I first joined the Freedom Oklahoma team four years ago. It feels both like just yesterday and the longest four years of my life (but maybe the last four years have felt a little like that for everyone). In that time, we’ve ushered in monumental changes to the work and the way we approach what it means to be a 2SLGBTQ+ organization, one now staffed entirely by 2STGNC+ folks, with a focus on how we shift closer to collective liberation, grounded in values-driven work. Which together might sound like nothing more than a nice string of buzzwords, so let me try to tell you what that means.

As we stand at the threshold of Pride Month, the air is thick with a familiar tension. There’s the glitter, the music, the promise of celebration. But Pride is so much more than a party. Its also a time to educate and be educated, to organize. It's a time to further the fight against institutions that keep us from accessing life beyond this month. Pride is a time that acknowledges the profound disillusionment many of us feel trying to find joy in  the midst of genocide. Pride is so much more than a party..

I sat down to write this, a week out from the start of disability pride month, as I scoured the internet to try and confirm if the launch of Governor Stitt’s new “make Oklahoma healthy again” initiative would in fact include the presence of US Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And, because this timeline continues to be the worst, it seems that indeed he will be here in Oklahoma to spew anti-vaccine, anti-science rhetoric on the record with our Governor, in what I anticipate will be a plan that focuses not on resources for the health and well-being of Oklahomans, but instead on the white, Euro-centric weight-based ideals that celebrate only those able-bodied people able to perform and contribute to communities at a level that benefits the demands of capitalism as healthy. And while I could rant at an extended length about the harms of the policies being pushed at state and national levels under the guise of popular health, I instead want to focus on the long history of mad, disabled resistance leaders in 2SLGBTQ+ spaces, and the way disabled folks have engaged in disruption to win better conditions for all of us, while often ourselves being left out of and/or excluded from spaces that claim to be organizing for our collective liberation.