Celebrating Pride Month
LGBT Pride Month is celebrated every June to honor the 1969 Stonewall riots and with a goal of achieving “equal justice and equal opportunity for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) Americans.”*
I embrace Pride Month and my many LGBTQ friends; however, as I began to write this blog post, I realized that I really did not know how the tradition began. That realization led me to try to educate myself about the origins of Pride month, and this is what I learned...
On June 28, 1969—a hot, summer day in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan—police raided the Stonewall Inn. Typically, this local bar was a safe place for the city’s gay, lesbian, and transgender community, but that was not the case on that particular night.
At that time in America, almost every state deemed homosexual acts as illegal, with bars and restaurants in peril of being closed if they had gay employees or served gay patrons, and police raids of gay establishments were not uncommon. The willingness of members of the LGBTQ community to fight back on June 28 sparked an uprising that launched other resistance efforts. Eventually, celebrations of LGBTQ Pride became a good outcome.
Today, LGBTQ Pride Month attracts millions of participants, worldwide. Parades, picnics, parties, concerts, workshops, and other celebratory events take place. What’s more, memorials are held during Pride Month to remember the people in the community who have been lost to hate crimes or HIV/AIDS. In June, we also have opportunities to recognize the impact that LGBTQ individuals have had on history locally, nationally, and internationally.
That’s a brief (and incomplete) description of Pride Month, but I hope that this post will result in others adding information that is lacking. Please share in the Comments section of my blog! Happy Pride Month...
