You can feel it happening again.
People are growing more careful. More measured. Watching what they say in public. Deciding where it feels safe to hold hands, speak openly, or simply exist without attracting attention.
For many LGBTQ+ people in Florida, especially during this year’s Pride Month, there is a familiar pressure settling back into the air. Not always direct. Not always spoken aloud. Still, it lingers.
Be less visible.
Less public.
Less yourself.
Most of us know what that does to a person over time.
You start editing yourself before the world even asks you to. You shrink preemptively. You learn how to scan a room before relaxing inside it. Entire communities become exhausted from calculating what version of themselves feels safest in a given space.
That exhaustion carries a spiritual cost.
Human beings were not created to disappear themselves in order to survive.
Pride Month has never only been about celebration. At its core, Pride has always been a refusal. A refusal to accept shame as the price of belonging. A refusal to live hidden. A refusal to surrender visibility simply because it makes other people uncomfortable.
That refusal matters now.
The life of Christ consistently moved toward people society preferred to keep hidden, women, lepers, tax collectors, sex workers, and the socially rejected. He encountered them publicly, visibly, and without apology.
Because of that ministry, even the disciples eventually found themselves living under pressure and threat. Retreat and silence probably felt safer.
The Spirit answered that fear with a resounding no.
They kept going. They kept preaching, gathering, healing, and refusing to disappear, even when empire pushed back, even when visibility carried a cost.
Communities like Wilton Manors carry some of that same courage now. Not perfect courage. Human courage. The kind that keeps showing up anyway.
Not everyone can safely live fully visible. Some people are still surviving circumstances that require caution. That reality deserves compassion, not judgment.
Still, no one should ever be pressured into erasing themselves.
A healthy society does not demand invisibility from the people it claims to value.
And communities like Wilton Manors exist because enough people, over enough years, decided they would no longer disappear just to make other people comfortable.
Father Rich Vitale is an Old Catholic priest, writer, and media creator whose work focuses on resilience, spiritual practice, and emotional health in a hyperconnected world. Through his publication Message from the Margins, he blends theology, psychology, and lived experience to help people stay grounded without abandoning reason.
