A Message from BRO: Pride Month Is Almost Over—But Pride is Eternal
A vigil held outside the Stonewall Inn two years after the 1969 uprising. GREY VILLET/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
This Pride month, we’ve been looking to our past to imagine a brighter future.
Fifty-four years ago this week, queer and trans patrons of the Stonewall Inn pushed back against institutional violence targeting what we today call the LGBTQ2SIA+ community. As we end the official Pride month of June 2023—and look forward to Oregon’s largest Pride celebration in July—the team at Basic Rights Oregon is reflecting on where our movement is now, and taking lessons from the Stonewall Uprising of 1969.
At the time of Stonewall, oppressive laws governed what people could wear, what kind of intimacy was permissible between consenting adults, and which people were free to gather and exist comfortably in public spaces. All these laws existed to enforce strict, binary norms of gender and sexuality that fail to account for the full range of human experiences. So when police showed up at the Stonewall Inn, a New York City queer bar, they had plenty of pretense to start harassing its community.
This context shouldn’t feel eerily familiar in 2023, but it does. Our community has seen huge strides of progress in the last half-century, and we celebrate these wins during Pride season. At the same time, legislation across the country repeats this shameful history, institutions recognizing Pride month face dangerous cultural backlash, and LGBTQ2SIA+ folks are demonized as threats to proper society.
This cultural chilling against Pride is hitting close to home for Oregonians. We’ve seen public libraries and schools forced to cancel affirming events due to threats of violence. As Oregonians across the state venture to their local Pride celebrations, many of us carry a worry in the back of our heads: Will I be safe here? Is my Pride the next one to face dangerous opposition? Can I truly be myself in my own community?
There’s an undeniable heaviness to Pride this year. We know no amount of threats or laws will erase our community’s existence—these are brute, ugly attempts to achieve an impossible end. But they can certainly do a lot of damage to our psyches, and our lives.
Still we show up. Because, as we know from Stonewall, when our community shows up for each other, we can persist. When our straight, cis accomplices are unflinchingly loud about their solidarity, our movement grows. By existing openly and joyfully, we can inspire change. By refusing to accept terms set by people who wish to erase us, we can flourish.
The Stonewall Uprising, and the decades of queer and trans activism that have followed, has been largely fueled by the most marginalized among us: folks of color, trans people, those of us who can’t be easily categorized or assimilated. The team at Basic Rights Oregon looks to these leaders as we commit to continuing to show up for ALL LGBTQ2SIA+ Oregonians through the rest of Pride season, and always. We reject the premise that our community needs to be less publicly ourselves, and refuse to simmer down our values into nothingness to appease people with our worst interests in mind.
There’s a running joke at the BRO office in which we remind each other that “Pride is every day.” We groan and chuckle because it’s a little corny and obvious, but in 2023, it also feels important to internalize.
So, happy end of Pride month. Also, Portland, we’ll see you at Pride next month. And so on.
In solidarity,
The BRO team