Pride month origins and how it started!

As we all know, June is lgbtq+ pride month! A full month of our rainbow community trying to make the world hear their voices, demanding equality and liberation, promoting self-affirmation, dignity, and increased visibility and showing our pride for being ourselves openly, pride as opposed to shame and social stigma!

But where does this month of colorful parades and political and social activism come from??

To understand that, we need to travel back in time to 1960s, to a gay bar, just like many others located in the Greenwich Village, New York City, to the stonewall inn!

In 1969 the solicitation of homosexual relations was an illegal act in New York City just like in most urban cities

Gay bars were places of refuge where gay men and lesbians and other individuals who were considered sexually suspect could socialize in relative safety from public harassment.

Many of those bars were, however, subject to regular police harassment.

One such well-known gathering place for young gay men, lesbians, and transgender people was the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, a dark, seedy, crowded bar, reportedly operating without a liquor license.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, June 28, 1969, nine policemen entered the Stonewall Inn, arrested the employees for selling alcohol without a license, roughed up many of its patrons, cleared the bar, and took several people into custody. (In accordance with a New York criminal statute that authorized the arrest of anyone not wearing at least three pieces of “gender-appropriate” clothing)

It was the third such raid on Greenwich Village gay bars in a short period.

And this time the people milling outside the bar did not retreat or scatter as they almost always had in the past. Their anger was apparent and vocal as they watched bar patrons being forced into a police van. They began to jeer at and jostle the police and then threw bottles and debris. Accustomed to more passive behavior, even from larger gay groups, the policemen called for reinforcements and barricaded themselves inside the bar while some 400 people rioted. The police barricade was repeatedly breached, and the bar was set on fire. Police reinforcements arrived in time to extinguish the flames, and they eventually dispersed the crowd.

The riots outside the Stonewall Inn waxed and waned for the next five days.

The legacy of Stonewall

Stonewall soon became a symbol of resistance to social and political discrimination, the queer community being loud and speaking themselves for the first time

Acceptance and respect from the establishment were no longer being humbly requested but angrily and righteously demanded. The broad-based radical activism of many gay men and lesbians in the 1970s eventually set into motion a new, nondiscriminatory trend in government policies and helped educate society regarding this significant minority.

in 2016 Pres. Barack Obama designated the site of the Stonewall uprising a national monument. In 2019, shortly before the 50th anniversary of the riots, New York City’s police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, issued an apology on behalf of the police department saying, “The actions taken by the N.Y.P.D. were wrong—plain and simple.”

Stonewall riots was not the first lgbtq+ uprising, there is storied history of LGBTQ activism in the United States that dates back long before the Stonewall Riots to 1920s but it definitely was a big loud movement with a huge alliance and resistance being showed by all groups of people united under the lgbtq+ flag!

In 1970, on the first anniversary of the riots, several hundred demonstrators marched along Greenwich Village’s Christopher Street, which runs past the Stonewall, many consider that as the first gay pride march the same year other commemorations were also held in different cities

As acceptance of the LGBTQ community increased among the straight community, politicians sympathetic to the views of the LGBTQ community and gay-friendly businesses and corporations began participating in the marches. The total number of people participating—both gay and straight—went up and up and Pride events were held in many parts of the globe