11 Inspiring Pride Poems for Pride Month!

Hard to believe another Pride Month is here! Unfortunately, this year’s celebration will be very different due to COVID-19. Nevertheless, we will still celebrate any way we can! Whether that’s reading about people’s coming-out stories or watching LGBTQ+ films, there’s lots of things to do to honor anyone who is a part of the LGBTQ+ community. To help start us off, here are eleven poems about pride that you should read!

1. “a poem for pulse” by jameson fitzpatrick

image via poetry foundation

Last night, I went to a gay bar

with a man I love a little.

After dinner, we had a drink.

We sat in the far-back of the big backyard

and he asked, What will we do when this place closes?

I don’t think it’s going anywhere any time soon, I said,

though the crowd was slow for a Saturday,

and he said—Yes, but one day. Where will we go?

He walked me the half-block home

and kissed me goodnight on my stoop—

properly: not too quick, close enough

our stomachs pressed together

in a second sort of kiss.

I live next to a bar that’s not a gay bar

—we just call those bars, I guess—

and because it is popular

and because I live on a busy street,

there are always people who aren’t queer people

on the sidewalk on weekend nights.

Just people, I guess.

They were there last night.

As I kissed this man I was aware of them watching

and of myself wondering whether or not they were just.

But I didn’t let myself feel scared, I kissed him

exactly as I wanted to, as I would have without an audience,

because I decided many years ago to refuse this fear—

an act of resistance. I left

the idea of hate out on the stoop and went inside,

to sleep, early and drunk and happy.

While I slept, a man went to a gay club

with two guns and killed forty-nine people.

Today in an interview, his father said he had been disturbed

recently by the sight of two men kissing.

What a strange power to be cursed with:

for the proof of men’s desire to move men to violence.

What’s a single kiss? I’ve had kisses

no one has ever known about, so many

kisses without consequence—

but there is a place you can’t outrun,

whoever you are.

There will be a time when.

It might be a bullet, suddenly.

The sound of it. Many.

One man, two guns, fifty dead—

Two men kissing. Last night

I can’t get away from, imagining it, them,

the people there to dance and laugh and drink,

who didn’t believe they’d die, who couldn’t have.

How else can you have a good time?

How else can you live?

There must have been two men kissing

for the first time last night, and for the last,

and two women, too, and two people who were neither.

Brown people, which cannot be a coincidence in this country

which is a racist country, which is gun country.

Today I’m thinking of the Bernie Boston photograph

Flower Power, of the Vietnam protestor placing carnations

in the rifles of the National Guard,

and wishing for a gesture as queer and simple.

The protester in the photo was gay, you know,

he went by Hibiscus and died of AIDS,

which I am also thinking about today because

(the government’s response to) AIDS was a hate crime.

Now we have a president who names us,

the big and imperfectly lettered us, and here we are

getting kissed on stoops, getting married some of us,

some of us getting killed.

We must love one another whether or not we die.

Love can’t block a bullet

but neither can it be shot down,

and love is, for the most part, what makes us—

in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul.

We will be everywhere, always;

there’s nowhere else for us, or you, to go.

Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you.

Around any corner, there might be two men. Kissing.

2. “Movement song” by Audre Lorde

image via ubuntu biography project

I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck

moving away from me

beyond anger or failure

your face in the evening schools of longing

through mornings of wish and ripen

we were always saying goodbye

in the blood in the bone over coffee

before dashing for elevators going

in opposite directions

without goodbyes.

Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof

as the maker of legends

nor as a trap

door to that world

where black and white clericals

hang on the edge of beauty in five oclock elevators

twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh

and now

there is someone to speak for them

moving away from me into tomorrows

morning of wish and ripen

your goodbye is a promise of lightning

in the last angels hand

unwelcome and warning

the sands have run out against us

we were rewarded by journeys

away from each other

into desire

into mornings alone

where excuse and endurance mingle

conceiving decision.

Do not remember me

as disaster

nor as the keeper of secrets

I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars

watching

you move slowly out of my bed

saying we cannot waste time

only ourselves.

3. “a litany to survive” by Audre Lorde

For those of us who live at the shoreline

standing upon the constant edges of decision

crucial and alone

for those of us who cannot indulge

the passing dreams of choice

who love in doorways coming and going

in the hours between dawns

looking inward and outward

at once before and after

seeking a now that can breed

futures

like bread in our children’s mouths

so their dreams will not reflect

the death of ours;

For those of us

who were imprinted with fear

like a faint line in the center of our foreheads

learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk

for by this weapon

this illusion of some safety to be found

the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

For all of us

this instant and this triumph

We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid

it might not remain

when the sun sets we are afraid

it might not rise in the morning

when our stomachs are full we are afraid

of indigestion

when our stomachs are empty we are afraid

we may never eat again

when we are loved we are afraid

love will vanish

when we are alone we are afraid

love will never return

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent

we are still afraid

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive.

4. “who said it was Simple” by Audre Lorde

image via stephanie craig on peony moon

The night we got bashed we told Rusty how

they drove up, yelled QUEER, threw a hot dog, sped off.

Rusty: Now, is that gaybashing? Or

are they just calling you queer? Good point.

Josey pitied the fools: who buys a perfectly good pack of wieners

and drives around San Francisco chucking them at gays?

And who speeds off? Missing the point, the pleasure of the bash?

Dear bashers, you should have seen the hot dog hit my neck,

the scarf Josey sewed from antique silk kimonos: so gay. You

missed laughing at us, us confused, your raw hot dog on the ground.

Josey and Rusty and Bob make fun of the gaybashers, and I

wash my scarf in the sink. I use Woolite. We worry

about insurance, interest rates. Not hot dogs thrown from F-150s,

homophobic freaks. After the bashing, we used the ATM

in the sex shop next to Annie’s Social Club, smiled at the kind

owner, his handlebar mustache. Astrud Gilberto sang tall and tan

and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema… and the dildos

gleamed from the walls, a hundred cheerful colors. In San Francisco

it rains hot dogs, pity-the-fool. Ass-sized penguins, cock after cock in

azure acrylic, butterscotch glass, anyone’s flesh-tone, chrome.

6. “poem about my rights” by June Jordan

Image via Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear

my head about this poem about why I can’t

go out without changing my clothes my shoes

my body posture my gender identity my age

my status as a woman alone in the evening/

alone on the streets/alone not being the point/

the point being that I can’t do what I want

to do with my own body because I am the wrong

sex the wrong age the wrong skin and

suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/

or far into the woods and I wanted to go

there by myself thinking about God/or thinking

about children or thinking about the world/all of it

disclosed by the stars and the silence:

I could not go and I could not think and I could not

stay there

alone

as I need to be

alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own

body and

who in the hell set things up

like this

and in France they say if the guy penetrates

but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me

and if after stabbing him if after screams if

after begging the bastard and if even after smashing

a hammer to his head if even after that if he

and his buddies fuck me after that

then I consented and there was

no rape because finally you understand finally

they fucked me over because I was wrong I was

wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong

to be who I am

which is exactly like South Africa

penetrating into Namibia penetrating into

Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if

Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the

proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland

and if

after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe

and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to

self-immolation of the villages and if after that

we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they

claim my consent:

Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of

the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what

in the hell is everybody being reasonable about

and according to the Times this week

back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem

and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they

killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba

and before that it was my father on the campus

of my Ivy League school and my father afraid

to walk into the cafeteria because he said he

was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong

gender identity and he was paying my tuition and

before that

it was my father saying I was wrong saying that

I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a

boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and

that I should have had straighter hair and that

I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should

just be one/a boy and before that

it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for

my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me

to let the books loose to let them loose in other

words

I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.

and the problems of South Africa and the problems

of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white

America in general and the problems of the teachers

and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social

workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very

familiar with the problems because the problems

turn out to be

me

I am the history of rape

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of

myself

I am the history of battery assault and limitless

armies against whatever I want to do with my mind

and my body and my soul and

whether it’s about walking out at night

or whether it’s about the love that I feel or

whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or

the sanctity of my national boundaries

or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity

of each and every desire

that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic

and indisputably single and singular heart

I have been raped

be-

cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age

the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the

wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic

the wrong sartorial I

I have been the meaning of rape

I have been the problem everyone seeks to

eliminate by forced

penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/

but let this be unmistakable this poem

is not consent I do not consent

to my mother to my father to the teachers to

the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy

to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon

idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in

cars

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name

My name is my own my own my own

and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this

but I can tell you that from now on my resistance

my simple and daily and nightly self-determination

may very well cost you your life

7. “history of sexual preference” by robin becker

image via poetry foundation

We are walking our very public attraction

through eighteenth-century Philadelphia.

I am simultaneously butch girlfriend

and suburban child on a school trip,

Independence Hall, 1775, home

to the Second Continental Congress.

Although she is wearing her leather jacket,

although we have made love for the first time

in a hotel room on Rittenhouse Square,

I am preparing my teenage escape from Philadelphia,

from Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest continuously occupied

residential street in the nation,

from Carpenters’ Hall, from Congress Hall,

from Graff House where the young Thomas

Jefferson lived, summer of 1776. In my starched shirt

and waistcoat, in my leggings and buckled shoes,

in postmodern drag, as a young eighteenth-century statesman,

I am seventeen and tired of fighting for freedom

and the rights of men. I am already dreaming of Boston—

city of women, demonstrations, and revolution

on a grand and personal scale.

                                                       Then the maître d’

is pulling out our chairs for brunch, we have the

surprised look of people who have been kissing

and now find themselves dressed and dining

in a Locust Street townhouse turned café,

who do not know one another very well, who continue

with optimism to pursue relationship. Eternity

may simply be our mortal default mechanism

set on hope despite all evidence. In this mood,

I roll up my shirtsleeves and she touches my elbow.

I refuse the seedy view from the hotel window.

I picture instead their silver inkstands,

the hoopskirt factory on Arch Street,

the Wireworks, their eighteenth-century herb gardens,

their nineteenth-century row houses restored

with period door knockers.

Step outside.

We have been deeded the largest landscaped space

within a city anywhere in the world. In Fairmount Park,

on horseback, among the ancient ginkgoes, oaks, persimmons,

and magnolias, we are seventeen and imperishable, cutting classes

May of our senior year. And I am happy as the young

Tom Jefferson, unbuttoning my collar, imagining his power,

considering my healthy body, how I might use it in the service

of the country of my pleasure.

image via literary hub

So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut? as if we’d been pierced by a glance!

The song of an old cow is not more full of judgement
than the vapors which escape one’s soul when one is sick;

so I pull down the shadows around me like a puff
and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment

of a very long opera, and then we are off!
without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet

will touch the earth again, let along “very soon”.
It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate.

I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear
to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can

in the rain. It’s wonderful to admire oneself
with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each

of the latrines. 14th Street is drunken and credulous,
53rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good

love a park and the inept a railway station,
and there are the divine ones who drag themselves up

and down the lengthening shadow of an Abyssinian head
in the dust, trailing their long elegant heels of hot air

crying to confuse the brave “It’s a summer day,
and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.”

9. “Gay pride weekend” by brenda shaughnessy

image via Janea Wiedmann on brenda shaunessy’s website

I forgot how lush and electrified

it was with you. The shaggy

fragrant zaps continually passing

back and forth, my fingertip

to your clavicle, or your wrist

rubbing mine to share gardenia

oil. We so purred like dragonflies

we kept the mosquitoes away

and the conversation was heavy,

mother-lacerated childhoods

and the sad way we’d both

been both ignored and touched

badly. Knowing that being

fierce and proud and out and

loud was just a bright new way

to be needy. Please listen to me, oh

what a buzz! you’re the only one

I can tell. Even with no secret,

I could come close to your ear

with my mouth and that was

ecstasy, too. We barely touched

each other, we didn’t have to

speak. The love we made leapt

to life like a cat in the space

between us (if there ever was

space between us), and looked

back at us through fog. Sure,

this was San Francisco, it was

often hard to see. But fog always

burned off, too, so we watched

this creature to see if it knew

what it was doing. It didn’t.

10. “the 17-Year-old & the gay bar” by Danez Smith

image via literary hub

this gin-heavy heaven, blessed ground to think gay & mean we.

bless the fake id & the bouncer who knew

this need to be needed, to belong, to know how

a man taste full on vodka & free of sin. i know not which god to pray to.

i look to christ, i look to every mouth on the dance floor, i order

a whiskey coke, name it the blood of my new savior. he is just.

he begs me to dance, to marvel men with the

                                                                                   dash

of hips i brought, he deems my mouth in some stranger’s mouth necessary.

bless that man’s mouth, the song we sway sloppy to, the beat, the bridge, the length

of his hand on my thigh & back & i know not which country i am of.

i want to live on his tongue, build a home of gospel & gayety

i want to raise a city behind his teeth for all boys of choirs & closets to refuge in.

i want my new god to look at the mecca i built him & call it damn good

or maybe i’m just tipsy & free for the first time, willing to worship anything i can taste.

11. “the mortician in San Francisco” by Randall Mann

image via the arkansas international

This may sound queer,

but in 1985 I held the delicate hands

of Dan White:

I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk

was made monument—no, myth—by the years

since he was shot.

I remember when Harvey was shot:

twenty, and I knew I was queer.

Those were the years,

Levi’s and leather jackets holding hands

on Castro Street, cheering for Harvey Milk—

elected on the same day as Dan White.

I often wonder about Supervisor White,

who fatally shot

Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk,

who was one of us, a Castro queer.

May 21, 1979: a jury hands

down the sentence, seven years—

in truth, five years—

for ex-cop, ex-fireman Dan White,

for the blood on his hands;

when he confessed that he had shot

the mayor and the queer,

a few men in blue cheered. And Harvey Milk?

Why cry over spilled milk,

some wondered, semi-privately, for years—

it meant “one less queer.”

The jurors turned to White.

If just the mayor had been shot,

Dan might have had trouble on his hands—

but the twelve who held his life in their hands

maybe didn’t mind the death of Harvey Milk;

maybe, the second murder offered him a shot

at serving only a few years.

In the end, he committed suicide, this Dan White.

And he was made presentable by a queer.

Featured Image via Thomas Hawk on flickr