Every June, like clockwork, someone asks: "But where's Straight Pride Month?" This year, writer Shaley Howard answered that question with a scalpel-sharp satirical column for LGBTQ Nation, and the jokes land precisely because the history behind each one is so grimly documented.

How the Joke Works

The column's structure is deceptively simple: it builds a case for "Straight Pride" with each paragraph, then has Howard's editor interrupt to point out she has the facts exactly backwards. Straight people were being targeted by police in public? Actually, that was gay and lesbian people. Nearly 70 countries criminalize heterosexuality? No, that would be homosexuality. Five hundred anti-heterosexual bills moving through state legislatures? Swing and a miss again.

Each correction hits harder than the last, because each one lands against a very real and very documented truth. The satirical framing is a delivery mechanism for factual weight, and it works because Howard never has to stretch a single premise. Everything "corrected" in the piece is simply the actual historical record.

Howard closes by building out a vision of Straight Pride in granular detail: a "Rainbow of Beige" palette featuring khaki, eggshell, and a daring splash of navy; a uniform of cargo shorts and too-tight polo shirts; biodegradable sawdust instead of glitter; a playlist of mid-tempo 1970s yacht rock and the "gentle hum of lawnmowers." The parade ends promptly at 4:00 PM so everyone can check their 401(k) and beat the dinner rush at a chain restaurant. It is, as satire goes, extremely well-targeted.

The Real History the Satire Points To

Pride Month exists because of a specific, violent night in New York City. In June 1969, patrons and supporters of the Stonewall Inn staged an uprising to resist police harassment and persecution that had been a routine fact of life for LGBTQ+ Americans. In the years preceding the uprising, it was standard practice in many cities for police to conduct regular raids on bars and restaurants where LGBTQ+ people gathered. People were arrested, photographed, and had their names published in newspapers. Employment, housing, and family relationships were routinely destroyed on the basis of sexual orientation alone.

The Stonewall uprising did not immediately produce Pride parades. It produced years of sustained political organizing. In 1999, President Clinton issued the first presidential proclamation designating June as "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month." President Obama expanded that recognition in 2011 to include the full breadth of the LGBTQ+ community. Getting a month on the federal calendar took roughly three decades of activism after Stonewall. That context sits directly beneath Howard's joke about "participation trophies."

Isn't the traditional rainbow a bit loud? It's time to tamp those colors way down and bring back the true spectrum: The Rainbow of Beige.
Shaley Howard

The column also nods to the global picture, gesturing at the roughly 64 to 70 countries where same-sex relations remain criminalized, sometimes carrying the death penalty. ILGA World's State-Sponsored Homophobia reports track this figure annually, and it shifts year to year as legal battles are won and lost across multiple continents. It is not an abstraction. People are imprisoned, and in some countries executed, under laws that remain on the books in 2026.

The 2026 Context Makes It Sharper

Howard's column is funny, but it is also doing work in a specific moment. Pride in 2026 is facing institutional headwinds that would have seemed extreme even a few years ago. The Trump administration has barred Pride flags from federal buildings. A Navy ship previously named in honor of a gay rights icon had that designation stripped. Federal investigations have been opened into schools that allow transgender students to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

The column's mock-lament that straight people can't find themselves represented in jewelry commercials or network sitcoms lands differently against a backdrop in which federal policy is actively working to erase LGBTQ+ visibility from public institutions. The joke is not that representation doesn't matter. The joke is that the people who never needed it are demanding the same concern as the people who are actively losing it.

It is also worth noting the specific context that LGBTQ Nation's piece links to: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has used counter-proclamation strategy, declaring June "Faith and Family Month" in an explicit rebrand of Pride Month. This is not an isolated move. Across multiple states, conservative governors have issued competing proclamations designed to rhetorically reclaim June, framing LGBTQ+ visibility as something that requires a political counter-response rather than a cultural acknowledgment. The pattern is deliberate and worth naming as such.

The Voice Behind the Satire

Shaley Howard is not a stranger to the territory she is writing in. She is the author of "Excuse Me, Sir! Memoir of a Butch," which received the IPPY Silver Award for excellence and was named a Next Generation Indie Finalist for LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction. She is also a small-business owner and activist based in Portland, Oregon. Her comedy voice is honed for exactly this kind of work: finding the precise absurdity in arguments that are presented in public life with complete sincerity, and letting the facts do the structural damage.

The column's mock-tragic description of a straight person "coming out" to their family, only to be embraced with reassurances that they are "perfectly, statistically normal," is the piece's sharpest moment. It inverts the emotional reality of a coming-out experience with such precision that it reads simultaneously as comedy and as a very plain statement of fact. The humor comes from the recognition. The sting comes from knowing why the recognition is necessary.

At the end of the day, I just don't think it's fair. Yes, my research has revealed that heterosexuals are the overwhelming majority. And yes, science confirms that society is already built entirely around the heterosexual lifestyle.
Shaley Howard

Worth Considering

Satire this clean is doing something more than making people laugh. It is making the invisible visible by inverting it, and in doing so, it creates a kind of emotional shorthand for anyone who has tried to explain Pride's purpose to someone who doesn't understand why it exists.

The "Straight Pride" argument tends to arrive in bad faith, but not always. Sometimes it comes from genuine confusion about what Pride is for, especially from people who grew up in environments where LGBTQ+ history was not taught and the social function of visibility was never explained. A piece like Howard's can reach that person in a way that a Wikipedia article about Stonewall might not, because the humor opens a door that a lecture cannot.

That is not a small thing in a year when Pride Month is facing both federal policy opposition and the tired annual ritual of "both sides" discourse around whether LGBTQ+ visibility is still necessary. Howard's answer, delivered in cargo shorts and a polo tucked in just a little too tight, is an unambiguous yes. And it is backed, paragraph by paragraph, by the actual facts of the matter.

Pride was not handed to the community as a cultural gesture of goodwill. It was won through decades of activism after real persecution, built on the memory of people who were arrested, jailed, and worse for existing in public. The beige parade will not be held this June. But the real one, fractious and loud and glitter-covered and stubbornly present, absolutely will.

Source: LGBTQ Nation

Cover photo: CBS Television-tag has been cropped or torn-the CBS eye logo remains in part for identification., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

satire

Satire With a Serious Edge: The Real History Behind Straight Pride Month