Celebrate Pride Month: No Kings, but bring on the queens!

It's June, and it's Pride Month in the United States, and there will also be Pride celebrations and observations across the globe on various days of the month.

And, as usual, large swaths of folks are deeply and chronically offended by all of that. To give but one example, the notorious Heritage Foundation, perpetrator of Project 2025, published a screed in 2022 by a Dr. Jay Richards, Director of the DeVos (familiar name, yes?) Center for Life, Religion, and the Family. Dr. Richards foamed at the mouth about drag queens reading books to kids, to which he pointed as clear evidence that the LGBTQ+ movement had officially dedicated itself to sexualizing our precious children, so Pride Month had, in his opinion, truly jumped the shark. (The very premise of jumping the shark was flawed, because Pride Month had never been anything to celebrate in the eyes of the religious and political right.)

Of course Richards and the Heritage Foundation were and are far from the only members of the American Reichosphere to be so profoundly aggrieved by men in wigs and makeup sharing literature with the littles. They're all still bitching about it to this very day.

It's not just the bogus fears about victimization of the kiddos; the Reich is offended by Pride Month in general. Just a couple of days ago the New England Patriots got blowback for posting a simple Pride celebration message online. And due to pressure from the Trump "administration" and the Turd Reich in general, numerous big brands in America have seriously pulled back from their own Pride celebrations. That's how intimidation (and fascism) work. I could go on and on, but examples of Reich-ous indignation over Pride are all over the Interwebs.

Not that any of this comes as any surprise, for the Pride party poopers are the very same ones who also righteously rail against Black History Month, Women's History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, and any month or week or day or other period of time set aside to acknowledge any marginalized population. Anything that even remotely hints of diversity/equity/inclusion, or DEI, sets them off.

DUI is A-okay, though! And DonOld Trump's most notorious DUI hire, Offense Secretary Plastered Pete Kegsbreath, has chosen to kick off Pride Month by demanding that a Navy ship named after the slain gay rights icon and Navy veteran Harvey Milk be renamed. From Military.com:

A defense official confirmed that the Navy was making preparations to strip the ship of its name but noted that Navy Secretary John Phelan was ordered to do so by Hegseth. The official also said that the timing of the announcement -- occurring during Pride month -- was intentional.

But it's all in the service of a very noble cause, according to the official Navy narrative.

...the memo reviewed by Military.com noted that the renaming was being done so that there is "alignment with president and SECDEF objectives and SECNAV priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture," apparently referencing President Donald Trump, Hegseth and Phelan.

Besides, in the interests of being an equal opportunity hatriot, the Kegster is also apparently nudging SECNAV to rename several other ships that currently honor various people of color, women, and civil rights heroes. So it's all perfectly all right; they're not just picking on the dead queer guy.

"Why isn't there a Straight Pride Month? It's not fair!"
Whenever the official celebration of any marginalized or minority group rolls around, the Righteously Offended step up and proclaim that in the interests of fairness and equality there should also be an official celebration of the parallel non-marginalized or majority population. Pride Month, which of course honors the LGBTQ+ population, is no different, and from various parts of the Reichosphere we are hearing, once again, the customary loud whines that there is no Straight Pride Month. Somebody call the waaaaaahmbulance!

For those who really are too dense to get it, USA Today on June 2, 2025 offers a simple explanation, one of numerous analyses that can be found all over the Internet.

For the second year in a row, a bar in Ohio is offering deals for "Heterosexual Awesomeness Month," and lawmakers from the state have proposed a "natural family month" that explicitly excludes LGBTQ+ families and celebrates only families led by straight men with children. Utah passed a bill to become the first state to ban Pride flags from flying on any government property, though Nazi flags were allowed, and Idaho passed a similar one.

More than 500 bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community have been proposed in 2025 alone, about 2 in 5 corporations are decreasing recognition of Pride Month out of fear of retaliation from the Trump administration and hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community, especially transgender people, are on the rise...

The article quotes a journalist and non-profit organization founder who patiently explains that marginalized groups such as LGBTQ+ have been systematically written out of history, excluded, and made invisible. The vast majority of people in the U.S. identify as heterosexual, and their norms are widely reflected in mainstream media. The majority don't need a special day or month; every month is already by default "their" month anyway.

Pride Month is becoming more important than ever as the LGBTQ+ population faces increasing threats to their health and safety and their very lives under Trump 2.0. It's worse in some states than in others, but pretty bad all across this great land of ours.

Globally it's getting worse as well due to the rise of reich-wing authoritarianism.

What's truly offensive is the Tangerine Toddler's birthday parade
By now nearly everyone has heard of a planned fascist military parade through the streets of the Capital on June 14, ostensibly to celebrate the US Army's 250th birthday and possibly Flag Day, but also coincidentally falling on Mango Mussolini's 79th b.d. From MSN, June 4, 2025:

Of course, plenty of people aren't buying the notion that this isn't actually meant to be a birthday bash to match Trump's blockbuster ego. While appearing on "Steve Bannon's War Room" podcast, former Fox News host and current U.S. Ambassador and Chief of Protocol Monica Crowley explained, "June 14 is a special day. Of course, it's the president's birthday, so I'm sure the crowd will break out into a 'Happy Birthday.' Providential. And it's also Flag Day, Steve. So, meant to be. Hand of God, Hand of God, for sure." She added that tickets are free on the America250.org website.

A major military parade on the president's birthday, during which the crowd sings "Happy Birthday" as tanks roll by, destroying the streets of the Capitol, has some sinister optics. Still, according to Crowley, "it means a lot to the president." 

"Sinister optics" doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. Heck, even the Baptists know it's a very, very bad idea. An April 14, 2025 opinion piece on Baptist News Global site counted the ways. Among the 20 reasons listed:

4. Authoritarian optics. This would mirror regimes like North Korea, Russia and China, not democracies.
6. Veterans want support, not spectacle. Many vets say they’d rather see improved VA services than pageantry.
7. Politicizing the armed forces. Such an event risks eroding the military’s apolitical stance.
15. Trump’s record of disrespecting the military. Trump infamously referred to fallen U.S. soldiers as “suckers” and “losers” — raising moral concerns about parading troops in his honor. Additionally, he did not serve.
20. No modern president ever has done this for himself. Even Ronald Reagan, a fervent military supporter, never organized such a display. The last major military parade (1991) honored the Gulf War victory, not a birthday.

But the show, and the snow, will no doubt go on.

Fortunately the Resistance is really doubling and tripling down on this one, planning many dozens of "No Kings" demonstrations in cites and towns across the USA on June 14 (follow the link in this sentence to find a demonstration near you). There are even several events planned for my neck of the backward woods, East Texas. That's how pissed off people are getting.

And here's a little song to celebrate their pissed-off-ness. There ain't no kings in the USA!

But there are plenty of gays, like the adorable Randy Rainbow. And there are plenty of other non-heterosexual, non-binary, non CIS-gender folks whose rights matter every bit as much as those of the majority.

So this month, let's celebrate love and laughter -- nonviolently, of course! -- in hopes that those celebrations overshadow the hate and the fascism and even the Big Birthday parade.

Related on this Whirled:
June 2015 -- Love wins, but hate is still throwing tantrums over there in the corner: A celebration of the June 26, 2015 decision by SCOTUS to legalize same-sex marriage across the country. Clearly it's a right that couldn't be taken for granted back then, and is in serious danger now.

Before you leave...
While money cannot make some personal nightmares go away, it can make them far easier to bear. With my husband Ron's passing, I have experienced significant income loss and am scrambling to find more work, but in an industry increasingly being taken over by AI, it has been a challenge. Now more than ever, donations are urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to do it:

• New: Venmo -- username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link to the Venmo page.
• New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to my PayPal page.
• Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, as well as the link in this sentence, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.

NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal, please specify that your contribution is for "friends and family," which will waive PayPal's substantial transaction fee.

Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting this Whirled.

Hiding your eyes won't make it go away

 

And here we are on the cusp of June, with another month having flown by -- in some parts of the world, May 2025 is already history -- and I'm just under the wire to keep my nearly 19-year-old commitment to posting at least once every month. As usual, my lack of attention to this Whirled is not due to a paucity of material; on the contrary, there's entirely too much potentially blogworthy stuff whirling around me, to the point where I could pluck just about any item from that ever-growing list and turn it into a reasonably well-thought out rant.

But my focus has been elsewhere as I continue to adjust to life after losing Ron. A week ago today, the 24th, marked the three-month anniversary of his death, and the grief always seems to hit hardest on anniversaries. Today wasn't an anniversary, but the sad hit me anew when I was out on the back deck this morning, looking at the sturdy work bench that Ron had built, as well as a smaller table that he had fashioned from a door. The latter served as our coffee table for years, and then it became a piece of outdoor furniture, which is now badly in need of refinishing.

Ron built and otherwise created so many beautiful things in his life, and I just got overwhelmed again by his absence. So I sat down and bawled my eyes out for a while, and then finally got up and cleaned up a pungent pile of dog poop that my ancient hound Roxanne had thoughtfully deposited on the deck earlier.

Story of my life.

Momentary escapes
I will say that the emotions around last week's anniversary were somewhat mitigated by the fact that my best friend drove all the way out to my hideaway behind the Pine Curtain and whisked me and my little dog Dobby off to her and her husband's lovely home in the Hill Country for the Memorial Day weekend. Not only did Dobby and I get to spend time with someone we dearly love, but I also fell in love with the Hill Country all over again. I mean, really in love. It's not the most verdant part of Texas, but it has a wild beauty of its own that even the egregious over-development hasn't yet destroyed.

And as a bonus, my friend and I got to meet her new neighbor, who is a bibliophile and animal lover like we are, and has also been recently widowed and knows exactly what I'm going through.

It wasn't the first time that my bestie had rescued me for a holiday; previously I'd spent the Easter weekend with my friend and her delightful family at their other home in my former neck of the (literal) woods, aka The Edge of Nowhere. The graphic above was created from a picture I snapped on one of my friend's artfully designed wooded trails that weekend.

Those two interludes were a most welcome respite and they renewed my strength. But there's still so much to deal with -- practical matters as well as things that are brewing just beneath the surface, such as unanswered questions about Ron's death that haunt me.

What dreams may come...
I haven't had a lot of dreams about Ron since he's been gone, at least that I can remember. This may change as time goes by; I've lost very close loved ones before -- my dad, my mom, my sister -- and my dreams about them after their deaths have all followed different schedules. I do, however, wake up many mornings with vague impressions that Ron was flickering in and out of my dreams, but rarely has there been a dream that left a lasting impression.

There was, however, one particularly vivid dream that I experienced shortly after I returned from my Easter weekend in the magical forest. I hadn't spoken of the dream to anyone until last week when I told my best friend about it. It was so real and so haunting that it has taken some time for me to process it.

First, some context. I haven't publicly written about Ron's medical journey in a great deal of detail; I'm saving that for the Substack or new blog that is still in the planning stages. But I have mentioned here and on my Facebook timeline that he developed some very puzzling medical problems in the last few weeks of his life.

Although his brain was messed up from the Lewy body dementia, and he had lost a lot of weight for reasons that his care teams were never able to figure out even after a battery of lab tests and X-rays and scans (oh, my!), he was otherwise still quite vigorously healthy. And he was strong -- too strong, as I found out in some truly frightening ways -- and also very, very mobile.

But he was a very mobile person with no place to go, and that was a source of unending frustration for him. As I've also mentioned, he was constantly trying to find ways to escape from his various places of confinement, first from the VA hospital, where he actually broke a hospital window one day, and later from the locked memory care unit at the VA-approved nursing home. In both places, he kept the staff on their toes, and that's an understatement.

Most of the time, however, even in those later months, he was affable and actually tried to be helpful to the staff and to his fellow patients/residents when he wasn't creating mayhem. But his violent episodes became more frequent; he tried to attack fellow residents as well as staff a few times, and had to be "redirected" and/or medicated. Sometimes I was notified about these incidents; other times I wasn't and only found out about them later.

Then things took a much more serious turn on January 20, a day that will live in infamy not only because of what happened to America, but also because of what happened with Ron.

On that morning, a nursing home staffer called me to get my permission for them to give Ron a vaccination against RSV, which was making the rounds of the nursing homes and could have made him extremely ill if he contracted the disease. I gave my consent for the vaccine, but I never found out whether or not he actually got it, because a few hours later I got another call from the nursing home about something else entirely.

Ron had had a particularly violent episode, and the nursing home staff had determined that they could not handle it there, so they had him transported and admitted to a "behavioral hospital" -- a mental institution -- in Pasadena, Texas, the same city where the nursing home is located.

This was all done before I was notified, and I didn't have a chance to try to get him taken back to his original care center, the VA hospital in Houston. I never was able to find out why he wasn't taken there; perhaps the beds were all full. In any case, he was at the behavioral hospital for a little over two weeks.

I was never able to visit him there, because I had no transportation and their visiting hours didn't sync with that of the free VA shuttle, which I had been taking when going to visit him. But I did try to keep in close communication with the staff about what was going on. As had been the case at the VA and the nursing home, Ron was, according to numerous conversations with staff, very mobile and a definite "elopement" risk.

He was finally discharged from that hospital and sent back to the nursing home on February 6. And the very next day the nursing home called and said he was found in his room that morning, having fallen out of his wheelchair and being unable to get back up. But he was okay, I was told.

Wait, what? Wheelchair?!?

Yep. According to the nursing home staff member, Ron was unable to walk or even stand up on his own after he got back from the behavioral hospital. Nobody seemed to know why.

Things went downhill from there. On Valentine's Day, a staffer called me and wanted to talk about hospice care. I was shocked. Hospice care?!? I consented to having a phone conference about it, scheduled for a few days hence. But on February 16, before we had a chance to have the conference, Ron was found unresponsive in his bed, and the nursing home sent him to another Pasadena hospital -- and it was the hospital that actually called me; the nursing home didn't. He was there for nearly a week, during which I spent days and nights at his bedside, and I signed him up for hospice care.

And he was discharged back to the nursing home, where he died on February 24.

The question remained: What had happened to him at the behavioral hospital that had accelerated his physical decline? They did change his meds, so clues to the mystery might very well be there. In any case, I have a bunch of questions that I haven't yet had time to pursue.

But Ron, or the dream fairy, or perhaps just my own troubled mind, won't let me forget this matter.

"Find out what happened..."
In the dream I had shortly after Easter, I was visiting Ron at some sort of medical facility. It wasn't any of the places where I had visited him in real life: not the VA hospital, or the nursing home, or the other hospital he was admitted to shortly before his death. I had never been to this facility before, but in the dream I figured out that it was the behavioral hospital.

I walked through several long hallways, asking for the way to his room, and I was given directions but only grudgingly, it seemed. Several people told me that I really shouldn't be there. "I'm here to see my husband, and I'm going to see him!" I kept saying. Finally I got to his room, and was astounded by what I saw.

I had been expecting Ron to either be in a room by himself, or at least a room with one other male roommate. But this was a big room with a bunch of beds. It wasn't like a regular hospital ward, with the beds arranged neatly in rows; rather, they were scattered willy-nilly around the room. Most of the beds were occupied, and people were milling about the room.

Even more weird, the room was co-ed. I passed one bed where a woman, who was obviously one of the patients, was sitting and having a session with what seemed to be a psychiatrist or therapist, right out there in the open where anyone could listen in. That was a little disturbing. Did confidentiality mean nothing there?

But I still couldn't find Ron. I asked a couple more people who seemed to be staff members where he was. Again I met resistance. One person who was apparently a nurse glared at me and told me firmly, "You don't need to be here!"

"Oh, but I do," I said. "I have to see my husband!"

Finally I spotted Ron, sprawled out across his bed, his legs hanging over the sides. He was naked. I rushed to him and found a sheet to cover him up, then began talking to him while the nurse person glared at me for a while longer before she wandered off and found someone else to glare at. Ron was mostly out of it; he barely opened his eyes, and didn't seem to recognize me.

I kept talking to him, but he only responded with whispers or mumbles that I couldn't quite understand. I leaned closer to him so I could hear him better, but I still couldn't understand a word he was saying. But I still kept talking to him, and finally some words came out that I did understand.

He said, "Find out... please find out."

I responded, "Find out what?"

"Find out... what happened to me here. Please!"

And then the dream faded, like they always do. But it didn't fade from my memory.

What does it mean?
The Occam's razor explanation, preferred by skeptical purists and other practical sorts, would be that my very vivid dream simply reflected deep concerns I already had. But I'm not quite the skeptical purist that I once was, and while I'm certainly willing to accept the Occam's razor version, I'm equally willing to consider that maybe Ron was really sending me a message. What I do know is that I want answers to this medical mystery. And I do intend to pursue those answers.

Before I got Ron's death certificate, I was expecting that the cause of death would be listed as acute respiratory failure, or something related to his heart (he started having heart problems after he got back from the behavioral hospital). To my consternation, the cause of death was listed as "senile degeneration of the brain." Which sounds totally bogus to me, and in fact a long-time client, turned friend, who is a retired physician, agreed that it sounded like bullshit. People almost never die of dementia; they die with it. Dementia might be a factor in events leading to their deaths, but it's almost never a primary cause.

There hadn't been an autopsy, and now the physical Ron has been reduced to a box of ashes that is sitting on his desk in our office. But I still have questions.

For now, though, I'm having to deal with so many other things, and there's so much to do, and so much to face, and so much that I just cannot face yet. I will face it all in time; these things take time, or so I'm told. As it is now, I still sometimes want to put my hands over my eyes and pretend that the nightmare of the past few years never happened.

But in the words most often credited to the (rightfully) much-criticized actor Johnny Depp, though they've also been credited to Anonymous: "You can close your eyes to the things you don't want to see, but you can't close your heart to the things you don't want to feel."

I'm certainly not trying to close my heart. But sometimes, sometimes... it gets a little overwhelmed, and I feel that I need to shield it from itself.

Before you leave...
While money cannot make some personal nightmares go away, it can make them far easier to bear. With Ron's passing, I have experienced significant income loss and am scrambling to find more work, but in an industry increasingly being taken over by AI, it has been a challenge. Now more than ever, donations are urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to do it:

• New: Venmo -- username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link to the Venmo page.
• New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to my PayPal page.
• Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, as well as the link in this sentence, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.

NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal, please specify that your contribution is for "friends and family," which will waive PayPal's substantial transaction fee.

Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting this Whirled.