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.
View all my reviews

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.