Pride (LGBTQ culture)

• 1. Introduction

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  LGBTQ pride began not as a celebration but as an act of defiance. Early on the morning of the 28th of June, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar at 43 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. The people inside fought back. That night, and over the nights that followed, something shifted in the history of LGBTQ rights that would never fully reverse.

  What is it about the word "pride" that carries such particular weight for this movement? Why did activists reach for one of the seven deadly sins as the name for their cause? And how did a riot in a bar in New York City become the seed of events held in dozens of countries, with a flag now recognized the world over? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

  The story that follows touches on a slogan borrowed from civil rights activism, a flag designed by an artist in 1978, a presidential declaration that took until 1999 to arrive, and a philosopher who turned down an award in the middle of a parade to make a point about what pride had become.

• 2. A Word Reclaimed

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  Thom Higgins, a gay rights activist in Minnesota and a former member of the Catholic Church, was thinking about the church when he put the words together. The institution had long cast same-sex behavior as a sin against divine and natural law, and among the sins it named was pride. Higgins chose to take that word back. By pairing "pride" with "gay," he turned a term of condemnation into a rallying call.

  The term was also claimed by Jack Baker and Michael McConnell, an activist couple in Minnesota, creating a disputed but geographically concentrated origin story. McConnell later reflected on what the word accomplished: "That language was transformative," he said. "This approach not only opened doors but also propelled individuals forward." In 1971, McConnell introduced the term "gay pride" in Chicago.

  Brenda Howard, along with bisexual activist Robert A. Martin and gay activist L. Craig Schoonmaker, are credited with popularizing "pride" as the name for these festivities more broadly. Howard in particular brought organizing energy that would prove essential to the early marches.

  The shift in language also reflected a shift away from an older vocabulary. Before the late 1960s, gatherings by LGBTQ people were called Homophile demonstrations, a term that signaled a more assimilationist approach. After Stonewall, the language became Gay Liberation, insisting on full equality rather than quiet coexistence.

• 3. Before Stonewall

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  Karl Heinrich Ulrichs is considered one of the first openly gay activists and a predecessor of the entire pride movement, working decades before any march existed.

  The 1950s and 1960s in the United States were a period of acute legal and social repression for LGBTQ people. Two organizations in particular tried to push back: the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society. They ran a series of pickets they called Annual Reminders, designed to inform Americans that LGBTQ people lacked basic civil rights protections. Those pickets began in 1965 and took place every July 4 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

  Frank Kameny, who participated in the Annual Reminders, reached for another civil rights parallel when crafting a counter-message to the stigma of the era. Inspired by Stokely Carmichael's "Black is Beautiful," Kameny originated the slogan "Gay is Good" in the early 1960s. The anti-LGBTQ discourse of those decades had equated homosexuality with mental illness. Kameny's phrase was a direct refusal of that framing.

  When Kameny marched in front of the White House, the State Department, and Independence Hall in those earlier years, the goal was careful self-presentation. He wanted to demonstrate that gay people could pass as ordinary government employees. Ten people marched with him then, and they told no press about their plans. That particular strategy would not survive the decade.

• 4. The First March

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  On the 2nd of November, 1969, Craig Rodwell, his partner Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, and Linda Rhodes proposed the first pride march at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations meeting in Philadelphia. The resolution called for an annual demonstration on the last Saturday in June in New York City, to commemorate what the document called "the 1969 spontaneous demonstrations on Christopher Street." It proposed the name Christopher Street Liberation Day. The only organization that did not vote for it was the Mattachine Society of New York, which abstained.

  Organizing meetings began in early January of the following year at Rodwell's apartment at 350 Bleecker Street. The core committee included Rodwell, Sargeant, Broidy, Michael Brown, Marty Nixon, Foster Gunnison Jr., and later Judy Miller, Jack Waluska, Steve Gerrie, and Brenda Howard. Getting major New York organizations like the Gay Activists Alliance to send representatives proved difficult at first. Gunnison served as treasurer and sought donations from national homophile organizations. Sargeant raised funds through the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop mailing list. Nixon worked to draw financial support from the Gay Liberation Front.

  Christopher Street Liberation Day fell on Sunday, the 28th of June, 1970, exactly one year after the Stonewall riots. The march covered 51 blocks to Central Park and finished in less than the scheduled time. Participants moved quickly, partly from excitement and partly from wariness about walking through the city carrying gay banners. The parade permit arrived only two hours before the march began. The New York Times ran coverage on its front page, noting that marchers occupied the full street for roughly 15 city blocks.

• 5. Rapid Spread

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  The day before the New York march, on Saturday the 27th of June, 1970, Chicago Gay Liberation organized its own march from Washington Square Park to the Water Tower at Michigan and Chicago avenues. Organizers chose that Saturday because the Stonewall events began on the last Saturday of June, and because they wanted to reach shoppers on Michigan Avenue. Many participants then marched on spontaneously to the Civic Center Plaza, now called Richard J. Daley Plaza. During the same weekend, gay activist groups held a march in Los Angeles and a march and "Gay-in" in San Francisco.

  The year after that, cities including Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, London, Paris, West Berlin, and Stockholm held their own marches. By 1972, Atlanta, Brighton, Buffalo, Detroit, Washington D.C., Miami, Philadelphia, and San Francisco had joined the calendar.

  Frank Kameny watched this expansion with something close to disbelief. Before Stonewall, he had spent years trying to persuade heterosexuals that gay people were no different from themselves. The riots changed the arithmetic entirely. "By the time of Stonewall, we had fifty to sixty gay groups in the country," he later observed. "A year later there were at least fifteen hundred. By two years later, to the extent that a count could be made, it was twenty-five hundred."

  Kay Lahusen, who photographed the 1965 marches, put it plainly: the Stonewall uprising was "the birth of gay pride on a massive scale."

• 6. The Flag and the Symbols

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  Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow flag in 1978. The original version had eight colors, each carrying a specific meaning for the LGBTQ community. Over subsequent years the design changed, settling into the six-stripe version most widely recognized today: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet, arranged in horizontal bands.

  Two other symbols arrived with darker histories. The pink triangle and the black triangle were both reclaimed from Nazi concentration camps, where they had been used as badges of shame. Their incorporation into pride iconography turned markers of persecution into declarations of identity.

  The pink triangle also inspired the homomonument in Amsterdam, built to commemorate gay men and lesbians who faced persecution because of their sexual orientation. The Greek lowercase letter lambda was another symbol that traveled with the movement from its more radical phase.

  In the 1980s, the character of the marches shifted. More organized and less radical factions of the gay community took on greater prominence in the events that had previously been grassroots in structure. Parades began dropping "Liberation" and "Freedom" from their names. The lambda and the pink triangle, which had represented the more confrontational Gay Liberation Movement, were absorbed into the broader Pride movement. In San Francisco, the name of the gay parade was not changed from Gay Freedom Day Parade to Gay Pride Day Parade until 1994.

• 7. Official Recognition and Its Limits

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  President Bill Clinton declared June "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month" in 1999 and 2000. Then, from 2009 to 2016, President Barack Obama declared June LGBTQ Pride Month each year of his time in office. President Joe Biden declared June LGBTQ Pride Month in 2021.

  Donald Trump became the first Republican president to acknowledge LGBTQ Pride Month, doing so in 2019 through a tweet rather than an official proclamation. The tweet was later released as an official statement from the president.

  International recognition remains uneven. Pride events take place at different times of year across the world, in months including February, August, and September. In Canada, Pride Season refers to a span of events running from June to September. Moscow Pride is held each May to mark the anniversary of Russia's 1993 decriminalization of homosexuality. In 2015 in Turkey, police dispersed the Istanbul Pride parade using tear gas and rubber bullets. In 2016 and 2017, Istanbul's governor's office refused to permit the parade at all, citing security concerns. In Uganda in 2016, police broke up a gay pride event in the capital; homosexual acts remain illegal in the country.

  In 2021, for the first time in the history of an Arab monarchy, diplomatic embassies in the United Arab Emirates raised the rainbow flag for Pride Month. The UK embassy posted the Pride flag alongside the Union Jack. The US embassy in Abu Dhabi flew the American and Pride flags together. Both moves drew online criticism and backlash from locals.

• 8. Inside the Debate

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  In a 1999 special queer issue of The Stranger, Dan Savage, openly gay author and journalist, questioned what pride still meant thirty years on. He wrote that pride had been an effective antidote to shame but argued it was now making LGBTQ people, in his framing, dull and slow as a group. He also acknowledged that pride in simpler forms remained useful for individuals still working through shame.

  Judith Butler, the American philosopher and theorist, made a different kind of protest in June 2010. At the Christopher Street Day Parade in Berlin, Germany, Butler refused the Civil Courage Award at the ceremony itself, then delivered a speech arguing the parade had become too commercial and was failing to address racism and the double discrimination facing homosexual and transsexual migrants. The general manager of the CSD committee, Robert Kastl, responded by noting that the organizers had already given an award to a counseling center for lesbians dealing with double discrimination in 2006. He also explained that small groups are not required to pay the participation fee, which ranges from 50 euros to 1,500 euros, and that he distanced himself from racism and Islamophobia.

  The commercialization debate also generated an alternative event in Berlin: the Kreuzberger CSD, also called the Transgenialer CSD. Political parties cannot sponsor floats or send members to give speeches. Companies are barred from sponsoring floats. After the march, the event holds a stage for political speakers, with discussions covering topics including poverty, gentrification, and what organizers call "Fortress Europe."

  The Gay Shame movement within the LGBTQ community opposes what it calls the commodification of non-heterosexual identity and culture, and in particular the over-commercialization of pride events. The tension between visibility and political edge is one that has run through the movement since, as Kameny noted, those first quiet pickets at Independence Hall gave way to fifteen hundred organizations in a single year.