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 with moral commitments to LGBTQ+ people and everything to do with milking our community for their lucrative commercial interests.

The current regime had changed the corporate playing field and we were seeing these so-called sponsors for who they are. Maybe we finally internalized that famous advice from Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Maybe it’s that we no longer can’t see the forest for the flags. 

We saw their real values when almost immediately after the new DC regime no longer required, but threatened to punish, diversity initiatives, so many of these big-profit-making corporate “partners” dumped their public commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Thirty-four major companies rushed to do so.

By Pride Month these conveniently, but only apparently, supportive corporations — which are so big and so rich that they could have protected themselves the way a few others like Costco continued to do — chose to tell LGBTQ+ people that they don’t want to publicly support their pride. The Advocate published a preliminary list of 14 that cut back including Target, Anheuser-Busch, Citi Group, Pepsi, and Lowes.

Such an abandonment of their highly touted values not only affected Pride Festivals but delivered a broader message to employees, suppliers, and customers that if push comes to shove these corporations will be proud to take your money, but don’t expect to get their support beyond that. (Were all the HR departments taking note?)

In some cases grassroots support filled in the gaps, and some had to downsize (good corporate term) as if Pride Festivals are about people, not corporate money. Like Stonewall, the grassroots moved closer to the center of Pride.

A second difference was that participants seemed to have a more Stonewall-like sense of why they were at the parades and festivals.

It’s not that Pride isn’t a time to celebrate. But there’s a bigger reason to be out there this year. So there was a more fighting spirit on display.

With all that is threatened around us now by those in power — with a White House that wants to punish those proud of who they are if they’re not cisgender, straight White males, a Supreme Court that’s intent on gutting the rights of transgender people on its way to eliminating the hard-won rights of all LGBTQ+ people, a rise in the power of reactionary sectarian religious movements (America’s largest Protestant denomination just vowed to end marriage equality) , and the corporate media’s desire to make bigotry just another sane and valuable opinion — LGBTQ+ people realize anew, like the Stonewall veterans, that they can’t just party away the threats but be there as a counter-statement standing up against them.

A third difference (one that might even bother other LGBTQ+ people) was that people around the nation and world showed up with their whole selves, displaying intersectionality and the diversity that really exists among those who have in common that they are proudly LGBTQ+. They reminded us that LGBTQ+ people are not monolithic.

Rainbow flags could appear along with Christian churches marching in a parade. LGBTQ+-affirming Jewish and Muslim groups were there. Some participants displayed Palestinian or Israeli flags that recognized brothers and sisters on different sides who are suffering, national flags supporting LGBTQ+ immigrants threatened by the regime’s cruel fixation on deportation, more flags supporting transgender rights, LGBTQ+ people making sure this country’s racism and the White supremacy movement enforcing it aren't forgotten (reminding us with those progressive rainbow flags), signs affirming their stand for women’s bodily autonomy, even signs about ending oppression of our planet.

Everybody didn’t have to agree with them all, but their existence showed the very human, very out-there presence and concerns of LGBTQ+ people today in a complex world where all oppressions are ultimately related. There will, of course, always also be those who act like tone police, complaining about something that confuses the issue or isn’t pure enough by some measure, too.

Back at Stonewall, too, there were disagreements among the participants — no organizing committee sat down to plan the spontaneous event. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t cautious. And those LGBTQ+ people who need things to be so wouldn’t have liked it. 

But that’s where people are, and, yes they felt as if they should be there. There’s diversity among those who seek diversity, a variety that’s seldom fits the plans of staid, consumer-oriented corporations who put on a show of valuing it or of carefully chosen hand-wringing committees.

All this seems to be why this year Pride looked somewhat more like its roots. Overall, people seemed to be more important than shows and profits.

And when people themselves really rise up, when there's a real democracy about a movement or a moment, as there was about those nights at Stonewall, and whether we like it or not, it’s bound to be less corporatized, as these events this year were, and closer to the late Texas journalist, activist, Molly Ivins’ description of it: “The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.”