Meet Joey Prism, Creator of Unbroken Pride

Why this work exists

I did not come to this work from a distance.

I came to it because I lived it.

Like many of the people who pick up Unbroken Pride, I grew up learning that parts of me were inconvenient, unacceptable, or unsafe to show. I know what it is to be punished for who you are. I know the confusion of trying to make sense of love that arrives with conditions. I know the long after-effects of childhood abuse tied to identity, and the way those experiences can leave marks that last far beyond childhood itself.

For me, those marks have included spinal injury, pain, and complex post-traumatic stress. I no longer live inside active C-PTSD in the way I once did. That matters to me, because it means I know both sides of the story: the years of surviving, and the slower work of building a life with more room for pride, agency, and breath.

I also know that survival is not tidy. Some days still ask for gentleness. Some memories still arrive with weight. And still, I am here. Still queer. Still creating. Still choosing a future that belongs to me.

What I learned the hard way

When you are harmed for your sexuality, gender identity, or expression, the injury is rarely only physical or only emotional. It becomes relational. It becomes identity-deep. It can teach a child to hide, to self-blame, to stay small, or to treat their own truth as the problem.

Many of us carry that training into adulthood.

We become high-functioning and exhausted.
We become tender and hypervigilant.
We become loyal to people who never learned how to love us safely.
We become experts at surviving rooms that were never built for us.

Unbroken Pride grew out of that reality.

I wanted resources that did not ask LGBTQIA+ people to translate themselves into generic recovery language. I wanted material that understood family rejection, minority stress, internalised queerphobia, and the particular grief of having your developmental milestones interrupted by shame, silence, or violence. I wanted something that could sit beside therapy, or support private reflection.

Most of all, I wanted survivors to feel less alone in the specific truth of what happened to them.

Lived experience, research, and community evidence

Unbroken Pride is shaped by lived experience, but it is not only personal testimony.

It has also been informed by reading, reflection, and engagement with trauma-informed practice, affirmative approaches, minority stress research, and broader LGBTQIA+ health evidence. That includes scholarship, community research, organisational submissions, and findings from inquiries and government reports that continue to show what many of us already know in our bodies:

• LGBTQIA+ people experience disproportionate levels of harassment, victimisation, discrimination, and family rejection. Those pressures are not abstract. They are linked with elevated rates of depression, anxiety, suicidality, and long-term distress across communities that are too often told to be resilient without first being protected.
• Those findings matter because they confirm that the problem was never our identities.
  The problem was the hostility directed at them.
• When family rejection and minority stress combine with childhood harm, the impact can be profound. That is one of the reasons Unbroken Pride exists in identity-specific editions. Lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and queer survivors are not interchangeable, and resources are stronger when they tell the truth about that.

What I believe

I believe queer survivors deserve tools that recognise both pain and power.
I believe pride is not a performance. It is a reclamation.
I believe chosen family can become one of the great corrective experiences of a life.
I believe self-compassion is not soft when you were raised in harshness. It is radical.
I believe nobody should have to recover in language that erases them.

I also believe honesty matters.

I am not writing from a pedestal. I am writing as someone who has had to rebuild safety from the inside out, someone who has lived with the long consequences of being harmed for who they are, and someone who refuses to let that be the end of my story.

If you are here because you are looking for something affirming, practical, and grounded in both survival and evidence, I hope Unbroken Pride meets you with respect.

You were never broken.
You adapted.
And your pride still belongs to you.

Series Extension and Further Development

Development is also underway on further identity-customised editions, including:

• Aro Edition
• Ace Edition
• Aroace Edition
• Gray-Ace Edition
• Genderfluid Edition
• Enby Edition
• Demi Edition
• Pan Edition
• Intersex Edition
• Omni Edition
• Mspec Edition
• Poly Edition

These additional editions are being developed to extend the series beyond the first five core releases and to better reflect the wider diversity of LGBTQIA+ identities, attractions, and lived experiences.

Pseudonym

I write under the name Joey Prism. I write under a pseudonym to protect the privacy of the people I love. My immediate family, chosen family, and partner deserve safety and ordinary life beyond the public edge of this work. Unbroken Pride was never meant to put them at risk of curiosity, hostility, or backlash. Using a pen name lets me speak honestly about survival and pride while keeping their lives protected.

It never was.