming-out timeline around Pride events that no longer exist. The ripple effects will extend for months, sometimes years. When the infrastructure of visibility crumbles, it doesn't just affect those who were planning to participate—it affects everyone watching, everyone calculating whether their own authenticity is worth the risk.
Why This Matters Beyond Pride Month
The assault on Pride events signals something broader than seasonal homophobia. It represents a systematic erosion of the public spaces where queerness can exist without apology. When Pride becomes too dangerous or expensive to maintain, the message reverberates through every other context where LGBTQ+ people seek visibility.
Schools become more cautious about anti-bullying programs that mention sexual orientation. Businesses reconsider their diversity initiatives. Healthcare providers grow reluctant to advertise LGBTQ+-friendly services. The fear doesn't stay contained to Pride Month—it seeps into every corner of public life.
This is why the seemingly separate incidents of the past few weeks matter collectively. They're not random acts of hostility but coordinated pressure designed to push queerness back into private spaces. When visibility becomes dangerous, we retreat. When retreat becomes habit, we disappear.
The children and teenagers watching these events unfold are receiving a clear message: your existence is conditional, your safety is not guaranteed, your community is under siege. This isn't the legacy we want to leave them, but it's the reality we're currently creating.
Finding Courage in the Clarity
Perhaps the only gift in this moment of heightened threat is its clarity. The pretense that acceptance was irreversible has been stripped away. The comfortable assumption that progress moves only forward has been shattered. We know exactly where we stand.
This clarity, while painful, can redirect our energy toward what matters most. Not performing invincibility, but building genuine resilience. Not pretending threats don't exist, but developing strategies to exist alongside them. Not shame about our fear, but recognition that fear contains important information about how to move forward safely.
The courage to show up when showing up carries risk isn't the absence of fear—it's the decision to act despite fear's presence. The Vienna organizers who opened their parade with a vigil but proceeded anyway understood this. The World Pride attendees who came despite safety concerns understood this. The queer people who will attend local Pride events this or next weekend despite the headlines understand this.
Visibility has always required courage. We're simply being reminded that courage isn't a one-time decision but a daily choice. That the work of creating safe spaces for authentic existence isn't finished but ongoing. That resilience isn't about being unbreakable but about continuing to heal from the inevitable breaks.
To Those Deciding Whether to Show Up
To the LGBTQ+ person reading this while weighing whether to attend Pride events in the coming weeks: your fear makes sense. Your caution is wisdom. Your decision—whatever it is—deserves respect.
If you choose to show up, you're not just attending a party. You're participating in an act of collective courage, making space for those who can't yet make space for themselves. If you choose to stay home, you're not giving up. You're prioritizing your safety and wellbeing, which is also an act of courage.
What’s happened in May and June, from Liverpool to Tel Aviv to suburban California, isn't just about Pride events. It's about the larger question of whether queer people deserve public space, public celebration, public existence without fear.
The answer to that question doesn't come from headlines or political rhetoric. It comes from our daily choices. From the moments we decide to be visible despite the risk. From the communities we build to support those who can't risk visibility yet. From the refusal to let fear make our decisions for us.
The pride flag becomes a target because it represents something powerful: the audacious claim that love and authenticity deserve celebration. That claim hasn't become less true because it's become more dangerous. If anything, the danger proves its necessity.
You don't owe anyone public courage—but you do owe yourself the truth of how far you've come just to be here.
This Pride Month, that flag—whether we carry it publicly or hold it privately—remains an act of resistance. Not against fear, but through it. Not despite the danger, but in full acknowledgment of it.
Where you plant your flag is your choice. That you have one to plant at all remains the victory no one can take away.
Note: The events described here unfolded over several weeks in late May and early June 2025. While compressed into a single narrative for emotional clarity, each incident is factually documented. Sometimes the truth of how violence accumulates matters more than the precise timeline—and the psychological impact on our community was immediate and real.
👉 Want more reflections like this—on queer mental health, identity, and healing?
Subscribe for weekly insights from a gay therapist, written for LGBTQ+ minds navigating a world that doesn’t always feel safe.
Disclaimer:
This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition. For info here.