As Pride Month celebrations ramp up amidst surging COVID-19 cases, immunocompromised and disabled LGBTQ+ individuals are facing difficult choices about participation and safety.

“This year, I feel more unsafe than ever in general and I feel unsafe with non-disabled queer people because it feels like Pride is right back to where it was before [COVID-19],” said Charis Hill, a Sacramento, Calif.-based trans disabled writer and activist living with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) since 2019, a systemic inflammatory condition that often impacts joints.

Additionally, Hill’s medication to treat their axSpA has caused them to be immunocompromised since 2013, making gatherings like Pride Month events a major health risk—not to mention in addition to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Hill hasn’t celebrated Pride since 2019.

“There are no mask mandates, there’s no mention of air filtration and events are packed in enclosed spaces,” they said.

COVID-19′s contagion in the U.S. has been on the decline since the winter season, though as summer travel gains traction, public health experts are on the alert for signs of yet another summer spike in cases. While data remains to be unclear on how COVID-19 impacts the LGBTQ community overall, a new Omicron variant is on the rise that could bar many community members from healthily and safely celebrating Pride.

An acronym of its comprised amino acids—phenylalanine (F), leucine (L), arginine (R) and threonine (T), the “FLiRT” variant currently makes up for 65% of COVID-19 cases today. Meanwhile, Pride Month celebrations and the June heat overall tend to bring out crowds in parks, clubs, bars, vacations and especially summer music festivals.

LGBTQ adults, trans adults in particular, were reported to be significantly more likely than non-LGBTQ adults to self-report having at least one disability, according to a 2020 survey conducted by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a nationally representative survey of adults across the United States.

That same year, deaths of those without intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) showed that COVID-19 was the third cause, following heart disease and cancer, according to a 2020 report by the Disability and Health Journal. Meanwhile, the number one cause of death for those with disabilities that year was COVID-19. And while research is still limited, studies are investigating the direct impact of COVID-19 on disabled peoples.

Today, rising queer pop singer Chappell Roan’s lightning-speed launch into stardom has only continued to garner more and more fans—a majority of whom are LGBTQ. Over the Memorial Day weekend weeks ago, she drew a crowd of over 40,000 people who came for her set at the Harvard Athletic Complex for the Boston Calling festival. Recently, her set at New York City’s music festival Governor’s Ball had crowds jam-packed at Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

In the Boston Calling and Governor’s Ball safety pages on their websites are no mentions of COVID-19 precautions or mask mandates. Even searching for “COVID” on Boston Calling and Governor’s Ball both lead to zero results. These are just two of various ongoing festivals without COVID-19 precautions, let alone other forms of larger public gatherings.

Pride Month is a time for celebration and community, but with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the emergence of new variants, the potential health risks for queer, trans, and nonbinary individuals—particularly those who are immunocompromised or disabled—are a pressing concern.

While many revel in the joy of dancing at crowded clubs or enjoying live music outdoors, the risk of infection and severe illness looms large. Immunocompromised individuals are especially vulnerable, facing potential hospitalization or long-term complications from even mild COVID-19 cases.

The question arises: how can the LGBTQ+ community balance the desire to celebrate and connect with the need to protect its most vulnerable members? As Pride events unfold across the country, this question becomes increasingly urgent, prompting discussions about safety measures, accessibility, and the responsibility to prioritize the well-being of all community members.

Feelings of betrayal and disappointment over lack of community care

Casey Wait feels angry and forgotten, not being able to participate in Pride events this year, mainly attributing to the great deal of health damage COVID-19 has done to everyone in the world—especially non-able-bodied people.

Based in Western Massachusetts, Wait, a nonbinary, immunocompromised, chronically ill and physically disabled public health educator, hosts the podcast “Sickos,” where they share the day-to-day realities of managing illnesses and the political dimensions of disability.

“It’s been really disheartening to see how quickly people, especially within more radical left queer spaces, were ready to take the CDC at its word when the public health emergency ended in spring of last year,” Wait said, stressing that community members have had histories of not trusting the government, and therefore found it discombobulating to see people suddenly quick to discard masking practices.

Wait, who has contracted COVID-19 nine times, four of which were in 2020 alone, believes that some people abandoned of COVID-19 safety measures after the CDC’s announcement last year because it was simply what people wanted to hear.

“Of course, I wanted that to be true, too, that the pandemic was over,” Wait said. “But as someone who’s had COVID-19 nine times—most of those times being post public health emergency mask mandates—I know very, very well and intimately that the pandemic has never ended.”

The irony, Wait told Reckon, is that watching people from their social media celebrate Pride unsafely is like watching people directly contributing to their sickness.

Balancing celebration and safety: Navigating Pride with COVID-19 concerns

Joseph Osmundson, a queer author of “Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between,” and clinical associate professor of biology at NYU wonders if it is purposeful or subconscious that many are forgetting how COVID-19 changed the conditions of the world in 2020.

For Osmundson, the journey COVID-19 has taken on in the past four years “is one of using science as a method of curiosity, as opposed to an ability to answer questions now and forever,” they said. During the first rollout of the vaccine, it showed 95% efficacy for preventing symptomatic COVID-19, but the evolution of variants made immunity short-lived.

“I think people are going to have to forever be more thoughtful and curious about risks of respiratory infection than they were prior to this experience we all lived through,” Osmundson added.

They tell Reckon that via HIV/AIDS, COVID-19 and mpox, there remains a tension between sexual pleasure and infectious disease for the LGBTQ community.

“[COVID-19] is not to be pathologized,” they said. “The risk of infectious disease can never be eliminated. You can never get rid of it entirely.”

Osmundson adds that people should especially focus on how to be thoughtful about the risk of infectious disease while seeking pleasure when socializing. This can look like wearing masks while traveling or in tight and closed-in spaces, Osmundson said; staying up to date with COVID-19 vaccines once a year; taking advantage of safe outdoor events.

Spaces like NYC Inferno Party, a local LGBTQ sex party in New York, have championed the multiplicity in providing social gatherings responsibly—even utilizing contact tracing, which is the process of identifying, tracing and managing those who have been exposed to someone infected with the COVID-19 virus as a way to effectively mitigate further spread.

Aside from the risks of COVID-19 itself looms a much more affecting disease: long COVID, a condition wherein COVID-19 becomes a chronic illness with symptoms that can last weeks, months, years or even be ongoing.

“We still don’t know what the health impacts [of long COVID] will be in five, ten, 30 years,” said Hill, who believes queer, trans and nonbinary people should be leading the charge to prevent COVID given their history mitigating the HIV/AIDs crisis. “Instead, we’re letting COVID spread unmitigated as a community. Ask yourselves: what message does that send?”

Kenyon Farrow, an HIV activist and communications director of AVAC, a nonprofit organization working with equity in biomedical prevention, says that diseases in the LGBTQ community has a trend of intercommunal mobilizing around epidemics, pandemics and endemics—including the mpox health emergency in 2022. HIV/AIDS alone killed over 100,000 people throughout the 1980s, according to the CDC’s report.

Frustrated with today’s circumstances, Hill questions event organizers on who, amongst LGBTQ people, really belong at Pride.

“If the answer is everyone, then you should do everything possible to reduce barriers to participation. Yes, that includes masking. Yes, it includes air purification. Yes, it includes testing,” they said, using the Dyke March as an example of queer social organizing that has required testing and masks with no damage to its attendance.

Creating safer spaces: Efforts to mitigate COVID-19 risks at Pride events

While many mainstream Pride events have forgone requiring or encouraging masks, like the Los Angeles Pride on June 9, some organizers are requiring masks at events.

Just last week, Abbey Alison McClain, co-founder and curator of the Queer Art Salon (QAS) in Washington, DC, took it to Instagram to note that an event she hosted this week mandated masks.

“The queer—and collective—liberation includes those who are disabled, immunocompromised and those who may require additional layers of protection for events,” she told Reckon, noting a particular privilege that comes with their work: “art galleries are rarely crowded.”

Despite both Hill and Osmundson expressing feelings of hopelessness about a full swift change within LGBTQ crowds to mitigate safe and accessible practices, Osmundson notes that the sooner event organizers regularly re-include healthy systems, the better.

Ramps, reduced price or free tickets, sensory-friendly spaces, ASL interpretation and masking and outdoor COVID-19 mitigations are all examples of accessibility measures, and “a failure to make pride accessible sends a clear message: you don’t see queer disabled people as members of the community,” Hill said.

While Pride events are not on their radar, demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine have felt safer for Hill, who mentions having attended because “people were there for justice, whereas Pride is more of rainbow capitalism.”

Disability organizations like Crips 4 Palestine have annotated guides on reliable collective care, access and disability in organization. Their recent guide provides an extensive blueprint for all organizing that can be adopted by many, from clear masking expectations to the consideration of needs of those observing daily and/or holiday-specific spiritual customs.

These are some of what LGBTQ organizers, like Crips 4 Palestine, are doing to be inclusive towards and protect disabled, immunocompromised and chronically ill people for Pride:

• Requiring masks
• American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters
• Paved, level and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)-compliant sidewalks, pathways and ramps
• Non-metered street parking or being transparent about financial information
• High weight capacity chairs and tall-seated chairs
• ADA-compliant bathrooms or free rides from hosts to and from the bathrooms
• Inviting those with mobility devices to lead or set pace of a march
• Slowing down on chants to allow proper, full breaths
• Making worded labels illustrations
• Safety team for emergencies

Hill stresses that implementing safety measures for disabled, immunocompromised and chronically-ill LGBTQ people actually benefits everyone regardless of ability, health and gender and sexual orientation—especially when diseases like COVID-19 can affect anyone anywhere. Referencing the work of disability activist Alice Wong, Hill puts it frankly.

“Access is love.”