Screamers

Ahead of Pride 2026, some thoughts on crickets, butterflies, discretion, and the politics of respectability.

I was born into a world that prizes discretion — a defining virtue of the French bourgeoisie. We did not even have our name on the buzzer. Growing up, my father would repeat, d’un air entendu, “Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés” (“To live happily, live hidden”). The line comes from an adorable 1793 fable by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, Le Grillon (The Cricket). A humble cricket envies a flamboyant butterfly until he sees it destroyed by the very attention it attracts — and concludes that happiness and safety lie in staying out of the spotlight.

Over time, the meaning of this fable evolved as a warning against turning oneself into a spectacle for public consumption — a perfect message for the age of social media.

My coming out around 2000, and even more my writing about being gay later on, was perceived as vulgar, attention-seeking, and improper. It would be less so today, though not by everyone. When Gabriel Attal, now officially a presidential candidate, wrote about his relationship in his book “En homme libre, j’ai décidé de tout dire” a few weeks ago, a conservative political commentator complained: “We need a form of transparency. But here we are slipping from transparency to exhibitionism. It’s a striptease.” 

This comment reminded me of the shame I felt in 2017 when a French conservative magazine — one read by the French bourgeoisie — published an unpleasant article about my family. It felt like the cricket lesson was being enforced in real time. It also reminded me of speaking for Pride at the conservative Swiss company Richemont in June 2020. Afterward, a contact told me that a manager had said, “Why does he need to talk in such depth about his private life? It’s just weird.” My transparency was framed as a character flaw, an ulterior motive: narcissism.

Another moment I think about often — and perhaps this lies at the heart of the queer experience: being told casually cruel things by people who forget them almost immediately, while you remember them forever — was during my visit to the World Bank’s Kathmandu office in 2012. After I presented to GLOBE, the employee resource group. An older Western consultant claimed during the Q&A section, “I don’t have anything against gay people. What I dislike are screamers,” slang for men who are obviously homosexual. If only we would learn to be discreet.

Les stéréotypes ont la peau dure. The accusation of narcissism against gay people is rooted in Freud’s early psychoanalytic theory, which framed homosexuality as “narcissistic object choice”. Gay men, the argument went, desired men because they identified with themselves rather than with the opposite sex.

The idea that queer people turn themselves into narcissistic spectacle has always been central to the critique of Pride: the topless dykes on motorcycles, the puppy-play hoods, the drag queens, the bare-skinned bears, the glitter and neon. Pride is often condemned as vulgar. The vulgar, the narcissistic, the exhibitionistic — set against the supposed discretion, demureness, humility, and decorum of straight people. Even the British royal family’s public relations doctrine is: “Never complain, never explain.”

And if French fables and royal mottos are not enough, Christians are quick to remind us that Pride is a sin: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble”. The word alone carries centuries of moral suspicion. The underlying message is often: Fine, we know you’re gay — but when are you going to stop talking about it? How many more years of Pride must we endure?

What this view obviously fails to grasp is that the damage society inflicts on LGBTQ+ people — an unfashionable idea at a moment when we are increasingly told to simply get over it — does not disappear once legal equality is achieved, or once someone comes out. Some wounds - particularly wounds coming from childhood - become structural. As I have written before, not everything broken can fully be repaired. And so, in many queer people, Pride and self-loathing end up coexisting in what becomes a lifelong internal battle.

In that sense, Pride is the antidote to shame. I wrote in 2023 that Pride is a maintenance medication for a chronic condition. For LGBTQ+ people to live happily, we have to live visibly and proudly. For us, Pride is also an antidote to death. “Silence = Death”, coined in the mid-1980s, captured the idea that secrecy was not merely oppressive, but literally fatal.

Today, LGBTQ+ people still feel compelled to lie about desire, relationships, sex, loneliness, or mental health. I just wrote this week about the silent devastation of chemsex; before that, about the disproportionate and hidden mental-health burden carried by LGBTQ+ people. Again and again, the pattern is the same: what cannot be spoken about openly metastasizes in isolation and kills us.

But I also suspect a little more honesty might be good for non-LGBTQ+ people, too — including the British Royal Family, actually. From the outside, that silence can look less like cricket wisdom and more like a system in which unhappiness, repression, and even cruelty are quietly allowed to persist.

It is not just queer people, then, who would benefit from being more honest. Vivre caché means keeping a low profile, curtailing one’s instincts, and accepting the parameters of one’s existence as drawn by others. And there is a dimension to the fable that goes unspoken: maybe the butterfly feels like a threat to the cricket’s life choices. What the fable doesn’t name is the rage the cricket may feel at having to hide, and the shameful satisfaction he takes in watching the butterfly punished for having the courage to try and be himself.

“I have no talent, and even less good looks; no one notices me,” the cricket says at some point in the fable. In choosing to live in hiding, he never learns to see his own worth beyond the standards society imposes on him. What he needs is not a better hiding place, but the message of Pride: that dignity and belonging are not reserved for the beautiful, the visible, or the socially approved.

I remember someone telling me once that he couldn’t understand why a person would transition if they weren’t going to become some glamorous fantasy figure. I have heard similar comments from gay men who seemed puzzled by attraction that falls outside conventional ideals of masculinity or beauty. Both remarks reveal the same misunderstanding: the idea that being queer is about aspiring to some idealized image, when it is really about being oneself.

That is precisely what makes Pride dangerous to so many and a target today. The idea that, beneath the veneer of polite society, people harbor aspirations that do not align with expectations is a threat to the established order — and to the cosplay of the powerful men of this world.

In 2026, Pride is under coordinated attack. In the U.S., symbols built to honor LGBTQ+ lives have been quietly dismantled: the USNS Harvey Milk was renamed after a straight military figure, Admiral Rachel Levine’s name and image were scrubbed from federal materials, Pride flags were lowered at the Stonewall monument, and LGBTQ+ references were stripped out of World AIDS Day programming. Abroad, the instruction is the same, only blunter. In Russia, courts have designated the Russian LGBT Network and at least six other organizations as “extremist” in the span of weeks. In Senegal, Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko defended his abhorrent law as a stand against the West’s “homosexual tyranny.” Across these very different contexts, the underlying instruction is identical, and it is exactly the cricket’s: quiet down, disappear, return to living hidden.

Unfortunately, the idea that we should tone it down has appeal even in our community. I have written about the rising appeal of the “normal gay”: a renewed trend toward being quietly and selectively “out” enough to protect one’s comfort and benefit. This explains the strange phenomenon of gay men supporting Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay,” for example. What is deeply annoying about all of this is that, as with many other ills LGBTQ+ people are blamed for, we did not start this. Our deep need to tell our stories, to be transparent, to show Pride, is rooted in society’s original injunction to lie.

Pride—marching in the streets—is inherently humble. LGBTQ+ people know what it means to be rejected, misunderstood, and pushed to the margins, yet many respond not with bitterness but with forgiveness, solidarity, and a radical openness to others. Pride dissolves hierarchies: people connect across class, race, gender, religion, and status in ways the wider world struggles to achieve. It asks people to leave their private ivory towers and meet one another in the streets—vulnerable, joyful, imperfect, and human together. In that sense, Pride is less about self-exaltation than about the humble insistence that every person deserves dignity, belonging, and love.

Pride will continue to unsettle some and offend others. We should expect renewed efforts to shame, restrict, or push it out of public life in the years ahead. And yet it remains worth marching. Pride is not merely a celebration; for many LGBTQ+ people, it is survival, solidarity, and a way to push back against shame. The message it carries — that every human being deserves dignity, visibility, and belonging — is universal, even, and perhaps especially, for the crickets of this world.

I hope to see you at the NYC March on Sunday, June 28.