It’s been a dazzling rainbow-drenched month of nationwide and worldwide celebrations of queer Pride this June, especially with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots that sparked the Pride movement. (As I write, World Pride is being celebrated in NYC, the birthplace of the movement.) But as June comes to a close, it’s a good time to take a step back from the parties, parades, and colorful merch and to reflect on the harsh realities that led to the organization of Pride, and the reasons it’s remained relevant to this day.
Pride wasn’t always a festival of joyful self-expression and loud music. Its origins lie within the brutal struggles for human rights and equal protections fought by all LGBTQIAA+ communities, and the protests aimed at unity, visibility, justice, and safety for all. Its foundations were a watershed moment for queer people to come together in numbers and demand to be seen and counted; prior to Stonewall, there were only 20 gay rights groups in the US, and many queer people lived in secrecy. Within a few years of the first Pride, the number of groups had skyrocketed to 1500. We owe it to those courageous fighters and organizers to honor their work and their great personal risk that paved the way for the progress we enjoy today. (We absolutely still have a long way to go to end oppression and violence against the queer community, but that doesn’t mean we can’t acknowledge what we’ve gained.)
Context: It was bad back then—really bad
The persecution of queer people was nothing new in white Western culture by the beginning of the 20th century, but criminalization of queerness and its demonization as a sickness became even more widespread and open throughout its first few decades. The American Psychiatric Association stigmatized queerness as first a “sociopathic personality disturbance” and later a “sexual deviation” in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Discrimination against the LGBTQIAA+ communities was common and legal, in every area of life from housing and jobs to religion and social institutions. Simply gathering as a community was enough to be outlawed as “disorderly conduct”, and it was illegal for two men to dance together. Bars and nightclubs—which we all think of as a cornerstone of queer community now—were unable to get liquor licenses if they served queer patrons.
Transgender people and drag kings and queens were treated especially viciously, with police regularly arresting them for not wearing “enough” items of clothing that conformed to the sex they were assigned at birth (a “law” that was never on the books and seems to have been nothing but a rule of thumb to justify persecution) or invoking obscure 19th century masquerade laws to make an arrest. It was common for police, in the course of an arrest, to “check” the genitals of the person they were detaining and to use it as an excuse to humiliate or sexually assault them. Law enforcement looked the other way when queer people were harassed and beaten.
A shaky—and unlikely—alliance
Because of the liquor laws forbidding actual gay bars, and straight bars often refusing to serve gay patrons, organized crime stepped in to seize the opportunity they saw. Mafia families were willing to open private clubs that catered to the queer community, setting them up as “bottle bars” where the patrons had to sign in as members and were theoretically able to bring their own alcohol (although in reality it was supplied through the syndicate). Raids on these clubs were common, both because of the illegal alcohol and because the fact of queer people dancing and partying together made it “disorderly” in law enforcement terms.
Naturally, the mob paid off the police to mostly look the other way, and worked with them to schedule raids at times of day when there would be few patrons there and with enough warning that the club owners could signal patrons to stop drinking and dancing. Queer patrons were regularly arrested if their clothing was gender-nonconforming or if they didn’t have proper ID.
Most of these clubs were poorly-run, with no sanitation standards and little maintenance, but they were inexpensive to get into, and they were the closest thing to a safe community gathering place for queer people. For those who were homeless, it was a place to stay off the streets all night.
The significance of Stonewall
The Stonewall Inn at 51 Christopher Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village was one of these “bottle bars”. (NB: The current Stonewall Inn is at 53 Christopher Street; the original location was broken up, rented to other businesses, and sold several times since the riot.) It was hardly what you’d call a chic gay nightspot; like other such clubs, it was dirty and poorly-maintained, with low-quality booze. It was also a refuge for queer people who couldn’t afford anything better and/or who were refused service even at other gay bars—homeless LGBTQ youth, trans women of color, queer sex workers, working-class queer people living in poverty.
That it was a hub for queer sex work was a reality born out of the fact that for many LGBTQ people, especially trans people and even more especially trans women of color, sex work was one of the only ways to survive and earn money in the face of completely legal workplace discrimination.
There had been raids at Stonewall before, and there had even been riots at other queer clubs. But in the wee hours of June 28th, 1969, the police riot on the packed bar sparked an outrage that blazed into active resistance, fueled by countless injustices against the community over the years. Patrons began to throw whatever they could grab at police, and when the police tried to barricade themselves inside the club, the patrons tried to set the building on fire.
Two trans women of color who were also sex workers, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, are now credited with being among the first to fight back (Rivera is credited with having thrown the first brick) and lesbian Stormé DeLarverie is thought to be the first to take a swing at a police officer.
This time, it wasn’t just a fight that was broken up or dispersed. Over the next six days, hundreds and thousands of local queer people descended on the club to continue the protest riot.
It was clear that a dam had broken within queer society, freeing decades of rage, grief, resentment, and humiliation to flood the community and demand to be heard. Within months of Stonewall, LGBTQ activists in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco were meeting to organize queer rights demonstrations on or near the anniversary of Stonewall.
The evolution of Pride
Prior to Stonewall, there had certainly been many marches and demonstrations on behalf of LGBTQ rights. The queer communities allied with other causes, such as Black Power, the feminist movement, and anti-Vietnam protesters; so-called “homophile” groups emerged as queer allies in protests and activist organizing. However, many of these marches were small and relatively subdued, enforcing a strict mainstream dress code in an effort to show that queer people could fit into “respectable” workplaces and neighborhoods.
From the start, the organizers of what would become Manhattan’s first Pride determined that there would be no regulations on age or dress—a tradition that continues to this day, when Pride revelers wear everything from casual shorts and tee shirts to elaborate, dazzling costumes to skin-baring club clothes or fetishwear.
Organizing committee member L. Craig Schoonmaker suggested “Pride” for the theme of the event, replacing the plan to call it “gay power”, making the argument that the LGBTQ community had very little power but a great deal of pride. “Say it loud, gay is proud” became the mantra of the day.
Those first rallies in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco received widespread media coverage, as had the Stonewall riot. In Manhattan alone, the marchers filled the streets—there’s no reliable count for the number of participants, but estimates have put it anywhere from 1,000 to 20,000 people that first year.
It was a bisexual woman, Brenda Howard, who did a huge amount of the work of organizing New York’s first Pride, and who suggested the idea of expanding from a parade to an entire week-long festival.
Seven more cities internationally celebrated Pride the following year, and 8 more had joined by the third year. In the 50 years since Stonewall, June has officially become Pride month, and it is celebrated in communities throughout countries on nearly every continent.
As the AIDS crisis emerged in the 1980’s, Pride marches also became a forum for groups like PFLAG and ACT UP to call attention to the plight of the gay community, in which countless queer people were stigmatized, shunned, and left to die in pain and indignity by a society and a government that ignored and suppressed research into the disease. The gay leather community, which often comes under fire at Pride events for not appearing “family-friendly” enough, was among the first of the queer community to mobilize for HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness.
The 80’s and 90’s also saw a gradual shift away from radicalism and towards a more conservative, organized, commercialism-friendly model. By the early 90’s, Pride had become less political and more party-oriented, as it is to this day.
The emergence of the rainbow
The rainbow flag was not part of the Pride movement from the beginning. In the early years of Pride, symbols used included the pink triangle, which was originally used to designate gay prisoners in Nazi concentration camps and which was adopted by the queer community to reclaim it.
It was an artist named Gilbert Baker who designed the rainbow flag for a march in 1978 in San Francisco organized by Harvey Milk. His design had eight stripes (later changed to six) and each stripe represented a facet of queer identity: “hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony and violet for spirit”.
Although the rainbow flag is still the most common Pride symbol today, smaller groups within the queer community have designed their own flags as well, and at any given event you’ll see different brightly-colored striped flags for bisexual, pansexual, trans, nonbinary, asexual, leather, bear, lesbian, and other groups.
Criticisms and controversies
As with any social and political movement, Pride contains many different communities and points of view, who often clash with one another and with the outside world.
There have always been struggles between the queer people who feel that outlandish costumes and spectacles undermine the seriousness of the fight for LGBTQ rights and fuel straight people’s stereotypes about queer people as a dangerous “other”, and the queer people who feel that trying to conform to mainstream society is just another form of oppression under respectability politics and that queer rights mean nothing if they’re conditional on “fitting in”.
Pride events are targeted for protests by homophobic religious groups and bigots. They are also often criticized by straight society for being too sexualized or for challenging the political or cultural status quo.
Particularly in recent years, as big corporations compete for queer dollars, Pride events have come under fire within the queer community for being too commercialized, with corporate-sponsored floats sometimes outnumbering community ones. DC’s Capital Pride Parade was publicly criticized this year for prioritizing corporate floats in the lineup, forcing community groups that included small children to wait for as much as four hours before marching. Many queer people resent the “rainbow-washing” performed by corporations that ignore the community the rest of the year (or actively harm or displace them).
Police presence at Pride is also a hot button for controversy, with many events including police departments or queer police groups in their marches. Some parts of the queer community feel that it’s important to build better relationships with law enforcement, to educate and work with them and include them as allies; while others feel that it’s disrespectful to the marginalized people whose suffering was the origin of Pride to forgive and turn a blind eye to the long history of police brutality and injustice against the queer community.
As intersectionality becomes a more visible and nonnegotiable part of the fight for queer rights, many queer women, trans people, queer sex workers, and queers of color argue that Pride has for too long centered the voices and priorities of white cisgender gay men with money, erasing the contributions and needs of the very populations that were targeted at Stonewall. (Indeed, in 1973, Marsha P. Johnson was denied a chance to speak at Pride because she was a trans woman sex worker of color—not the face that Pride organizers wanted the world to see.)
So…why do we still need Pride, then?
Questioning whether Pride is still relevant is nothing new, even within the queer community—columnist and author Dan Savage was criticizing Pride’s shortcomings and saying that it no longer fulfilled its original purpose, back in 1999.
But despite all the legitimate criticisms and the internal and external battles surrounding Pride, it does still matter deeply to many, many queer people around the world. It’s a celebration of history and heritage, a chance to speak out on political issues that affect queer people, and a radical act of unity, visibility, and affirmation of ourselves and each other. For many newly-out queer people, it is their first chance to be surrounded by a huge community and to see their queerness loved and celebrated. Many families—both straight and queer—bring their children to marches and festivals so that those kids will grow up seeing queerness as normal and beautiful.
And with anti-LGBTQIAA+ bias, hate crimes, and criminalization on the rise again around the world, it’s desperately important to stand against bigotry and hate. There are countries newly choosing to put queer people to death. Here in the US, attacks on queer people happen everywhere from beatings in the streets to acts of terrorism like the Pulse nightclub shooting, and trans women of color are murdered in this country at an alarming rate. Even the battles we thought were won—such as marriage equality, queer adoption, and anti-discrimination laws—are being threatened by a homophobic administration.
There are storms brewing all around us, threatening the lives and existences of those in the queer community. We need Pride, if for no other reason, than to keep alive the hope that the clouds will someday part and let our rainbows shine.
