COLUMN | Pride: Beyond the flags, a claim to being

June again, and the streets glisten with permission. Corporations, fluent now in performance, flood timelines with slogans: Love wins. Be proud. We accept you. The cadence is rehearsed. The rhetoric, familiar to fatigue. We are assured that visibility is victory, that acceptance is arrival. But attend, closely, to the diction—and something fractures. 

What is this phrasing if not quiet violence? Cloaked as comfort, it masks a hierarchy: one must grant acceptance, the other petition for it. Queerness ceases to be presence; it becomes a proposition. Here lies Pride’s philosophical scandal, not in contestation, but in its condition. For what is acceptance, truly, if always conferred and never inherent?

Let us be precise: acceptance is no synonym for equality. It is permission, a grammar that codes gatekeeping.

To grasp this, we must unpack inclusion’s subtle architecture. Naomi Ellemers, a social psychologist, names the “integration dilemma”: marginalized identities welcomed only insofar as they mimic or dilute the very traits marking their marginality. Inclusion, then, masquerades as assimilation. Pride is reduced to participation within dominant culture’s optics—colorful, palatable, non-threatening.

We celebrate Pride, but only when it wears progress’ guise. Only when it can be posted, sold, or sponsored. Only when it obeys normativity’s emotional script: happy, grateful, tidy. Queer anger, grief, monotony? Too unruly. Too defiant. Too authentic.

Yet it is within the real—untamed and unfiltered—that liberation truly resides.

Acceptance’s language moves through what Judith Butler calls the “regulatory ideal”: to be intelligible, one must first be recognizable. Yet within heteronormativity, recognition demands translation. The queer subject is summoned not merely to come out, but to explain, justify, perform coherence—rendering identity legible not as self, but as spectacle.

This is not acceptance. This is auditing.

Consider the queer student in a conservative school: tolerated, so long as no date crosses the prom threshold. The lesbian employee, welcomed, provided her partner remained unspoken in office chatter. Trans visibility, applauded—only when cloaked in cisnormative ease. These are not anomalies; they are structures.

This dynamic mirrors Carl Rogers’ concept of “conditions of worth,” where self-acceptance is tied to external approval. When love is conditional, so too is worth—internalized as a ledger to be balanced, never freely owned. This is not identity affirmation; it is identity erosion.

Beneath it all is an ontological wound—what Miranda Fricker names epistemic injustice: the harm of being disqualified as a knower. For queer lives, this means being legible only through borrowed vocabularies. When a parent says “I accept you,” what they often mean is: “I will endure you—so long as you stay within the borders of my comprehension.”

But the demand for understanding was never queer in origin. It was imposed—an expectation to render oneself legible, palatable, safe. Why must queer love require annotation? Why must gender variance arrive footnoted? Why must existence be taught to be allowed?

In this context, acceptance is no offering—it is an intellectual debt, unsolicited yet endlessly owed.

Consider the boy who, one dinner too quiet, names his truth without spectacle. His parents nod, measured, murmuring the phrase they’ve rehearsed—“We accept you.” What follows is not rupture, but quiet revision: his photos gone from the walls, his name missing from Sunday prayers, invitations receding into unsaid things. He is not exiled, only edited. This, too, is acceptance—less an act of love than a method of erasure made polite.

This story is not rare. In many Filipino homes, acceptance resembles a truce—quiet, conditional, easily revoked. Speak softly. Dress plainly. Take up less space. Queerness is welcome, but only if it stays within bounds. Not condemned—contained.

This is why queer life in the Philippines walks a tightrope: come out, but keep it soft; be seen, but stay smooth at the edges. In a culture ruled by pakikisama, the queer becomes the compromise.

To move queer discourse forward—past slogans, past the pastel performance of tolerance—we must reject acceptance as a paradigm. For acceptance implies a gate. And Pride, if it is to mean anything at all, must refuse to knock. It must dismantle the door.

The future does not wait at the threshold. It is built by those who stop asking to be allowed in.

This, precisely, is what Sara Ahmed names in her theory of “willful subjects”—those who disrupt by daring not to accommodate. The queer must reclaim the right to inconvenience—not out of defiance, but because in a system that equates comfort with coherence, their very being is already deemed a breach.

To say queerness deserves acceptance is not incorrect—it is merely incomplete. It places queer existence perpetually on probation: you may stay, but only if you continually justify your right to be.

True liberation in Pride does not seek a seat at the table. It overturns the table altogether, declaring: we have always belonged.

Let us be clear: the aim is not to invert the hierarchy, to crown queerness as norm. It is to dismantle the very premise of normativity. Queerness, at its fiercest, is not a category—it is a rupture.

This demands ceasing the contortion of queer bodies into legibility, rejecting allyship reduced to branding, and interrogating why institutions parade Pride while silencing expelled queer students, harassed queer workers, and legislated queer erasure.

The SOGIE Equality Bill transcends legal safeguards—it asserts a metaphysical imperative: that existence requires no precondition, that dignity is not something to be earned.

Perhaps what is required is not greater visibility, but a recalibration of language: not “acceptance,” but affirmation; not “allyship,” but solidarity; not “tolerance,” but justice. We do not seek permission to enter. We demand presence: unquestioned, uninterrupted, unqualified.

Pride, then, is not a parade. It is a philosophical revolt. A refusal of the idea that differences must ask for permission. That love must soften itself for comfort. That bodies must translate their truth into safety.

Let us forge a world where no child recoils from their own truth, where love is never mistaken for mere tolerance, and where queer survival demands no applause—as if existing were a performance.

Let us discard “acceptance”, that velvet leash, that unseen tally, and dare to live as if worthiness were never in question.

Because we weren’t.

Because we aren’t.

Because we won’t be.