49 Pride Month Messages (What to Write in a Pride Card)

Who else will read this card?

Start here, because it decides the envelope, the address and half the wording. Cards get opened by flatmates, parents, partners, mailrooms and whoever is standing in the kitchen when the post lands. An office group card is read by the whole team, out loud, sometimes by the manager. A rainbow envelope announces itself through a letterbox before anyone has read a word. None of that makes the card a bad idea. It just means a Pride card has two audiences, the person you are writing to and everyone who might see it first, and the second audience is the one you have to think about.

My friend Robin came out at 41, the previous October, in Sheffield. The following June I bought the brightest card in the shop, wrote the line I had been rehearsing, sealed it, and then stood in my own hallway realising his mum was staying that month and opens his post to be helpful. I bought a plain envelope at the corner shop and felt ridiculous, and then I felt better, because the card inside could say the true thing precisely because the outside said nothing. He rang me about that card. He has never rung me about a card before or since.

So the working rules are simple. Use the name the person uses now, on the card and on the envelope, spelled the way they spell it. Send the card to the address they would choose, not the one you happen to have. In a group card, write to the person, and let them be the one who decides what the card says about their life. And remember the month is long: Pride runs the whole of June, a month of parades and smaller things, fifty-odd years on from the Stonewall uprising of June 28, 1969 and the first march a year later. A card that lands in the first week never reads as an afterthought.

The same rule covers photographs, which matters more every year. A picture of someone mid-parade, posted to a feed their family follows, can do in one tap what a careless envelope used to do. Ask before you post a photo of anyone at Pride, every time, even when the photo is joyful and even when they posed for it. Posing for your camera and consenting to your audience are different decisions, and the second one belongs to them.

For a friend

For the friend who is out, settled and treating June as a season, the job is specificity, not solemnity. They have heard the slogans. They sell them on tote bags. What they have not heard is the sentence that could only be about them, from the person who was actually there for the ordinary parts of their life. Write that one.

• Happy Pride to the person who organises the rest of us every June and pretends it is no effort. We see the spreadsheet. We love the spreadsheet.
• Happy Pride. Watching you be entirely yourself, at full volume, in every room, has recalibrated what I think brave looks like.
• You came out, built a life that fits, and somehow still answer my 1 a.m. texts. Happy Pride. Proud of you in the least abstract way I know.
• Happy Pride. Dinner at yours, your chosen family round the table, is the best night of my year. Save me the seat by the window.
• To my favourite person to stand next to at a parade: Happy Pride. Same spot as last year. I will bring the water, you bring the running commentary.
• Happy Pride. If younger you could see this life, the flat, the job, the people, they would not believe the route. I believed it before you did.
• You are the friend who taught me a family can be built, not just born. Happy Pride. Thank you for building some of yours around me.
• Happy Pride. No speech. Just this: I love who you are, I love who you are becoming, and I am not going anywhere.
• Happy Pride to the only person I know who keeps a spare flag in the car. May June treat you as well as you treat everyone in it.

For a first Pride

The first June after coming out is loud in every sense, joyful and exposing at once, and the cards that land are steady ones. Skip the 'finally' jokes, which bill the person for the years before. Skip assuming the year was either terrible or triumphant. It was probably both, on rotation, sometimes before lunch.

• Your first Pride. I hope some part of this month feels like the parade is for you, because this year it is.
• You told me in November, in your kitchen, like it was nothing, and it was everything. Happy first Pride. I have been proud of you since that night.
• Happy Pride. Whatever this month brings up, good, strange or both, you do not have to carry any of it alone. I am a phone call away, all year, not just June.
• First Pride, and you get to spend it as yourself. That sentence took some getting to. I hope you are enjoying every ordinary bit of it.
• Happy Pride. I will walk with you, stand with you, or wait with the bags and the water. Your call, your pace, your day.
• You do not owe anyone a story this month, or an explanation, or a performance. Happy Pride. Being here is the whole thing.
• Happy Pride. The people who matter are not surprised and are not going anywhere. Count me first on that list.

From a parent

A parent's card carries a weight no friend's card can, which is why the plainest lines do the most work here. If your first reaction when your child came out was not your best one, the card is allowed to say so, briefly and without asking them to comfort you about it. That sentence, the honest repair, is often the one that ends up kept in a drawer for years. A note for parents of teenagers, whose Pride cards are a different genre again: keep it light, keep it ordinary, and let them lead. A fifteen-year-old does not need a position statement from the kitchen table. They need the same boring proof as any other kid, that nothing about their place in the house has moved.

• Happy Pride. You are my child, entirely, exactly as you are. There is no version of you I would trade for another one.
• I did not say everything right when you told me. I have thought about it since, and I would rather say this late than never: I am proud of you, and I love you. Happy Pride.
• Happy Pride. Bring who you love to Sunday lunch. There is a seat, there is enough food, and there always was.
• You trusted me with the truth about your life. Thank you for that. Happy Pride. I am on your side, in June and in every ordinary month after it.
• Happy Pride. I am still learning some of the words. I am not learning whether I love you. That part was never in question.
• I keep the photo of you at last year's parade on the fridge, mid-laugh, flag over your shoulders. Happy Pride. You look like yourself in it. That is the whole compliment.

For your partner

Pride as a couple is part celebration and part logistics, trains and weather and whose flat everyone ends up at. The card can be romantic without turning into a press release about the relationship. Aim for the version you would say in the kitchen, because that is the register your partner actually believes.

• Happy Pride to the person I get to stand next to in the crowd and come home with afterwards. Loving you is the easiest thing I do.
• We get to be us in public, holding hands, mid-laugh, in the photographs. I do not take any of that for granted. Happy Pride, love.
• Happy Pride. Whatever June throws at us, weather, crowds, the last train home, I would rather be in it with you than anywhere else.
• You made my life bigger and braver. Happy Pride. Here is to the ordinary Tuesdays as much as the parade.
• Happy Pride to my favourite plus-one at every wedding we ever attended as 'friends'. We fooled no one. I love you.
• Another June with you. The flags fade, the photographs yellow, and I keep choosing this. Happy Pride.
• Happy Pride. Years from now I will not remember the speeches or the route. I will remember dancing with you in the street like it was ours.

For a coworker, and the office group card

Workplace cards are semi-public by design, so the rule is to follow the person's own lead. If a colleague is out at work, flies the flag at their desk and organises the parade contingent, write warmly and by name. If they have never mentioned Pride at work, do not let a card be the announcement; a general line in the team card, aimed at their work and their presence, says the welcome thing without saying the private thing. Recognition that names something real beats a rainbow on a poster, which is the whole argument of these recognition ideas that actually work.

• Happy Pride Month. Glad to have you on this team, this month and every month.
• Happy Pride. Your work makes this place better, and so does your being in it. Both things, on the record.
• Happy Pride Month from the whole team. The good projects, the calm in a crisis, the biscuits: thank you.
• Happy Pride. Proud to work alongside you. (And grateful for the March deadline save.)
• Happy Pride Month. Whatever you are marching in, hosting or quietly enjoying this June, I hope it is a good one.
• Happy Pride. This office is more itself with you in it, and that seems to be the point of the month.
• Happy Pride Month. Chosen family includes the people who cover your shift. Consider this me volunteering for July.
• Happy Pride. One line in a card full of them: you are valued here, by name, not as a category.

From an ally, without making it about you

Ally lines fail when they audition. The giveaway is the biography: the card that explains your journey, your credentials, your one gay friend from university. Drop all of it. What is left is short, and short is the point. The first line below is the one I actually send, most Junes, to three different people, and it has never once needed a second sentence.

• Happy Pride. I am in your corner, in June and in the months nobody puts on a poster.
• Happy Pride. You will never have to wonder where I stand. Standing with you is not a favour. It is just where I stand.
• Happy Pride. If it ever costs anything to back you, that is my bill to pay, not yours to carry.
• Happy Pride. When I get a word wrong, correct me, and watch me use the right one next time. I would rather be corrected than comfortable.
• Happy Pride. Dinner, lifts, plus-one duties, awkward-family buffering: all available, all year, no invoice.
• Happy Pride. I love the life you are building and the people in it. That is the whole message.

Quiet lines, for when loud is not right

Some Junes are private. A recipient who is not out at home, a workplace where it is complicated, a person who simply does not do parades and crowds and glitter. A plain card, in a plain envelope, with one true line inside, reaches all of them without announcing anything to anybody. Quiet is not a lesser Pride. For some people it is the only available one, and a card that understands that is worth more than a marching band.

• Thinking of you this month. Nothing on the envelope, nothing you have to hide. Just this: I know, I am glad I know, and I am here.
• No flags, no fuss, just a card to say you crossed my mind and I am proud to know you.
• For your June, whatever shape it takes this year: I see you, and I am in your corner. Quietly counts.
• This card says less than I mean, on purpose. You know the rest. Happy Pride, in the way that works for you.
• At your pace, in your words, in your time. I am not going anywhere in the meantime.
• A plain card for a person I think the world of. The plainness is the privacy. Everything else is inside it.

These lines also travel outside June, which is worth remembering in the other eleven months. Support that only shows up when the flags do is a seasonal product. A quiet card in November, when nothing is being celebrated and the year is just hard in the ordinary way, tells the person the June version was not a costume.

Lines to leave out

Good intentions do not survive these lines, because the recipient hears the clause you hoped they would skip. If a draft of yours contains any of the following shapes, the fix is not a softer version. It is a different card.

'I may not agree with your lifestyle, but happy Pride anyway.'

'You don't even look gay!'

'So when did you decide to be... you know?'

'Love the sinner, hate the sin.'

The first one makes the card a debate, and the 'but' is the part that gets remembered. The second ranks the person against a costume they never agreed to wear. The third treats a life as a decision, and a card as an interview. The fourth imports a verdict into a greetings card, whatever you intended by it. The same bin takes the old name used 'as a joke from before', any question about bodies or surgery, and the line copied off your employer's Pride poster into a personal card, which reads as exactly what it is.

If the honest version of your card is the first one, because you and this person have real ground to cover, write the repair instead: Happy Pride. I love you, and I am still learning. Both are true, and the first one is bigger. It admits the distance without charging them for it.

Turn it into a group card

Pride is one of the few occasions where the group card is not a compromise but the correct instrument. Chosen families are scattered across postcodes and time zones, work teams are hybrid, and the parade contingent group chat has forty people in it. A group card with multiple signers lets every one of them write their own line, in their own register, instead of one person being volunteered to speak for the whole crowd. You can create a card online in a couple of minutes and send the link round; people sign from trains, night shifts and other continents.

Two practical notes from the office end. A team card works better when somebody sets a deadline and a tone, which is the unglamorous machinery behind most group greeting cards that actually land. And if half the chosen family is in another country, pair the card with the call: a virtual celebration on parade day, card first, faces after. The card is the part that stays readable in October.

The umbrella from Robin's first parade is still by our front door. It cost nine pounds from a stall outside the station, rainbow panels, one spoke bent by the wind on the walk home, and it has been the house umbrella ever since, mostly for ordinary rain on ordinary days. Twice a year someone suggests replacing it. It is still there, bent as ever, and the first one anybody grabs.