Happy Pride

As we kick off Pride 2026, let’s look back a few months to the “Predators” going Full Rainbow:

Science tells us that there is no correlation between spending every night at the bathhouse and contracting monkeypox. Nonetheless, “Boston health officials to offer residents mpox vaccines at Pride event, amid uptick in cases” (state-sponsored WBUR):

The city will offer mpox vaccinations at the City Hall Pride flag-raising ceremony at on June 1 at 1 p.m.

Let’s shift to the other coast… For children in Ketchikan, Alaska who want to get an early start on the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle, the local bookstore was set up for them (photos from May 29, 2026):

Rainbow: A First Book of Pride is for “Preschool – Kindergarten”.

The town is less than 1% Black and the percentage of 2SLGBTQQIA+ is unclear, but the bookstore offers a book featuring at least some people at the intersection of Black and 2SLGBTQQIA+:

Example: Marsha P. Johnson. From Wikipedia:

Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Johnson wore women’s clothing for the first time when she was five years old. After graduating from high school, she moved to Manhattan, where she regularly spent time on 42nd Street in Times Square, working at the local Childs Restaurants and supplementing her income through begging and sex work. … After the beginning of the AIDS pandemic in New York in 1980, she cared for her friends who were dying of AIDS and engaged in AIDS-related activism. She disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1992, with her body being found floating in the Hudson River on July 6. While police initially ruled her death a suicide, many speculate that she was either murdered, chased into the water, or fell in accidentally. She was 46.

Related:

• Frontiers of English: “this Pride” like “this Christmas”