Pride and Publication

In my last post, I told you to stay tuned for details on the publication of my new book, Defiantly Joyful: Unitarian Universalist LGBTQIA+ Histories. Well, now it is June, Pride Month, and today is also the official publication date of the book! (You can find it here or if you are in the Minneapolis area, you can get a signed copy directly from me!)

The book is only partially mine—the majority of the content is a collection of essays by a wide range of Unitarian Universalist people across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. Ministers, other religious professionals, laypeople of many ages and backgrounds—all writing from the intersection of their faith and their gender identities and sexual orientations. I am honored to have had the opportunity to compile this collection of their stories, which include both challenges and celebrations.

Pride has always been both a protest and a party—and in 2026 both feel very real. On Sunday as I helped staff a booth at Bloomington (Minnesota) Pride, where the congregation I serve was a sponsor, I saw celebration all around me: rainbows and glitter and drag queen story time and singing and dancing.

Alongside the celebration, though, was the awareness of our privilege in living in a place where we can be relatively safe at an event like that. I could safely walk around in a t-shirt from Blessed Bee that boldly and colorfully proclaims “This Queer Minister Loves You”—though I know that my identity as a cisgender white woman offers me layers of protection not equally available to my trans and BIPOC beloveds. Even that safety feels more precarious these days.

The postscript of Defiantly Joyful is titled “We’re Not Done Yet.” Even as we celebrate Pride, there is so much work to be done. Work to regain protections removed by the current administration and by many states and local communities in the last decade. Work to then move beyond where we were pre-Trump, because we never had full equality.

If you aspire to be an ally and are joining in the joy of Pride, I hope you will also join us in that work, in defiance of those people and systems who seek to rob us of our joy, our freedom, our dignity, our safety.

Before, at, and since Stonewall, we have had to fight for our rights. That fight is far from over. We celebrate how far we have come, and that we are still here, still being ourselves, still finding joy and love in our communities—and we continue to demand more. More justice, more freedom, more safety, more respect. We are still defiantly joyful, though some days the joy is harder to access than others.