June celebrates Pride Month globally and that means the LGBTQ+ community is honored for their work, authenticity, and overall awesomeness.
The world has come a long way to acknowledge the community, but there is still progress to be made. Pride Month is the first step.
Pride Month is not just a month of parties, parades, and protests. It is a remembrance of a critical event in 1969 that changed the course of history.
On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Uprising occurred in New York City. Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn was one of the most popular gay bars and had been raided before by police. At the time, police would frequently raid gay bars and harass the queer community because there were still many laws that banned homosexuality. But on that particular day in June, the community fought back and protested for several days.
The following year, organizers marched down Christopher Street to Central Park. They adopted the theme of “Gay Pride” to counterpoint the prevailing attitude of shame inflicted by society. The march soon expanded to other cities throughout the 1970s until Pride became the massive celebration that we know and love today.
Although Pride may feel like a party today, it has always been a protest against unjust systems. The establishment of Pride events in major cities has created many outreach opportunities. Some of these opportunities include getting queer people to register to vote, demanding action on HIV (from groups like ACT UP and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS), and pressuring politicians to express their support for the community by marching.
Likewise, several major Supreme Court rulings on LGBTQ+ equality have taken place in June. Some examples included the Obergefell decision that legalized marriage equality; the Lawrence decision that ended sodomy bans; and the Bostock ruling that stopped hospitals from turning away transgender patients. These victories inspired and boosted efforts to advance queer liberation further.
How can you celebrate Pride month? Donate to LGBTQ+ organizations like the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, the National Center for Transgender Equality, the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network, The Trevor Project, and a multitude of HIV charities. Try learning more about the community’s history through research, going to a local drag event, supporting LGBTQ+ businesses, raising money for your local LGBTQ+ center, or waving flags with your family at local Pride parades. It’s the perfect time to learn, grow, and celebrate!
But once Pride Month is over, don’t stop supporting, empowering, celebrating, educating yourself, and raising awareness of the LGBTQ+ community.
Before you go, here are some important LGBTQ+ figures to know about:
Human Rights:
Marsha P. Johnson is a celebrated icon. She was an activist, drag performer, sex worker, and model for Andy Warhol. She was also a Black, queer, and transgender woman, who fearlessly advocated for her rights and the rights of the LGBTQ community. Johnson was a key figure of the 1960s gay rights movement in the United States and was allegedly the one who threw the brick that began the infamous Stonewall riots, which were the catalyst for the movement and inspired many Pride marches. She also co-founded the gay and trans advocacy organization S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), alongside her close friend Sylvia Rivera.
“As long as gay people don’t have their rights all across America, there’s no reason for celebration.”
-Marsha P. Johnson
Politics:
Harvey Milk rose to prominence in the late 1970s when he became California’s first openly gay person elected to public office. The San Francisco community leader supported the rights of gay teachers, sponsored anti-discrimination legislation, and fostered LGBT-run businesses. In 2009, his nephew Stuart Milk founded the Harvey Milk Foundation to continue his fight for equality.
“If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”
– Harvey Milk
Law:
Alice Nkom is a human rights lawyer and LGBTQ+ activist from Cameroon, where homosexuality is still criminalized. Although Nkom identifies as heterosexual, she has dedicated her work to fighting for Cameroon’s LGBTQ community and founded the Association for the Defense of Homosexuality in 2003. In Cameroon, police officers entrap and beat members of the LGBTQ community. She and her colleagues are sometimes in danger, but Nkom remains undeterred.
“These threats are in fact proof that our fight must continue.”
– Alice Nkom
STEM:
Sally Ride was a Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree, received NASA’s Space Flight Medal twice, and was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame, Astronaut Hall of Fame, and National Aviation Hall of Fame. She was also a space shuttle robotic arm operator and America’s first female and youngest astronaut to go to space. In 1983, she flew with crew members aboard the shuttle Challenger, the same orbiter that tragically exploded after lift-off during a mission in 1986. Before her death in 2012, Ride revealed that she had been in a 27-year relationship with a female partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy. Sally Ride co-wrote with her partner seven children’s books about subjects related to space, Earth, and astronomy.
“The best advice I can give anybody is to try to understand who you are and what you want to do, and don’t be afraid to go down that road and do whatever it takes and work as hard as you have to work to achieve that.”
– Sally Ride
Education:
Audre Lorde was a self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” She broke down barriers with her emphasis on the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexual identity. Her most well-known work includes “Sister Outsider,” a collection of essays and speeches, and the semi-autobiographical “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.” In the 1980s, she and writer Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She was also a founding member of Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa, an organization that worked to raise concerns about women under apartheid. She was a professor of English at John Jay College of criminal justice and Hunter College. She was the poet laureate of New York from 1991-1992. In 2020, Lorde was elected as an inductee to the American Poets Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
– Audre Lorde
Climate Change:
Jamie Margolin is a 19-year-old Colombian-American writer, community organizer, activist, and public speaker. Her identity as a Latina Jewish lesbian and her love for mother earth has driven her to fight for those who are oppressed and marginalized. She is the founder of Zero Hour, an international youth climate justice movement. Zero Hour led the first Youth Climate March in Washington DC and 25 other cities all around the world during the summer of 2018. Margolin was also a plaintiff in a Washington state lawsuit, Our Children’s Trusts’ Youth v. Gov. She went against the state for denying her generation’s constitutional rights to a livable environment by continuing to make climate change worse.
“The only thing that can create the change we need in the time we have left, if we’re honest with ourselves, is a radical political transformation that holds the rights of youth, of indigenous peoples, of women, of all people as more important than the rights of corporations to pollute and perpetuate intergenerational injustice on me and my peers.”
– Jamie Margolin
Art & Culture:
Wu Tsang identifies as “transfeminine and transguy, “and is a Chinese-Swedish-American video artist. Tsang’s work combines activism, community organizing, and mediation on the elusiveness of various identities. Tsang has won a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and was nominated for the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize in 2018. She is an artist of international renown. Her 2017 installation We hold where study, now on view at the Museum of Modern Art, draws on the writings of Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey and features dancing individuals whose images appear to intertwine and overlap. She recently directed a new film, Passage, for Solange’s creative agency Saint Heron.
“In my art and as a person, I just tend to be OK with contradictions.”
– Wu Tsang
Animal Rights:
Milo Runkle is the founder and former president of Mercy for the Animals or MFA. He founded MFA after witnessing the brutal handling of a piglet brought into school for dissection. Runkle discovered that the current legal system offered no recourse for him to press charges on behalf of the animal. The experience inspired him to find MFA when he was 15-years-old to give farm animals an advocate in his community. Over the last 20 years, his organization has become an important group in assisting the move away from factory farming and the worst practices of animal agriculture to create a more kind, compassionate, and gentle human presence on the planet through the foods we eat. Runkle is also the founder of the Good Food Institute and is a writer, meditator, and advocate outside of farm animals for LGBT rights and the rights of nature. At age 25, Milo became the youngest person ever inducted into the United States Animal Rights Hall of Fame.
“To me, when we talk about the issue of our treatment of animals and our food system, and transforming it, it really is about compassion, not just compassion for animals, but for those who are forced to do work that causes a lot of suffering.”
– Milo Runkle
Sports:
Martina Navratilova is a Czech-American tennis star. By 1981, she had won Wimbledon twice and was about to start a record-breaking string of nine Wimbledon final appearances. But she put her career and celebrity status in jeopardy by coming out; first as bisexual and then as a lesbian. She lost millions in endorsement deals following her revelation. But, she continued to dominate the tennis court and used her voice to advocate for gay rights. In 1992, she joined other activists in a lawsuit that challenged a Colorado amendment that banned the extension of civil rights protections to gay people.
“Labels are for filing. Labels are for clothing. Labels are not for people.”
– Martina Navratilova