LGBTQ Pride: Celebrating The Gains While We Keep On Keeping On The Fight For Full Liberation

Written by Ellen Buchman, President, The Opportunity Agenda

For the LGBTQ+ community across the United States, every year, the month of June feels like a timeless moment to celebrate the gains made by and for LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance. While for some that means taking to the streets, for others it’s about quietly and confidently displaying a rainbow flag or wearing a pride t-shirt.

For me, it means honoring the past while working like hell for the future. I will never forget the first time I attended a NYC LGBTQ Pride parade. It was the early 1990s, and there was palpable, righteous joy and the most profound feeling of independence. The powerful storytelling. The spellbinding outfits. The colors, and the cat calls. All of it rooted in unvarnished purity and joy, and in the right to assembly in order to proclaim joyously: YES I AM, and YES I CAN.

And while this month of June makes Pride seem so timeless, there is still so much in the balance and so much more to do. I remember in the 1990s how important visibility was toward cultural affirmation. It felt different then. After all, look how far we’ve come since that time! That’s why it’s important to keep celebrating - with unvarnished pride toward what’s possible - the progress while at the same time keep on keeping it on toward full liberation.

I often think about one of those points of progress that I have personally benefited from - and it keeps me hope-filled even in the darkest of days. It’s that we’ve achieved marriage equality and the cultural and statutory affirmation of our relationships. Seven years ago, in 2015, marriage equality became the law of the land as a result of movement organizing in states and nationally, the U.S. Supreme Court. It was as though one of the pieces that had eluded the puzzle for so long had finally been plopped in its place. Lesbian and gay people could finally and legitimately, under the law, express love through the institution of marriage.

But as important a break-through that puzzle piece represented, and even with the affirmation of my own marriage, I know that there are still missing pieces to achieve full equality and liberation and we must keep hope and pride alive. It’s full protection under the law from non discrimination in the work place. Or the certainty that trans folks are safe in their homes and on the streets. We must continue to strive for these and other aspirations just as we did for marriage equality. If anything, the marriage equality accomplishment should stand as a reminder that there is hope and we must stay the course, especially now, during this time of great polarization.

Further, we must never box ourselves in with a narrow focus on solely the incremental milestones toward progress. Sometimes I think that we have been socialized to believe that we can only ask for only so much and that these wins along the way are enough, that we’re not deserving of more. But they’re not, and we are. We need to replace this with a bigger aspiration - that we can demand more, and that we must not settle for anything less than full equality and liberation for all people.

I think about how we must always remember and celebrate — in June’s Pride month and every month — the lessons from the queer and trans people of color who stood up in the 1969 Stonewall uprising to say NO to prolific police brutality and surveillance of gay people and YES to our humanity as not only queer people, but people. The essence of that protest sparked a movement – a movement that begot intersectionality in its approach long before that word even came about, recognizing that no one can be free and safe until all are free and safe. More recent examples of this were the Pride parades in 2020 that were changed to focus on police brutality and Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

And this year in particular I have also been thinking a lot about the fragility of the gains we have made and the lives lost. And I’ve tried to deploy that same YES I CAN strategy of bold pronouncement even in the face of what feels like the worst of polarizing times in our history. But that’s when I am reminded of the stamina of people like Harvey Milk, who was assassinated because of his vision for full liberation, that he would not cease to reach and stretch toward despite the challenges he met. Or the profound and legendary contributions of Urvashi Vaid, who passed just a few weeks ago after a lifetime of leading ground breaking, truly intersectional thinking and organizing that enabled our community to see itself in its full depth, promise and breadth, in so many ways. They, and so many others, inspire me to stay the course, and to be even bolder, even more intentional than ever.

So with pride, I say let’s continue to say: YES. YES I CAN and YES I AM. Let’s resist the fatigue and the fear and proudly proclaim our next strategy, our next goal, our next big aspiration. Let’s keep the beauty of our people and the way we know our society can be at the forefront, and let’s not use excuses to settle for anything less. Let’s always remember to keep remembering those who came before us. To say their names and to keep their memory alive by doing right by their Pride, their energy, their innovation, their lives, and their gifts of service in the history that they created. For us.

And let’s make sure that we, as a community, are using this time to showcase our beautiful and diverse array of expressing Pride for all as means to making ourselves, our society, our lives and that of everyone around us better. More joyful. More colorful. And more proud of not just what we are, but what we will be, together.

Ellen Buchman is an organizer, a narrative and communications expert, civil rights advocate and the president of The Opportunity Agenda (TOA), a community dedicated to building narrative and cultural power to move our nation toward a vision of equity and opportunity for all.