Our Guide to Pride 2023 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️
This Pride month, there are so many ways to celebrate our LGBTQ+ community and for allies to show meaningful solidarity. We've put together a guide to our favorite pop-ups, organizations & local queer-owned businesses you can support all year long!
At the NYC Pride march, a queer person wearing a trans flag holding up a sign that reads, “Respect your roots. Trans women of color rioted for your right to Pride!”
This Pride month, there are so many ways to celebrate our LGBTQ+ community and for allies to show meaningful solidarity.
We've put together a guide to our favorite organizations, pop-ups & local queer-owned businesses you can support all year long!
STAND UP FOR QUEER & TRANS JUSTICE
Help organizations that protect queer and trans people stay running by donating extra funds, volunteering your time, and advocating to your local lawmakers on issues that matter.
This year, we have seen a staggering number of violent anti-trans and anti-queer legislative bills in states across the U.S. that ban trans existence in public, gender affirming healthcare, LGBTQ history, and creative queer expression. Be part of the change and help ensure that queer and trans kids grow up to be adults and can live in safety.
⚖️ Sylvia Rivera Law Project
SRLP is a collective organization that provides free legal services to meet survival needs and build community power with transgender people who are low-income, people of color, and immigrants.
🩺 Callen-Lorde Community Health Center
Callen-Lorde provides healthcare services, education and wellness to New York’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities regardless of ability to pay.
🍽️ Queer Food Foundation
QFF is a collective-run resource and platform for queer folks in food and beverage. Their mutual aid fund provides support for Black Queer and Trans folks facing food insecurity.
🥕 Love Wins Food Pantry
Love Wins provides LGBTQ and gender non-conforming people & families access to healthy vegetables and non-perishable food.
SHOW SUPPORT ALL YEAR
Pride month is in June, but true allyship happens during the other eleven months of the year. Attend a local Pride march, patronize your neighborhood queer vendors, and shop from queer-owned small businesses (like ours!) year round.
Here are just a few of our favorites in NYC, but look up queer events and LGBTQ+ creators closest to you to show your patronage and to get involved!
🎪 Hester Street Fair Pride Market
We will be at this pop-up market of all queer-vendors serving TAGMO fare featuring Diaspora Co. spices. Join us Saturday, June 24th from 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM at The Seaport, 89 South Street in Manhattan.
🥣 Queer Soup Night
QSN is a queer-run pop-up with chapters across the U.S. where LGBTQ+ folks and allies can share food and raise funds to strengthen grassroots social justice movements.
🗺️ Diaspora Co.
Diaspora Co. is a queer South Asian-run spice company that sources South Asia's freshest, heirloom, and single-origin spices directly from farmers.
🌶️ Shaquanda Will Feed You
Shaquanda's is a queer Black-owned small business making drag-themed small-batch hot sauces. Each flavor uses high quality chili pepper varietals and relies on the bounty of mother nature, with less sugar and salt than commercial sauces.
🌯 Ursula Brooklyn
Ursula is a queer-run New Mexican inspired cafe & bakery in Brooklyn that centers activism in the hospitality industry and the queer food community.
Taking Pride in Mithai
The strength of mithai is in its versatility. Able to carry a world of flavors, colors, textures and aromas, these small Indian confections are the perfect vehicles for culinary experimentation. There are traditional tried and true flavors you can find in any South Asian sweets shop that promise nostalgia and reliable flavor profiles in every bite, from Mumbai to Kolkata, from Jackson Heights, Queens to at our own mithai shop in the Seaport District.
An open box of TAGMO’s Pride Collection filled with multi-hued mithai.
The strength of mithai is in its versatility. Able to carry a world of flavors, colors, textures and aromas, these small Indian confections are the perfect vehicles for culinary experimentation. It’s a queer confectioner’s playground.
There are traditional tried and true flavors you can find in any South Asian sweets shop that promise nostalgia and reliable flavor profiles in every bite, from Mumbai to Kolkata, deep in Jackson Heights, Queens to at our own mithai shop in Manhattan’s Financial District.
We love our Besan Ladoos and Pistachio Burfis as much as the next desi, but we yearn to play in the kitchen, create new experiences through food that showcase who we are as queers not just where we come from.
Sometimes we choose the flavor and sometimes the flavor chooses us. Take the newest addition to our 2022 Pride Collection: Blueberry Lemon Curd Burfi, a short king ready for a zesty summer fling, made with dried blueberries and tart lemon curd folded into a sweet Burfi base. It called to us loud and clear.
Mithai purists might call ours inauthentic, but what is culture if not constantly evolving expressions of oneself that’s harkening back to their origins while creatively innovating into the future — and hopefully having some fun along the way.
NO BURFI BINARIES
Our new mithai is queer in its own right, not just because it is handmade by well-paid queer people. Blueberry Lemon Curd Burfi shares 3 out of the 4 colors of the nonbinary flag: yellow, white, purple and black, which together represent gender fluidity outside of the male/female binary.
Gender fluidity is an expression of being alive, of vibrance, change and movement — something that ancient South Asian culture made space for prior to British colonization, which imposed its rigid Western cishetero gender ideologies onto colonial subjects, instituting laws that banned centuries-old traditions that honored gender and sexual diversity in India.
Trans and gender fluid people were certainly treated differently than cis people prior to colonization (and there was certainly pre-existing gender oppression of all women and girls), but they were not violently erased in the way they are being threatened today. South Asian culture recognized the gender expansiveness of trans, nonbinary and intersex people, including them in folklore, history and acknowledging their religious roles in society that exist today.
Anjali Gopalan and Gopi Shankar Madurai inaugurating Asia's first Genderqueer Pride Parade at Madurai with a rainbow and genderqueer flag.
PRIDE ISN’T FOR SALE
For us, Pride and queerness is so much more than rainbows, pronouns and a march co-opted by multinational corporations, banks and cops. Pride is about fighting back against state oppression while celebrating queerness in all of its many shades and flavors. It’s about creating spaces where people can be free from harm, harassment and discrimination, where they can feel safe to come alive into their fullness.
As a queer South Asian owned business in New York City, we understand the tension of showcasing our culture and identities while existing under capitalism, selling products that are on the higher end because we want to pay our workers well, buy high quality products and keep the lights glowing in our storefront.
Can a burfi solve structural oppression of gender nonconformity? Certainly not, but it’s a small way we use food to celebrate who we are, and to point to more meaningful ways of pushing the boundaries that have been set for us, whether it’s challenging the ingredients of mithai or expanding what a person’s gender expression can be.
We want to grow and build not just as a company but as a community where people’s lives matter more than profit and where everyone can experience abundant queer joy. Happy Pride!