We’re Not Your Pride Publicity Stunt 

Every June, institutions remember they have queer artists on file. The rainbow logos roll out. The emails start flooding in. “We’d love to include your work in a Pride show.” There’s always a tone of urgency — sometimes even desperation. A scramble to prove solidarity through scheduling. To perform inclusion through proximity.

For a lot of us, Pride Month doesn’t feel like a celebration. It feels like extraction.

Because what’s being asked of Black queer artists — year after year, project after project — is to show up, offer our stories, submit our pain, perform our resilience, and trust that someone else will decide how to frame it all. And we’ve seen how that framing usually goes: with a press release, a checklist of buzzwords, and very little interest in the politics or power dynamics underlying it.

This isn’t a new tactic. The cultural performance of inclusion has a long and calculated history.

In the Renaissance, artists worked at the pleasure of patrons — popes, princes, aristocrats — whose commissions were less about art and more about immortality. They paid for paintings and sculptures to cement their power, and artists obliged because their survival depended on it.

In the 1980s, the patron was no longer a cardinal but a collector. Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat became iconic not just for their work, but for how quickly it was aestheticized, monetized, and stripped of its radical edge. Warhol’s queerness was flattened into Pop. Basquiat’s rage and critique of colonialism were repackaged as “raw genius.” After their deaths, their estates and markets went into overdrive. Their most challenging, deeply personal work was made palatable for institutional walls, luxury brands, and auction houses.

That dynamic of erasure didn’t end with the ’80s. By the 1990s, artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres were being cautiously embraced by institutions, but often only in ways that neutralized their politics. His candy spills, his stacks of paper, his string lights — these were celebrated as poetic and conceptual, but rarely framed as acts of mourning and protest amid the AIDS crisis. His deep intimacy with grief, queer love, and loss was repackaged as minimalist elegance.

A recent exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery reignited long-standing tensions around the erasure of queerness and HIV/AIDS in institutional settings. Critics noted that one of his most iconic pieces, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991), was installed without an immediate reference to its deeply personal context — his partner’s body weight before dying of AIDS-related complications — and arranged in a linear format that deviated from the more common diminishing pile. While the museum later clarified that other labels in the show included this context, and the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation defended the curatorial choices, the moment still speaks to a larger pattern: How easily queer history, illness, and intimacy can be flattened in favor of aesthetic neutrality.

Even when well-intentioned, these omissions — or relocations of meaning to less visible corners of the gallery — suggest that certain truths remain too “difficult” for front-and-center institutional framing. It’s a reminder that visibility doesn’t guarantee clarity, and reverence doesn’t always translate into responsibility.

Gonzalez-Torres had been teaching at New York University (NYU) when he passed in 1996, and by the time I moved to the city in the fall of 2002, his presence was still very much felt. People would compare me to him often — casually, almost offhandedly — rarely mentioning that they’d actually known him, taught with him, called him a friend. It took me a while to realize what was really being said, and even longer to understand the weight of what I was being held up against. It was strange. Reverent, sometimes well-meaning, but also disorienting. These comparisons flattened my work into a familiar template, one that the institution could already digest. It wasn’t about what I was trying to say — it was about how legible I was to people who had already decided what queer art should look like.

I didn’t want to be seen like Basquiat was seen either. I didn’t want my work to be called raw, instinctual, “gifted.” I wanted it to be seen as intentional, precise, and designed down to the millimeter. So I went deep into the computer. Into planning. In control. Every line, every vector, every composition had to prove that my work came from training, not from some fantasy of innate, “primitive” talent.

Looking back, I understand that instinct as a kind of defense. Maybe not trauma in the capital-T sense, but certainly a reaction to being under a gaze I never identified with — one that romanticized struggle while refusing to honor labor. A gaze that wanted my brilliance without my boundaries.

And I’ve seen how this plays out in real time. I once ran into a White man I’d met in a gay bar who’d discovered my work online. After we spoke for a few minutes, he looked at me and said, “I just think it’s really smart that you make your art for White people.” He meant it as a compliment. As if the ultimate mark of intelligence was learning to package your pain for an audience that will never feel it.

This is what we’re up against. Not just institutional erasure, but something slicker: institutional enthusiasm. We’re celebrated — but only when we contort ourselves into something recognizable, something profitable, something “relatable” enough to be displayed without disruption.

The truth is, Black queer artists are often forced into a kind of aesthetic code-switching. We learn to perform professionalism, pain, pride — whatever is required. And that performance becomes part of the work itself.

I’ve always felt that ballroom culture understood this better than most. “Realness” — the ability to pass or blend in as a certain type of person in the real world, like a businessman, a straight man, or a cisgender woman — wasn’t about conformity; it was about survival. It was about learning to move through spaces that weren’t built for you, knowing the stakes of being perceived as too queer, too feminine, too Black, too loud. Ballroom taught an entire generation how to defend, obscure, and protect themselves from dominant gazes. It was both camouflage and confrontation.

But it wasn’t my undergraduate education at NYU that taught me how to advocate for myself or speak up with confidence. School didn’t show me how to take up space — it showed me how quickly my pain could be aestheticized, my rage consumed, my presence folded into someone else’s curriculum. It was only after school that I found the mentorship I truly needed. Through a mutual friend, I was “adopted” by two older gay men I lovingly call my gay dads: David and Kenny. They taught me how to move through the world with dignity, clarity, and a refusal to shrink. They gave me the tools NYU never did: How to protect myself; how to command a room; how to name my worth.

Kenny appears briefly in Paris Is Burning, a detail I share not to elevate one over the other, but to ground the world they helped usher me into — a lineage of ballroom elders, chosen family, and survival-based pedagogy that did more for me than any classroom ever could. David and Kenny modeled what it looked like to live fully self-possessed. They taught me that voice, presence, and self-determination are not given in the art world — they’re built and defended, often against the very institutions that claim to uplift us.

That’s the backdrop against which I’ve watched today’s art world rewire itself. The hierarchy is clearer than ever: Curators have become celebrities. Flyers for group shows feature the curator’s name in larger type than the artists themselves, and sometimes the names of the artists don’t appear at all. I find that deeply problematic. If the people making the work are treated as an afterthought in the presentation of the exhibition, then we’re not talking about curation — we’re talking about consumption.

Some artists have even stepped into curatorial roles, inserting themselves into exhibitions under the banner of community, but sometimes as a means of visibility, of entering the canon through the side door. It’s easy to critique this move, but the reality is more complicated. Sometimes it’s self-preservation. Sometimes, the opportunity to curate is handed down from a faceless institution hoping to capitalize on an artist’s social capital while retaining full control of the budget, the framework, and the final say.

When artists are asked to curate under tight timelines or without adequate support, what looks like agency is often a trap, engineered by institutions looking to outsource responsibility while avoiding accountability. What we’re actually seeing is the outsourcing of care: delegated visibility without structural investment.

But we do have models for something different.

Rashaad Newsome’s new documentary, Assembly, which premiered at SXSW earlier this year, offers one such model. The film captures Newsome’s 2022 commision at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, an immersive multimedia project fusing AI, performance, dance and pedagogy that centers Black queer creativity and the global impact of ballroom culture. Rooted in the Black queer community, self-directed, and unapologetically lush, Assembly isn’t simply a portrait of resistance — it’s a blueprint for what becomes possible when Black queer artists are given the space to flourish on their own terms. It’s not designed for White institutions. It’s not asking to be decoded. It asserts its own language, its own logic, its own audience.

Meanwhile, we’re watching corporations begin to pull back from Pride entirely. Sponsorships are shrinking, rainbow branding is less conspicuous, and internal DEI initiatives are quietly being phased out. Some of this is in response to conservative backlash, some of it is simple cowardice. Either way, it reveals what many of us have always known: The support was never unconditional. It was strategic. It was commercial. It was a seasonal trend that depended on applause, not accountability.

And to be clear, many of these corporations should never have been allowed through the front door to begin with. Pride was born out of rebellion, not brand partnerships. And Black History Month wasn’t created to boost Q1 marketing metrics. My mantra has always been: If I don’t see you celebrating me outside of June or February, you won’t be getting my dollar during either of those months. Because I don’t exist for your convenience. My work, my life, and my community don’t only matter when they’re trending. Visibility without consistency is nothing more than optics. Allyship that folds under pressure was never allyship to begin with.

I was talking recently with the drag queen Holly Dae about these pullbacks in corporate Pride sponsorship, and she said it best: “You know, this happens with every conservative administration. These folks come and go. We’ll still be here, fighting.” There’s something steady and defiant in that reminder. Because she’s right — we’ve always been here. We’ve survived shifts in political winds, economic downturns, institutional betrayals, and cultural amnesia. Our presence isn’t contingent on corporate approval. It never was.

If you’re only showing up for us in June, don’t bother. If your solidarity lives in captions but not in contracts, we see it. If you need our pain to feel progressive but aren’t willing to give up your power, we know what it is.

This Pride, don’t tell us we’re seen. Don’t tell us we’re inspiring. Don’t tell us you’re proud. Instead:

Give us decision-making power.

Give us funding without strings attached.

Let us be complicated, inconsistent, angry, celebratory, contradictory.

Stop demanding clarity where you offer none in return.

We are not your theme. We are not your redemption arc. We are not your strategy.

We are artists. Whole people. And if you’re not building a world where we can exist on our own terms, your allyship isn’t solidarity — it’s spectacle.