The Origins and Heroes of Pride Month

Written by: Becca Williams, SBT Copywriter

Cover art  is from this article on the corporatization of Pride and Juneteenth

 June is one of my favorite months, for a lot of reasons.  In Oregon, it’s the first month of actual warm temperatures after essentially 10 months of rain.  It’s also Juneteenth, summer solstice, and the beginning of Cancer season which serves as a reminder to let myself reconnect with my emotions and my loved ones.  And, it’s Pride Month, a time to celebrate our queer selves and siblings, and to take stock of where we are in the LGBTQ+ rights movement.  Pride parades and celebrations are such energetic and shining spaces, yet they also some with their own sense of conflict, progress that still needs to be made, and, in the last few years, a deepening sense that the rights that have been so hard to win are slowly slipping away. 

This week’s blog is about the origins of Pride celebrations, which started the year after the 1969 uprising at New York’s Stonewall Inn.  I’ll discuss this debated history as well as the Black and brown queer and trans activists who led the way and continue to lead us.  There is a lot of information about this topic out there, and this is absolutely an incomplete portrait of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.  As a note, language around this topic is constantly evolving and has changed significantly since the time of Stonewall. I’ll be using the phrases “LGBTQ+”, “gay”, and “queer” rights to discuss Pride. 

Many say that the LGBTQ+ movement began with the Stonewall Inn uprising that lasted for six days starting on June 28^th, 1969 at a dimly lit and mafia-owned gay bar in New York.  While this certainly was a pivotal moment not only for the movement but also for the associated folklore, the activism for gay rights had been going on for years.   Many protests in the 1950s and 1960s started with queer people of color and centered on police brutality and restrictive anti-gay laws, including laws that criminalized sodomy and the wearing of more than three items of clothing that did not correspond to one’s assigned sex at birth. 

LGBTQ+ folx were often denied service at bars and restaurants, and establishments that catered to this community were frequently raided by the police.  In the late 1960’s, the Stonewall Inn was one of the few gay bars in New York where dancing was legal.  A lot of these laws were predicated the fears that non-heteronormative behavior actually represented a pattern of pedophilia and predation, and that long-standing stereotypical idea that gay rights activists are attempting to “recruit” heterosexual people.  We see those same fears resurfacing in successful conservative efforts with bathroom bills, restricting the teaching on gender and sexuality, criminalizing medical care for trans youth, and banning trans women from participating in sports, most recently swimming and rugby.

 (The 1966 "sip-in" at the Julius tavern in New York)

The 1959 uprising outside of Los Angeles’ gay-friendly Cooper’s Do-nuts is widely considered to be the first modern-day LGBTQ+ rights uprising.  Trans women and queer sex workers were routinely raided and arrested by law enforcement officers for simply congregating (which was legal) and in May of 1959, they fought back, pelting officers with doughnuts, coffee, and plates.  The police returned in larger numbers and the riot shut down LA’s Main Street for a whole day.  In August of 1966, there was an uprising, also led by trans women and queer sex workers, in San Francisco’s Compton Café based in the Tenderloin district.  As one woman was being arrested by police for “cross-dressing”, another trans woman threw hot coffee in a police officer’s face, which ignited an uprising that included lighting a newsstand on fire and breaking the windows of an officer’s squad car.  In retaliation, local bars and restaurants flatly refused to serve queer and trans folx, which set off local demonstrations.  Also in 1966, three gay men who were part of the gay activist group called the Mattachine Society, sat at the Julius bar in New York, proclaimed they were gay, and refused to leave after being denied service.  This was known as a “sip-in”.

A “sip-in” sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  Many of the tactics used by the LGBTQ+ rights movement were modeled after the Black Power and Civil Rights movements.  Modeled after, co-opted, borrowed, plagiarized – these are all words I have come across in researching this blog.  Many social movements use tactics that have been successful in other movements, and this, to some, is no different.  Solidarity was encouraged between the Black Panther Party and the Gay Liberation Front (a group formed after the Stonewall uprising), and the Black Panther’s own Huey Newton called for an intersectional approach to liberation work in one of his speeches. Afeni Shakur, a Black Panther revolutionary and artist Tupac Shakur’s mother, organized a meeting with the Gay Liberation Front at Jane Fonda’s house (what I would give to be a fly on the wall).  As with most things, multiple truths exist around this. There was significant racism and transphobia within early iterations of this movement (that absolutely linger today), and queer activists of color are often understudied compared to their white counterparts so there is a lot of this history that we likely don’t know.  And, while tactics were borrowed and phrases co-opted (the rallying cry “Gay is good” is a re-wording of “Black is beautiful”), credit was not regularly given where due, and there wasn’t always introspection around the positionality of whiteness in the LGBTQ+ movement.

(A group of folx outside the Stonewall Inn the weekend of June 27th, 1969)

Let’s turn to the Stonewall Inn on June 28^th, 1969.  This quote sums up what the actual bar was like: “Stonewall was a piss-stinking hole-in-the-wall bar with weak drinks and blacked-out windows boarded up from previous raids. The lovable kind. Back door entry was for drag kings and queens, sex workers, and anyone in transit to or from cruising the queer ruin of Hudson piers.”  The bar had been raided by police earlier that same week, and they came again to force LGBTQ+ folx to show their identification and then to aggressively arrest them.  There are many stories of what happened that night, including a lot of speculation about “who threw the first brick” that instigated the uprising that would last for six days.  One of my favorite tidbits of information about Stonewall is the description of the “Rockettes style kicklines” formed by drag queens and other queer patrons as they clashed with police.  That night and in the following days, many folx were arrested and many experienced police brutality, particularly queer folx of color.

There are entire books, movies, documentaries, and articles written about some of these Black and brown queer activists and legends of this movement.  This small description is really meant as a basic primer with the hopes that you’ll dive into more content.  Marsha P. (as in “Pay it no mind” Johnson was a 23-year-old Black trans woman and drag performer at the time of the Stonewall uprising.  Many people conclude that she was the one who initiated it, although Marsha herself denied that claim.  After the uprising, Marsha, along with activist Sylvia Rivera, a 17-year old Latina trans woman, founded the STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) shelter, the first LGBTQ+ centered shelter in this country, and the first organization led by trans women of color.  Both Marsha and Sylvia were sex workers who used the money they made to fund STAR.   Marsha continued her advocacy until her mysterious and to this day unsolved death in 1992.  Sylvia Rivera’s advocacy and organizing continued as well, including her now famous “Y’all Better Quiet Down” speech that was made to a largely white gay crowd.  Please take a listen.  In this speech, Rivera speaks directly to the racism and transphobia within the movement, as well to the experience of incarcerated trans women of color.  In 2019, a monument for Marsha and Sylvia was unveiled in New York, blocks away from the Stonewall Inn.  This is the first permanent public artwork recognizing trans women in the world. 

(A bust of Marsha P. Johnson near the Stonewall Inn)

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Stormé DeLarverie are two other legends whose activism continued well after Stonewall.  Miss Major, a Black trans woman from Chicago, was knocked unconscious by a police officer the first night of the uprising.  She spent her life organizing around the AIDS epidemic and prison abolition, eventually founding the House of GG in Little Rock, Arkansas.  The House of GG serves as a retreat house for the trans community, offering various healing-centered and advocacy-focused programs.  Stormé, a Black lesbian activist, is also believed to be the one to start the Stonewall uprising.  A police officer shoved her and she punched him in the face, causing four more officers to attack her.  One of those officers hit her in the head with a baton, which many remember as being the incendiary moment that began the upheaval.  Stormé served as a bouncer for lesbian bars and as a street patrol guardian for the gay community.  She also participated in the Jewel Box Revue, North America’s first racially integrated touring drag show, where she performed as the show’s only drag king.

A few hundred feet from the Stonewall Inn, in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village, was the Women’s House of Detention (or House of D, as it was called).  For me, this is a fascinating piece of history that demonstrates the intersections of the Black Power movement, the LGBTQ+ movement, and the prison abolition movement.  During the Stonewall riots, a group of incarcerated women, mostly women of color, started their own protest at the House of D, chanting “Gay power!” and setting fire to their belongings before throwing them out the window.  One of the women involved in this was none other than Afeni Shakur.  If you’d like to learn more, please take a listen to this interview, featuring the author of the recently published, “The Women’s House of Detention.”  

 The first Pride celebration took place on the one-year anniversary of Stonewall in parades in New York and San Francisco.  The intention of this celebration was, and still is, to protest, party, and build community in defiance of oppression.  Many activist groups continued their work after Stonewall, and much organizing happened as a result.  Yet, there is still plenty of room for progress.  Pride is often corporatized, and I’m sure you’ll be seeing displays of LGBTQ+ support (often in the form of rainbow flags, this phenomenon is also known as “rainbow capitalism”) from large companies claiming to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights.  Similarly to what we spoke about regarding the corporatization of Juneteenth, this serves a façade without much meaningful policy to back it up.  Many queer and trans folx, particularly folx of color, struggle to be out in their workplace – near 50% of queer employees remain closeted and about that same number report hearing or experiencing homophobia. 

(Sylvia Rivera, Stormé DeLarverie, and Marsha P. Johnson, from this article)

As we know, there is still a lot of work to be done.   A full 20% of trans people are denied housing applications, and around 10% are evicted because of their gender identity.  The advocacy work of Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major Gracy-Griffin, and Stormé DeLarverie remains crucial today and LGBTQ+ folx face higher rates of incarceration, police brutality, homicide, and housing insecurity.  Within the LGBTQ+ movement, there continues to be a need to address racism and transphobia.  There is often a police presence at Pride parades and celebrations and at one parade a few years back in Ohio, Black queer protesters were attacked and arrested by law enforcement for blocking the parade route in order to draw attention to the recent acquittal of the officer who murdered Philando Castile and to protest the erasure of Black and brown queer voices at Pride festivals.

There continues to be incredible organizing and advocacy by Black and brown queer activists as well.  I encourage you to take a look at the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, the Ali Forney Center, the Trevor Project, and other efforts local to you.  During the course of researching this blog, I thoroughly enjoyed looking through pictures of Stormé’s Jewel Box Revue, and watching the incredible performances of Miss Shalae, a transgender Beyoncé tribute artist.  Take some time to look at these profiles of queer Black community activists, as well as Southern Fried Queer Pride, an Atlanta-based organization owned and operated by queer folx with the intention to build community and create places for anyone, regardless of identity, to access.