What Are You Looking At? Or the Judgements We Still Make

Monday, July 13, 2026

Happy Monday, my friends! Now that we’re a few weeks from Pride Month we can reflect on the ups, the downs, and the weird. We can consider what we saw, we heard, and what might have caught us unawares. One of the dynamics I love about the Queer community is our ability, collectively, to find new and to show up at Pride parades and festivals, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t find myself judging the people, outfits, and general tenor of some of the individuals who show up at Pride. For better or for worse, I have ideas of what certain people “should” wear, how certain people “should” carry themselves, and, generally, how my community “should” conduct itself. After almost 20 years out, at least half of those involved in LGBTQIA+ advocacy, you’d think I’d have excised my internal middle-age suburban soccer mom. Alas, sometimes she comes out at the wrong times.

Pride festivals have a way of (re)surfacing things we didn’t know were still living inside us.

I’ve been attending Pride events for years, first as a baby gay, then as a professional, and now as a pastor too. I’ve marched, tabled, preached, prayed, and celebrated in diverse Pride spaces. I am, by any reasonable measure, exactly the kind of person who should feel entirely at home at Pride. And mostly I do. But “mostly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

When I’m honest with myself, there are moments at Pride when something flickers across my mind that of which I’m not proud. A quick internal recoil at someone wearing a harness. A passing judgement about how much skin is showing. A split-second thought that amounts to “That’s a little much.” It arrives before I can stop it, and it departs quickly, but it was there. And I’ve learned that the things that arrive before we can stop them are usually worth paying attention to.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: when we judge what other people are wearing or how they’re presenting themselves, we’re almost never really talking about them.

We’re talking about ourselves. We’re talking about the parts of ourselves we’ve learned to hide; the desires we’ve been told are too different, too strange; the expressions of self we’ve tamped down in order to be acceptable to our families, our churches, our communities, or the culture at large. The discomfort we feel looking at someone else’s freedom is often the echo of our own captivity.

Jesus had something to say about this kind of judgment: “‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.’” (Matthew 7:1-5 NRSVUE).

But it’s one thing to know it and another to feel it land in the middle of a Pride festival.

The LGBTQIA+ community has spent generations being told that how we dress, how we present, how we love, and how we exist is too much. Too flamboyant. Too visible. Too sexual. Many of us internalized those messages so deeply that we now deliver them to each other. We police one another’s expression with the same tools that were once used to police ours.

What would it look like to extend to others the same grace we needed someone to extend to us? What would it mean to let someone else's freedom be exactly that — theirs — without it threatening anything about our own?

I don’t think the goal is to never have a reaction. We’re human beings with histories, and those histories show up whether we invite them or not. The goal, I think, is to get curious about our reactions rather than simply acting on them. To ask: what is this judgement telling me about me? That question, practiced honestly, is one of the most quietly transformative spiritual disciplines I know.

Pride, at its best, is an invitation to that kind of honesty.

What judgements do you notice arising in yourself, about others or about yourself, that might be worth getting curious about?

Let us pray: God, you made us in your image: every body, every expression, every person who has ever had to fight to exist freely in the world. Forgive us for the ways we have turned the tools of our own oppression against one another. Help us to be curious about our reactions rather than captive to them, and to see in the freedom of others an invitation into our own. Give us the courage to examine what we carry and the grace to set it down. We ask this in the name of Jesus, who welcomed everyone the world had decided was too much. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +