A few weeks ago, I used this column to discuss the importance of pride week, and how today, even though we have come a long way as a country, it is still a very relevant celebration which ought to continue.

Naturally the piece got its mixed reactions. What I hadn't quite expected was the number of people who reached out afterwards, by message or in person, simply to show their appreciation for the piece. Some I knew well, while many I had never met before. Quite memorable was the note I received from someone who admitted they had always kept a few steps back from expressing themselves, and that those few thoughts had made them feel a little less alone for a moment.

That response taught me something Pride Month itself teaches us every September, which is that this conversation is never really about flamboyant clothes, colourful floats or fluttering flags. It is about the people standing underneath them, and all the spectrum of reasons each of them has for needing the day to exist at all.

I am thinking of a teenager from a rather conservative background who still hasn't found the courage to tell their parents who they really are. For that person, Pride isn't a party, it is another push, as small as that may be, towards plucking enough courage to introduce themselves, their real selves, to the world anew.

Or the father in his 50s who told me his son came out two years ago, and that marching alongside him at Pride last year taught him more about himself and about love than any other experience in his life. He told me how he attends because showing up for his son matters, and because he wants his son to never once doubt whether he is welcome at his own family's table.

Then there is the woman well into her 70s who reached out to tell me how Pride was never something her generation could ever even dream of. She spent most of her adult life choosing silence over risk, because the alternative, in her time, could cost you your loved ones, your job, sometimes your own safety. She told me she doesn't march, and probably never will, but watching the celebrations each year still moves her to tears, because it is the closest thing she has to the youth she never got to live openly.

And there was a young man, still not fully out with his work colleagues, who told me that pride for him is the only opportunity he gets to be himself.

None of these people need convincing that Pride matters. What strikes me is how differently it matters to each of them, and how none of those reasons cancel the others out. They are all pieces of the beautiful mosaic that makes Pride so crucial and real.

This is, I think, the real argument for keeping Pride exactly as visible and exactly as loud as it is. Not because the community needs reminding of who it is, but because everyone else does too, including the people who haven't yet found the words for what they're carrying.

If a handful of paragraphs from an opinion piece could reach as far as they did this summer, imagine what an entire month of visibility can still do for someone who hasn't found their own words yet.

So as Pride Month is with us again, I find myself thinking less about any silly debate we might have about it, and more about the people who are at the centre of it, and for whom it really matters. They are the real reason it continues, and they are worth remembering every time someone asks why we still need it.

Happy Pride Month to all!