Disclaimer: I’m strongly against AI-generated imagery, and all the rage-bait images in this post have been pulled from Facebook or Threads. Featured image at the bottom of the page is my own.

Happy last day of Pride! This June, my Facebook and Threads feeds have been mostly ragebait. I’ve endured onslaught after onslaught of AI imagery painting musclebound men sheilding their wives and children from a mysterious rainbow ray coming from somewhere offscreen. Sometimes, for feminism I guess, the haters will generate an image of a woman reading the Bible to her children, holding up a shield to protect them from that same ray of rainbow light. In other images, white families stand under an umbrella while multicolored paint pours down over them. Protected by faith, their family is safe from this mysterious, Amorphous Gay Force.

As you let these images pour over you, you’ll notice the same three symbols: a family (usually white), a shield or umbrella, and that damn rainbow coming from somewhere out of sight, directed at them like a city-destroying energy beam in a 1950’s comic book. Curiously, the beam is always anonymously coming from an unknown place outside the field of view, and it is always very personally targeting the family, specifically the children. Some spectral multicolored enemy which we can’t see has it out for this family in particular. The visual storytelling labels Queerness as something that’s Outside (Devil/world) infiltrating and corrupting the Inside (home/family). Ergo, it must be fought and destroyed. But how do you destroy something without a face, originating from a mysterious offsite location?

If the image vocabulary of umbrellas, shields, and nebulous rainbow beams did hold true, and faith could defend the home from Queerness, we should see remarkably lower rates of it within “protected” religious homes, and higher rates in “unprotected” non-religious homes. But the contradictory truth is that many, MANY queer people come from religious backgrounds. They grew up faithful, devoted, and genuinely committed to following God’s commandments in their lives. They phone-banked for sanctity-of-marriage campaigns, prayed for the LGBTQ community to see the light, and fast forwarded through gay and lesbian kiss scenes in movies. And then sometime after becoming a teenager—or in lots of cases, much earlier—they simply woke up and found the attraction there. There was no exorcist-style scene of climbing on the ceiling as the gay demon possessed them. There was no picket protest of God’s laws or of nature. There was no deal with the devil. Instead, there was a crush that didn’t make sense to them and began years of nervous system damage. How do you reconcile faith and experience when they’re mutually-exclusive? You’ve been told your whole life that there’s no such thing as a blue watermelon, and you’ve just cut open a watermelon to find it’s blue.

The problem with this idea of outside Queerness infiltrating sacred spaces is that it lacks measurable indicators. There is no materially-evidenced genesis of queerness, only feelings, And when claims are made of defeating same-sex attraction, there’s no way to measure whether or not the subject is telling the truth. (I should actually say here that there is a way to measure presence of attraction, but it’s quite intrusive to conduct and rather damning to the conversion therapy arguers.) As such, the beginning and end of queerness in a person’s life is susceptible to all manner of mythology which ultimately affects the queer people themselves. Time after time, biologists and pschologists have found queerness to be something intrinsic, built-in, essential to being a person. Yet what exactly causes it is still a mystery. This mysterious origin, I argue, is why the Rainbow Beam is always coming from somewhere offscreen. We don’t fully understand where it comes from, or how it develops.

Despite scientific evidence denoting attraction as biologically baked-in, a large majority of faith groups continue to narrate Queerness as an Outside Force, an anonymous Rainbow Beam that targets children, sweeping them away from God’s light. As we exit June 2026, I’d like to call into question how queerness is conceptualized in religious spaces. The onus is on people of faith to take a hard look at conversion therapy success rates (spoiler: it backfires a LOT) and ask themselves why it almost never, ever works. Ask themselves why time after time, children brought up in faithful homes mysteriously end up LGBTQ. It’s my belief that there would be less crises of faith if the narrative was scrutinized and refined, and experience would no longer conflict with faith. Gay people just happen. Oh and by the way, if you were somehow able to round up all the queer people in the world and eliminate them, in a short while we would be back because straight people gave birth to more queer people. Because that’s where we come from.

Pride month isn’t about destroying the family, making unwilling people gay, celebrating depravity, forcing millions of drag queens into schools for reading hour, or disassembling America.

Pride month is literally just the perpetual fight for us to continue existing.

Happy Pride 2026!