This week we hand over to Dáithí C., a trans/nonbinary person living with dementia, to hear their experiences during Pride Month.
Queer to the Grave: What 52 Pride Marches Mean to Me as a Trans/Nonbinary Person Living with Dementia
In 1974, I came out into a world that did not particularly want people like me to exist.
The language was different then. The dangers were different too. In those days, queer life was often lived in fragments: coded conversations, hidden bars, whispered introductions, dangerous friendships formed in the shadows of respectability. We learned early that survival itself could become an act of political resistance.
I could not have imagined, at that moment, that more than half a century later I would still be marching in Pride events around the world as a trans/nonbinary elder living with dementia.
And yet here I am.
This year marked my 52nd Pride march.
Over the decades, I have marched in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Brussels, Rio de Janeiro, and many other places in between. Some Prides were enormous spectacles pulsing with hundreds of thousands of bodies and impossible joy. Others were small, fragile community gatherings held together with determination and homemade banners. Sometimes Pride looked less like a parade and more like a picnic in Indianapolis, Indiana, where queer people gathered simply to prove to one another that we were not alone.
I remember supporting the first Pride march in Bratislava, Slovakia, where courage hung in the air as tangibly as fear. I remember Rio de Janeiro, where the crowds seemed endless and exuberant, a human river of colour and sound stretching beyond the horizon. And most recently, I marched in Brussels among more than 200,000 people — young people, elders, drag artists, disabled activists, leather folk, families, asylum seekers, lovers, trans teenagers, and queer elders like me who have somehow survived long enough to become living archives.
Every Pride contains ghosts.
We march with those who did not survive AIDS. We march with trans women murdered by violence. We march with those who died estranged from their families, criminalized by their governments, erased from history books, or institutionalized for being “different.” We march with the frightened younger selves we once were.
As someone living with dementia, these acts of collective remembrance have become even more important to me.
People often speak about dementia as though it is only a process of disappearance. The dominant cultural narrative insists upon decline, diminishment, and tragic vanishing. But my experience has been far more complicated than that. Dementia certainly affects memory, language, confidence, orientation, and everyday functioning. There are names I lose. Details I cannot retrieve. Stories that arrive incomplete.
But identity is not stored only in perfect recall.
Identity also lives in the body.
It lives in ritual.
It lives in music.
It lives in community.
It lives in the feeling of seeing a Pride flag and instantly recognizing yourself in it.
Even now, when I stand at a Pride march and hear chants echo through the streets, something ancient inside me awakens. My body remembers decades of resistance. It remembers dancing. It remembers fear. It remembers desire. It remembers solidarity.
Queer memory is often communal rather than individual.
For LGBTQIAP2S+ people of my generation, many memories were formed collectively because we had to build ourselves collectively. Families rejected us. Governments ignored us. Religious institutions condemned us. Medical systems pathologized us. So we became one another’s historians. One another’s caregivers. One another’s witnesses.
That matters enormously for people living with dementia.
In dementia care, there is often an assumption that memory is private property located solely within an individual brain. But queer communities have long understood another truth: memory can be distributed across relationships, places, symbols, songs, and shared political struggle.
At Pride, other people help carry my memories when I cannot carry them alone.
Someone plays a disco anthem from the 1970s and suddenly I am twenty again. Someone mentions ACT UP and an entire emotional landscape returns. A younger trans person hugs me and calls me “elder,” and I remember that surviving long enough to age openly as queer was once unimaginable for many of us.
Pride reminds me that I still belong to something larger than dementia.
That may be one of the most important things of all.
Too often, older LGBTQIAP2S+ people living with dementia become isolated from queer spaces precisely at the moment we need them most. Disability, stigma, inaccessible events, poverty, institutionalization, and ageism all create barriers to participation. Some of us retreat because we fear becoming burdensome or invisible. Others enter care systems where our genders, histories, partners, or identities are ignored altogether.
And yet Pride remains a radical site of recognition.
Not despite dementia, but alongside it.
When I march, I do not march as someone who has somehow transcended dementia. I march as a person living with dementia whose life remains valuable, political, queer, relational, and unfinished.
There is something profoundly healing about standing in a crowd where difference is not merely tolerated but celebrated. For one afternoon, entire cities reorganize themselves around queer existence. Streets close. Flags rise. Music erupts. People who have been told all their lives to disappear instead become gloriously visible.
For trans and nonbinary people living with dementia, that visibility matters.
Our stories are still rarely told.
Most dementia research continues to assume heterosexual and cisgender life histories as the default. Care systems often overlook the realities of chosen family, trans embodiment, queer trauma, HIV survivorship, social exclusion, and lifelong experiences of stigma. Even now, many LGBTQIAP2S+ elders fear entering services where they may need to hide themselves again in order to remain safe.
But Pride tells a different story.
Pride says: you are still here.
Pride says: your life mattered.
Pride says: your memories belong to a collective history larger than any single brain can contain.
And perhaps that is why I keep marching.
After more than fifty years, Pride is no longer merely an event I attend. It has become part of the architecture of my identity. A recurring act of remembrance. A declaration that queer lives — including queer lives shaped by dementia — deserve joy, dignity, complexity, rage, tenderness, sexuality, care, and public presence.
I came out in 1974 believing, like many queer people of my generation, that survival itself might be temporary.
Instead, I have lived long enough to become an elder.
Long enough to witness astonishing social change.
Long enough to develop dementia.
Long enough to keep marching anyway.
And that, in itself, feels like Pride.
Happy Pride, everyone.
Dáithí (they/them)
Flanders in Belgium
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