I’m writing this from the café inside Saks Fifth Avenue because it’s a place I go to quiet my mind. Something about the combination of the 934 designer perfumes, genuine leather bags and iconic uptown old ladies absolutely locks me in. I realize this is a very gay habit of mine, and somehow, that feels important to mention.Maybe because being gay has always made me hyper-aware of context and presentation. Perception and I have been mates for a while — it’s always about where I am, how I’m being read and how much of myself feels safe to reveal in any given moment.Pride has snuck up on me this year and, honestly, it feels different now.When I was younger, I thought Pride was supposed to feel loud and vibrant. I imagined adulthood as this glamorous arrival point where authenticity would eventually become effortless — especially once I moved somewhere like New York, where freedom feels like the default mode when you crank it in these streets. In many ways, it has been. But the older I get, particularly as a queer creative working in industries obsessed with image, culture and identity, the more Pride has started feeling quieter, heavier and infinitely more honest than I expected.I’ve spent years building a life around creativity. My entire career has been built on understanding emotion and perception at a professional level. But a lot of queer creatives arrive in these industries already carrying an unusual relationship to performance — long before we ever enter the room. Many of us learned very young that identity itself could become something strategic. I’ve written previously about how queer people learn to read a room before anyone speaks and how we anticipate rejection before it arrives. We soften ourselves, edit constantly and develop emotional intelligence in the name of safety. I’ve stepped back in meetings with more conservative brands. I’ve laughed and smiled at something that definitely hurt me. I’m the king of making myself more digestible. Some say this has a lot to do with my being a middle child, but we can talk about that another day. This constant internal dialogue — sometimes big, sometimes small — never fully stops. But over time, constantly managing how visible you are creates a very particular kind of exhaustion.That’s why queer burnout is rarely discussed honestly enough, especially in creative industries. Because the same survival mechanisms that protect queer people growing up are often the exact qualities that get professionally rewarded later. For example, my “exceptional emotional intelligence, social fluency and professionalism” are, in plain terms, hyper-awareness, code-switching and masking. For me, this performance has become marketable and rewarded, even.As a cofounder of an agency navigating exponential challenges, this feeling has only intensified. Advertising, especially, can feel like an ecosystem built entirely around perception management, which is probably why many queer creatives end up excelling professionally while quietly disconnecting from themselves personally. We know how to perform because, for many of us, performance began as survival. I felt that long before I had language for it.For years, I thought survival meant becoming untouchable. Gorgeous, rich and successful. Ambitious enough that nobody would look closely enough to notice the parts of me I still hadn’t fully understood myself. I became fluent in branding long before I became fluent in honesty, and the exhausting part is that sometimes the mask works. I’ve gagged the crowd for so long, but often people are connecting to the version of you that feels least threatening to their own comfort. There’s a lot of grief in that. A quiet loneliness that comes from being rewarded for a self you built to stay safe. Queer people understand that feeling intimately. That constant emotional calibration takes a toll on the body eventually, and yet queer people continue finding ways to create beauty from it. My TikTok loves to tell me my bloated face is cortisol, so I add dandelion tea to my cart immediately.This queer resilience moves me. That’s why representation matters more than people sometimes realize — not because queer people need perfect role models (I’m currently asking myself if writing this is too real and whether it will land the right way), but because there’s something life-changing about encountering a person, song, character or story that makes you feel recognized instead of edited.And maybe that’s what I’ve been craving more of lately — not visibility but honesty. Because girl, I’m tired. A lot of queer creatives are tired. I’m tired of feeling like authenticity only becomes acceptable once it’s aesthetically polished enough for consumption. When I started writing this, I said, ‘I need to be myself,’ and even that can start feeling like another role to execute correctly.I don’t think Pride means the same thing to me anymore because I no longer see queerness purely through the lens of celebration. I see the complexity now. Imagine how much creative energy could be redirected into truth instead of self-protection — especially now, in this crazy world we’re experiencing together.The strongest creatives, leaders, artists and storytellers I know are not the most polished ones. I’m done performing survival like it’s the only way to be seen.Martin Magner is the cofounder and CCO of Sounds Fun, an independent creative agency founded in 2023. Previously, he was group creative director at Virtue Worldwide.