Why Pride Month is Still Important: The Fight Isn’t Over Yet
Pride was born out of the struggle for the gay community to be seen. As early as 1965 the queer community banded together for “Annual Reminder” marches, a way to illustrate to mostly ignoring public that they mattered and that they didn’t have the same basic civil rights. It wasn’t until the Stonewall Riots of June 28, 1969 that the gay rights movement fully took hold. What started as a group of LGBTQ+ people fed up with continued police raids on gay bars swelled into a city-wide demonstration. That day was later commemorated as the Christopher Street Liberation Day, and the first Prides were born.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots it’s easy to look back on all the hard-fought accomplishments of the LGBTQ+ community and wonder why Pride is still necessary, or at least to question its transformation in recent decades from protest to party. So what is the purpose of Pride Month today?
Even just in the past year, we’ve seen some amazing changes around the world. India decriminalised homosexuality, Taiwan became the first Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage, Hong Kong gave visas to same-sex spouses, America elected its first openly gay state governor, while there are more queer leaders worldwide than ever before.
These tremendous advancements haven’t come without setbacks, however. The world watched in horror as Brunei reinstituted the death penalty for gay people while districts in Malaysia continued their brutal crackdown on trans and gay people.
In America, as in most of the world, rates of trans murder continue to skyrocket, Trump successfully instituted his ban on trans people serving in the military, and the Equality Act, somehow, continues to struggle its way into becoming law.
The Equality Act is an important piece of legislation that would ensure nationwide protections for LGBTQ+ people against discrimination in areas of employment, education, housing, and public accommodations. An earlier version was first proposed in 2015, and then again in 2017 – both times it was rejected.
In the UK, we’ve seen tremendous pushback from new education schemes that would seek to add LGBTQ-inclusive lessons – teaching primary school children that families can have same-sex parents; including LGBT+ people in sex education for teenagers, etc. These proposals have been met with mass protests in Birmingham and a refusal to understand how significant or helpful they might be for young LGBTQ+ students.
While these points are huge issues for our community there are subtler forms of homophobia we have to confront as well. 62 percent of LGBTQ+ graduates who are already out to their friends and family feel they have to go back into the closet when they get their first job.
“I don’t like thinking I’m in the closet because I’ve come out of the closet. But none of my superiors know,” Elle, 22, who works in finance told the Evening Standard.
“In principle I should be fine, my company encourage diversity and being open about that sort of thing. But it’s always at the back of my head that I wouldn't want to do something or tell someone something that could create discrimination for me, and put myself in a position that isn’t best for my career,” she adds.
“Through Pride, LGBT history is kept alive, and that encourages communication and talking openly about LGBT issues. It’s a lack of talking that leads to it being stigmatised. I hear colleagues questioning why there needs to be a Pride, and even though I’m not out I can still tell them.”
Joel, a 25 year-old barista adds that “people think our generation is forward thinking, but I’m worried people just suppress their bigotry and only let it out when it’s in an acceptable environment.
“Because they didn't know I was gay, work became an acceptable environment. You’d have gay couples coming up to be served and my colleagues would say ‘I like them, they’re not in your face about it’ or others who were more flamboyant and they’d say ‘he’s a big poof’, which is from the 1970s! If you’re going to be offensive, at least come up with something new.”
“To show the huge diversity and an awareness of different people is great,” Joel says about Pride. “And it’s good that it’s there for people who don’t mix with that crowd. But it’s only for a couple of days, and when it goes down, does it just fade away in people’s minds again?”
Legislation can be passed, votes can be won, but long-held attitudes and assumptions can take decades to change. For most of history LGBTQ+ people have been viewed as less-than, as an other, something to ridicule or be indifferent to. Pride still brings a visibility to those issues, and to all the other issues we still face.
So, while we celebrate Pride this summer we must remember why it’s so important that we do so. We have to carry that spirit and tenacity beyond the month of June and through to the rest of the year.
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