(Photo courtesy of Brothers of the Desert)

By R. Ayité Okyne, article from The Drumbeat July 2026*

I watched the fireworks from a rooftop in Hollywood last July, surrounded by men I love, and I thought about the particular quality of silence that falls over a group of gay men when the national anthem plays.

It is not disrespect.

It is something more complicated: the body bracing itself against a story that was never quite written for us.

We are taught, all of us, to feel a swell of pride on the Fourth of July. Independence. Self-determination. The right to pursue happiness on our own terms.

But that story has always had missing chapters.

This country declared freedom while people were still enslaved. It celebrated liberty while Black bodies were bought, sold, separated from families, and worked to exhaustion. It spoke of equality while women could not vote, Indigenous people were displaced, immigrants were demonized, and generations of gay, queer, and trans people learned to survive by hiding the very parts of themselves that most needed tenderness.

So when some of us feel complicated on Independence Day, it is not because we hate joy. It is because we know what it means to be handed a promise and then told to wait.

For many of us in this community, the pursuit of happiness has come at the cost of family dinners we were not invited to, jobs we quietly left before anyone could ask questions, hometowns we now visit as tourists in our own childhoods.

I think often about the men who write to me after a workshop or session, men in their fifties and sixties who still flinch when a hand brushes theirs in public. Not because they are ashamed. Because forty years of conditioning does not dissolve the moment a law changes.

Independence, for us, was never declared once and settled. It has been negotiated in increments: a marriage ruling here, a city ordinance there, a workplace policy there, a fragile sense of safety that still depends too much on which state line, family system, church, workplace, or neighborhood you happen to be standing in.

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And we are seeing, even now, how quickly rights can be questioned, narrowed, delayed, or taken for granted. Voting rights are still being contested. Racism still shapes whose bodies are treated as threatening, whose grief is believed, whose history is taught honestly, and whose pain is dismissed as “divisive.” Queer and trans people are still turned into political talking points by people who have never had to live inside the fear they casually create.

There is a particular loneliness in that kind of freedom. It arrives unevenly, and it arrives late, and by the time it reaches you, you may have already built a whole architecture of self-protection. Freedom on paper and freedom in the nervous system are two very different inheritances.

So what does it mean to celebrate a freedom you have had to win in pieces, in private, often alone?

I do not think the answer is cynicism. I think it is something closer to clarity.

The fireworks are still beautiful. The barbecue is still good. The laughter still matters. But there is a version of patriotism available to us that holds the contradiction without flinching from it.

We can love a country and still name the parts of it that did not love us back.

We can celebrate independence and still grieve the enslaved people who were denied it, the Black citizens who had to fight for the vote long after freedom was supposedly granted, the queer elders who did not survive long enough to marry, hold hands, transition safely, or be seen without shame.

This is not an argument for withholding joy. It is an argument for a more honest joy. The kind that does not require us to pretend the road here was simple. The kind that lets a man sit with his discomfort during the anthem instead of performing enthusiasm he does not feel. The kind that makes room for the brother still not out to his mother, alongside the one throwing a party with a rainbow flag on the porch.

Independence was never a single moment for us.

It is a practice.

Something we keep choosing, body by body, conversation by conversation, year after year, long after the fireworks have stopped.

That, to me, is worth celebrating.

*The Drumbeat, a monthly newsletter of the Black Brothers of the Desert, Palm Springs California

(Contributed by Calvin Harris, H.W., M.)