June letter 2025

Rainbow flags are flying, parades move through villages, towns and cities. Love is in the air, nature blooms, our garden is swarming with buzy bees, wasps and bumblebees, the strawberry jasmin lets its wonderful fragrance find its way to our nostrils.

June!

The month of Pride in major parts of the world.

I ponder the rainbow, limited as it is to red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. What shades linger in the narrow spaces between these distinct or maybe not so distinct colours?

The narrow bands between red and orange display Vermillion (bright red-orange), Scarlet (vibrant reddish-orange), Tomato (warm red-orange); between orange and yellow linger Amber (golden-orange), Peach (soft orange-yellow), Marigold (rich yellow-orange); and it goes on with many, many shades until we reach electric Indigo (vivid blue-violet), Ametyst (soft purple with blue undertones), Blue-violet (a balanced mix of the two). Sometimes, especially in double rainbows, Pink or Magenta tones are also present.

I shall not be mistaken to believe that all this and even more shades between the betweeners will appear when pride parades unfold.

Joy!

Once a female actor showed me that if you stretch both your arms up towards the sky, you cannot in those uplifted moments feel depressed. Being part of, or just watching the colourfulness, the joy and the love that fills the air when Pride parades advance is like a community of upstretched arms with minor space for depression.

Pride!

In the beginning there were the gays, lesbians and the drags to set it all in motion. In came bis, fetishists, BDSM, intersex, transpeople, feathers, butts, ballons, breasts and simply all the attractions, orientations, erotics, identities that the human state can shamelessly bring forward.

Solace

It has been and still is a struggle, a fight for this huge and beautiful fellowship of diversity. Go wherever you like, and you will recognize this all-inclusive spirit of pride. It is a wave that cannot be blocked. Some try, but the flow will go under their feet, behind the corners, in the lofts and basements.

The bless of joy we cannot question, the sense of pride resides in those who sense it. No one can say that what you sense and feel, you do not sense and feel.

Take solace in the joy, the pride and the shamelessness.

June is a month for gaining strength through love of all that we name human. All is nature, our human nature, nothing is artificial or synthetic apart from many of the colour displaying fabrics that swing with swinging bodies in this incarnation of Natures symbol of diversity, the rainbow. This natural phenomenon with all its colours and colours in between and in between and in between.

There is no end, we are all included: gay, lesbian, straight, binary, cis, non-binary, fetishist, consenting sado-masochists, missionary positionists all of us. We are in this together we belong together, we are all dependent on each other whatever way we feel or love.

Let me include for those poetically inclined this celebrating poem that I wrote some years ago:

Spectrum II (declaration)

A prism is a piece of glass or possibly from crystal made

When struck by light the prism sends all colours separate

We see the red, we see the blue, but some will always fade

Our senses cannot fetch it all, the spectrum is too great.

We name the rainbow as a row from red to violet

We name it as the borders are all straight with nothing strange

We give no name to in-betweens their shades are just not met

They fall outside our naming ways, outside the human range.

But be aware, they are still there as clear as sunny days

Just look in close, and you will see a sparking multi-verse

It will appear first wage at night, then near in all their changing ways

It will expand before your sight, the gender spectrum Universe.

It gives us more than were before, it makes our kind complete

It renders beaty for us all and stories not yet told

They lingered deep, in secret rooms where truth and shame compete

Now they are out, they shine so bright in colours manyfold.

Happy pride!

Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad

President EFS