👹 what the heck is the 'Pride Demon'? 👹

QUEER WORD
PRIDE DEMON

What It Means:

a meme originating from an image shared on social media featuring the all-caps words ‘PRIDE MONTH’ repeated four times. Row by row, letters disappear from either side until only the word ‘DEMON’ remains. The extra layer to this meme is that, depending on who's sharing it, it can be either queerphobic or ironic (or maybe even both at the same time?).

Let’s Use It In A Sentence:

It was the 31st of May, and Janice could feel their inner Pride Demon awakening...

A Little Bit of History

Sometimes the real world is far stranger than any fiction.

And this is definitely one of those times.

Our story begins during Pride Month in 2021, when a Christian publisher called Sword-In-Hand Publishing shared an image intended as an anti-LGBTQIA+ statement to social media.

At the top of the image sat the caption:

‘a little hint at what dwells at the heart of “Pride Month”’

The graphic below this text showed the words PRIDE MONTH repeated several times, with letters gradually disappearing until only the word DEMON remained.

Not exactly subtle.

Unfortunately for its creator, it didn’t quite have the effect I think they were hoping for.

Yup, you guessed it. People immediately started mocking it.

Within days, screenshots of the image began circulating on Reddit, Twitter and Tumblr, where people openly poked fun at its outright ridiculousness. 

It gained a fair bit of attention, but perhaps not quite enough to be considered truly viral. People shared it, laughed at it, briefly marvelled at the absurdity of it, and then largely moved on.

A Twist in the Tale

A little while later, a queer, non-binary artist called Art by Veya created their own version of the design to sell on their online merch store.

Except this time, Instead of ending with that overly dramatic, fire and brimstone blood-red ‘DEMON’, the final word appeared in rainbow colours.

I can't speak for the artist's motivations, but my assumption is that they saw an opportunity. The original image was already circulating because people found it ridiculous, so why not lean into the joke, make it explicitly queer, and stick it on a t-shirt?

Only then, things started to get a little confusing. The line between parody and sincerity began to blur.

The Parody Escapes Containment

A few years later, in 2023, American far-right political commentator Lauren Witzke shared the rainbow version of the graphic with her followers.

Which is all well and good, except the version she shared was the parody.

So, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page here.

A queer artist had jokingly reclaimed the image, only for it to be shared unironically by someone who appeared to believe it supported their argument.

Layers upon layers of nonsense. The original insult became a parody, which was then mistaken for the insult all over again.

And, just like in 2021, the response was almost immediately biting and delicious.

Because Witzke had a larger following, thousands of people who had never seen the original image were suddenly introduced to Pride Demon.

People created fan art. People made t-shirts. People edited the image to spell other words. Some began joking about summoning the Pride Demon every June. Others simply shared it because, frankly, it looked kind of cool.

At that point, the cat was well and truly out of the bag.

Pride Demon no longer belonged to the people who created it.

It belonged to the messy, petty people of the internet.

So What’s the Lesson Here?

Perhaps the lesson is simply ‘don’t trust the people of the internet not to mock you’, but I like to also think that there’s something a bit more generous buried in there too.

Because, in its own (very silly) way, Pride Demon speaks to the resilience of the queer community.

Throw insults at us, and we’ll find a way to subvert them, laugh at them, and strip them of their power.

The word ‘queer’ itself is probably the most obvious example. Once used to wound, it’s now a word many of us wear proudly.

Pride Demon is, admittedly, much stupider than that.

But the impulse is the same.

If someone tries to make us sound scary, dangerous, or corrupting, sometimes the best response is to slather that insult in glitter and claim it as your own.