Pride This Year: Standing in the Crowd, Standing in My Own Skin

Pride This Year: Standing in the Crowd, Standing in My Own Skin

This photo is a thumbnail, not a documentary. I'm shirtless, glasses on, staring into a camera with an expression somewhere between worried and stubborn. Behind my shoulder you can see the Red House in Ximending, a police car with its lights running, rainbow flags bolted to a building, a megaphone, a protest sign — and pasted in on the right, Istanbul at dusk, minarets cutting into a bruised sky.

Two cities. One question. Are we going backwards?

I've been sitting with that question since Pride this year. Not because anything dramatic happened to me personally. Because of what I noticed while standing in a crowd of people who had all decided, for one afternoon, to be visible on purpose.

What I actually saw

I kept my clothes on at Pride. That's not what that day is for, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But I watched.

I watched a kid, maybe nineteen, in a hand-painted sign and borrowed boots, holding it above his head with both arms like it weighed something. I watched two older women in matching shirts walk slowly at the edge of the route, holding hands, not performing anything for anyone. I watched a drag performer fix her eyeliner in the reflection of a parked scooter, completely unbothered.

And I watched the police car. Parked at the corner, lights on, not moving. Nobody was doing anything wrong. The lights were just there, the way they're always there now.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Not the flags. The lights.

Why a naturist keeps showing up to Pride

People ask me this sometimes, and I understand why. Naturism and Pride aren't the same thing. They don't have the same history, the same demands, the same risks.

But they share one root, and it's a root I care about more than almost anything: the idea that a body is not automatically a problem.

That's it. That's the whole thing. When I take my clothes off at a beach or in a sauna or in front of a camera, I'm not making a statement about sex. I'm making a much smaller, much more stubborn statement: my body does not need to be hidden to be acceptable. It doesn't need to be young, or thin, or smooth, or symmetrical. It just needs to be mine.

Pride makes a version of that argument in public, at scale, with sound systems. I make it quietly, on a towel, with sunscreen. Same root.

The two skylines in the frame

I put Taipei and Istanbul in the same image because I wanted the contrast to be uncomfortable. In Taipei, Pride happens. It's loud, it's enormous, it's the biggest in Asia, and the city mostly lets it be. There's still friction — permits, police presence, the usual negotiation between a crowd and a state — but the crowd gets to exist.

In Istanbul, it doesn't. Pride there has been officially blocked for years. People still gather. They still get moved along, sometimes detained. The flags still come out, and then they go back into bags, and everyone walks home separately.

I'm not a journalist and I'm not going to pretend I have the full picture of either place. What I know is what the picture shows: one city where the rainbow is architecture, bolted to a building, and one where it's a risk you carry folded in your pocket.

That gap is the whole story.

Police lights and rainbow flags

Here's what unsettles me about the thumbnail. The flags and the police car are in the same frame, and neither one looks out of place.

A few years ago that would have read as irony. Now it reads as weather.

The pattern I keep noticing isn't a ban. It's a slow tightening. More paperwork. More officers at the edges. More rules about where a crowd can stand and how loud it can be and what counts as a family event versus an adult one. Nothing dramatic enough to make a headline. Just enough friction that some people decide it isn't worth the trip next year.

That's how freedom usually goes. Not with a wall. With a queue.

The body is never just a body

I think about this constantly, because my whole life is built on the idea that a body can be neutral. That a naked person on a beach is not a crisis. That skin is not a weapon.

But I'd be lying if I said the political weather doesn't reach me. When public expression gets squeezed, it squeezes everything downstream — Pride, protest, art, photography, nudity, the right to be seen without being read as a threat.

I've had conversations this year that I didn't have five years ago. Venues asking more questions. Photographers being careful about locations. People in my own community quietly deciding to keep things indoors.

None of it is illegal. All of it is smaller.

What I'm not saying

I want to be clear about a few things, because this is a topic where it's easy to get sloppy.

I'm not saying anyone should be naked wherever they want. I'm not saying rules don't matter. I'm not saying consent is optional, or that other people's comfort is irrelevant, or that local laws are suggestions.

Naturism only works because it's built on respect — for the place, for the people around you, for the line between your freedom and someone else's day. That line is real, and I take it seriously.

What I am saying is that the line keeps moving, and it's worth noticing which direction.

What I'm taking home

I came home from Pride with glitter in my bag and a bad sunburn on one shoulder, which is a very specific kind of souvenir.

But the thing I actually brought back was the image of that nineteen-year-old holding his sign with both arms. He wasn't there to shock anyone. He was there to be counted. That's all most of us want, in the end — to be counted, without having to justify the shape of the body we're standing in.

So I'll keep doing what I do. I'll keep taking my clothes off in places where it's allowed and welcome. I'll keep writing about it honestly. And I'll keep showing up to the crowd, fully dressed, because some days the most useful thing you can do is stand next to someone and make the numbers bigger.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, you're already part of this.

Thank you for being here with me on this naked journey. If my story resonates with you, please visit nakedwill.com, read my blog, follow my updates, and join me in exploring body freedom, authenticity, and naturism with kindness.

Curious what Pride looked like where you are this year — bigger, smaller, or about the same? I'd genuinely like to know.