June 2023 Pride Table of Contents

I wrote these in June 2023 and posted them in my work Slack each working day of the month. Rather than leave them locked in Slack forever, I wanted to keep them for myself, becuase frankly, I'm proud of the work I put into them, and if other people can learn as much from them as I learned from writing them, then putting them online is a good idea!

June 5 - Trans women and drag queens riot at Compton’s Cafeteria

June 6 - Willem Arondéus burns nazi records to protect Dutch Jews

June 7 - The US Navy searches for Dorothy

June 8 - Perry Watkins serves with pride and honor

June 9 - d’Aubigny burns a convent for love

June 12 - Anna Genovese provides mob protection

June 13 - d’Éon does everything

June 14 - Josephine Baker blows their minds and steals their secrets

June 15 - Frank Kameny challenges the system

June 16 - Sylvia Rivera is her own boss

June 19 - No post because it was the observation of Juneteenth

June 20 - The rainbow flag evolves

June 21 - Colonialism ruins everything (same-sex marriage)

June 22 - LGBTQ+ people face the AIDS crisis

June 23 - Movies go gay all of a sudden

June 26 - Martha P. Johnson doesn’t throw a brick but does fight

June 27 - Roberta Cowell rules the skies and the racetrack

June 28 - Category IS… Ballroom realness

June 29 - Lil Nas X comes in on a horse

June 30 - We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going anywhere

June 5 - Trans women and drag queens riot at Compton’s Cafeteria

 How far back do you think the fight for transgender rights and equality goes? Well, since the dawn of gender norms, most likely. But we can trace the modern movement to at least 1952, following a high-profile sex reassignment surgery that captured the public’s attention. Within a decade, there were dozens of gender clinics scattered around the US, and gender-affirming medical care was gaining acceptance.

In the mid-1960s, transgender women teamed up with drag queens in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district to form a social and political organization to advocate for their rights and needs. They met at Compton’s Cafeteria to plan their activities. However, because they generally used the location solely as a meeting spot and never bought anything, staff eventually began calling police to have them removed.

In August 1966, three years before the Stonewall Riots, police were called to the cafeteria to oust the women and queens. But they used force and were not prepared to be met with force in response. The activists hit police with their purses and high-heeled shoes, as well as threw sugar shakers and other tableware at them. When police retreated into the streets to call for backup, the drag queens and women followed them and fighting continued.

This event was dubbed the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, and it is a huge moment in the LGBTQ+ rights movement. It brought visibility to transgender people and the struggles they faced, and the creation of the National Transexual Counseling Unit, a peer-run network of social, psychological, and medical support – the first of its kind in the world. The Compoton’s Cafeteria Riot is also the first-known collective forceful queer response to police harassment in American history, certainly an inspiration for the later Stonewall Riots.

There was a political backlash against LGBTQ+ people in general in the last 1970s, and the AIDS crisis that began in the early 1980s also undermined queer rights efforts. It also served to functionally erase large segments of the queer population, including our transgender family. But as you can see, trans folks have been present and fighting for their rights and the dignity they deserve for a long time. And this is why we have Pride: to be visible, to be seen, and to be proud of who we are.  

Happy Pride, everyone!

June 6 - Willem Arondéus burns nazi records to protect Dutch Jews

BE GAY! DO CRIME!

It’s an internet meme, but it’s also true. Being homosexual is illegal in sixty-four countries. Our mere existence as gay people is illegal. This meme rings especially loudly during Pride month, then, when simply by being, we are committing a crime – but we won’t be stopped from being.

Willem Arondéus took this call to doing crime especially seriously. Arondéus was an openly gay man living in the Netherlands when nazis invaded and occupied the country. He joined an anti-nazi resistance organization, and became a forger to help hide the identities of Dutch Jews from the nazis who were looking for them. Unfortunately, the nazis were meticulous records-keepers, so they were soon able to identify the forgeries. Arondéus and others in the resistance then carried out a daring plan: they bombed the nazi records office. In the process, they destroyed around 800,000 identity cards.

Sadly, a few days latter, Arondéus was arrested by the nazi occupiers. A month later, he and 13 other men were convicted of the bombing. Arondéus took full responsibility, possibly sparing the lives of some of the other conspirators. Before he was executed, he is quoted as saying, “Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards.” He was gay, and he did a righteous crime.

Pride is about that: being queer and fighting for justice. Sometimes the cause of justice does not align with the letter of the law, and the only way to justice is through crime. When that happens, be gay! Do crime!   Happy Pride!

June 7 - The US Navy searches for Dorothy

It was illegal to be gay in the military until 1994, when the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy allowed closeted homosexuals to serve, provided they didn’t come out during their service. But before that, being gay at all was illegal. The mere suspicion of homosexuality was enough to get someone discharged from the military; confirming that you were gay could land you in prison. With that historical footnote in mind, it’s no surprise that the military branches occasionally launched investigations to find and punish gay service members.

In the early 1980s, the US Navy had turned its sights on gay sailors in Chicago. They discovered that gay men sometimes referred to themselves as friends of Dorothy. Dorothy, they reasoned, was the center of the gay community. If they could find Dorothy, she might lead them to all the gay sailors. And so, they launched an enormous hunt for Dorothy. Despite all their efforts, however, they never found her.

“Friend of Dorothy” is, indeed, slang for a gay man, but it’s not about Dorothy, the head of some imaginary queer cartel. It’s a reference to Dorothy Gale from the movie Wizard of Oz. In the movie, Dorothy quickly befriends the effeminate Cowardly Lion. Gay men latched on to that friendship and adopted it as their own. The Navy... did not know that.   Happy Pride!

June 8 - Perry Watkins serves with pride and honor

Remember how it used to be illegal to be gay in the military? Up until 1994, just being gay was illegal. But that’s unjust, and sometimes injustice must be met with… crime. Enter Perry Watkins. Watkins was an openly gay Black American man living in Germany as an Army kid. In 1967, he received draft papers, putting him in a double-bind: refusing the draft was illegal, but so was being gay in the military. What was he to do?

He did the honorable thing: he appeared for his examination and induction, and both times, he told the staff that he was gay. Watkins wasn’t ashamed of who he was, and when he was harassed by other servicemembers, he never shied away from a fight. He quickly earned a reputation for his willingness to defend himself and others in the service soon stopped harassing him.

In 1970, his draft tour concluded, but Watkins had trouble finding a job at the time so he re-enlisted. Again, he was open and honest about his sexuality, and again he was admitted into the Army. He even sometimes performed in drag, including at shows sponsored by the Army! In 1972, he was investigated for being homosexual – which seems like a really strange investigation to open, given his prior admissions – but the investigators concluded that maybe he was lying to get out of service. Which… I mean… clearly they didn’t see his record. He volunteered the second time!

In 1974, Watkins re-enlisted again, and again made no secret of who he was. In 1975, he was investigated again, but this time the Army acknowledged he was gay. His service record, however, was excellent, and they decided he should not be disciplined or removed. In 1978, another investigation. In 1979, he re-enlisted for the final time. His reasoning was that being openly gay was obviously not disqualifying, so he’d make the military his career and retire with an Army pension. Makes sense to me!

In 1980, yet another investigation into Watkins’ sexuality led to his security clearance being revoked, which prevented him from being promoted. He filed a lawsuit, arguing that he’d never hid his sexuality and multiple previous investigations had determined that, “my homosexuality is no obstacle to my military career.” The Army responded to the lawsuit by starting discharge proceedings. The lawsuit wound on, with Watkins winning an early victory, but in 1983, an appeals court sided with the Army and he was discharged in 1984.

After leaving the Army, Watkins went to work for the Social Security Administration, demonstrating a clear interest in public service. But he also continued his legal fight against the Army. In 1989, the courts found in his favor, declaring that simply being homosexual could not be grounds for discrimination as it was a violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. The White House appealed to the Supreme Court, who declined to hear the case, and Watkins was offered reinstatement. Instead, he opted for retroactive promotion, pay, full retirement benefits, and an honorable discharge.

Watkins was instrumental in clearing the path for other gay men and women to serve in the military. Investigations into possible homosexuality, absent any claims of misconduct, were no longer allowed. Nobody should be forced to live against the law, but I am grateful for the people who’ve gone before me and had the guts to do it. Perry Watkins was gay, did crime, and won.   Happy Pride!

June 9 - d’Aubigny burns a convent for love

SPOILER: SWORD-FIGHTING BISEXUAL OPERA SINGER SETS FIRE TO A CONVENT

Julie d’Aubigny was born in 1673, before the concept of bisexuality had evolved. (The evolution of our understanding of sexuality is pretty fascinating, but also pretty recent. Just because we didn’t have language to describe it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, though.) She was given to a count in arranged marriage in 1687 at the age of 14. The count was sent to southern France by the king, but d’Aubigny stayed in Paris.

That same year, she began a relationship with a fencing instructor named Séranne. Due to legal troubles, the pair fled Paris. In the course of their flight, d’Aubigny made money by giving fencing exhibitions. She also dressed mostly in men’s clothings, though she never claimed to be a man or tried to pass as one. She was just a woman who liked men’s clothes. S’cool. But anyway, she was a gifted fencer. And when the duo arrived in Marseilles, d’Aubigny joined an opera company and began performing. Turns out, she was gifted at that too.

A spectator at one of her shows, a young woman, was smitten. The woman’s father attempted to hide her from d’Aubigny by sending her to a convent, but d’Aubigny would not be deterred from her new love. Instead, she told the nuns that she was interested in becoming a nun herself to gain entry to the convent. When the time came to escape, she stole a dead nun’s body, put it in the other woman’s bed, and then set the room on fire. The chaos that followed allowed them to escape unseen. Their love affair was brief, however – they split up after 3 months – and d’Aubigny was eventually charged with kidnapping, body snatching, and arson.

d’Aubigny moved back to Paris and joined the Paris Opera, where she performed for the king multiple times. She continued dressing in men’s clothes because that’s what she wanted to do and she was a boss. And when someone dared to insult the opera, she challenged them to a duel and won. During her time at the Paris opera, she was known to date both men and women, as suited her fancy.

I don’t know how much discrimination d’Aubigny faced, but one thing is for sure: she was in charge of her own life. “Queer” is a broad term, but it certainly includes bisexual people. (Or maybe pansexual? There’s no way to know how she would have identified since the language simply didn’t exist yet.) But it also includes people who eschew gender norms and expectations in favor of what brings them joy, like a woman wearing pants or sword fighting. Not everyone who is gay and does crime does it for justice, but we celebrate their individuality just the same.   HAPPY PRIDE!

June 12 - Anna Genovese provides mob protection

“Be gay, do crime” isn’t just a meme, as you know. It’s a lived reality when your existence is criminal. And a funny thing about criminals is they tend to band together for mutual protection. Enter Anna Genovese.

Genovese was an Italian-American woman born into a mafia family. She married Vito Genovese in 1932, and when Vito had to flee the country because he was wanted for murder in 1937, the family business fell to Anna. With prohibition repealed a few years earlier, the mob bar business wasn’t as strong as it had been, and Genovese needed a new way to attract customers and their money.

Around this same time, police began harassment of queer people, including raiding bars that were suspected of serving or catering to homosexuals. Fending off police raids is something mafia bar owners knew how to do, so Genovese decided to operate gay bars. Effectively, she created a place for queer folks to safely be themselves. Her bars hosted drag performances, both drag kings and drag queens, and attracted lots of queer patrons who could relax and be themselves for a while.

And it turns out, she wasn’t simply extorting an oppressed minority. Genovese left Vito in 1951, and was soon striking up romances with others, including a drag queen (a woman who performs masculinity). Anna Genovese was likely bisexual, as attested by those who knew her at the time.

Anna Genovese wasn’t the only person in the mafia running queer bars. The fact that the gay bars were a frequent target for police raids made them naturally interesting for the mafia – pay off the cops, run your “illicit” business, make a bunch of money from the people who believe you’ll keep them safe in exchange for their cash. The Stonewall Inn was owned by one of Anna’s cousins, “Fat Tony” Genovese, even. The relationship between organized crime and queer existence and open expression is long, out of an unfortunate necessity. As the saying goes, “When you outlaw being queer, all the outlaws are queer.” Or something like that, anyway.   Happy Pride!

June 13 - d’Éon does everything

Born to poor nobility (so not rich, but still privileged) in 1728, Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste- André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont – generally simplified to just d’Éon – led quite a life. d’Éon first rose to prominence for their writings on financial and administrative systems in their 20s. That attracted the attention of the government, and they soon found themselves with a royal appointment.

In 1756, just 28 years old, d’Éon was appointed to the king’s secret network of spies. This network was so secret that the department of state didn’t even know about them. d’Éon was dispatched to Russia to seek Empress Elizabeth’s support in France’s ongoing war with England. The English were concerned about such a plot, so they guarded the border with Russia and only allowed women and children to enter the country. No problem if you’re d’Éon, who had naturally androgynous physical characteristics. They simply passed as a woman to enter the court. d’Éon lived fully as a woman until they returned to France in 1760.

War with England still raged, so d’Éon joined up as a dragoon and went to fight towards the end of the Seven Years’ War. For their service on the battle d’Éon was made a chevalier (“knight”), and they were then tapped to help write the treaty to end the war. Peace “achieved,” d’Éon was sent to London as an interim ambassador. But they were a spy, so why not do some light spying while you’re there?! And they did, getting in good with British nobility and learning everything they could to help the French prepare to invade England.

But in 1763, the permanent ambassador arrived and tried to make a fool of d’Éon. The government summoned them home, but they refused to go. d’Éon was being used as a political pawn and wanted no part of it. So to get the government’s attention, d’Éon published much of the secret diplomatic work they had carried out, embarrassing the French government and bringing them fame across Europe. But d’Éon held back information about the planned invasion to use as leverage against the king and government.

d’Éon was safe from further government harassment and had secured a pension, but they were forbidden from returning to France. They lived in exile in London until the king died in 1774. The new king disbanded the secret spy network, prompting d’Éon to seek permission to go home, which they eventually received, along with an important concession: the king and French government agreed to recognize d’Éon as a woman.

Now that seems a little out of left field, but d’Éon had claimed to be a woman, raised as a boy to guarantee their father’s inheritance. And d’Éon was physically androgynous. d’Éon was so well known and questions of their gender so high-profile that the London Stock Exchange even had a betting market about it. Like taking bets on a gender reveal party – is d’Éon a raging wildfire or a fight at Applebee’s? (That’s the two options, right?)

Anyway, d’Éon was back in France and now Charlotte-Geneviève-Louise-Augusta-Andréa-Timothéa d’Éon de Beaumont. And that’s basically where their story ends, but not because they stopped trying to be amazing. d’Éon attempted to join French forces in assisting American colonists in the war for independence from Britain, but the French wouldn’t allow a woman to fight. Then in 1792, d’Éon offered to build an army of female soldiers to do battle against the Habsburgs, but they were told no. In fact, being recognized as a woman was enough to sideline as a skilled diplomat and spy who hadn’t been stopped by anything else.

Today’s story is about someone being themselves and being willing to hold a king hostage to do it. It’s also about sexism and the intersections of discrimination people face. None of us are one thing, after all. For Pride, we put kings on notice – we won’t be stopped – and we continue the fight for equality for all.   Happy Pride!

June 14 - Josephine Baker blows their minds and steals their secrets

Josephine Baker. What a star. The American-born French entertainer was the first Black woman to star in a major movie, she was the top-headliner at the famed Folies Bergère in Paris, was the iconic fashionista of the Jazz Age, spy, civil rights activist, and bisexual.

Baker was celebrated in her own time, sometimes called the most beautiful woman in the world, but always called talented. Her career began at around age 13 in New York during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. She began in the chorus line, but she ad-libbed a bit of the performance to draw attention to herself. In 1925, she moved to Paris and starred in a show soon after, becoming an instant success. She embraced erotic dancing and wasn’t afraid to show a little skin. Sometimes she performed with her pet cheetah – yeah, an actual cheetah – and it frequently escaped and terrorized the orchestra. The audience loved it.

Baker toured Europe with her star on the rise. Her musical skill was beyond question, and her film appearances were always crowd favorites. Her physical humor and comedic timing made audiences love her.

In 1939, the world changed with the outbreak of war in Europe. Germany invaded Poland prompting a cascade of war declarations, including Baker’s now-home France. She joined a French spy agency, using her European stardom to rub elbows with German bigwigs all over the continent as she performed. After France fell, Baker left Paris but continued her work in subterfuge. She found out the locations of troop musters, airfields, and more, passing that information along to the English who were busy planning for the liberation of Europe.

In 1941, she toured French territories in North Africa, ostensibly “for her health” but in reality because that was fertile ground for intelligence gathering. She’d make notes of what she learned and tuck them in her underwear, hoping the Germans wouldn’t give her the mandatory strip search because she was a star. During her stay in Africa, however, she struggled to recover from complications of a miscarriage, but once she was back on her feet, she created a troupe to entertain Allied soldiers in the region.

After the war, Baker’s stardom jumped to a whole new level. Her spying activity was well-known, and it freed her to take on riskier and more serious projects. In 1951, she was invited back to the United States to play a nightclub in Miami, but she refused to play unless the audience would be integrated. And her starpower was too much to ignore. The club relented and every performance she gave was sold out. She followed with a national tour to rave reviews. She similarly criticized the Stork Club for its segregationist policies, but unfortunately this time, the political machine turned against her and accused her of being a communist, a pretty serious allegation in 1950s America. She went home to France.

But her refusal to bend to discrimination wasn’t unrecognized. The NAACP declared Sunday, May 20, 1951 to be “Josephine Baker Day.” Baker joined the fight to save Willie McGee, a Black man dubiously-convicted of a crime, from death. She spoke alongside Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the March on Washington. She had this to say:

“I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of

presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a

cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my

big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it

all over the world.”

Baker was married four times in her life, and between those marriages, she also had numerous relationships with other men and women, including, allegedly, famed painter Frida Kahlo.

Is her sexuality a footnote? Well, I mean, kinda. But that’s the point. None of us are just one thing, and in an ideal world, the intrinsic characteristics of who we are should be unremarkable. But also kinda not a footnote. For a bisexual Black woman to become so prominent is surely an accomplishment, not because of her intrinsic being but in spite of the discrimination she faced because of it.

Pride is all-encompassing. Whoever you are, you’re valid and good. We exist at all kinds of identity intersections, and they should all be celebrated. And we should fight for equality and dignity along all those axes of identity, because none of us are free until all of us are free.   Happy Pride!

June 15 - Frank Kameny challenges the system

Do you know about the Lavender Scare? Just to recap in case you don’t, alongside the anti-communist McCarthyism of the 1950s, there was a parallel moral panic about homosexuality, particularly within the federal government. One shortsighted argument against queer people in government service was that, due to the public stigma of homosexuality, homosexual people could be more easily blackmailed to subvert the United States. It’s a self-reinforcing belief, but also wrong.

Anyway, under the Eisenhower White House, new policies were developed in 1947 to effectively bar homosexuals from federal service, and many gay and lesbian federal employees were rooted out and fired. This was the Lavender Scare. But not everyone was scared…

Frank Kameny served in the US Army during WWII, and following the war, he turned to public service, first in academia and later as a federal civil servant in the US Army Map Service. In 1957, at a bus stop in San Francisco, Kameny allowed himself to be touched in a sexual way by another man. Police were watching the station and promptly arrested Kameny. Shortly thereafter, he was fired from the Army Map Service, and in 1958 he was barred from federal service for life.

Kameny wasn’t going to take it lying down, however, and appealed his firing, ultimately pursuing a lawsuit. This was the first civil rights claim based on sexual orientation brought before a US court. In the end Kameny’s lawsuit was unsuccessful, but it was critical groundwork for the fight to come. That was also the end of Kameny’s paid career, as he spent the rest of his life dedicated to civil rights activism, financially supported by his friends and family.

In 1963, he drafted legislation to overturn DC’s sodomy laws – a bill that was eventually passed in 1993. He cofounded the Annual Reminder in 1965, an early precursor to modern Pride. And he rejected the notion that homosexuals should adopt heteronormative behaviors in order to be accepted, arguing that nobody should be expected to change who they are:

“We are interested in obtaining rights for our respective minorities, AS Negroes, AS

Jews, and AS HOMOSEXUALSS. Why we are Negros, Jews, or Homosexuals is

totally irrelevant, and whether we can be changed to Whites, Christians, or

heterosexuals is equally irrelevant.”

In 1972, Kameny lobbied the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to question whether psychiatry was doing good or harm to the queer community. They asked several gay psychiatrists, but only Dr. John E. Fryer was willing to facilitate the conversation; he demanded that he be allowed to do it in disguise for fear of backlash, though. His testimony and the ensuing debate led the APA to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973, formally rejecting the idea that homosexuality was a disorder.

Throughout the 1970s, Kameny worked with military service members to fight dishonorable discharges for their sexuality, winning victories in court and earning the public support of the Washington Post, which noted that the men being punished:

“[were] involved in no scandal and had brought no shame on the Marine Corps”

So there you go. He fought employment discrimination in the federal civil service, discrimination in the military, and in healthcare. Kameny was instrumental in much of the groundwork for the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. When faced with discrimination, Kameny came out swinging and changed the world. Pride. He had it.   Happy Pride!

June 16 - Sylvia Rivera is her own boss

Sylvia Rivera was a drag queen in New York. She was raised as a boy but her effeminate nature was rejected by her family and she left home at the age of 10, living instead on the streets. To survive, she turned to survival sex work, and was soon taken into the protection of local drag queens, including Marsha P. Johnson with whom she found a lifelong friendship.

In 1970, Rivera and Johnson co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), advocating for homeless queer youth, especially those who turned to sex work. In addition to advocacy, the group also provided housing.

Rivera referred to herself as both a drag queen and a transvestite at this time, showing a fluidity about her identity, sometimes identifying as a man in a dress and other times calling herself a woman. (Later in life, she identified strictly as a woman, hence the “she” pronouns in this post.) But because she didn’t fit social gender norms, she faced harassment. It was common through the 1960s and 1970s for people to be arrested for wearing the “wrong” gender’s clothes, and as you can imagine, that meant Rivera got arrested.

Police brutality towards queer people was well-known, and being Latina made her even more vulnerable. On one occasion, Rivera escaped arrest by leaping from a moving police car.

Rivera was an adamant proponent of making the LGBTQ+ rights movement more inclusive, specifically advocating for drag queens, transvestites (which in her later speeches would include transgender people, a term which wasn’t widely used in the 70s), the homeless, people of color, and sex workers. She believed that we all shared the same fight, and we can be most effective at securing our rights if we work together.

The closet is a place people retreat to when they are afraid that their identity could get them harmed, but Rivera never bothered with the closet. She was unashamed and loved herself; she even began wearing makeup to school in 4th grade! And her life demonstrated her belief that everyone should be able to love themselves and live with dignity. Pride is a celebration of who we are and our collective march towards greater equality, dignity, and respect, and Sylvia Rivera exemplifies that.   Happy Pride!

June 20 - The rainbow flag evolves

 Rainbow flag. It's nearly universally understood today to represent LGBTQ+ Pride, but it's a pretty obvious design, it's been used in flags since at least the 1500s, and has represented causes of liberty, peace, and cooperation. How did it become the de facto symbol of the fight for LGBTQ+ rights and equality?

After WWII, LGBTQ+ activists adopted the  pink triangle as a symbol for their cause. The nazis had forced gay men to wear the pink triangle in prison and concentration camps, and after the war, people decided to reclaim the symbol for their own use. In 1978, Gilbert Baker designed a new flag for the community to use, to replace the symbol born (and reclaimed from) hate. He was inspired by the rainbow's common usage in the earlier hippie movement of "peace and love," and together with artist Lynn Segerblom, they created the first rainbow pride flag.

That flag had 8 colored stripes, with each color assigned a meaning:

• Hot pink for "sex"
• Red for "life"
• Orange for "healing"
• Yellow for "sunlight"
• Green for "nature"
• Turquoise for "magic"
• Indigo for "serenity"
• Violet for "spirit"

The new pride flag was first flown at San Francisco's 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade. Later that year, gay lawmaker Harvey Milk was assassinated, and demand for the new flag skyrocketed. A local flag maker began producing them as quickly as they could, but using stock fabric that only included 7 colors – no hot pink. (Hot pink didn't return primarily because the fabric was just too hard to source.) And in 1979, the turquoise stripe was dropped so the flag could be split into two 3-stripe segments to sit on opposite sides of light poles.

And that's basically the flag we know today. In 2016, the flag design was incorporated as an  emoji, possibly marking its ascension into public knowledge and acceptance. But even so enshrined in our most important modern glyphs, the flag has continued to evolve. For example, in 2017, the Philadelphia Pride Flag introduced black and brown stripes to the top of the flag to bring awareness to the additional struggles faced by non-white queer people. In 2018, the Progress Pride flag was introduced, incorporating the two additional stripes of the Philadelphia Pride flag into a chevron alongside the trans pride colors to make clear that trans people are part of the LGBTQ+ community. And in 2021, that Progress Pride flag was modified further to include intersex pride. (See below for these three flags!)

Unlike the pirates on TV, our flag doesn't mean death. Our flag means pride. It means community, mutual support, and a willingness to fight for ourselves and each other. The more recent evolutions of the flag reinforce this by explicitly including more of the LGBTQ+ coalition into the symbols.             Happy Pride!

(In order, Philadelphia Pride, Progress Pride, and Intersex Progress Pride)

June 21 - Colonialism ruins everything (same-sex marriage)

Same-sex marriage is as old as marriage itself. Instances are recorded in ancient Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, and continental Europe. The ancient Greeks accepted same-sex relations on equal footing with opposite-sex relations, and the Roman marital rites were freely given to any couple. Nero not only fiddled while Rome burned, but in his lifetime, he had at least two husbands. It really wasn't anything anyone cared about, but then people got very judgemental and very opinionated about right and wrong on the subject, and it became taboo in the western world starting around the 300s CE.

The relationships between same-sex couples didn't stop, of course, but they soon had to become more secretive and they lost the protection of the state. As European traders made their way to China, they brought their new beliefs with them, and as a response to later European colonization, China adopted laws against homosexuality on the hope of strengthening their own population to repel the invaders. Meanwhile, many African cultures were tolerant and accepting of various sexualities and genders, according to evidence collected by anthropologists. It wasn't until European colonization that attitudes began to shift. Many cultures in the Americas similarly accepted homosexual and nonbinary people and their relationships, and it was European colonizers who sought to crush this aspect (as well as most others) of indigenous American society.

But, things keep turning, and people keep fighting for justice. The first same-sex marriage in modern times was in 1971 in Minneapolis. Despite being technically illegal, a clerk granted the marriage license and it was never annulled or revoked. Their marriage wasn't recognized by the federal government, so the couple played shenanigans – one partner legally adopted the other and claimed them as a dependent on their taxes. Hey, whatever works! During the 1970s, many American LGBTQ+ rights activists believed that same-sex marriage was just a few years away from mainstream acceptance, but the HIV/AIDS crisis that began in the early 1980s derailed the movement.

It wasn't until 2001 that any modern country finally legalized same-sex marriages when the Netherlands broadened the legal definition and conferred equal rights for all married couples. That kicked off a cascade, and today at least 34 countries have followed suit, including the United States in 2015. And this year, the Choctaw Nation, Andorra, and Estonia all recognized marriage equality. And lots of other nations are reconsidering their past stance on the issue as well: Honduras, India, Japan, the Navajo Nation, South Korea, and Venezuela, to name a few!

The thing about Pride is that it never ends. It's been a 2,000-year-battle to get where we are today – a place that for many parts of the world is actually back to where it was before European colonization. And we've still got a long way to go, which is why Pride must continue. It's not about imposing a worldview or morality on anyone, but rejecting moralities and worldviews imposed on us. Fight the power!   Happy Pride!

June 22 - LGBTQ+ people face the AIDS crisis

HIV likely made the jump from apes to humans in the 1920s. People with unusual symptoms were documented as early as the 1950s, and their tissue samples were later shown to be infected with HIV. But for the most part, the virus and associated illnesses were poorly understood until the 1980s, when it exploded around the world.

By 1980, gay men in the United States were aware of some kind of illness spreading within their communities. In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control published a report about the surprising appearance of uncommon diseases among otherwise healthy men in cities across the US, with pneumocystis pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma chief among them. In 1982, researchers speculated that some as-yet unidentified pathogen was being transmitted by sexual activity, and the collection of symptoms was dubbed GRID for “gay-related immune deficiency.”

The virus was isolated in 1983, but the damage to the queer community was already done. An entire generation of gay men would be decimated, with hundreds of thousands dead. And the fact that the virus initially spread primarily among gay men was fodder for anti-queer activists who had already begun mobilizing to oppose LGBTQ+ rights.

The name GRID was a political disaster for the LGBTQ+ community as a whole. The virus was not, in fact, gay-related at all. It did not and does not care about a person’s sexual orientation. But anti-queer activists latched on to the idea and quickly began calling it “gay plague,” and claiming it was their god’s wrath striking down sinners. There wasn’t much news coverage or public interest – after all, only “those” people got sick. Sex workers, intravenous drug users, gay men? Society didn’t really care.

But, as we know, queer people fight back. It was gay community leaders who proposed renaming the condition to AIDS, for example. Political leaders often didn’t want to engage on the issue, so queer folks brought the conversation to their doorsteps, marching and protesting at their offices or public events. To gather more attention, the protestors staged “die-ins,” modeled on Black civil rights sit-ins, where they would lie down in streets, churches, or other high-profile places to symbolize those who had died and were dying.

ACT UP was formed in 1987 to be a more active political organization, and they didn’t let anyone off the hook. The White House was infamously silent about HIV/AIDS, and did little to make resources available for the study, prevention, or treatment of the disease. In response. ACT UP took up a protest outside the US Federal Drug Administration in 1988, shutting the office down entirely while chanting, “Hey, Hey! FDA! How many people have you killed today?” Because they effectively shut down a government agency, they got a lot of attention, and that led to a dramatic increase in funding for HIV/AIDS-related programs. In 1988, the Department of Justice reversed an earlier policy and prevented discrimination on the basis of HIV diagnosis (later incorporated into law in the Americans With Disabilities Act), and the FDA substantially lowered the cost of one of the most effective HIV drugs, AZT.

Public and political perception of HIV/AIDS shifted dramatically due to the work of activists and organizations like ACT UP. It was not an easy fight, but it was effective. Public funding of research has led us to highly effective treatments and even preventative medication. Today, people infected with HIV and with access to healthcare can expect to live long, healthy lives thanks to new medicines that suppress the virus so successfully that it can’t even be transmitted to others (often called “undetectable”). This would not be possible without the work of these activists and the impressive protests they put on.

HIV/AIDS is no longer a “gay disease,” either in public perception or in statistics. The epidemic is still raging and more work is needed to make treatment available to everyone. But the hard work of LGBTQ+ activists broke open the gates of research funding that have made HIV less of a death sentence.

Pride is about demanding justice and equality, not just politically but medically too. When it’s denied to any of us, we all suffer, so we must fight for everyone. Pride is also about acknowledging our victories. HIV/AIDS isn’t solved, but queer activists successfully got the funding spigots turned on, which led us directly to modern treatments that work so well. We should all be proud of those who fought that fight because they brought hope into the world. Happy Pride!

June 23 - Movies go gay all of a sudden

You’ve probably heard of or seen some queer movies: Brokeback Mountain, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Call Me By Your Name, Tangerine, Paris is Burning. There are bunches of them! And LGBTQ+ characters commonly appear in movies that aren’t about being queer, which is nice because it’s just like real life – queer people who exist but whose queerness isn’t their defining characteristic. But as common as LGBTQ+ have become in film today, it hasn’t always been that way.

Early films didn’t shy away from LGBTQ+ representation. Charlie Chaplin played up “sissy” stereotypes when his character was mocked for appearing to kiss another man. A 1919 German film told the story of a gay man who committed suicide after being blackmailed for his sexuality, advocating for more acceptance. In 1930, actress Marlene Dietrich, bisexual herself, added a scene to the movie Morocco in which she dresses in a man’s tuxedo and kisses a woman in the audience – the first known same-sex kiss between women

Alas, in 1934, Hollywood studios adopted the Hays Code, a strict set of rules about what was and wasn’t allowed in film. Positive depictions of homosexuality were strictly forbidden. Movies had to go through censors before they could be shown to audiences, and censors would eagerly chop out scenes that violated the code. As a result, queer representation was reduced. But… not eliminated.

In 1938’s Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant exclaims, “I just went gay all of a sudden!” This was the first time in film history that the word “gay” was used to mean homosexual, but surely that ran afoul of the Hays Code? Well, technically yes, they were able to skirt it because “gay” wasn’t well-known slang for a homosexual man yet, and they told censors that Grant’s character was referring to being very silly. But closeted Hollywood actors used the term to describe themselves, and Grant was friends with several gay actors so he knew what he was doing when he ad-libbed the line. (Delightful movie, by the way.)

Queerness was often “coded” into movies with exaggerated stereotypical behaviors. Rebel Without a Cause featuring James Dean, for example, a supporting character, Plato, is coded as gay – the way he looks longingly at Dean’s character and the picture of a hunky man in his school locker. Censors warned the filmmakers against going too far, which squares with a claim that the original script had the two boys sharing a kiss.

It was easier for movies to code villains as queer, since that wasn’t a “positive” portrayal of homosexuality. As a result, a lot of film villains have played up queer stereotypes and tropes. And you’ve seen many of these villains! Disney especially bought into it. Scar from The Lion King is strongly queer-coded, for example. And Captain Hook from Peter Pan. Jafar from Aladdin is so strongly coded that it’s almost ridiculous to call him coded at all. And Ursula from The Little Mermaid was inspired by drag queen and subversive actor Divine. (Look at the two side by side. You can’t not see it.)

The Hays Code ended in 1968, and films began incorporating openly queer characters as heroes again. Most mainstream films continued to code LGBTQ+ characters, but the doors were open to more explicit representation. The Rocky Horror Picture Show embraced queer camp wholeheartedly, Paris is Burning showed people what New York’s queer ballroom culture was about, and Philadelphia saw Tom Hanks, already an A-list celebrity, portray a gay man fighting for his rights.

By the mid-1990s, queer characters in film no longer had to be villains, secondary characters, or tragic figures, and now it’s not unusual to see LGBTQ+ characters in movies and TV shows leading the kinds of normal lives that real LGBTQ+ people lead. Pride is about persistence in the face of oppression. The censors said “no homo” but filmmakers and actors… well, let’s just say malicious compliance is technically compliance.  Happy Pride!

June 26 - Martha P. Johnson doesn’t throw a brick but does fight

Marsha P. Johnson was a major LGBTQ+ rights activist and drag queen in New York City. You may have heard that they threw the first brick at the Stonewall riots, a nod to Johnson’s importance though inaccurate – Johnson wasn’t there when the patrons began fighting back against police harassment, and Johnson consistently corrected rumors to the contrary. But Johnson did cofound Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) with Sylvia Rivera, to promote the rights and safety of queer youth and sex workers. Many young LGBTQ+ people ended up in “survival prostitution” after being cast out by their families, and organizations like STAR helped them survive and build their new lives.

Marsha P. Johnson was more than just an activist, too. They were a performer, doing regular drag shows in outfits designed to showcase both masculine and feminine at the same time. They modeled for photography, most notably a session for Andy Warhol in 1975. They sang with the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus. And Johnson was also just plain nice, known as “the mayor of Christopher Street” in Greenwich Village because they were so welcoming.

But Johnson had to fight discrimination from within the LGBTQ+ community. As a drag queen, they were not readily accepted as a civil rights figure. Many people were afraid that their presence would actually hinder the queer rights movement. In fact, Johnson and Rivera were both banned from the 1973 Pride parade. In response, the pair held their own parade – marching down the street immediately in front of the official Pride parade.

When the HIV/AIDS crisis hit, Johnson – who eventually contracted the disease – committed to visiting and sitting with patients in the hospital so they wouldn’t have to suffer and die alone. They also joined ACT UP, bringing their signature flair to AIDS activism.

Besides being a gifted performer, a welcoming figure in the community, and an outspoken advocate for social outcasts, Johnson also had a delightful sense of humor. They originally adopted the drag name “Black Marsha” but eventually settled on Marsha P. Johnson, taking “Johnson” from the Howard Johnson’s restaurant. The P stands for “pay it no mind,” a phrase Johnson often used sarcastically when asked about their gender. When asked about their name in court, Johnson told the judge exactly what the P stood for, which amused the judge and led to Johnson being released.

In the early 1990s, anti-queer violence was peaking in America with thousands of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes reported around the country, including many committed by police. In 1992, Johnson’s body was discovered in the Hudson River. Police immediately declared it a suicide, but Johnson’s friends denied that. Considering Johnson’s outspoken activism and the hate-fueled anti-queer violence permeating New York City at the time, homicide seems likely. In 2002, the New York police department finally acknowledged that Johnson’s death was unlikely to be suicide, but through at least 2016, they still refused to reopen the case and investigate.

For Pride today, we reject our predecessors’ bias against drag queens, thanks to activists like Marsha P. Johnson. Their welcoming demeanor and work with STAR helped young queer people, cut off by their families, find safety and stability. Their compassion helped people suffering from HIV/AIDS to at least have a friend to accompany them. We celebrate their compassion, their humor, their creativity, their courage, and their authenticity.   Happy Pride!

June 27 - Roberta Cowell rules the skies and the racetrack

Roberta Cowell was born in the United Kingdom in 1918 and was a transgender woman. She attended an all-boys public school, where she joined the motor club, learning about race cars, engines, and other miscellaneous mechanical knowledge. In the early 1930s, she made a school trip to Germany where she exercised another hobby, filmmaking, taking footage of drills being conducted by nazi soldiers. She was arrested, but the nazis let her go when she promised to destroy the film. She did not destroy the film, instead destroying a blank roll of film to fool the nazis.

After school at just 16 years old, Cowell got a job as an aircraft engineer, and with war looming, she soon joined the Royal Air Force. Unfortunately, she suffered from motion sickness, so she was discharged from the service. Cowell then turned back to her love of automobiles and took up auto racing. In 1936, while studying engineering in college, she won a race at Land’s End Speed Trials. And she learned a lot about cars by putting on mechanic’s clothes, sneaking into the garages, and offering to help anyone who needed it. Within three years, she owned three race cars of her own and was a regular competitor.

Eventually the looming war became a present war, and in late 1940, Cowell was back in military service, this time in the British army. She served outside of the UK for a year before transferring back into the Royal Air Force. Here she served on the frontlines in a British Spitfire, and narrowly escaped disaster when the oxygen system on her plane conked out at 30,000 feet. She passed out, but mercifully the plane continued flying. Over enemy territory. Through anti-aircraft fire. Somehow she survived, regaining consciousness an hour later as the plane descended, and she was able to return home.

In another event, her plane was shot down and she was captured by nazis. She didn’t go quietly, though. She attempted to escape twice before they even got her back to their camp. She ended up in solitary confinement before being transferred to a prisoner of war camp, where she remained until liberated by the Soviet army in 1945.

After the war, Cowell returned to racing in events across Europe, but PTSD troubled her. After seeing a psychiatrist for a while, she realized that she’d aggressively repressed her femininity and would be more comfortable embracing and identifying as a woman. She began hormone treatments and soon had the first of a pair of “sex change” surgeries. A gynecologist declared her intersex, which opened the door for her to get a new birth certificate and name change. In 1951, she underwent the second surgery.

The surgeries were illegal in the UK at the time due to anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry coupled with a poor understanding of gender generally and transgender identity in particular. The same attitudes cost Cowell her businesses and prevented her from getting jobs. Her primary source of income through the mid-1950s was through selling her story – first to a UK magazine and then from her autobiography. She did continue her racing career, to the extent she was allowed, and continued to win.

When her story landed in the United States, it was a sensation. And groundbreaking. At the time, people undergoing gender-affirming surgery were closely associated with the taboo of homosexual or effeminate men. Cowell shattered both of those views: she was not homosexual, having previously been married to a woman and raising children; and she was not effeminate, being a World War II ace fighter pilot and an automobile racing star.

During Pride, we celebrate people for who they are. Cowell was a race car-driving fighter pilot who just needed time to recognize and understand their gender identity. She demonstrated that gender does not have to box us into – or out of – anything, and in doing so, she opened Americans’ eyes to the possibility that people who receiving gender-affirming care could possibly be normal people. While she was still considered a spectacle in her own time, challenging the misconceptions people held about trans people laid important groundwork for a more accepting future.   Happy Pride!

June 28 - Category IS… Ballroom realness

Drag has its roots in the late 19th century, when people would gather in private to wear the “wrong” gender’s clothes, in direct defiance of laws banning that practice. (In the United States, these laws persisted into the 2000s, though courts would immediately throw them out. They were actively used to justify police harassment into at least the 1980s.) William Dorsey Swann, the first person we know to have called themselves a drag queen, had been enslaved, and most of his drag events were filled with other formerly enslaved men. White gay men were welcome at his drag balls, and soon they began hosting them as well. Despite being integrated balls, there was still a bright streak of racism: all of the judges were white and only white performers won awards. This persisted until the 1960s, when Latino and Black attendees grew fed up and started their own balls.

Thus, modern Ballroom culture was born in Harlem. The new Ballroom culture was meant to be inclusive of all LGBTQ+ people, explicitly embracing and celebrating those who faced discrimination within the larger LGBTQ+ community at the time. Ballroom was one of the few places that transgender people, especially transgender people of color, could safely be themselves in a welcoming community. To support this diversity, Balls often had competitions in a very wide range of categories so everyone in the community could find a niche to compete in.

In the 1980s, voguing developed in the Ballroom, a highly stylized form of dance where the body is used to create symmetrical shapes and forms with graceful movement between distinct poses. It further evolved into “new way vogue,” which deemphasized holding poses in favor of more continuous movement, rapidly “snapping” between poses and demonstrating more flexibility than the straight lines of “old way.” Voguing takes its name from Vogue magazine whose cover model poses were an inspiration to dancers. It reached mainstream audiences when Madonna released her song Vogue in 1990, drawing on her experience attending and watching Ballroom performances.

And Ballroom continues today! Balls are hosted regularly and around the world. The influence and legacy of Ballroom has made its way throughout queer culture, and has even seeped into mainstream entertainment, with shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race finding major success with traditional Ballroom categories and performance styles. The language of Ballroom has also broken out into wider usage with terms like “shade,” “werk,” and “fierce” entering the common parlance.

Pride celebrates all aspects of all LGBTQ+ people, and especially highlights those who have fought against intersectional injustice, such as being queer and a racial minority. Ballroom is that: Black and Latino LGBTQ+ people fighting back against racism and homophobia, making their own space, and winning more acceptance for themselves – and all of us – in the process.  Happy Pride!

June 29 - Lil Nas X comes in on a horse

Hip-hop was born in the late 1970s in the Bronx, in response to and influenced by the popularity of disco. Disco was, in many ways, a revival of energetic dance halls, and quite often discotheques were open to everyone – explicitly included people who’d been excluded previously: Black, Hispanic, Latino, and LGBTQ+. As a result, early hip-hop had close ties to the queer community.

Many hip-hop and rap artists soon adopted toxic masculinity in their lyrics, however, which also meant homophobic language. Even today, some use homophobic language in their music despite expressing allyship elsewhere. That said, since at least the early 1990s, hip-hop and rap had become large and diverse genres, including many openly LGBTQ+ artists. Meshell Ndegeocello, an openly bisexual Black woman, for example, discussed sexuality and the intersectionality of sexuality and Blackness in America. And that’s really no surprise; rap and hip-hop had been confronting social justice issues since almost day one.

Frank Ocean made a big splash when he publicly came out in 2012, becoming the first mainstream successful Black gay male hip-hop artist. In late 2018, a relatively unknown artist named Lil Nas X released a country/rap song titled “Old Town Road,” and it blew up. First it went viral as the soundtrack for a TikTok trend (largely because of serious work Lil Nas X put into promoting it). It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and debuted at #19 on the country chart and #36 on the R&B/hip-hop chart. The song set the record for most streams of a single song in a week, with over 140 million listens. By late August, the song had over a billion listens on Spotify alone.

On the last day of Pride in 2019, Lil Nas X tweeted to the world that he is gay. In 2021, he released the song and accompanying music video for Montero. The lyrics are pretty gay, but the music video is just an outright queer festival: homosexuality on full display, high drag, gender-bending, and a shot across the bow of those who claim being LGBTQ+ is immoral. This kind of emotional explosion is not uncommon with coming out. It’s normal for all the feelings that had been locked inside the closet to come pouring out when the doors first open, and those emotions can include a lot of anger – for the time lost to hiding, for the self-loathing, and for the people who made you feel unsafe.

Anyway, Lil Nas X has never shied away from his identity since then, using his music to explore more of his experience growing up in the closet and coming to terms with his sexuality. He’s also never backed down from people who criticize him for being gay or for his artistic expression, instead embracing, extending, and inventing memes meant to validate LGBTQ+ identities in the face of attempted oppression. And in 2023, after more introspection – and with the freedom to explore himself – he came out as “a little bit bisexual.”

At Pride, we celebrate the younger generations continuing the fight for justice, equality, and respect. The work of generations past have made it safer and more acceptable to be openly queer, and today’s younger generations are taking that and building on top of it to make the world more inclusive and just. Lil Nas X wasn’t the first openly gay Black male hip-hop/rap artist, and because of the way he uses his stardom, he won’t be the last. For Pride, we celebrate those who came before, those who are here now, and those who are coming next.  Happy Pride!

June 30 - We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going anywhere

We’ve made it to the last day of LGBTQ+ Pride month! I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of posts as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. Pride month may be drawing to a close, but the themes of Pride never end: respect, dignity, equality, justice. We’ve been here since the beginning of humanity, and no matter how much some folks might wish otherwise, we’ll be here until the end, too. The whole, giant spectrum of us: lesbian, bisexual, transgender, asexual, gay, nonbinary, pansexual, genderqueer, intersex, and everyone else too. None of the various queer identities are new, though the language we have to describe them may be. “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” as they used to chant.

Everyone deserves Pride. Whatever skin you were born into, wherever you were born, however you were raised, however you dress, however you wear your hair, you deserve respect, dignity, and justice. June may be designated as LGBTQ+ Pride month, but the goals of Pride are for everyone.  Happy Pride!

If you want to learn more about LGBTQ+ history, you may be interested in the Making Gay History podcast, featuring recordings of the actual people involved and at the center of the modern queer rights movement.

(The previous message was replaced in light of the Supreme Court decision.)

I had a final feel-good message prepared for the last day of Pride, but not anymore. Today the Supreme Court ruled that LGBTQ+ people do not deserve protection in the public sphere. The question at hand was simply this: can a business discriminate against someone based on their inherent being, if that business has a “deeply-held belief” that those people are immoral. The Supreme Court said yes, the business can discriminate. It is just a breath away from overturning major provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. If businesses can refuse service to queer people because they believe queer people are immoral, what’s stopping businesses from making the same argument about people of color? Women? Muslims? Etc. It’s a very slippery slope.

Pride is the unending fight against injustice and intolerance. And injustice persists, even literally to this day. This very morning. This very hour. I can’t end Pride month on a happy note when the powers that be have decided injustice shall be the order of the day. We all deserve respect, dignity, and justice. Every one of us. Pride is for us all. June may be designated LGBTQ+ Pride month, but the fight – the crimes people have had to commit simply for being themselves – is shared across all human experiences.

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If you want to learn more about LGBTQ+ history, you may be interested in the Making Gay History podcast, featuring recordings of the actual people involved and at the center of the modern queer rights movement.