Pride (LGBTQ culture)
In the context of LGBTQ culture, LGBTQ pride is the promotion of the rights, self-affirmation, dignity, equality, and increased visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people as a social group. Pride, as opposed to shame and social stigma, is the predominant outlook that bolsters most LGBTQ rights movements. Pride has lent its name to LGBTQ-themed organizations, institutes, foundations, book titles, periodicals, a cable TV channel, and the Pride Library.
Ranging from solemn to carnivalesque, pride events are typically held during LGBTQ Pride Month or some other period that commemorates a turning point in a country's LGBTQ history; one example is Moscow Pride, which is held every May for the anniversary of Russia's 1993 decriminalization of homosexuality. Some pride events include Pride parades and marches, rallies, commemorations, community days, dance parties, and festivals.
Common symbols of pride include the rainbow flag and other pride flags, the lowercase Greek letter lambda, the pink triangle and the black triangle, these latter two reclaimed from use as badges of shame in Nazi concentration camps.
Terminology origins
In the earlier decades of the 20th century before the term "Pride" became widely used, gatherings and protests by the LGBTQ community were often referred to as Homophile demonstrations; this reflected a more conservative and assimilationist approach to LGBTQ rights. As the movement became more radical in the late 1960s, particularly after the Stonewall Uprising, they were called Gay Liberation marches or rallies which emphasized demands for full equality and liberation.The term "Gay Pride" was claimed to be coined either by Jack Baker and Michael McConnell, an activist couple in Minnesota, or by Thom Higgins, another gay rights activist in Minnesota. Higgins, a former member of the Catholic Church, sought to combat the negative energy emanating from the institution. Higgins paired one of the seven deadly sins, "pride", with "gay" due to the church's stance on same-sex behaviors as going against divine and natural laws. "That language was transformative", McConnell said. This approach not only opened doors but also propelled individuals forward. In 1971, McConnell introduced the term "gay pride" in Chicago, setting off a powerful movement.
Brenda Howard along with the bisexual activist Robert A. Martin and gay activist L. Craig Schoonmaker are credited with popularizing the word "Pride" to describe these festivities.
Historical background
Pride precursors
was one of the first openly gay activists and is considered a predecessor of the LGBTQ pride movement.Annual Reminders
The 1950s and 1960s in the United States constituted an extremely repressive legal and social period for LGBTQ people. In this context American homophile organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society coordinated some of the earliest demonstrations of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. These two organizations in particular carried out pickets called "Annual Reminders" to inform and remind Americans that LGBTQ people did not receive basic civil rights protections. Annual Reminders began in 1965 and took place each July 4 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia."Gay is Good"
The anti-LGBTQ discourse of these times equated both male and female homosexuality with mental illness. Inspired by Stokely Carmichael's "Black is Beautiful", gay civil rights pioneer and participant in the Annual Reminders Frank Kameny originated the slogan "Gay is Good" in the early 1960s to counter social stigma and personal feelings of guilt and shame.Christopher Street Liberation Day
Early on the morning of Saturday, June 28, 1969, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons rioted following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar at 43 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City. This riot and further protests and rioting over the following nights were the watershed moment in the modern LGBTQ rights movement and the impetus for organizing LGBTQ pride marches on a much larger public scale.On November 2, 1969, Craig Rodwell, his partner Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, and Linda Rhodes proposed the first pride march to be held in New York City by way of a resolution at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations meeting in Philadelphia.
That the Annual Reminder, in order to be more relevant, reach a greater number of people, and encompass the ideas and ideals of the larger struggle in which we are engaged—that of our fundamental human rights—be moved both in time and location.
We propose that a demonstration be held annually on the last Saturday in June in New York City to commemorate the 1969 spontaneous demonstrations on Christopher Street and this demonstration be called CHRISTOPHER STREET LIBERATION DAY. No dress or age regulations shall be made for this demonstration.
We also propose that we contact Homophile organizations throughout the country and suggest that they hold parallel demonstrations on that day. We propose a nationwide show of support.
All attendees to the ERCHO meeting in Philadelphia voted for the march except for Mattachine Society of New York, which abstained. Members of the Gay Liberation Front attended the meeting and were seated as guests of Rodwell's group, Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods.
Meetings to organize the march began in early January at Rodwell's apartment in 350 Bleecker Street. At first there was difficulty getting some of the major New York City organizations like Gay Activists Alliance to send representatives. Craig Rodwell and his partner Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, Michael Brown, Marty Nixon, and Foster Gunnison Jr. of Mattachine made up the core group of the CSLD Umbrella Committee. For initial funding, Gunnison served as treasurer and sought donations from the national homophile organizations and sponsors, while Sargeant solicited donations via the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop customer mailing list and Nixon worked to gain financial support from GLF in his position as treasurer for that organization. Other mainstays of the organizing committee were Judy Miller, Jack Waluska, Steve Gerrie and Brenda Howard of GLF. Believing that more people would turn out for the march on a Sunday, and so as to mark the date of the start of the Stonewall uprising, the CSLDUC scheduled the date for the first march for Sunday, June 28, 1970. With Dick Leitsch's replacement as president of Mattachine NY by Michael Kotis in April 1970, opposition to the march by Mattachine ended.
Christopher Street Liberation Day on June 28, 1970, marked the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots with the march, which was the first Gay Pride march in New York history, and covered the 51 blocks to Central Park. The march took less than half the scheduled time due to excitement, but also due to wariness about walking through the city with gay banners and signs. Although the parade permit was delivered only two hours before the start of the march, the marchers encountered little resistance from onlookers. The New York Times reported that the marchers took up the entire street for about 15 city blocks. Reporting by The Village Voice was positive, describing "the out-front resistance that grew out of the police raid on the Stonewall Inn one year ago". There was also an assembly on Christopher Street.
Spread
On Saturday, June 27, 1970, Chicago Gay Liberation organized a march from Washington Square Park to the Water Tower at the intersection of Michigan and Chicago avenues, which was the route originally planned, and then many of the participants extemporaneously marched on to the Civic Center Plaza. The date was chosen because the Stonewall events began on the last Saturday of June and because organizers wanted to reach the maximum number of Michigan Avenue shoppers. Subsequent Chicago parades have been held on the last Sunday of June, coinciding with the date of many similar parades elsewhere. Subsequently, during the same weekend, gay activist groups on the West Coast of the United States held a march in Los Angeles and a march and "Gay-in" in San Francisco.The next year, Gay Pride marches took place in Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, London, Paris, West Berlin, and Stockholm. By 1972 the participating cities included Atlanta, Brighton, Buffalo, Detroit, Washington D.C., Miami, and Philadelphia, as well as San Francisco.
Frank Kameny soon realized the pivotal change brought by the Stonewall riots. An organizer of gay activism in the 1950s, he was used to persuasion, trying to convince heterosexuals that gay people were no different from themselves. When he and other people marched in front of the White House, the State Department and Independence Hall five years earlier, their objective was to look as if they could work for the U.S. government. Ten people marched with Kameny then, and they alerted no press to their intentions. Although he was stunned by the upheaval by participants in the Annual Reminder in 1969, he later observed, "By the time of Stonewall, we had fifty to sixty gay groups in the country. 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."
Similar to Kameny's regret at his own reaction to the shift in attitudes after the riots, Randy Wicker came to describe his embarrassment as "one of the greatest mistakes of his life". The image of gays retaliating against police, after so many years of allowing such treatment to go unchallenged, "stirred an unexpected spirit among many homosexuals". Kay Lahusen, who photographed the marches in 1965, stated, "Up to 1969, this movement was generally called the homosexual or homophile movement... Many new activists consider the Stonewall uprising the birth of the gay liberation movement. Certainly it was the birth of gay pride on a massive scale."