For those who don't know, the memorial parades following Stonewall were called many things, "Gay Liberation Parades," "Gay Power Parades," etc. It was L. Craig Schoonmaker who suggested using "pride" as the umbrella term, making it less political and more personal.
This makes sense for a time when being queer was a criminal act.
Which we are still in, by the by. Many states still have "homosexuality" in their obscenity laws.
I do think that calling them Pride Parades worked for what Schoonmaker had in mind. And the widespread popularity of Pride is wonderful.
But I do wonder how things would be different if we gave ourselves permission to dream bigger.
Honestly, with a lot of companies and communities scaling back on pride things, and with the right wing more directly challenging LGBT autonomy, it's going to be much easier for us to lose whatever power we have since we didn't assert it the first time.
There is a video from an early Pride festival where Sylvia Rivera storms the stage and rips the organizers a new one for focusing on a party instead of liberation and not wanting to include trans people and boy howdy is it abundantly clear how we got to the place we are now.
It feels like more small communities across the country are doing Pride events this year. The grassroots are where we make progress. Still the death spectre of SCOTUS looms.
