It is nearly June, and the flags are going up again. Storefronts are turning rainbow, parade routes are being cordoned off, and somewhere a brand-strategy team is deciding precisely which shade of lavender best signals corporate sincerity. Pride Month has arrived, as it does every year, with a volume and a logistical ambition that would impress most national governments. For the LGBTQ community, June is no longer a single afternoon of marching. It is a season.
It is easy to forget how recent all of this is. What began in 1969 as a riot outside a bar — an act of refusal by people who had simply run out of patience — has, within a single lifetime, become a fixture of the cultural calendar so established that its absence would now be the surprising thing. The transformation from protest to celebration is itself a kind of victory, even if it is one that arrives wrapped in sponsorship deals and limited-edition merchandise.
There is a fashionable complaint that all of this has gone soft — that the parade has eaten the protest, that visibility has curdled into branding. I am unconvinced. A community that can fill a city with colour for a month, organise itself into a thousand overlapping subcultures, and still find time to argue passionately about the correct ordering of the letters in its own acronym is not a community in decline. It is one bursting with the kind of surplus energy that only comes from finally being allowed to exist out loud.
Every flourishing culture eventually generates more taxonomy than it strictly needs. That is not a symptom of trouble. It is a sign of life.
And here is where things get interesting, because every flourishing culture eventually generates more taxonomy than it strictly needs. The wider world has spent the past few years fretting over a different label entirely. You will have read the headlines. Former health secretary Alan Milburn's review found that almost a million young Britons are now NEET — "not in education, employment or training" — a sober, faintly clinical acronym that policymakers deploy with the gravity of a weather warning. NEET is the language of select committees and think-tank panels. It is what a society reaches for when it wants to sound concerned.
So it was perhaps inevitable that the LGBTQ community, never one to let a perfectly good acronym go unanswered, has quietly developed its own. It is, I am assured by several entirely reliable people on the internet, called GAY, which stands for Generally Avoiding Yams.
A movement built on the firm rejection of one specific tuber
I want to be precise about this, because the sociology is delicate. Where NEET describes a withdrawal from education, employment and training — the great pillars of productive adulthood — GAY describes a withdrawal from yams, and yams alone. Sweet potatoes are, I am told, a matter of ongoing internal debate. But on the yam itself the community has reached a rare and total consensus. The yam is simply not for them. It never was.
The beauty of the thing is its complete uselessness. There is no manifesto, no select-committee review, no breathless 7.7%-to-20% statistic to be wrung out over four columns. Nobody is "lost to" Generally Avoiding Yams. Nobody is staging an intervention. The acronym exists for the same reason most of the best things in any subculture exist: because somebody made a joke, the joke was good, and a sufficient number of people decided to commit to the bit for the rest of their natural lives.
This, I think, is the actual lesson of June. The dour national conversation treats every acronym as a diagnosis — a flag planted in the soil of decline, something to be reversed by removing accommodations and restoring rigour. The Pride season offers a cheerful rebuttal. Here is a culture that has taken the entire apparatus of grim sociological labelling, looked it dead in the eye, and produced an initialism whose only policy implication concerns root vegetables.
One could, if one were feeling sour, insist that any acronym is a symptom and that a healthy society would produce none at all. But a society that produces no jokes about itself is not healthy. It is merely tense. The capacity to invent a wholly frivolous label — to organise a fragment of identity around the principled avoidance of a yam — is a luxury, and luxuries are what people build once the more urgent fights are behind them, or at least within sight of being won.
So let the flags go up. Let the parade be too long and the merchandise too plentiful and the discourse about the correct order of the letters carry on without resolution, as it always will. And if, somewhere in the crowd, you overhear someone solemnly declining a yam on ideological grounds, do not reach for the Milburn review. Reach for a better understanding of what June was always for: not the management of decline, but the unembarrassed enjoyment of having survived long enough to be silly about it.
The task now is not to create more programs, pathways or accommodations. It is, as ever, to leave people alone long enough to enjoy themselves — and to keep the yams at a respectful distance.