Pride Month is long behind us, the dust settled on all those temporary rainbow avatars, so it is high time for a cold, honest look at what Pride actually stands for. This is not some thirty-day marketing carnival on the calendar - it is an everyday, 365-days-a-year battle for the right to exist without being jammed into society's suffocating little boxes. When you hit the streets alongside thousands of other non-normative people unapologetic about who they are, something almost magical happens: the daily gender dysphoria and chronic anxiety triggered by living in a queerphobic world take a total back seat. For a few hours you feel untouchable, tapping into genuine main character energy, knowing that this city belongs to you just as much as anyone else. Too bad networks like TV Republika are terrified of running our footage in the main broadcast, unless they can crop it into cheap ragebait for their audience.

The earliest Pride events were never gentle, sanitized family picnics - they were raw street riots against police brutality and institutional oppression. Fast forward to today, and we are forced to watch this celebration of freedom get hijacked as a free marketing platform. On one side, corporate ghouls run shameless pinkwashing schemes, slapping rainbow decals on their social logos for four weeks just to flog branded junk at an absurd markup, while ignoring queer rights for the rest of the year. On the other side, sleazy politicians shove their way to the front of the march, farming free PR and photo-ops off our backs. Human rights marches are not campaign rallies or nationalist parades. Let us state this bluntly: party banners, political electioneering, and national flags have zero place at Pride - whether that is the Polish flag, the Ukrainian flag, or any other flag on earth.

The loudest moral panic, of course, always erupts over alt culture, leather, latex, and kink at Pride. Online hypocrites froth at the mouth screaming about „degeneracy”, collars, and fetish gear, completely wiping historical reality from the record. From day one, the BDSM community and queer people shared the very same underground, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder for basic bodily autonomy - especially during the devastating AIDS crisis, when communities had to forge their own safe, stigma-free pathways to intimacy. Capitalism and moral purists want to scrub Pride clean until it is a sanitized, neutered husk that will not offend the delicate sensibilities of conservative shoppers: you are allowed to march, provided you dress like an accountant and do not step out of line. But whenever an oppressed group concedes to safe boundaries dictated by their oppressors, those boundaries immediately start shrinking.

The absolute peak of hypocrisy is weaponising „protect the children” as an all-purpose excuse. Self-righteous moral guardians have full-blown meltdowns over someone wearing a harness or cat ears, hypersexualising alternative fashion that any responsible parent could explain in two simple sentences about individuality and self-expression. Yet these same people see absolutely no issue with fundamentalist hate vans roaming Polish streets unrestricted - plastered with giant, graphic photos of bloodied, dismembered fetuses while blasting horrific accusations of murder and pedophilia through loudspeakers outside schools. If anyone genuinely believes that a person in latex harms a child more than mutilated shock imagery and hate speech broadcast into residential streets, they do not give a single damn about kids. „Protecting children” is nothing but a cowardly smokescreen for pure bigotry against anyone daring to exist outside the norm.

The real harm inflicted on young people is not seeing someone dressed authentically on the street. The real harm is grooming children into hatred, drilling into their heads that any deviation from the norm makes them broken, and churning out another generation of bitter adults programmed to run witch hunts. What is truly catastrophic is that queer kids growing up under this relentless harassment learn to despise their own bodies and question their right to live. The world is diverse, and the streets belong to all of us. Pride is an uncompromising refusal to vanish or let ourselves be sanitized by terrified conformists. We are not going back into the closet, and we will never squeeze into your corporate boxes.