Did This Year’s Pride Festivals Return to their Stonewall Roots?
The standard explanation is that Pride Month commemorates the date of the Stonewall uprising in June 1969, but with time and hard-won successes, its celebrations became more like LGBTQ+ expos or commercial fairs than Stonewall-commemorating fights for acceptance and liberation . The larger ones not only touted their big corporate sponsorships but started charging admission fees in order for everyday people like those at Stonewall to be proud. People who’d fought so hard for acceptance for generations began to take these as signs of activism’s success – we must have made it because look at all those corporations taking our side. And look how we can put on a party that gets us mainstream attention and, maybe, their love and respect. But something was different about these events this past month. First , so many big corporations who loved waving rainbow flags showed us their true colors (not those rainbow ones). We learned that their affirming talk and sponsorships had little to do ...
