PRIDE in Our Beloved Community

Pride Sunday 2026 at First Parish, est. 1716

"Queer Resilience" was the title of our congregation's Pride Sunday service this morning, which our minister began with the poem A Protest and a Party by Rev. Hannah Roberts Villnave. It begins:

People sometimes ask:
Is Pride a protest
Or a party?

And the answer is
Of course
Yes.

I invite you to read the rest of A Protest and a Party on the UU World web site, where it was published last June, though it was first published about a decade ago. From the web page, I learned that the author is the minister of Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Appleton, Wisconsin -- where we will be visiting cousins in just a few days, as I write this. 

Our minister next read the picture book Stitch by Stitch. I include my entire brief review here because Goodreads links are sometimes glitchy. 

Stitch by Stitch: Cleve Jones and the AIDS Memorial Quilt by Rob Sanders

Before our minister read this book to our congregation as part of our Pride Sunday service, she said that it had moved her to tears while she was reading it in a public library earlier in the week. I should have gone to fetch a tissue when she said that, because my eyes are famously leaky, and indeed, this moved me in the same way.

I knew something of the story of the AIDS quilt, having seen a large part of it when it was traveling the country in sections. This small book catches the spirit of those tragic times and tells the very personal story of the man who initiated the quilt and those who helped him bring it to fruition.
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Our service was co-led by a young parishioner who shared their own story, both underscoring the importance of PRIDE and offering a poignant comparison between the AIDS crisis of the 1980s -- which they learned as history -- and the current crisis. Back then, they said, the government let the disease do the heavy lifting, while today it is attacking the queer community directly.

Lagniappe: Pride Sunday with the Poet 

As hinted above, we managed to have two Pride Sundays, a week and a thousand miles apart. As mentioned above, the author of "Queer Resilience" is a minister in our favorite Midwestern town, and was leading a Pride Sunday service there today (June 14, 2026). 

We did not hear the poem again, but greatly enjoyed the service, including her message and that of a parishioner as well as some deeply moving original music. 

Fox Valley UU Fellowship

How Many Gables? Seven.

 Note: this is simply my Goodreads review, but accessing such reviews through social media is no longer simple, so I'm reposting the review here. Also, I really like this related photo!

A famous house and several of its gables, framed in currants
From my Two Days in Salem folder on Flickr

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We started visiting Salem (north of Boston) pretty regularly when we moved to Bridgewater (south of Boston) in 1997. We drove or walked by the House of Seven Gables many times, always saying we should go there "some day" but not getting around to it until 2024, when we decided to spend part of our spring break in this fascinating city with important family ties (my wife being a direct descendent of Rebecca Nurse).

It was such a good house tour that I wanted to take the tour again immediately when we were finished -- so many twists and turns and more architectural and historic tidbits than I could keep in my brain from just one visit. And that was without having ever read the book.

We put the book on our list, and eventually it moved to the top. We thoroughly enjoyed the audio version -- laughing far more often than I expected to. It is a low-key gothic tale in which the horror is rather subtle and the humor quite clever. Having been in the house -- and knowing therefore what a "gable" actually is and how much the gables of the actual house have evolved led me to visualize the story more vividly than otherwise I could have.

One of our favorite photos of the house has it framed in currant bushes -- which were bearing fruit at the time of our visit. It was nice to hear them mentioned specifically almost any time the gardens are being described. Much is made throughout the book of a "cent shop" -- I am particularly interested in seeing if I am remembering that part of the tour correctly.

The book opens with a long discussion of sordid events said to have taken place on the property BEFORE the house was built -- a sordid tale of woe related to the aforementioned witch hysteria. When Hawthorne ends this back story by explaining that it sets the context for the real story of the house, we both exclaimed "opening snippet" because it reminded us of so many television shows in which a huge complicated story plays out before the opening credits.
I highly recommend both the book and the house tour. I'll be visiting again and rereading after such a visit!

Language note: the book includes many interesting turns of phrase. It also uses the word "epoch" more times that I would typically hear the word in a couple of years. In the audio book, it is pronounced the way I usually don't pronounce it.

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