This op-ed by Nicholas E. Stewart, executive director of the Justice Education Project, explores the significance of Juneteenth being celebrated during Pride Month as Black and brown LGBTQ+ youth continue to face disproportionate incarceration.
A man I was surveying, a process of collecting data on incarcerated experiences, in a Florida county jail folded paper into stars while we waited for the officer to come let us out. I was 21, an undergrad researcher, crouched over my bag as I repacked folders and consent forms. When I looked up he had made a small, tight star, the corners pressed flat with his thumbnail—the kind of detail that takes a steadiness most people lose in a room like that. He'd started crafting it while I was gathering my papers, working quietly, not waiting for me to notice. He told me he made them for luck. He also told me, without my asking, that the other men laughed at him for it. He couldn't have been much older than I was.
I think about him every June, and for a long time I couldn't have told you why. He read to me, in the way you clock someone when part of you is from where they're from, as a gay man. He was Black. We were about the same age. The only real difference between us in the room was which side of the survey we were sitting on.
This young man was making luck by hand in a building engineered to issue none, and the men around him had decided that the folding was a soft thing, a funny thing, a thing worth laughing at. He kept folding while he talked to me. He kept folding while we waited for the officer. He finished the star, and then started another.
I didn't understand what I was looking at. I was there to collect data on incarcerated experiences, and he was a row in that volume of information. He had not arrived at a county jail in his early 20s by accident or because of a single bad night; somebody had started reading him as a threat a long time before, when he was young enough that the reading had time to become his whole life.
The kids most likely to end up in a room like the one we were in are the kids who stand in an intersection I'd spend my later career studying. LGBTQ youth make up close to 30% of the population in juvenile facilities, compared with being roughly 20% of kids in public schools on the outside. Of the queer kids who are locked up, most are Black or brown.
I used to think of June as a kind of marker month. Nothing more than a repeat on the calendar. The school year ends, heat settles in, everything slows down and gets louder at the same time. I didn’t connect it to him then, but I do now. It took me years to go back to that room in my head and see it, and the thing that brought me back, every time, was June.
June is when the US celebrates exactly the freedoms this young man was on the wrong side of. Juneteenth (a combination of June and nineteenth) marks the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they'd been free for two and a half years already; the news was delivered by the Union Army, then in the process of enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation. A world of meaning lives in that gap: the distance between the freedom on paper and the freedom in fact.
What I see now—that I couldn't when I was crouched over my bag all those years ago—is that this gap was never closed. It moved. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery “except as punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” and that exception has been doing steady work ever since. Congress has a live bill to strike it. California put the question to voters in 2024 and lost. The holiday that marks the end of legal slavery and the clause that has kept it legal for the incarcerated share a birthday, and I had sat in a room with someone living inside that clause.
Similarly, Pride marks the crawl of queer people out of the category of criminal, sick, arrestable—and the liberation is real. But the kids most overrepresented behind the wall of incarceration are queer, mostly Black and brown, and the celebration, for the most part, isn't designed to think about them at all. The man folding stars for luck was already one of the kids forgotten by the celebration when I met him. Though both holidays are, in a sense, partly about him, neither one includes where he actually was.
When the officer came in, I packed the last of my things; the man set the stars down on the table— three or four by then—and that was it. I don't know his name. I don't know if he's still inside. I know the other men laughed, and I know he kept folding stars anyway, like the laughing was beside the point.
