June 21, 2014

School’s out, longer days, warm summer nights. What’s not to love about June? As a kid, I knew I could balance out the onslaught of pine pollen allergies with hours of playing Sharks & Minnows at the pool. (Now I leverage endless coffee against the Benadryl.) As an adult, June was all about commencement, a few weeks of sleeping in, and celebrating Pride with my LGBT friends. The lack of social media let us think it was all wine and roses.

Then came the Tweets and Trump. It seemed like all at once all the hate that been hiding under a rock came roaring into the daylight. On a June evening in 2016, that hate took 49 lives at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. I was in Washington DC when it happened and watched as President Obama lowered the flags on federal buildings to half-mast. And the Trump trolls wasted no seconds in complaining about the need to grieve the death of “homosexuals.” I heard them with my own ears. “They were pedophiles, not veterans,” I heard one man in a MAGA hat say, in front of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

Over the next four years, after Trump’s election, it only got worse. Hate crimes spiked as bigots were given license to take off their hoods and go mainstream. The deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was a foreshadowing of things to come. The racist and homophobic bile that used to be the stock and trade of the “deep web” flooded your mom’s social media feed. Who needs to wade though 4chan anymore when you can freely and openly spew hate on Facebook? There’s no need to be anonymous anymore. If you’ve had it with gay pride and black lives mattering, the floor is yours.

On June 17, 2021 President Biden signed the Juneteenth holiday into law and, again, the Trumpies were triggered. The day the marks when the last group of Texas slaves were informed that slavery was abolished has been an informal black holiday for years and I had attended many a Juneteenth celebration. Thanks to the hard work of teacher and activist Opal Lee, it was now a federal holiday. When Lee was twelve, a mob of 500 white supremacists burned down her family home in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2021, Lee stood next to President Biden at the signing as white supremacists burned down her holiday on line.

Social media has been the place where bigots come out of the closet. Soon as posts celebrating Pride Month appeared the comments section became a soup of homophobia, decrying the holiday as “woke,” “sinful,” “sick,” and a celebration of child abuse. One woman posted, “Why is there a month celebrating putting a penis into an ass?” Trumpies posted that “their” pride flag was the American flag. I tried to respond to each and every one with a meme that read, “Pride is important because someone tonight still believes they’re better off dead than being gay.” The response was met with laughing face emojis and I just realized my efforts were pointless.

The Juneteen celebration posts brought out white supremacists by the score. A meme circulated that Juneteeth was for black people since they couldn’t celebrate Father’s Day. Posts that equated Juneteeth with black crime and the destruction of “America” came fast furious. I tried to engage with one commenter who told me that black people need to be more grateful to white people for freeing them. How do you unpack that in a Facebook comment? The fact that so many people think celebrating the idea that the day the America got better is a bad thing shows what the “again” is in their “Make America Great Again” battlecry. Juneteenth is Freedom Day, but, for them, freedom is not for others. It’s their freedom to unlimited guns and their freedom to shove the 10 Commandments in our faces.

Each of these anti-Pride and anti-Juneteenth posts illustrates EXACTLY WHY we need Pride and Juneteenth celebrations. Social media has magnified the forces of marginalization. Every day, queer and black people are reminded of hatred towards them. Celebrating allows the cumulative trauma to heal just a little bit. (And can we get an intersectional day in June when queer black folk get a little extra love?)

Maybe it’s because I’m a sociology professor and my job is to help people unlearn ideologies of oppression that I’ve come to see June as a gut punch. This massive, very public, Klan rally seems to be growing. We lack serious national leadership on this issue. Trump and his troll army seem like they have momentum and Biden and Democrats fear looking too “woke” to come out swinging against this fascist fad.

Maybe I should stay off social media and find my people out in the streets. But, lordy, it’s hot our there. And about to get hotter.