I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, June 30th.

Well, here we are on June 30th, the last day of Pride Month and three days out since the pride protests and pride parades

that usually mark the last weekend in June. And with the question, more center stage than in most

years of which one of those two things, parades or protests, or what combination, is best for

the community and best for the world for pride to actually be.

Let's get a take on how that all went and what it means from Zach Stafford, an MSNBC opinion

columnist who recently served as editor-at-large for BuzzFeed, was the first black editor-in-chief

of the big LGBTQ publication, The Advocate,

and has worked as an investigative journalist at The Guardian.

His two latest articles are called,

Is Pride 2021 for Getting Its Anti-Police Violence Roots?

And this Pride Month, LGBTQ people deserve gay rights, not a temporary logo.

Zach, great to have you. Welcome to WNYC.

Thank you for having me. It's great to be here to talk to you about all these very gay things

on our last day of pride. Indeed. Well, let's start on your temporary logo piece.

And let's do the sort of fun part first, if that's okay. It starts with

you saying, if you had walked around your local hometown Walmart as a kid and seen a rainbow

flag, you believe you would have come out earlier. So what is your hometown? And what's the

commercial scene that you're describing now as you reference places like Arkansas and Texas in that

piece? Yeah, so I am from Tennessee. I'm from north of Nashville on the Tennessee-Keducky border

and not a very big place. It's a town called Hendersonville within Sumner County. And in

southern cities, in southern counties, Walmarts are kind of our town squares.

...