For Pride Month, Adam Lambert tells trolls their hate is only making queers louder

Fresh off his appearance at West Holly Pride earlier this month, out singer Adam Lambert wants the anti-LGBTQ+ far right to know they’re not going to stop him or the community from celebrating and living out loud.

“Their hate is not going to dull my light. In fact, in some ways, it fuels my fire,” he recently told The Advocate. “I feel like now more than ever, it’s time to express whatever I want to express. And if someone has a problem with it, I would prefer if they just ignored me. You got a problem with it? Get over it. Mind your own business.”

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“I don’t understand why the haters out there focus so specifically on things they don’t like,” Lambert continued. “You don’t have to like everything. That’s society. We’re in a free world. We’re supposed to be in a free society, where everyone has the freedom to express themselves, as long as you’re not hurting anybody. There’s plenty more that we need to be focusing on other than who people are sleeping with and what identity people want to see themselves as.”

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Lambert was part of a star-studded line-up of performers at WeHo Pride’s OutLoud Music Festival earlier this month that included Kesha, Janelle Monáe, Kyle Minogue, and Diplo. The three-night event kicked off a Pride Month that has found the LGBTQ+ community defiantly celebrating in the face of continued attacks from conservatives.

The last few years have seen a dramatic rise in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric on the right and efforts to pass anti-LGBTQ+ laws across the country. Most recently, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Republican administration tried to dampen Pride festivities by banning bridges in the state from displaying rainbow lights. And in New York City, where 150 Pride flags outside the historic Stonewall National Monument were vandalized last week, NYC Pride was forced to cancel two of its marquee Pride events.

While Heritage of Pride executive director Sandra Pérez has cited rising costs in “a ‘post’ COVID environment” and lack of support from city and state agencies for the organization canceling its Pride Island music festival and Pride Rally this year, Queerty’s Michael Musto spoke to one event organizer who suggested that corporate sponsorship has “dried up” in the wake of last year’s high-profile anti-LGBTQ+ boycotts of brands like Target and Bud Light.

“We went for the usual corporate support we got for past years. We reached out to corporate America — I don’t want to mention sponsors by name — but as January became February became March, any support dried up,” said Nathan James, who had to cancel a Pride concert at Carnegie Hall that had been planned for June 26. (The event was unaffiliated with Heritage of Pride.)

But Lambert sees the recent challenges in the context of a long game that the LGBTQ+ community can win.

“We’ve been dealing with this forever,” he said. “If you look back at the last 15 years, there’s been a lot of progress. We pushed really hard, and our community has come a very long way, and of course, there’s going to be pushback, but I hope that anybody out there seeing that hate and seeing that negativity takes it — now I know this sounds strange — as a compliment.”

“These types of people wouldn’t be so threatened,” he added. “So, it’s just a response to the beautiful work we’ve done as a community.”

Queer young people in particular, Lambert said, aren’t going to take the recent backlash to LGBTQ+ progress lying down.

“I don’t think they’re going to be intimidated into hiding. There’s a real, bold sense of self in our community now,” he said. “People are empowered to be verbal and public about who and what they are in a way that we’ve never had before. There will be attempts to censor us and to dim our light and quiet us down. But I really don’t think it’s going to work.”

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