What’s the story behind Pride Month?

LOGAN – This past Friday, June 28, was International LGBT Pride Day, commemorating the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, a several-day spontaneous uprising around the gay bar Stonewall Inn in New York City.

The events in 1969 came as a response to a police raid, frequent in a time where homosexuality and gender non-conformity had been criminalized. It is largely considered the most pivotal moment in the American movement toward gay rights.

The riots came in the context of a society in cultural upheaval along racial, class, and gender lines, and a society that viewed LGBT people as anything from communist agents to mentally ill. The Diagnostic and Statistic Manual (DSM) classified same-sex attraction as a mental illness until the year 1974.

According to Barry Adam's "Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement," thousands of people in the mid-century U.S. were discriminated from government jobs under suspicion of being gay. Many cities performed "sweeps" to keep gay or gender non-conforming people out of public spaces, while universities expelled instructors suspected of homosexuality. Additionally, Stonewall and many gay bars in the NYC area were reputedly owned by organized crime, who left them to deteriorate in woeful condition.

In David Carter's Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, the historian interviewed Michael Fader, a witness of the unfolding events.

There were "all kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined," Fader said.

"We were really trying to get back in and break free. And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We weren't going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around – it's like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way and that's what caught the police by surprise… It took different forms, but the bottom line was, we weren't going away. And we didn't."

The events of the Stonewall Riots were followed, on the one year anniversary, by the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, where the Stonewall Inn was (and continues to be) located. Pride marches also took place in Los Angeles and Chicago that year.

The Christopher Street march, "much to the organizers' surprise, attracted thousands of participants," according to the NYC LGBT Historic Rights Project.

Recent historians have noted the exclusion of transgender people and racial minorities from the first marches – including Marsha Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Stormé DeLarverie – despite the critical role they played in the initial riots. These groups were often the first and most violently targeted in police raids on gay bars.

It was not until 1999 that Pride Month was federally recognized via presidential proclamation, and the last two presidencies have featured men that were either unwilling to recognize the month's celebrations, or had a voting history in the U.S. Senate of denying recognition of gay marriage.

June also marks the anniversary of the Orlando Pulse nighclub mass shooting, a gay club where over 100 were injured or murdered in 2016.

Email at rmorris@logandaily.com