The last protest

In Texas, joy has started to look like rebellion. What used to be a celebration now feels like resistance.

Pride has always been a protest. It began that way and it remains that way, even now when the fight has taken new forms. Over the past year, attacks on LGBTQ+ rights have reached across nearly every part of life. Transgender Americans have been told they cannot serve in the military. Students have watched long-standing programs and events disappear. Educators have faced new limits on what they can say or support.

At the University of Texas at Arlington, Resolution 25–26, known as “The Glitter Haus Act,” which aimed to allow nonbinary students to room with their preferred gender, was recently killed in committee following consultation with the Office of Legal Affairs over state legal concerns. For many students, decisions like these are not abstract policy debates. They shape whether belonging feels possible on campus.

The wave of restrictions feels familiar because history is repeating itself, and yet that repetition reminds us of something powerful: We have always survived.

The queer community has learned to fight on its own just as it did in the past, when there was no safety net or public support. Each time we are pushed out, we find our way back in. Every generation has rebuilt from the ground up and made something beautiful out of what was broken. That is not just survival. It is a culture of perseverance.

It is how we answer hate without letting it decide who we are.

And still, there will always be people who fear what they cannot understand. They want attention because what we have is something they do not want to see. Do not give them what they want. Keep being yourself until their noise burns out.

We have always been part of human history. Why try to erase something that has existed as long as people have? Is it ignorance, fear, colonization or the inability to accept that humanity has never been uniform? The world has always been diverse. That is what makes it alive.

As legislation reshapes societal institutions, off-campus spaces like coffee shops and community centers have become sanctuaries for students who just need to breathe. What was once public has become personal, but it is not powerless. This strength in the face of uncertainty has become part of our identity.

Every laugh, every gesture, every flag in a window, every friendship that dares to exist out loud goes against a patriarchal system that keeps trying to control who has power and who must stay silent.

This is not to romanticize resilience. There is nothing glamorous about having to reclaim joy from the rubble of policies designed to erase it. But there is something sacred about a community that refuses to surrender its color, its rhythm, its love, even when the law forgets its humanity.

Legislators can regulate funding. They can rewrite job titles, reword codes of conduct and redefine what counts as acceptable. What they cannot do is outlaw happiness.

Joy, in its purest form, is freedom they cannot touch. It is the drag performer who keeps creating art from the margins, the trans student who finds home in chosen family, and the ally who refuses to stay quiet when neutrality means harm.

If grief builds our movement, joy will sustain it.

According to The Trevor Project’s 2024 survey, LGBTQ+ youth who felt connected to their communities were nearly 50 percent less likely to experience depression or suicidal thoughts. That connection is not just comfort. It is proof that joy saves lives. In a state where policy keeps trying to narrow belonging, joy becomes the evidence that existence itself is resistance.

Universities, cities and organizations have had a choice to treat queer visibility as controversy or as community care. One builds walls. The other builds home. But that does not mean we cannot also build our fortress, because safety without authenticity is not peace.

It is paralysis.

Joy does not need permission, but it does need protection. It needs bravery enough to say that celebration is not a threat.

There is a reason every generation of queer Texans has found a way to dance through the storm. We have always known that when politics become theater, joy becomes the encore.

Because joy is the last protest. It is louder than shame. It is stronger than policy. And it is the one thing they can never legislate away.

As long as we keep finding one another, loving one another and laughing in a language the law cannot translate, we remain unstoppable.

I write this now not just as a voice within the community, but as someone closing a chapter at the University of Texas at Arlington. After everything that has unfolded — the conversations, the resistance, the moments that demanded more than silence — I carry both the weight and the clarity of what it has meant to exist and advocate in these spaces. This is what I leave behind — not just frustration, not just memory, but a reminder that even in moments of fracture, we are still capable of creating something whole.

Connect with your spaces. If you don’t have one, make one where you can be yourself without limits, even if it’s small. And if that feels far, believe in it anyway because you deserve it and you belong.

The world may not be ready for all that we are. But we are. They can dim the lights, but they will not end our show.

Elwim E. Sorto is a queer social work student at the University of Texas at Arlington, known for being a student senator, veteran of the Texas Army National Guard and co-founder of the Queer Social Work Association. They are a prominent advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and DEI initiatives, and they authored the book It’s Okay To Like Who You Like.