() Pride Month has been overshadowed by sexual exhibitionists, corporate hypocrisy and other factors, says fitness influencer Jillian Michaels.
The gay media personality wrote an op-ed piece this week challenging the modern-day trappings of the June celebration, which she says veer toward the shocking.
“We’ve all seen the footage,” she writes. “Leather daddies in assless chaps simulating sex acts in public. Drag queens twerking in thongs in front of children. Parades that look more like adult fetish conventions than civil rights celebrations.”
She says corporations, meanwhile, pay lip service to Pride Month and roll out rainbow flags and related merchandise while having “no problem doing business in countries where homosexuality is punishable by death.”
Michaels, who married fashion designer Deshanna Marie Minuto in 2022, said Pride Month has moved away from honoring the gay people who demanded change during previous eras.
“It was meant to commemorate the people that we lost to brutality, disease, who were silenced, who were invisible,” she told “On Balance” on Wednesday. “You fought for rights to marry, to adopt kids, to work as a gay person in the public eye.”
She added: “Those days have come, and they are gone.”
Also muddying the waters, Michaels says, are debates over transgender rights.
“We’ve crossed the line from personal liberties and personal freedoms of, ‘Hey, love is love, live your life the way you’d like to,’ to, ‘Listen, if you’re a biological girl, you’re going to have to deal with probably not taking the podium again, because a biological male who identifies as a female is going to kick your ass.’”
In her op-ed column, Michaels suggests swapping Pride Month for a single day of “shared humanity.”
