On a Sunday afternoon, after a five-mile run from the Upper West Side down to the West Village, I met up with an old friend at a small corner café. Back in college when we met, 2014 "Tipping Point" still felt like a promise to so many, including women like us, as though visibility, once attained, could only move in one direction, never to go back. She greeted me with the kind of smile you only get from someone who has known you a long time, who has witnessed the good years and the frightening ones both. We did the easy part first: the catching up, marveling at our own milestones, the long loop through politics and culture. We reviewed the last decade. She now works as a mid-level manager in tech, one of those companies that flew the rainbow and has lately gone hard the other way. It was only over the second coffee, though, that she told me the rest: She, too, had gone quiet this past year. Her blog, archived. Her name scrapped off the web. She told it like a confession, like she expected me to be disappointed in her.
Yet, what surprised me is that she had not stopped doing any of the actual work — she had just stopped doing it where it could be seen. And I realized we had been circling it the whole afternoon without naming it, in a lower register, the conversation the whole movement is grappling with right now: what visibility costs. Before we parted, she asked what I was doing for Pride this year. I didn’t have a clean answer either.
Walking back toward the subway near Christopher Street, where NYC Pride still centers itself every June, I thought about how much we've come to measure the movement by how visible it is. The brighter the displays, the louder and more various the voices, the more rainbows in windows and across sidewalks, the healthier we assume things must be. So, when the visible signals dim such as when the corporate logos revert, when people go quiet, when every media report seems to be another account of the hostilities, punishment, and backlash our communities face, it is easy to read the quiet as retreat, as if the movement itself were contracting.
That is precisely how the hostilities of these past years were designed to work. Make visibility costly enough (i.e., funding terminations, defund programs, sue or tax the institutions into compliance unless obedience is shown) and people stop displaying, which produces a surface that looks like a movement stifled. To read that quiet as defeat is to give up ground our movement fought and grieved for, at exactly the moment we should be doubling down.
And here is where I want to be careful, because it would be comforting to say that the quiet is secretly fine, the work goes on underground, we are more durable and resilient. Some of that is true, and understanding the pros and cons of visibility (as well as invisibility) is not simple. To understand what visibility is doing right now, you have to be willing to hold it at arm's length and ask harder questions of it than Pride usually allows.
Most trans people have always known how to do this; and we have a word for it: stealth. To live stealth meant moving through the world without disclosing our transness. Not out of shame, but out of survival, safety, and for the right to decide who knows what about you. The word later picked up a complicated reputation, recast as hiding, as a failure to be sufficiently visible, even a betrayal of the people being loud on your behalf. But that was always a misreading. For many trans and queer people throughout history, stealth was never the absence of a strategy. It was the strategy, i.e., trans people doing the math on risk long before anyone handed us a vocabulary for it, deciding deliberately when to be seen and when to stay under the radar so we could keep living and keep working.
That centuries-old practice and knowledge have a great deal to teach us now, because visibility, it turns out, is a surface signal, and surface signals are the easiest things to suppress. You can scare people off a platform. You can make a symbol too costly to display. What you cannot reach nearly as easily is the layer underneath. The people still doing the work, the relationships that took years to build, the coalitions still forming in rooms no one is watching. That layer did not stop. In a lot of places, it got more serious, more careful, more tightly woven, precisely because the stakes went up.
This is what my colleagues and I call strategic visibility, and I think it is the frame we actually need. Not visibility as a moral test you pass by being loud, but visibility as a resource you spend deliberately. That is, it is a calculation about where being seen does work and where it merely draws fire. Strategic visibility treats disclosure and exposure as decisions rather than a duty: surfacing where it builds something, going stealth where it protects something, and knowing the difference. Both are forms of staking a claim. The latter does it by the simple, stubborn fact of not stopping, which, if you have ever tried to outlast a hostile season, you know is the harder of the two.
That's what makes this season hard to describe honestly. The networks held, and our communities continue to find each other and quietly build. But surviving underground is not the same as being safe; it’s a measure of how unsafe it has gotten above it. You only get that good at survival when survival is what's on the table.
And the thing I keep returning to is not the observed behaviors of visibility or the stealth. It’s what sits under both, the part that does not change no matter what the season asks of you: The commitment to being ourselves holds whether the lights are on or not, and our desire and choice to keep each other in view either way. The loud one and the quiet one are doing the same work from opposite ends, looking out, checking in, holding a place for someone who can't hold it themselves right now. None of it works alone.
So here is what I would ask this Pride. Instead of asking you to be more visible, find the people working in the quiet and make sure they are not working alone. If you can afford to be seen, spend some of that visibility as cover for someone who can't. If you've gone stealth to survive, know that disappearing from view is not the same as being out of reach.
My friend did not need me to tell her to be louder. She needed to know that the quiet wasn't the same as being alone in it, that the work she'd pulled out of sight was still work the rest of us could see her doing. So this Pride, in place of the louder kind, keep track of queer people and their work, especially those who are quietly building. Be the person who notices when a profile goes dark and reaches out instead of assuming. Be seen, or be stealth, as the year requires. Just don't do either by yourself in isolation.
Author's note: With gratitude to Kristi Gamarel and Don Operario, who read and sharpened this piece.
Arjee Javellana Restar, PhD, MPH, is a social and legal epidemiologist whose work focuses on trans health and policy.
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