Category: Diversity / Inclusivity

Happy PRIDE On Friday

in Hawai’i!

Hawai’i Governor Signs Powerful Trans Shield Law Bill Just In Time For Pride

“Parents and caregivers who affirm, support, and seek medically appropriate care for their keiki [child] are exercising their fundamental right.”

s. baum

After a three-year push, Hawai’i officially has implemented a shield law to explicitly protect providers and patients of gender-affirming care for the trans community.

House Bill 1875, also known as Act 059, was signed by Governor Josh Green—himself a physician—late last week. The bill explicitly adds gender-affirming care to its existing shield law, which broadly covered reproductive health, and established safeguards from “abusive litigation” coming from outside states.

Shield laws create “legal protections for patients, health care providers, and people assisting in the provision of certain health care in states where that care is legal from the reach of states with civil, criminal, and professional consequences related to that care,” according to the Center for Reproductive Health, Law and Policy at UCLA. For example, it means Hawai’i state actors may not aid out-of-state attacks—such as, say, through the extradition of health care providers—over lawful care rendered in Hawai’i.

“The legislature finds that the people of Hawai’i have a long tradition of protecting an individual’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy independently of, and more broadly than, the United States Constitution,” the bill reads. It emphasized that the right to privacy and bodily autonomy extends to minors.

“It is the policy of this State that the rights of equality, liberty, and privacy guaranteed under […] the Hawaii State Constitution are fundamental rights and that those rights include an individual’s right to make health care decisions about one’s own body, including the right to seek and receive health care services that affirm their expressed gender.”

The signing was a resounding victory for LGBTQ activists on the islands. Hawai’i was among the last of the blue states to enact a shield law for the transgender community and their providers.

“We’ve heard from legislators that this is considered a controversial topic and that they’d rather not engage in bills that could draw attention to Hawai’i from the Trump Administration,” Abby Simmons, Chair of the Stonewall Caucus of the Democratic Party of Hawai‘i, told Erin in the Morning last year.

Now, she’s singing a more triumphant tune. “This bill truly was a team effort,” she said in an interview this week. “Lawmakers wanted to understand the legal implications, hear from stakeholders, and make sure they were crafting legislation that would withstand challenges. While that process can sometimes feel slow, it also means that when legislation succeeds, it often has a stronger foundation.”

Simmons also said the playbook for getting the bill over the finish line was rooted in building a big tent. “I think what finally made HB1875 successful was that supporters increasingly focused on a message that resonated far beyond the LGBTQ+ community,” she continued.

“The conversation wasn’t simply about gender-affirming care. It was about protecting patients, families, and healthcare providers who are following Hawaiʻi law. It was about preventing out-of-state actors from interfering with healthcare decisions made here in Hawaiʻi. It was about provider stability at a time when Hawaiʻi already faces healthcare workforce shortages. And it was about preserving Hawaiʻi’s ability to govern itself.”

The bill arrived on the Governor’s desk amid rising federal threats from the Department of Justice against hospitals, including the use of judge and forum shopping to prosecute gender-affirming care providers in conservative jurisdictions based outside of their state. Last month, the Northern District of Texas—an infamously conservative federal court—ordered Rhode Island Hospital, which is almost 2,000 miles away, to hand over patient records from its transgender youth care program. That legal battle is ongoing.

“Gender-affirming care is lawful in Hawaiʻi, grounded in established medical standards, and essential to the well-being of transgender, nonbinary, māhū, and gender-diverse people,” Hawai’i’s LGBTQ political action committee, HOKU, wrote in submitted testimony from when the bill was being considered by the legislature.

“Failure to protect access to gender-affirming care is not only an attack on patients and providers; it is a violation of parental rights,” reads another submission from Pride at Work Hawai’i. “Parents and caregivers who affirm, support, and seek medically appropriate care for their keiki [child] are exercising their fundamental right.”

Donavan Kamakani Albano, Policy Fellow at the ACLU of Hawaiʻi, further spoke to the importance of gender diversity in Hawaiian tradition. Some right-wing officials may push the myth that transness is somehow novel or a “trend.” But Hawai’i has especially rich ties to its pre-colonial culture—including non-binary concepts of gender.

“In Kanaka Maoli culture, māhū describes someone who embodies kāne and wahine [the masculine and feminine] energies,” Albano’s testimony said. “While the visibility of māhū individuals has recently increased, ongoing barriers to gender-affirming care remain.”

This united LGBTQ advocacy with other causes. “Those principles brought together a broad coalition of supporters and helped lawmakers see the bill as a matter of healthcare access, privacy, and state sovereignty,” Simmons said.

Rest In PRIDE (Redux)

In Honor and Memory

Erin In The Morning

Pride, Birds, And The Beauty Of Survival

Everything beautiful survived something to get here.

Erin Reed

Birds (Sources: Birdsandblooms, Blair Benson, Bill Duncan, Blair Benson, JM Arment, Hummingbird centarl)

It’s June 1, which means Pride Month begins again today. It’s my seventh Pride. I remember my first one, seven years ago—terrified and excited, going out dressed in the clothes I felt best in, using the name I wanted to use for the first time in public. I had people with me that day, people I found safety with, people who helped me grow into the person I am now. Seven years later, so sure of myself and so comfortable in my skin, I look back on those moments as some of the best of my life. And now, this year, as I have every year, I watch the new flock—countless in number—who are wearing rainbow colors and joining a family that will show them more love than they have ever known. They are arriving even after a political winter that was, by any measure, cold and brutal to all of us. It is watching them that has me thinking about the beauty of what we witness starting today.

This year, I took up birding. I always thought it was a silly hobby, but my wife Zooey encouraged me to point my camera at a new subject. I first did so on the Pattee Canyon trail up in Missoula—and caught, soaring in place, a single red-tailed hawk, just hovering, watching the ground below. I stared at it for a while in awe. That was all it took. And the timing was perfect, because in the weeks that followed I stumbled into the best time to be a birder: spring migration. Wave after wave of orioles, tanagers, flycatchers, and warblers of every different color and size came pouring through. I didn’t even know there were so many birds. It made me realize that for most of my life I had been walking through the world completely unaware of the beauty around me—that there was this entire world that had always been there, just waiting for me to lay eyes on it.

What I also didn’t know was the incredible journeys so many of these birds had taken just to be here—how far they had traveled to find the flocks they’d spend the season with, to build nests, to raise families, to simply exist in a place that could sustain them. The Prothonotary Warbler I spotted in the marsh? It spent the winter in the mangrove swamps of Central America, then crossed the entire Gulf of Mexico in a single flight—more than 600 miles of open water, eighteen hours in the air with nowhere to land. It had to travel that far just to find its family. And the most stunning thing about a bird like that—one that has gone through so much, that has flapped its wings until it has exhausted itself and left everything behind? It arrived here in the most brilliant gold you’ve ever seen, and began to sing. The Prothonotary Warbler isn’t nearly the only species that does this. Ruby throated hummingbirds, blackpoll warblers, bobolinks… all take incredible journeys.

I was unaware of all of this before I took up birding. It makes me wonder how much else I walk right past without seeing. I remember before I came out, I didn’t know how rich this chosen family was, how many different people were also queer like me. I had no idea that once I came out, I’d find so many of them had been here all along. They were just waiting for me, and all I had to do was stop and look and embrace something new. And I did, and an entire world opened up. I love moments like this, where life teaches you something about itself, and you realize that diversity and surprise might just be the best things it has to offer.

Today, as Pride begins, I am reminded that every single person who has made it here, put on their colors, and found their family has survived something difficult. Every one of them has just lasted through a winter where our rights were systematically stripped away. Politicians who hate us have spent the year dismantling everything we built—healthcare ripped from hospitals, identities stripped from documents. Corporations that once draped themselves in rainbows every June are nowhere to be found. Some of us have quite literally migrated to entirely new states looking for safety. And our gulf crossing this year was met with heavy headwinds.

And yet, so many of us still made it. This year, you will see your city streets filled with rainbows. This year, countless new people will celebrate their first Prides. People will put on the clothes that fit them best. People will love in ways they didn’t know how to before. People will dance and sing, and others will have no choice but to acknowledge our existence, because when we arrive, we do not do so quietly. Every single person you see in the streets this month is a testament to our resilience, and a reminder to the fact that this is a journey we have been making since the beginning of human existence. We call it something different now. We carve out a specific month for it. But we have always been here, and we have always had to search for ways to express ourselves, be ourselves, and find our kin.

Maybe birding is a silly hobby. Maybe dragging myself out of bed before dawn—and I am not a morning person, I might add—is more trouble than it’s worth. Birders look ridiculous. We stuff our pants into our socks so the ticks don’t climb up our legs. We carry binoculars and absurdly large cameras into places where everyone else is just taking a walk. But I think there is something more to it than that, something that opened my eyes to the way the world moves around me—something I wasn’t expecting to find when I first pointed a camera at a hawk and couldn’t look away. I think I understand something about this month that I didn’t understand before because of it. Pride isn’t just a celebration, it’s a testament to survival and a refusal to be quiet even after the journey. It’s putting on your most brilliant colors after the longest winter of your life. And I’m so glad we made it one more year.

Happy Pride.

Real But Not Real-

Friend of Playtime Barry, from Another Spectrum, intro’d me to this blog I’m reblogging today. Thanks to both!

How can something seem true, look true, feel true — but still not be quite true?

Somebody Did It-No One Has To Walk Alone ! 🏳‍🌈

An Archive of Queer Catholic Histories Didn’t Exist. So I Made One

By Emma Cieslik

When I was coming out of the closet, I was looking for someone—anyone—to share about their experience of coming out as a queer woman raised Catholic.

Any stories I found about reconciling queerness and Catholicism came from the perspective of gay white men. I could not find any accounts of Catholic women, nor could I find stories about deconstructing purity culture as a queer Catholic. But I knew—or rather, had faith—that I couldn’t be alone. So in 2021, I reached out to Bernie Schlager, executive director of the Center for LGBTQ & Gender Studies in Religion at the Pacific School of Religion, and asked if there were any archives, projects, or books that shared my own experience. 

Schlager confirmed my suspicions: No such archives existed. But he invited me to begin the work of making an archive. I jumped at the suggestion. After all, I felt a need to find and hear other people’s stories, and I also had the skill set to conduct these interviews, having worked on oral history projects in the past. Maybe it was my calling to create an archive of queer and trans people grappling with their identity and how it related to Catholicism. 

In 2022, I founded the Queer and Catholic Oral History Project. The purpose of this project is to record stories of queer and trans people who have some connection to Catholicism—whether they were born into it, converted to it, left it, or returned to it. So far, I’ve recorded over 100 interviews with LGBTQ+ clergy and laypeople who are proud to let the Catholic Church know that they exist, even if the church continues to bar them from being full members of the faith.

And as I’ve discovered, I am not alone in searching for queer Catholic stories as a way to find and affirm my place within this tradition. 

As Justin Telthorst, a gay Catholic man who runs the LGBTQ+ Catholic ministry Empty Chairs, shared with me after his interview, many people reached out to him seeking stories of LGBTQ+ Catholics, but he didn’t know where to direct them until he learned about my project. 

They’re not alone. Philip Calabro, a gender-fluid Catholic drag queen and employee of PFLAG, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, explained his own search for representation in his interview: “One thing I find myself doing pretty consistently is looking for other queer Catholics who are existing as queer Catholics because I want to know how they do it,” Calabro said. “Because I know it is possible. I can feel it.”

Like me, Calabro had faith that we were not the only ones navigating these identities. And what I will say after working on this project for five years is that learning how other people hold these two identities together only strengthens my belief in the importance of recording our histories and the transformative power of an all-inclusive gospel. 

Often, anti-LGBTQ+ Christians claim that queer and trans people did not exist before the 20th century, or that modern LGBTQ+ inclusion or theology is shallow because it is rooted in cultural trends rather than the deep wells of the Christian tradition. But it’s less a matter of us not existing, or of there being no evidence that we have always been part of religious communities, than of certain terms only coming into use as society’s understanding of gender and sexuality expanded.

Sister Eva Lynn Goode, a nonbinary and Catholic Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, shared the following with me in their interview: “I come from a long line of queer people in church history, and I am blessed to continue that tradition.” They are not wrong. As I dig into contemporary queer Catholic histories, I’ve learned that there are many saints throughout church history whom people today consider queer and trans. These saints are recognized by the institutional church, but their queerness is not. Although they would not have known or claimed these terms, modern queer historians identify these saints as queer and trans ancestors who lit the way for LGBTQ+ people living today. 

Perhaps the best example is queer Catholic author, teacher, and medievalist A.W. Strouse, who believes that their queerness cannot be separated from their spirituality. In fact, as they shared in their interview, being queer is a spiritual vocation.

“I don’t really see them as being distinct,” Strouse explained. “I think that being queer just saturates everything, and being a believer also saturates everything. And I know many people would find this sacrilegious, but I think that being gay for me is a spiritual vocation. I think that it’s my mission to love other queer people. And I mean, talk about loving your neighbor. If there’s anyone more destitute and in need, it is other queer people.”

LGBTQ+ Catholic lay minister and lawyer Yunuen Trujillo agreed that her visibility is an urgent testament to and a call to return to the gospel teachings of love and inclusion in her interview. “I think God made me an LGBTQ person for a reason, and I think that reason was to call the church back to its roots and to be able to show the church that we’re not supposed to be a church of power and dominance and exclusion, but we’re supposed to be a church of love and care,” she explained. “I think they fit perfectly, even though the church might not agree.”

For some people, their faith is only deepened by their identities. As they came to understand themselves more fully, they grew spiritually. In finding queer and trans spiritual ancestries, they realize and affirm the divinity and dignity in themselves—and connect more deeply with Catholicism. 

In her interview, Madeline Marlett, a trans Catholic woman and board member of the LGBTQ+ Catholic organization DignityUSA, explained that she returned to the faith after stepping away from the church for a period of time. “It wasn’t until part of the way through transitioning that I felt like I wanted to reconnect with my faith,” she explained, “so that kind of brought me back into Catholic spaces, helped me find dignity.”

It’s one of the reasons many queer and trans Catholics I speak to are often very literate in church dogma and the catechism. After fighting against bigoted members of the church to live how they want and love whomever they want, they have a fuller understanding of gospel teachings and Catholic theologies of the body. 

For transmasculine Catholic artist Elliott Barnhill, who creates icons of queer saints online, learning about the fields of queer theology and queer biblical studies was critical. “It’s really important for me in my coming out experience, my own acceptance of Catholicness in myself,” he said in his interview. “I have a very strong interest in the way that this fits together, that queer lives and deaths can be found in Catholic history and the way that echoes back to the present day. I believe that this history is a form of good news, and is a form of Gospel.”

It’s important to note that not all of the people I interviewed are still Catholic or align themselves with the Roman Catholic Church. The project is a testament to the diverse experiences of many queer and trans people raised in Catholic homes, communities, and cultures. 

Documenting our queer religious histories and educating the Catholic church about its queer members is, on the one hand, a way to resist the homophobia in our tradition and, on the other hand, a way to honor the LGBTQ+ ancestors and contemporaries who have and are charting pathways forward inside and outside of the church. Their testimony brings attention to the harm that the church has caused, but it also brings attention to the fact that there are people committed to the church even if it rarely loves them back. For those who choose to stay, they live the gospel truth just by showing up as themselves. 

Ultimately, my hope is that the Queer and Catholic Oral History Project will offer future queer Catholics what I didn’t have when I was coming out: an archive of stories to remind queer Catholics that we can change things and that we have always and will always exist.

Emma Cieslik

2 For Science On Tuesday

New solar desalination breakthrough makes fresh water without toxic brine

This sunlight-powered desalination breakthrough turns seawater into fresh water while harvesting valuable minerals.

Date: May 31, 2026

Source:University of Rochester

Summary: Scientists have developed a solar desalination system that turns seawater into drinking water without creating environmentally damaging brine. Special laser-textured metal panels use sunlight to evaporate water while automatically moving salt deposits away from the working surface, preventing clogging. The process was successfully tested with water from three oceans and can recover nearly all salts as solids. Those leftover materials could even become a source of valuable lithium for batteries.


‘This is a tragedy’: swimming snakes open new front in battle with Balearic lizards

Sam Jones in Madrid

Irrefutable proof of what Spanish researchers and wildlife experts had long suspected, and long feared, finally presented itself in the form of a grainy video that was shot on a minuscule island in the Balearics in April 2024.

Ribboning its way through the turquoise waters that separate the east coast of Ibiza from the islet of Santa Eulària 450 metres away, came a pale and solitary horseshoe whip snake in search of new territory and fresh sustenance.

The arrival of the snake on Santa Eulària, recorded by a local wildlife ranger, confirmed that the insatiable invader from the Spanish mainland – which has almost wiped out Ibiza’s endemic population of dazzlingly coloured wall lizards – had opened up a new front.

“There’d been increasing anecdotal evidence from fishermen and tourists who’d seen the snakes swimming, so we’d thought it was happening very often,” said Oriol Lapiedra, a biologist at the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (Creaf) in Catalonia. “But this was the first proper [evidence] we’d had of a snake swimming from Ibiza to the islet.”

The horseshoe whip snake, a non-venomous reptile found across southern and eastern Spain, has become an existential threat to the lizards since it began appearing on the island two decades ago.

Its rapid colonisation has been attributed to the fashion among wealthy property owners in Ibiza for importing ancient olive trees from mainland Spain to adorn the grounds of their homes. Unbeknown to them, however, the trees – replete with their nooks and hollows – have provided ideal travel berths for hibernating snakes and snake eggs. (snip-MORE)

2 Video Shorts From Jessica, + A Short From Ronny Chieng

Clay Jones, Open Windows, & A PRIDE Greeting from We Rate Dogs

Trump is bored with his war

Thousands killed and billions of taxpayer dollars for Trump’s Iran quagmire

Ann Telnaes

Trump also says he “couldn’t care less” if negotiations break down with Iran.

Murder, She Wrote

Scott Pelley said that Bari Weiss is murdering 60 Minutes

Clay Jones

Getting rid of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to appease Donald Trump isn’t the only poke in the eye of CBS by Paramount Skydance.

Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, appointed by Paramount Skydance CEO and Trump ally David Ellison, has been accused by Scott Pelley of murdering 60 Minutes.

Ellison really wants to be on good terms with regulators in the Trump administration. He was at the inauguration, has attended UFC fights with Trump, and even hosted an invite-only Washington DC party for him.

Tech journalist and filmmaker Nick Bilton is the new executive producer of 60 Minutes, who was appointed last week after the firing of former producer Tanya Simon and her deputy, along with correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. Bilton held a morning meeting in Midtown Manhattan, which was a formal introduction to the staff of 60 Minutes, where he was told by Pelley that he had “slender” qualifications for the job and that Beri Weiss was “murdering” 60 Minutes.

A recording of the meeting was obtained by The New York Times. (snip-MORE)


WeRateDogs 1 day ago

This is Bodie. His presence indicates the beginning of Pride Month. May his whimsy and steadfastness bring joy and confidence to all. 14/10 the parade starts right behind him 🌈🐾

The Rainbow Flag & Gilbert Baker Day

(Gilbert Baker Day was yesterday, but PRIDE month is all month. I’m not sure I recall ever learning Gilbert Baker’s name before this morning. Also, I’m really gonna miss Gov. Kelly after her term ends, even if we manage to elect another Dem.)

As Pride Month dawns, Kansas governor helps celebrate rainbow flag creator Gilbert Baker

Clay Wirestone

Kansas residents and activists gathered with Gov. Laura Kelly last week for her signing of a proclamation honoring rainbow flag creator Gilbert Baker. (Photo from Kansas governor’s office)

Happy Gilbert Baker Day!

Thanks to a proclamation from Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed Friday, we can celebrate the life and work of Parsons native Baker this June 2. He created a piece of American iconography that has spread across the globe and into the hearts of those who care for their gay neighbors: the rainbow pride flag.

Kelly Wall, a board member of PFLAG Lawrence, requested the day after reading about Baker in an authoritative piece by founding Kansas Reflector opinion editor C.J. Janovy. (You can also read Janovy’s work in the new anthology “Kansas Matters: Twenty-First-Century Writers on the Sunflower State.”)

Lauren Shepard of Parsons was on hand at the Statehouse to watch Kelly sign. She had just graduated from Pittsburg State University with a master’s degree. According to her, efforts to honor Baker locally ran into static.

“Ultimately, the town, the city commission ended up tabling the idea, so we pivoted and got together and started a Gilbert Baker Memorial Scholarship through the Parsons High School, where he graduated,” she told me. “So now every year we select a student that’s active in their OAQ, which is like a gay-straight alliance, it’s a student organization there at the high school.”

Wall was out of the state Friday, but a group assembled by her showed up to honor Baker. It included Shepard, several Lawrence activists and state Sen. Marci Francisco. I tagged along and noted that multiple groups had gathered on the second floor of the Statehouse for their own proclamation time with Kelly. One was promoting an “Asteroid Day.”

Inside the governor’s ceremonial office, group members realized that no one had actually brought a rainbow flag — the symbol for Pride Month and LGBTQ+ rights more generally.

No worries, Kelly told them.

She retreated into her actual office and returned bearing a rainbow flag coaster and a copy of Janovy’s book, “No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas,” which features rainbow stripes on the cover.

Crisis averted, the group took pictures with Kelly, the proclamation and the props. That was that.

No one on hand missed the broader implications. Baker had turned his back on his Kansas background, living in San Francisco and New York City. He had finally agreed to return to Parsons, Janovy writes, for a key to the city and film festival in 2017. A month before the events, Baker died at the too-young age of 65.

“It allows us to recognize one of our own who created an emblem that allows us to recognize all of LGBTQ across the country and across the world,” said Rachel Reed of Lawrence. “And it’s very, very important.”

Janis Guyot serves as president of Lawrence PFLAG and stood in for Wall at the signing. Afterward, she held the proclamation certificate as others in the group swirled around to take a look.

“I’m really happy that there’s something to celebrate for the LGBTQ world right now,” Guyot told me. “It’s tough time for all of them.”

Since Baker’s untimely death, we’ve seen a public push and pull over gay rights. Transgender folks — members of the movement from the beginning, whether they were identified as such or not — have been systematically excluded and discriminated against. The Kansas Legislature has repeatedly passed hateful laws.

Who knows what Baker might say about this recent turmoil. Given that he went by the drag name “Busty Ross,” I imagine he would bring an irreverent sense of humor along with his passion for making the world a better place.

Hopefully, he would say progress hasn’t stopped, and it won’t stop, regardless of small minds and even smaller hearts.

In an oral history from 2008, Baker suggested as much: “I do know that time is on our side and that the young people generation, and more importantly my generation, we have fought hard, and we have — we’ve worked on our parents, we have our own children, and we’re moving society forward. So I think we’re going to be all right. I mean, it may take a little more fight and a little more work than people want, but we’ll get there.”

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

50 Years Ago In Pride History

50 Years Ago, Dykes on Bikes Rode to the Front of Pride. Their Engines Are Still Hot

We ride along with the legendary, leather-clad lesbians — and take a trip through their history.

By Ana Osorno

The first sound you hear at San Francisco’s annual Pride Parade is the revving of hundreds of motorcycles. Atop them the most glorious dykes you’ve ever seen, bedecked in leather. They slowly coast down Market Street, as joyful as they are queer, waving to thousands of spectators as they kick off the procession. But that wasn’t always the case.

In 1970, San Francisco’s first-ever Pride celebration took place on Polk Street, with a small group of LGBTQ+ people organizing to mark the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City. What began as a small word-of-mouth event grew rapidly, turning into the Christopher Street West celebration by 1972 — which drew some 2,000 participants and 15,000 spectators — and then the Gay Freedom Day Parade.

But in 1976, something magical happened that would forever change the trajectory of queer history. During the Gay Freedom Day Parade, a group of brave, motorcycle-riding lesbians made a seemingly inconsequential and impromptu decision to move their bikes to the front and claim their space.

“There were some women on motorcycles and they were in the middle of the parade, behind a bunch of men, and they wanted to be at the front,” current Dykes on Bikes president Kate Brown, who uses she/they pronouns, tells me. “It was that movement of just being up and in front and loud and proud. And it was a moment of courage and lesbian dignity and owning that. Somebody coined the name Dykes on Bikes and our paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, picked it up and ran with it. And we have been known as Dykes on Bikes ever since.”

Their faces reflected in the motorcycle mirror under a Pride flag, a pair of women in the ‘Dykes on Bikes’ group wait, in the Castro District, for the start of the International Lesbian & Gay Freedom Day Parade, San Francisco, California, June 26, 1988. (Photo by Bromberger Hoover Photography/Getty Images)Bromberger Hoover Photography/Getty Images

Today, the San Francisco Pride has grown far beyond its humble beginnings, with an estimated one million people celebrating, protesting, and marching in 2025. The rainbow Pride flag — the global symbol of LGBTQ+ joy and resistance — flies over all the proceedings, first raised by creator Gilbert Baker in 1978 in this very city and now ubiquitous around the world. The Dykes on Bikes have multiplied as well.

The first time I ever glimpsed a group of queer women on bikes — whom I would later learn were affiliated with The Sirens MC — was in June 2025, but to say that I “saw” them would be an understatement. I was attending the Brooklyn Pride parade with friends when a group of older butches on motorcycles rolled up, engines humming, and invited younger lesbians to hop on the back of their bikes. It was thrilling to witness.

But you don’t just see Dykes on Bikes. No, you hear and feel them throughout your entire body. It’s an all-consuming experience. The noise of the engines fills your ears, and your legs feel like jelly beneath you as they make the ground shake through their sheer numbers. “You can’t look away, it’s so powerful,” Brooke Oliver, the lawyer for Dykes on Bikes, says. And then there’s the joy radiating off both the riders and the spectators who are lucky enough to be in their presence — a pure feedback loop of mutual admiration. As someone who had grown up desperately wanting to ride a motorcycle when she was older — thanks in large part to childhood joyrides around my uncle’s neighborhood — I was immediately in awe.

Little did I know that this would be the start of a thrilling adventure which would eventually lead to me sitting on the back of Big Butch’s bike, coasting over the Golden Gate Bridge. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

That night in June of last year, as I was riding the subway home after the Brooklyn Pride Parade, still coming down from the exhilaration of the evening, I pulled my phone out, and like any good journalist would, began doing research. I learned that Dykes on Bikes would be celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2026 — a major milestone packed with so much history, including a legal battle over the use of the term “dyke” that made it all the way to the Supreme Court.

“It’s incredible history, and I think every time we ride, whether it’s in a Pride parade or whether we’re putting our jacket with its patch on, it just resonates with us what that group of small women did,” Brown says. “Twenty Dykes on Bikes just moved to the front and said, ‘We’re here. We’re not going anywhere. I’m a dyke and I’m riding this motorcycle and nobody’s going to tell me I can’t ride it.’” (snip-MORE, and it’s a Great read!)