We must not cancel any plans that we had to celebrate Pride. In fact, invite more people. Make our numbers bigger. Let's double the size of every Pride celebration for the rest of the year, holding hands with our friends, family, partners, spouses, children and allies.

Living in the intersection of the fears I walk around with being Black in America, being a Black man in America, being gay -- and probably other a handful of other qualifiers -- leaves me angrily afraid.

We need companies to take legitimate financial steps at not just selling rainbow versions of their products back to us -- but to make money and give it to us so that we can live in this society effectively.

Since November of last year, when the church announced a policy that mandates church discipline (the process that leads to excommunication) for LGBT individuals in same-sex marriages and bars their children from baptism, church leadership has engaged in a consistent drumbeat of bigoted messages aimed at the LGBT community.

As I came out to family and friends over the course of the next year and a half, the response was varied -- from unconditional love, to those who feared for my soul because now I was going to hell to blatant rejection. Many kept asking: "Why?"

We are still far away from full LGBT equality and acceptance which is why Laurie and I keep advocating.