As far as willfully ignorant hot takes go, “Why isn’t there a straight pride month?” is top 5. It’s likely rolling out in waves on X/Twitter even now. While it’s a question that’s well worth ignoring, for the sake of absolute clarity, we’ll answer it: You don’t get a “straight pride” month because your federally guaranteed right to marry isn’t less than 10 years old. You don’t get it because you didn’t lose people you loved, perhaps even many people, in the AIDS epidemic. And you don’t get it because you’ve very likely never been discriminated against, arrested or assaulted simply for loving who you love. Pride Month exists because it was fought for and earned.

André Wade, state director of Silver State Equality—a Nevada organization dedicated to winning and upholding the rights of LGBTQ people—doesn’t think that Las Vegas, and Nevada as a whole, are innately homophobic. “I would like to think that we are more enlightened than that,” he says.

But the struggle for equality in Vegas does sometimes turn ugly, as it did last winter when a 62-year-old man was beaten down in the Arts District by assailants shouting gay slurs, and as recently as last month with the deadly shooting of an 18-year-old transgender girl, Jazlynn Johnson.

There’s much more to be done, both here in Southern Nevada and across the U.S., Wade acknowledges. But he’s hopeful. He cites the 2021 passing of Nevada SB148 through the state Legislature—a bill that requires law enforcement agencies to submit monthly records of hate crimes to the Central Repository for Nevada Records of Criminal History—as a positive move and adds that local businesses and organizations have been receptive to teaching on how to stop discrimination before it appears.

“Over the past 20-some odd years, in what we call the equality movement … we’ve been doing a lot of work in talking to different institutions and providing training on LGBTQ+ competencies. That’s child welfare, juvenile justice, law enforcement, schools, health providers, the whole gamut—[getting] them prepared and ready to receive clients and have interactions in ways that are less discriminatory,” Wade says. “We’re starting to see people automatically being inclusive of LGBTQ+ folks when they’re doing their work, and I think it’s a result of all these trainings [we did] on the hospitality side.

“We have a federal grant we’re getting off the ground now that’s focused on public education around hate crimes,” he adds. “Essentially, it’s letting people know how to identify [a hate crime], how to report it if they see it or if they’re a victim, and then giving information to the general public about numbers to call and figuring out what the reporting actually looks like.”

If you’ve witnessed such crimes or been a victim yourself, once you’re out of immediate danger, you should reach out to the LGBTQ Center of Southern Nevada (thecenterlv.org) and/or Silver State Equality (silverstateequality.org). And if you’d like to do something proactive, consider donating to these organizations, or at the very least visit Silver State’s “elections” page, where they offer pro-equality endorsements and even include a list of openly LGBTQ candidates. Do some good for your LGBTQ friends, coworkers and family members, and you can feel like you’re part of Pride Month, too.

“We want people to be allies,” Wade says. “It can be as easy as seeing something and reporting it, or helping someone who’s in distress. It could be people going into their own places of employment and advocating for better policies and procedures. And it’s also about having difficult conversations with family members. Maybe not necessarily changing people’s minds in that moment, but just starting to plant seeds.”

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