Why Pride Month Still Matters - Editorial
Many people wonder why Pride Month is a thing, and they are not inherently wrong for it. It is an innocent enough question on its own, but can easily become marred with bias, distaste, and outright hate. Those with a certain inclination spend the entire month of June balking, deeply perturbed by the sheer idea that queerness is something being talked about publicly, something they’re being “forced” to face off with.
“Why does Pride Month even matter now?” they ask. “The gays have equal rights. What more do they want? Why do they get a month? Where’s Straight Pride Month?” In this mindset, the celebration of Pride Month feels less like that and more like a four-week-long diss to heterosexuals and everything they stand for. As one of them aptly put it in a recent viral clip from an Adele concert: “Pride sucks.”
We can recognize that to some, equal rights for all feels like less rights for them. We can’t say we understand or agree with the concept, but we understand nonetheless that for some, that is their truth. And that is just the reality of living in a society—we’ll likely never unanimously agree on anything, and unfortunately the concept of “human rights for all” is not immune to that hard-and-fast rule. Three things in life are absolutely certain: death, taxes, and disagreements.
In black and white, members of the LGBTQ+ community do have equal rights... for the most part. On paper things look alright, definitely better than they were 50, 20 or even 10 years ago. And that is a great, wonderful and inspiring thing, one worth celebrating for sure. But a celebration of where we are would be remiss without proper remembrance of how we got here, and what the fight along the way actually looked like.
And yes, it was a fight—in fact, it was a riot. The first pride was a riot. At least, it started with one.
It happened at the Stonewall Inn, a janky gay dive bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, on the evening of June 28, 1969. But ask any queer historian worth their salt, and they’ll tell you that June 28 was a culmination, not a beginning. The tension had been building for years.
The short version is that the queer community was fed up with NYPD’s regular raids of gay bars, most of which were haphazardly run by shady characters from New York’s criminal underbelly. These owners catered to the queers of the city not out of the goodness of their hearts, but out of hunger for profit from what they correctly clocked as an entire community shunned by the rest of the city’s social circles and establishments. The owners’ poor treatment of their clientele rivaled that of the NYPD officers who—surprise!—were on their payroll.
Pride matters now because before, gay people were refused service at taverns and bars (Mattachine Society Sip-In, 1966). Pride matters now because before, known gay people and their associates, known establishments, and actions were monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (1950/’60s-????). Pride matters now because before, two people of the same sex dancing together at a club was an arrestable offense. Women wearing less than three pieces of “feminine clothing” were arrested. Effeminate men and men in drag were arrested. Pride matters now because before, merely existing as a visible gay or queer person could (and very likely would) get you thrown in jail.
According to gay canon, a brick thrown by local street queen and gay icon Marsha P. Johnson started it all, and the rest was history. The reality is far muddier than that, as details often get in times of rebellion and uprisings. But the point was, the community that had been so beaten down—politically, socially, economically, physically, spiritually—fought back. And they won.
It wasn’t pretty. Change rarely is, and progress truly never is. There is always opposition, there will always be oppressors. But more importantly, there will always be fighters—for what is right, for the underdog, for the greater good, and for those who can’t do it themselves. And that is what Pride Month is for.
Pride matters now because even after, homosexuality was still a clinical mental disorder (removed from the DSM in 1973). Pride matters now because two decades later, the world watched as America let its queer citizens die en masse of an epidemic they thought only the queers could die from (in 1982 it was referred to as a “gay plague” in the media; by then, nearly 1,000 had perished). Pride matters now because in 1992, queer rights activist Marsha P. Johnson, a renowned figure in the gay rights movement, was murdered (her case remains cold to this day). Pride matters now because in 1998, University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepherd was brutally beaten, tortured and left for dead solely because of his sexuality. Pride matters now because today, LGBTQ+ youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. Pride matters now because in 2024, the ACLU is tracking more than 500 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in America.
So Pride matters now for a lot of reasons. And we hope you, dear reader, will join us in acknowledging that. Happy Pride Month.