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Sometimes we talk about queer joy like it’s something you have to go looking for.
Book the trip. Buy the ticket. Find the gay bar. Wait for Pride Month to roll around again.
But this week’s Slay Weekly has us thinking about all the queer joy that’s already right here.
Closer than we think.
It’s on Brookline Boulevard, where neighborhood businesses hung Pride flags and basically said, Of course we’re celebrating. You’re our neighbors.
It’s inside a love story written by two Pittsburgh women who fell in love here themselves.
It’s printed on paper and waiting to show up in your mailbox.
And hopefully, it’s somewhere in your life right now, even if it’s something so small you haven’t thought to call it joy yet.
Tomorrow marks the autumn equinox. The days are getting shorter. Summer is officially handing over the keys. So maybe this is a good moment to get a little more intentional about noticing the good stuff around us.
Queer joy isn’t always waiting somewhere over the rainbow. Sometimes it’s right down the street.
Happy Monday, Pittsburgh. Let’s slay the week.
SLAY OF THE WEEK: Brookline Rolled Out the Rainbow Carpet
There is something incredibly charming about a neighborhood’s first Pride celebration.
Especially when the neighborhood’s response seems to be: Well, obviously we’re participating.
Brookline held its inaugural Pride on September 12, bringing rainbow flags, performances, community organizations, and 16 Pride Stops to Brookline Boulevard.
And the businesses showed up.
There were Pride shirts and photo booths. Free STI testing. A cappella performances. A Coming Out Booth where people could record their stories. There was even a poet with a manual typewriter writing improvised love poems for same-sex couples.
But what really stuck with us was how ordinary the welcome felt.
Brookline isn’t Pittsburgh’s gayborhood, not by a long shot. It isn’t a tourist destination people immediately associate with LGBTQ+ culture.
It’s a neighborhood.
And when Pride came to the Boulevard, businesses throughout that neighborhood essentially responded with “Of course. These are our people, too.“
That’s the kind of queer belonging we love.
Not acceptance treated like some enormous favor. Not inclusion accompanied by a press conference and twelve paragraphs congratulating yourself for being inclusive.
Just neighbors welcoming neighbors.
Sometimes progress looks like rainbows everywhere. And sometimes it looks like nobody thinking the rainbows are particularly unusual.
Brookline, we’re giving you a little fuss anyway.
That’s a slay.
SHARE YOUR JOY: Tell Us Something Good
Okay, Pittsburgh. Your turn.
We know something good happened to somebody reading this.
Maybe it was big.
You got engaged. You came out. You landed the job. You celebrated an anniversary. You finally did the thing you’ve been talking yourself into doing for months.
Or maybe it was wonderfully, beautifully small.
Your crush texted back. Your dog did something cute. You found five dollars in an old jacket. A stranger complimented your outfit. You had dinner with somebody you love and laughed until your face hurt.
That’s the stuff we want.
Reader Joy isn’t about having the most impressive story.
It’s about noticing those little moments that make being alive feel pretty damn good and sharing some of that happiness with the rest of us.
So tell us something good. Send us your Reader Joy, big or small, and you might find yourself right here in next week’s Slay Weekly.
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Queer Joy, Delivered
While we’re talking about finding queer joy close to home, how about finding some literally at your front door?
Every month, we put together a new edition of the QBurgh newspaper filled with LGBTQ+ news, community, history, arts, culture, and plenty of queer Pittsburgh. Plus a crossword puzzle and a cartoon!
And you can have it mailed directly to you. No hunting down a copy. No discovering somebody grabbed the last one from your favorite pickup spot.
Just a fresh QBurgh showing up in your mailbox every month like a little bundle of gay newsprint saying, “Hey. You’re part of this community, too.“
And your subscription does more than deliver queer joy. It helps support QBurgh and the independent LGBTQ+ journalism we work hard to produce all year long.
So treat yourself. Support queer media. Get some queer joy delivered.
Subscribe to the QBurgh newspaper today.
Queer Joy in the World: Pittsburgh Gets the Girl
September is for sapphics. We don’t make the rules.
QBurgh’s Jami put together a Sapphic September reading list featuring lesbian vampires, queer history, messy exes, underwater danger, and enough yearning to keep your library card extremely busy.
But there’s one book on the list we’re feeling particularly Pittsburgh-proud about.
She Gets the Girl by local authors Alyson Derrick and Rachael Lippincott.
They’re also wives. And they met while attending the University of Pittsburgh.
Yes. The Pittsburgh lesbian romance was written by an actual Pittsburgh lesbian romance.
We love literature.
She Gets the Girl follows Alex and Molly, two college students who agree to help each other win over the girls they’re crushing on.
We will give you approximately three seconds to guess how well that plan works.
Even better for local readers, the story unfolds around Pittsburgh, offering that delightful experience of recognizing your own city inside a queer love story.
There’s something especially joyful about that. Queer stories don’t always have to happen somewhere else. The romance can happen here. The authors can live here. Pittsburgh gets to be part of the love story, too.
And She Gets the Girl is only one book on Jami’s Sapphic September list. We’ll leave the toxic lesbian vampires for you to discover yourself.
Go build that TBR pile.
Here’s our assignment as fall begins: Look closer.
Queer joy has a habit of turning up in unexpected places.
Maybe it’s hanging from a storefront on Brookline Boulevard. Maybe it’s inside a novel where streets you’ve walked become the backdrop for two women falling in love. Maybe it’s waiting in your mailbox. Maybe it’s the tiny thing that happened to you this week that didn’t seem important enough to tell anybody.
Tell somebody anyway.
Joy doesn’t have to be enormous to matter. Neither does belonging.
Sometimes all it takes is walking down your neighborhood’s main street and seeing a Pride flag in the window. Sometimes it’s opening a book and recognizing home.
Sometimes it’s realizing somebody thought enough about queer people like you to make something, write something, host something, print something, or hang a rainbow outside and say, “Of course you’re welcome here.”
Tomorrow, summer officially becomes fall. The light will keep getting shorter for a while. So let’s get good at noticing where it still shines.
Look around. Something good might be closer than you think.
Take care of each other out there, Pittsburgh. And seriously, send us your joy.
We’ll see you next Monday.
Talk soon.
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