You arrive, as you always do, while the glitter is still settling.

The flags are coming down this week off the storefronts on Main Street, off the porches in the Avenues, off the profiles of companies that will not think about us again until next May. The parade route has been swept clean. The festival stages are broken down and loaded into trucks. And we are still here, in Utah, in America, in 2026, carrying everything we carried into June plus whatever June added to the load.

So let’s talk.

Pride Month was beautiful. It genuinely was. Tens of thousands of people filled the streets of Salt Lake City and said, loudly, by their presence alone: we exist, we belong, we are not going anywhere. There is real power in that. There is something that happens in a crowd of queer people — the recognition, the exhale, the reminder that you are not, in fact, alone in this state — that cannot be reduced to politics or dismissed as spectacle. We needed that. We always need that.

But you are not June.

You are the month when the rainbows stop feeling like a promise and start feeling like a reminder of the distance between symbol and substance. You are the month when the Utah Legislature is gone but its work remains — in classrooms where teachers are still measuring their words, in school libraries where shelves are still thinner than they were three years ago, in the lives of transgender youth who watched this last session from the gallery and came home with less than they arrived with. The bills get signed or they get defeated, but the kids are still here in July, still navigating a state that cannot decide whether to protect them or erase them.

I am watching the school board races. I need you to know that. The decisions being made in district offices across the Wasatch Front — in Davis County, in Utah County, in Washington County — will shape the daily reality of LGBTQ students far more than the words of a publisher. These are the elections that feel small and aren’t. These are the rooms where the fight actually lives.

I am watching the rural communities, the ones that never make the festival photos. The kid in Cedar City. The couple in Vernal. The trans woman in Juab who is building a life in a place that is just beginning to figure out how to see her. Pride Month belongs to them too, but the infrastructure, the community centers, the affirming counselors, the chosen family — those things are still scarce once you get past the Wasatch Front, and that is a failure we have not fixed and cannot stop talking about just because June is over.

I am watching Washington. I do not need to tell you it has been a difficult few years at the federal level. What I will say is this: the policy fights happening in D.C. land differently when you live in a state that has not always acted as a backstop. Utah has surprised us before — in both directions. We cannot afford to stop paying attention.

And I am watching us. Our community. The ways we include and the ways we exclude. The conversations about race and class and gender that are harder than holding a sign in a parade. The LGBTQ Utahns who are also members of the LDS Church, navigating a faith that has not finished deciding what it thinks of them. The bisexual and nonbinary and asexual community members who are still sometimes treated as afterthoughts in our own spaces. July is a good month to look inward without the pressure of performance.

Here is what we are carrying into you: hope that is not naive, anger that is not exhausted, and love for this community that is, frankly, stubborn enough to have survived everything Utah has thrown at it.

We are not done. We were never done. June just reminded us why we started.

Take care of our people, July.

We will be watching.