What is Pride Month?
Pride Month commemorates the 1969 Stonewell Uprising in New York and celebrates the LGBTQ community and the fight for equal rights. The Stonewell Uprising began on June 28, 1969, when police in New York raided the Stonewall Inn, a prominent gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The subsequent protests for the next 6 days are credited with LGBTQ activism in the United States.
The following year saw the first Pride parades in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Despite the pivotal role transgender people and people of color played in the riots, including trans activist Marsha P. Johnson, they were largely excluded from early Pride celebrations. “The reality is that most of the folks on the front lines at the Stonewall Uprising were trans women, trans women of color, other people of color, butch lesbians,” Cathy Renna Communications Director for the National LGBTQ Task Force told USA Today last year. “And yet somehow, the power that was coming together… to put together Pride events was from cisgender, gay white men.”
Today Pride Month symbolizes an opportunity for visibility and a sense of community. In addition to celebrating LGBTQ love and joy, it’s also a time to highlight important policy and resource issues the community faces.
Resource credit: USA Today
