Pride & Prohaireses

Áine wrote to me recently through the website. She asked whether I might share some thoughts on Pride Month, from a Stoic perspective. So this note is for her, and for others who carry the meaning of this month with them.

There are events that begin in protest and over time become something else. Pride, like many such events, carries a history. Sometimes remembered, sometimes forgotten. What began as resistance to violence has become, in some places, celebration. In others, it remains a risk. And in some corners, it is still unspeakable.

A Stoic perspective does not ask us to deny difference. Nor does it reduce life to dispassionate neutrality. What it offers is something harder. A practice of holding one’s ground, not in aggression, but in alignment. It asks what is truly in your power, and what is not. It teaches us to act with integrity, regardless of recognition. It teaches us to live by reasoned choice and not by social permission.

The Stoics had a word for this capacity: prohairesis. It refers to the only thing that is fully ours: the ability to choose our response. Prohaireses was not governed by our feelings. Nor was it governed by potential outcomes. And certainly, it did not care for the opinion of others. But the inner decision to act in accordance with who we are and what we hold to be right. Prohairesis is not control, we must understand. It is composure. The deliberate refusal to be shaped by fear or flattery.

There is a long tradition, both ancient and modern, of treating sexuality as something to be either flaunted or suppressed. The Stoics took neither path. For them, the central question was not whom one loved, but whether that love was governed by care, by temperance, by justice. Not in the punitive sense, but in the deeper sense. Does it honour what is human?

They were concerned with the character of desire, not with its direction. They urged freedom from domination. They warned against living according to the crowd’s opinion, especially when the crowd was unthinking.

“If you want to improve,” wrote Epictetus, “be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things.”

That includes, perhaps, the courage to love quietly in a world that expects performance. Or the choice to live truthfully in a world that rewards disguise.

Pride, seen through this lens, is not so much a demand to be celebrated. It is the refusal to be ashamed. It is the decision to stand where you are, without apology. That decision, whether made in public or in private, is not always safe.

James Baldwin understood this. In 1965, he spoke at the Cambridge Union in a televised debate on the motion: “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” His opponent was William F. Buckley, a conservative commentator known for polished rhetoric and the easy assurance of those accustomed to being listened to. Buckley entered the hall with comfort. Baldwin entered with something else: the truth.

He sat calmly. He did not flatter the room. He did not adjust the truth to make it easier to hear. His voice was steady. His words were exact. He spoke not in anger, but with the weight of having endured what Buckley had only thought about.

“It comes as a great shock,” Baldwin said, “to discover that the country which is your birthplace… has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you.”

That debate was about race. But Baldwin was also a gay man. That part of his life, just as defining, could not be spoken aloud in that room. And yet it was present. Looking back, his composure in the face of risk was just remarkable. He had already been made to feel unspeakable. And still, he spoke. 

When I used to teach ethics, I would show students a recording of that debate. Their response was often silence. Not confusion. Not discomfort. Just quiet.

Truth of that kind does not need to be explained or debated. It just is. It is undeniable. The Stoics recognised that kind of truth. They believed in argument, yes, but more than that, they believed in bearing. Baldwin’s truth was not persuasive. It was present in his refusal to be ashamed.

To my knowledge, Baldwin was not a Stoic by study. But in that moment, and in many others, he embodied this Stoics idea of prohairesis: the sovereign freedom to respond with integrity, even when one’s dignity is denied. He was not detached, nor was he indifference. But with incredible calmness he refused to let hatred shape the soul.

This was the posture of someone who had placed their dignity where no insult, law, or silence could reach it.

Four years later, another refusal took place. On the night Judy Garland died, police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York. A bar frequented by those who had long been asked to remain invisible. This time, they did not. The crowd pushed back. Not with philosophy, but with high heels. What Baldwin had done with poise, they did with resistance. What had been unspeakable became, for a moment, unstoppable.

The Stonewall riot has sometimes been described as violent. I have always found that description curious. Boarding yourself in. Throwing stilettos and bricks through a window. Is that violence? Really?

Or is it the sound a community makes when it refuses to be disappeared again. The Stoics warned against mistaking surface for substance. They would have asked what long injustice preceded the brick. What humiliations made the refusal necessary. What does it mean to call this violence, and not the conditions that led to it.

At Stonewall, the so-called “rioters” were also acting from prohairesis. They had suffered enough. They pushed back to declare that dignity was at the core of their sexual and gender identities. This dignity would no longer submit to fear.

There are experiences that cannot be understood entirely from the outside. To have a core part of one’s being named as a disorder or danger is not a disagreement. It is a kind of psychic injury. It’s a quiet, internal wound that may be carried for years. Those who have not borne it often do not see its weight. They may mistake its effects for defensiveness or oversensitivity, without realising what it takes to live for so long without recognition, or with the wrong kind.

This is why Pride is important for Stoics. Not because it flatters the self, but because it refuses the lie. It names what is real. A Stoic does not celebrate identity for its own sake, but stands against the denial of another’s humanity. Pride, at its best, is not a performance. It is the public bearing of dignity after long refusal. It is the calm insistence that what is human is not to be hidden.

There are many for whom this month is joyful. And many for whom it is difficult. The Stoics would not have insisted on one response over another. But they might have asked: what matters here? What is yours to choose? And then: what would it mean to act with integrity in the face of misunderstanding, misnaming, or erasure?

To those living that question, quietly and daily, not only in June, this note is for you.

To Áine, thank you for the nudge. Yours was a timely and thoughtful invitation. I hope this meets it, and returns the care with which it was offered.

And to the late Mr Baldwin, in speaking calmly into that room, you showed a kind of courage that continues to demand the best from all of us. Requiesce in pace domine et gratias.