Why We Pride: Moment to Movement to Month

LGBTQ+ Pride Month is a month where folks can come together to celebrate the many freedoms and rights won over the many decades of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement. And although the pandemic has changed how Pride Month looks this year, people are still out celebrating.

Here in Portland, the Dyke March drew hundreds of people as organizers on motorcycles led a march from Monument Square to Post Office Park in the Old Port. Outside of Portland, we saw a number of Pride events hosted in Ellsworth, Bar Harbor, Hallowell, and Bangor.  The Ellsworth Pride event is especially noteworthy because it was largely organized by Ellsworth High School students, many of whom we consider friends of the HHRC!

But as the month comes to an end, let us remind ourselves of how we got here.

A Moment

It was not always rainbows and butterflies for the LGBTQ+ community, and a lot of progress is still to be made when it comes to transgender rights and inclusion. It was only in 2012 that Maine voters legalized same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court later did the same in 2015. For decades before that, LGBTQ+ people had to fight with blood, sweat, and tears to win basic rights.

Pride has its roots in the Stonewall Riots, a series of struggles between police and LGBTQ+ protesters that lasted for six days in New York City. At the time, homosexuality was considered a criminal offense and it was illegal to sell alcohol to a gay person. In the early hours on June 28, 1969, police in plainclothes conducted a raid on the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar. As the raid continued through the night, tensions flared and commotion ensued.

As Howard Smith wrote in his July 3, 1969, article:

"The turning point came when the police had difficulty keeping a dyke in a patrol car. Three times she slid out and tried to walk away. The last time a cop bodily heaved her in. The crowd shrieked, “Police brutality!” “Pigs!” A few coins sailed through the air…escalated to nickels and quarters. A bottle. Another bottle. Pine says, “Let’s get inside. Lock ourselves inside, it’s safer.” 

Word traveled fast throughout the LGBTQ+ community in New York City and protests and clashes with the police lasted for days.

The first Pride week and march was held on the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. In fliers that were distributed throughout the community, the organizers, the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee, wrote that gay Pride week was to:

"...commemorate the Christopher Street Uprisings of last summer in which thousands of homosexuals went to the streets to demonstrate against centuries of abuse ... from government hostility to employment and housing discrimination, Mafia control of Gay bars, and anti-Homosexual laws."

Watch: Footage of the very first Pride march in NYC

A Movement

The Stonewall Riots is widely recognized as the birthing of the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement. As written by Kay Tobin and Randy Wicker inThe Gay Crusaders, “Many new activists consider the Stonewall Uprising the birth of the gay liberation movement. Certainly, it was the birth of gay pride of a massive scale.”  

From this point, the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement began to pick up steam. In 1973, the American Psychological Association (APA) voted to withdraw “homosexuality” from its list of mental illnesses, a key step to destigmatizing LGBTQ+ people. The group drew criticism from the public and its members when, in 1952, the APA labeled homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” and later as “sexual deviation” in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 

LGBTQ+ people also started to see themselves represented in halls of power and government at the local level. Kathy Kozachenko made history when she became the first openly gay American elected official in 1974 when she was elected to the Ann Arbor, Michigan, city council. This was three years before Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. 

The 1980s cast a dark shadow over the LGBTQ+ movement as hundreds and thousands of lives were lost due to the HIV/AIDS crisis, initially referred to by the CDC as “GRID” or “Gay Related Immune Deficiency Disorder.” Seeing their loved ones, friends, and neighbors die in the face of government inaction and stigmatization, the HIV/AIDS galvanized LGBTQ+ activists leading to the formation of organizations across the country and a National March on Washington in 1987 to demand action from President Ronald Reagan. 

The 1990s was a mixed bag when it came to recognition of LGBTQ+ rights. In 1993, in what was considered a compromise at the time, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was put in place ostensibly to allow LGBTQ+ people to serve in the military without being asked or required to reveal their sexual orientation. On the flip side, it also prohibited LGBTQ+ people from sharing their sexual orientation voluntarily and engaging in homosexual acts. 

In 1996, following the Supreme Court decision in Romers v. Evans to strike down Colorado’s attempt to deny LGBTQ+ people protections from discrimination, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between “one man and one woman.” 

In 1998, Coretta Scott King, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s widow, called on the civil rights movement to join the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights, stating at a Lambda Legal meeting:

"When we allow our institutions to exclude minorities from full citizenship rights, I believe we are cooperating with evil. Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to deny a large group of people their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spreads all too easily to victimize the next minority group."

…

"It's not good enough to support human rights for one's own race or culture and then be silent about injustices to other groups. As Martin once said, ‘We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny . . . an inescapable network of mutuality. . . . I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.’”

The 2000s saw the movement come to fruition as Vermont became the first state in 2000 to allow civil unions between same-sex partners. On June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court declared in Lawrence v. Texas that sodomy laws, or laws prohibiting homosexual acts, were unconstitutional. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. 

On May 6, 2009, Maine Governor John Baldacci signed a law to allow same-sex marriage in Maine, but it was later overturned by a people’s veto. In 2012, however, Maine became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote after a broad coalition mounted a successful campaign. 

The LGBTQ+ movement reached a new pinnacle in the 2010s as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed by the U.S. Senate in 2010 and the Supreme Court struck down DOMA as unconstitutional in 2013 (U.S. v. Windsor) and legalized same-sex marriage in 2015 (Obergefell v. Hodges). 

A Month

 The long march toward freedom and protection from discrimination for the LGBTQ+ community is why we celebrate Pride month. It is not to be confused with the kind of haughty and condescending pride. It is pride in oneself and one’s community. Pride in the overcoming of obstacles and resilience in the face of adversity, bigotry, and, yes, defeat. Pride in terms of the sense of how far we’ve come and pride in the willingness and resolve to press on. 

All of the parades, glitter, dancing, crop tops, kissing, cocktails and mocktails; it is a celebration of existence, a mantra of “I love, therefore I am,” and “We love, therefore we are.”

This is why we Pride.