Pride is Political: Survival in the Digital Era

By Jess Smolinski, Creative Manager

This Pride, I want to tell a story about survival in the digital era. About the ways that LGBTQ+ people use digital spaces to connect and to become. 

Growing up in a conservative Midwestern state as a repressed queer kid posed many challenges and my exposure to adults and peers living openly and proudly was borderline nonexistent. Without role models to encourage my self discovery, I was left to my own devices on the family computer. As a result, digital spaces were, for better or worse, the first places I found queer community, the first time I met people who subverted gender like me, and who loved regardless of gender like me.

But before we can talk about finding community, we have to talk about who is being left out of it. LGBTQ+ people are incarcerated at rates far exceeding their share of the general population. According to Moncies Franco, Dream.Org’s Minnesota Empathy Network Leader, the underreported numbers are staggering.

 

"One in six transgender people have been incarcerated at one point in their life. And when you break that down to Black transgender people, fifty percent have had histories of incarceration and fifty percent have not."

 

Those numbers represent people who entered a system that wasn’t designed to protect them but they’re expected to survive it. And when that system releases people back into the world, the work of rebuilding identity and community has to start somewhere.

Justin Allen, the New Mexico Campaign Coordinator for Dream.Org, identifies as queer. He says it with intention, because for most of his life, he couldn't. Growing up in the South Valley of Albuquerque in a conservative household, queerness was derided. Justin describes a home where MTV was dismissed as "narcotics and sissies jumping around." The message was clear. To survive, he learned to hide.

That hiding followed him into incarceration. Justin was never out while inside. He kept that part of himself carefully concealed, not because he didn't know who he was, but because visibility felt dangerous.

 

"Despite concealing those parts of myself, I was still a subject of abuse by correction staff and administration who tried to out me. When I think about LGBTQ+ identity and finally being free, this is the first time in my life I can say that I'm queer openly without feeling like there are consequences behind it."

 

Moncies' story carries a similar weight. Born in St. Paul to a Mexican American family steeped in machismo, he grew up in a world where toughness was currency and vulnerability was weakness. He came out later in life, after a marriage and becoming a father. "I learned how to become who people wanted me to be before I ever learned who I actually was or had the space and opportunity to discover that for myself.”

Then, when Moncies went to prison, he identified as gay on the intake where they chose to quarantine and question him. One officer boldly stated they were less worried about Moncies’ safety because he wasn’t a blue eyed blonde haired “twink”. The biases of being gay in prison started right at the gate but, through the difficulties, Moncies found himself a beacon of safety for other incarcerated LGBTQ+ people.

“Some people came around and started to share bits and pieces of themselves. I think that I became a safe space for people to share their experiences. And out of that, a sense of community was born.”

After incarceration, he began using his story as a tool to dismantle shame around HIV. He then helped pass Restore the Vote in Minnesota in 2023, which allows people impacted by the criminal legal system to vote after incarceration without waiting additional time. "I was a visible person in this fight for health equity around people living with HIV and also a criminal justice reform advocate. Where it once was a mark of shame for me, now it's a credential."

Justin describes how connecting with like minded individuals and being in community with people loving people was a key to freedom. "Digital spaces were often some of the first places I could find community, information, and a sense of belonging. A sense that I wasn't alone, or that I wasn't crazy sometimes.” For many queer people, especially those navigating additional barriers, the internet has functioned as the first unlocked closet door.

That sense of not being crazy is easy to overlook until you understand what its absence feels like. For Moncies, the digital path to community was longer and more complicated. He traces it back to chat lines before social media existed, then Craigslist, then eventually Facebook, each platform representing a big step toward visibility.

Justin is candid about the fact that many formerly incarcerated people avoid social media because it can feel like being watched. The internet is not a replacement for real community. It acts as a rehearsal space. It’s where queer people practice being themselves before the world feels safe enough to do it out loud. And for people who have been incarcerated, for whom visibility can feel like surveillance, that rehearsal space is important.

Justin resisted at first when his family encouraged him to get on social media, but the connections he made changed what was possible in his work. The Unlock Civics curriculum he brought to New Mexico jails was created by formerly incarcerated people in Chicago. He could not have found it, adapted it, or built relationships with its creators without digital spaces bridging that distance.

I asked Justin what he would say to a young queer person who feels alone right now. He didn't hesitate. 

 

"You are not what they call you. You are what you survive." 

 

He talked about how labels become internalized, how they calcify into identity and then into limitation. He called himself a felon for years and let it become the reason he couldn't.

"I see this internalization of labels that become barriers for us and even handicap us a lot of times." Justin reclaimed the word queer the same way I have. He told me it used to be used against him. "I understand the power of words," he said, simply.

Moncies tells an emotional story about a Facebook message that made a lasting impact. "I had to give myself permission to find community. And one of the messages that really attracted me was your community is waiting for you. I thought, wow, I never really had anyone that was waiting for me.”

That's the thing about community, it rarely arrives all at once. It comes in pieces. A comment from a stranger online that makes you feel seen. A curriculum someone built in Chicago that finds its way to a jail in New Mexico. A chat line. A Facebook post.

If you are reading this and you feel alone, know that community is waiting for you too. It may be in a digital space. It may be somewhere you haven't found yet. But it exists, and you are allowed to look for it.

Pride is not a single month. It is an ongoing act of resistance, and for many people we work with, it is inseparable from the fight for criminal justice reform, health equity, and economic opportunity. We cannot fight for justice-impacted communities without fighting for the LGBTQ+ people within them. We cannot build a more equitable world while leaving the most impacted out of the conversation.

The gap in representation is not accidental. It is the result of systems that have always preferred their subjects to be one thing at a time, easy to categorize, easy to dismiss. I refuse that framing. Digital spaces, for all their noise and imperfection, have given queer people a place to exist before the rest of the world was ready to let them. This Pride Month, we honor that.

Happy Pride 🏳️‍🌈