✍️ #PrideOnThePage Week 3: LOVE (Connection, Intimacy, and Chosen Family) (June 14-21)

Join my fun & free 30-day Pride Month journey to explore voice, identity, and belonging—together. 🏳️‍🌈

💗 Week 3: Love (Connection, Intimacy, and Chosen Family)

We turn now toward each other—toward the tender places, the open hands, the homes we’ve found in one another.

This week invites you to write the people, moments, and connections that have made you feel seen, softened, steady.

What does love feel like when it’s yours to define?
Who holds you without asking you to shrink?

Runs June 15–21 on Substack Notes

Friends, welcome to Week 3 of #PrideOnThePage. This week is called Love—and it’s an invitation to explore the full, radiant spectrum of queer connection: friendship, intimacy, chosen family, touch, trust.

Each day from June 15–21, I’ll post:

• one word

• a poetic spark

• and a gentle invitation to reflect—through writing, image, memory, music, collage, or any form that holds tenderness for you.

There’s no pressure to be profound. Some days, a gesture or a glance may be all you need to write. A single line can carry a whole world.

This week is not about romantic love alone. It’s about the spaces where you’ve been held without explanation. Where your joy was mirrored back to you. Where softness wasn’t weakness, but wisdom.

You’re invited to write with love, through love, or simply alongside it.

Join these brilliant creators who are responding with layered, moving reflections:

DIANA ADMIRE

Kris Winters

Jude (they/them)

Lady Libertea

Leeron Heywood

Tess McCarthy

Wendi Gordon

Lily Pond

Rey Somatics

Robin Taylor (he/him)

Rey Katz (they/them)

Sunbeamdream

Lee Summers

Bo Ea

WilM

Jade Matias Uchoa

Darienne

Jeannie Ewing

Cassandra Zilinsky

Therese Ralston

Laura Hays

Love

Louise Haynes

Gloria Horton-Young

Francesca Bossert

I’d be honored to witness what you share.

With care,
Jay 💗🖊️

💗 Week 3: Love

Connection, Intimacy, and Chosen Family
This week centers the ways we are held—and the ways we hold. Love, in queer lives, often arrives unannounced, unlegislated, and unmistakably real. It lives in gestures, in chosen family, in spaces where we don’t have to explain ourselves. These prompts invite you to explore trust, touch, and tenderness as acts of self-definition. Write into the relationships that shaped you—not through obligation, yet through choice.

#prideonthepage June 15 2025 Creative Challenge Week3 Start

2.46MB ∙ PDF file

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#PrideOnThePage Day 15 (June 15): TOUCH

✨Let your words begin at the fingertips and end at the heart.✨

• Where have you felt love without it needing to be explained?

• This prompt asks you to write through the body: a hand held, a glance returned, a shoulder leaned on.

• Let the physicality of closeness carry the poem—what you gave, what you received, what you never forgot.

#PrideOnThePage Day 16 (June 16): KIN

✨Describe love as a house you built by hand—with no blueprint.✨

Who are the people you found—or who found you—and made you feel known?

Chosen family doesn’t arrive whole. It’s built, slowly, from survival, trust, and shared language. This prompt invites you to map the people who hold you—and the ways you hold them. Or how you imagine it do be.

#prideonthepage June 16 2025 Creative Challenge

1.21MB ∙ PDF file

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#PrideOnThePage Day 17 (June 17): OFFER

✨Offer something that can’t be returned. Let your creativity carry it.✨

What have you given freely, because it came from the center of who you are?

This prompt invites you to write the moment of offering—when you crossed a threshold with open hands. Focus on what moved, what opened, what lingered in the space where the gift once was. Let the act speak for itself.

#prideonthepage June 17 2025 Creative Challenge

1.19MB ∙ PDF file

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#PrideOnThePage Day 18 (June 18): LONGING

✨Write longing as weather. Let it shift mid-sentence.✨

What ache do you return to—even when you’re not looking for it?

Longing is not a flaw. It’s a current, a tide, a forecast. This prompt invites you to write the shape of desire—fleeting or constant, gentle or wild. Let it move without needing to resolve

#prideonthepage June 18 2025 Creative Challenge

1.19MB ∙ PDF file

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#PrideOnThePage Day 19 (June 19): PULSE

Come back June 19

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#PrideOnThePage Day 20 (June 20): DEVOTION

Come back June 20

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#PrideOnThePage Day 21 (June 21): NEST

Come back June 21

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Continue the Challenge in the next weeks:

You don’t need to sign up. Just check my Substack Notes or #PrideOnThePage-Hub and the respective Essay for the week each day.

• 🫚 Week 1: Rooted (Foundations of Self) (was June 1-7)

• 🛡️ Week 2: Resistance (Power, Protest, and Survival) (Runs June 8 -14)

• 💗 Week 3: Love (Connection, Intimacy, Chosen Family)(Runs June 15-21)

• 🌈 Week 4: Becoming (Joy, Vision, and Liberation) (Runs June 22-28)

• 🏡 Final Days: Reflection and Celebration (Run June 29 and 30)

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✨ What becomes of it

By the end of June, you may hold:

• Thirty sparks

• A thread you didn’t know you needed

• A language for something previously unspoken

You might gather what you’ve written and shape it into:

• A stitched poem

• A reimagined About page

• A queer manifesto

• A letter to your future or former self

Or maybe you keep it private. Whole. Undisturbed. That’s writing too.

What matters is that you showed up.
What matters is that you wrote.

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✨ Why This Matters

Writing opens a door.
Not just to the page, but to each other.

This challenge is about what happens when we meet with curiosity instead of certainty.
When we ask instead of assume.
When we explore the space between what we’ve been told and what we’ve begun to know.

You don’t need credentials. You don’t need a label. You don’t need to be sure.
You just need to begin.

So bring your voice.
Bring your questions.
Bring your presence.

Let’s put pride on the page—together.

With care,
Jay 🏳️‍🌈✍

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💚 If This Moved You

If you found a truth in these prompts—if this journey has made space for something that matters—consider supporting the work that holds it.

Wild Lion*esses Lookout is a living studio:
a space for poetry, photography, digital art, and queer reflection.
It’s also a space for care-based consulting, editing, and ghostwriting—rooted in lived experience and radical presence.

Your support keeps this work alive, independent, and honest.
It helps me keep creating. It helps me stay.

Ways to support:

• Tap the ❤️ if you read something that moved you—it helps others discover this space.

• Share this page with someone else on a path of becoming.

• Leave a Comment below and leave a kind word or share your offering to us on this challenge—I read them all, and they matter more than you know.

• Become a free subscriber to stay connected to future offerings.

• Send a one-time donation— or Buy us a coffee every coffee or bowl of Monty’s food is deeply felt.

• Become a paid subscriber for $10/month to sustain the work. You can explore the About page for more.

Since early 2024, I’ve been navigating the edges of mental health, medical leave, and financial precarity. As I wrote in When Healing Means Losing Everything, I’m in the midst of building something new from almost nothing. This space, and your presence in it, is part of that rebuilding.

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🐾 A Note from Monty

Hi. It’s me. Monty.
I’ve been supervising from the keyboard (as you can imagine, I’m very helpful). And I just wanted to say—you did it.

You showed up.
You made room for your truth.
You dared to write something into the world that hadn’t existed before.

That’s a kind of magic.

If Jay’s work meant something to you—if you felt seen, heard, nudged, or nourished—consider leaving a little love behind. A tap, a tip, a share, a thank-you.

It keeps this space soft, creative, alive.
It keeps Jay writing.
It keeps me purring and fed. 🐟

You’re part of this now.
And we’re so glad you’re here.

With a head tilt and a soft paw,
Monty 🐾💚