Pride is our community’s response to the closet, our response to shame. Many LGBTQ+ people grow up with the feeling, experience, or belief that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love. We must always remember that Pride was born of resistance to relentless and potentially crushing pressures—to conform, and not to love ourselves. It was born not only from the kind of visible resistance seen at Stonewall, but also from the kind that allows us to forge belonging, connection, meaning, and truth, even as the struggle for equality continues. Pride reminds us to take the sand and the shell and make a pearl.