My Joy is the Heart of Revolution

Talking about joy and revolution at the same time has gotten quite sticky lately.

On one hand, you have the folks bringing a misery-superiority-complex. Yes, you know the one. There’s a certain smug “I told you so” energy coming from the doomers among us who insist it’s time to give up. An anger not just at those who are taking time to rest or celebrate or live, but at those who are still fighting to make things better.

On the other hand, you have the folks proudly proclaiming, “my joy is resistance!” while they go to brunch in a blue state, which can feel like coded language for “please, no one ask me to do anything difficult to make the world better.”

On the third hand, because it’s my essay and I can have as many hands as I want, you have the folks who are absolutely doing lots of difficult things to make the world better, but at tremendous and constant psychological cost to themselves. A beautiful martyr has no need for joy.

So where does that leave us? Where does joy fit in? There’s no better place to examine this than with the messy, beautiful celebration that is Pride Month.

Pride 2025 felt different. For some, it feels much closer to Stonewall’s riotous roots. For others, it feels like a unique moment of fear and erasure. Others still might’ve been feeling too burned out to even think about pride. Some of us took a lasered-in focus on joy and found opportunities to celebrate wherever we could.

Wherever you were, I’m betting you—like me—saw a significant uptick in signs reading “the first pride was a riot”. Yes, that’s a catchy slogan for a poster, but it also ignores the rich legacy and power of joy and celebration at the core of the queer liberation movement at the time of Stonewall.

Yes, the Stonewall Inn uprising was a riot and is an incredibly important part of our history. Rioting, fighting back, and making good trouble, have and do and will have a critical role to play in changemaking. And in the same period, queer activists were hosting “Gay Dances” at NYU for queer folks and allies to come together and celebrate being alive. Gilbert Baker was hand sewing and dyeing a mile-long pride flag to be marched down the street in a joyful parade. Jeanne Manford was encouraging parents to publicly celebrate their love for their queer children while marching in the pride parade with her son and establishing the first PFLAG chapter. Marsha P. Johnson was throwing bake sales to cover rent for the STAR house and bail funds for fellow revolutionaries.

Activists were working hard, yes, and they were celebrating every second that they could. They were dressed to the nines, full drag, full makeup, full glam, in open defiance of “three items” laws. In an arguably far more hostile environment, where hope might have felt even further off than it does now, they partied, they danced, they laughed, they rested, and they lived to fight another day.

To say in response to celebration and joy that the “first pride was a riot” is to strip those first protesters—who were literally protesting for their right to gather, dance, and party at the Stonewall Inn—of their joy. To say, “How dare you celebrate, there is so much further to go! There is work to be done!” is to paint joy as a luxury for the privileged few, as a dainty dalliance growing from ignorance.

True joy, revolutionary joy, the kind of joy I associate with pride, has dirty fingernails, bruised knuckles, and ripped stockings. Joy is hard fought and hard defended. Of course, we have further to go, and we can use joy to dream of where that is and how we’ll get there.

So Where Does Joy Fit?

To get in deep, I think there are two critical operative words we need to define: Queer and Joy.

How do you define queer? If one defines queerness as only a sexual orientation, “queer joy” perhaps isn’t going to resist much. But, if one defines queer as a broader rejection of social norms, judgments, and ways of living and loving, “queer joy” will absolutely be inherently defiant.

Second, I think it’s important to differentiate joy and happiness. Happiness is an emotional state, usually borne out of specific positive circumstances and often (but not always) coming with the ability to forget about our problems, at least for a little while. Joy is an attitude, a choice, that defies circumstances. There’s a bit more intention there, even if it will often overlap with happiness.

An example of the overlaps and the difference: When I go to testify at the Missouri state capital, I am not happy. I don’t like to go there any more than my legislators like to have me there. It’s hostile, exhausting, and a last-minute 3-hour drive at 5am every week is not a happy occasion. But in those walls, I am profoundly joyful because I choose to be. I choose to get excited that I’m going to see my friends from around the state that I only see in Jefferson City. I choose to feel empowered when I give my testimony. I choose to leave the hearing room to spend time with people who make me feel loved when my testimony is over. I choose to bring books to loan out to queer kids, to bring my tarot cards to give amateur readings to folks that might need it.

I could sit in the corner and isolate myself and stew in my fury that I’m back in the capital again, reading an emotionally raw testimony to a group that doesn’t want to hear it, and tell myself the story of my life as one of victimhood. Even if some of these things carry the pain of truth, I choose to be joyful.

The joy itself is not the full resistance, but I think with a slight tweak the phrase can still help us in this movement: joy is the heart of resistance. While it might seem like splitting hairs, I think it does a better job of capturing that while we cannot fix the world with joy alone, we also cannot fix it without joy.

So what is the actual role of joy here?

Well, in general I think my job as an advocate is three things, and I use joy in intentional ways to accomplish each of these goals:

I have to decide what I want to fight for

I have to get other people to fight for that with me

I have to sustain myself and my community so that we can arrive at the world we’re fighting to build

Joyful Imagination:

I’m using joy to dream of a better world for all of us, of a liberated future with robust access to healthcare and significant creativity in how we express ourselves while knowing that we’ll be seen as we are no matter what. If you try to fight for a different future motivated only by anger or fear, you will build a future full of anger and fear (if you manage to build anything at all).

To be clear: anger, fear, despair, and their cousins are not bad emotions. There is no such thing. These are critical parts of the human condition that let us know when a boundary has been crossed—when we can no longer accept the way something is. But as I’ve said before and will certainly say again, we cannot build a home in anger. We must listen to it, thank it, and heal from it by fighting for something better.

Your Turn:

Spend some time deeply envisioning the world you want to build—but do so without words like “not”. We aren’t dreaming of what we want less of, we’re dreaming of what we want to build. What we want more of. And we’re dreaming of this future with you in it.

What does your day look like in this future?

How do people engage with each other in this future?

How does it feel to live there? What does joy look like there?

Once you have a clear picture of what you’re fighting for, hold onto this. Let it fuel you. What are you dreaming of?

Joyful Invitation:

To quote the brilliant Black feminist, artist, and organizer Toni Cade Bambara, “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible”. We need to make our fight for a better world something people want to be a part of. We will not do that with academic, ideological, and linguistic purity tests (which are usually highly classist as well). We will not do that by shaming people into getting involved. We will not do that by only choosing to take, recommend or value advocacy actions that feel bad.

Joy in our movements looks like taking time to celebrate progress and growth. Joy is building deep and genuine relationships where I feel loved and supported, and where I trust that when I make a mistake my community will let me know so we can work through it. It also means trying to balance suggesting actions that have a positive and negative emotional impact; Go to the capitol to testify and then attend a performance raising funds for queer youth. It means that when someone new is ready to start their allyship journey, I meet them with love and tell them: “I’m glad you’re here.”

Your Turn:

Reflect on the ways you invite others in to make change with you, and the ways you experience enjoying advocacy.

Who has surprised you the most with their growth journey recently?

What are the ways you can make a difference that feel good?

What is your favorite way to make a difference? Not your most effective, favorite.

For some people, it’s having conversations with loved ones to “move the needle.” for others it’s making and celebrating queer art that dreams of a better future. For others still, it’s changing your spending habits to move away from Amazon and Target and towards local and LGBTQ+ owned businesses.

Joyful Continuation:

I steadfastly believe that we are going to be able to see a better world within our lifetime. I don’t know how long it will take. I don’t know what exactly it will look like or what it will cost to get there. But I know we are building something that cannot be stopped or unbuilt. When I look at the pervasive hopelessness within our community, I feel a kind of grief and worry that some people won’t get to see what we’re building.

I’ve spent countless hours talking to folks who struggle with wanting to stay on the planet, as well as brilliant folks in the movement who’ve burned allllll the way out and gone to focus on other things, or just folks who are so despondent they feel like it’s not worth getting involved in the first place.

This is a critical, and perhaps obvious, use of joy. I use joy to fuel my hope, and to encourage me to bring hope to others around me. I find joy in cooking and feeding people, a skill I regularly put to use sustaining my loved ones. I bring joy in the form of extra books and tarot decks to share at the state capitol during long waits, and custom playlists to rage about the specific bill I’m going to fight.

Yes, this also includes rest and relaxation and brunch, or an evening spent playing board games. Joy means remembering you are not just a vessel for change, you’re a human being who deserves to experience comfort and love and sex and all the good things.

I center joy in my self-care and community-care routines and try to teach others to feel the same. In short, I use joy to do the best I can to stay in this movement and in this fight until we get to the world we’re fighting for.

Your Turn:

Think about the ways you make space for joy.

What does joy look like for you? How do you connect joy with things like rest, community, and healing?

How do you build joy with or for others?

What’s one thing you can do this week that will bring you joy? How can you share that with others?

In Summary, With Love:

I know this might feel like a lot. But there is so much joy to be found. Resist the urge to glue your eyes to the horizon and say that nothing counts yet because there is more fight to be had. Look down at your feet, look to your sides at where we are right now and what we’ve fought for. Look at the incredible, brilliant, powerful resilience and resistance of the advocates standing next to you. You are not alone.

Look behind you! Look to the activists and revolutionaries who laid down their lives in the hope that one day you could walk down the street wearing more than 3 items of women’s clothes. Marsha’s dreams of robust mutual aid networks and increasing safety for trans women of color. Lou Sullivan’s dreams for transmasculine community building and recognition of the existence of gay transmasculine people. Jeanne Manford’s dream of parents feeling brave enough to celebrate their love for their LGBTQ+ children. ACT UP’s dream for access to sex education, HIV testing,

and an end to AIDS deaths.

We have so much further to go, but my god if it isn’t incredible how far we’ve come since then. How far their dreams have taken us and how quickly we might take them for granted. We can and we must take every opportunity to look around us, to look forward, to look backward, and to celebrate the beauty and strength we find there.

Remember: We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. If you decide there is no more joy left to find; that everything is awful and everyone is hateful, you’ll find evidence that that is true. You’ll notice the corporate sponsorships missing from Pride. You’ll be extra aware of the sharpness of a stranger’s questions. But if you decide there will always be reasons to be joyful, and you make time to look for those reasons, you will continue to find them. A community-oriented pride festival with trans kids realizing they get to grow up. A grandparent ready to start learning how to support their enby grandchild. City council resistance pride flags. If you decide to become someone who looks for the joy, you’ll find it absolutely everywhere.

Stick around with me, okay? I want you to be here to see what we’re building.