Welcome to Pride Month: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ History and Culture
June marks the beginning of LGBTQ+ Pride Month. Former U.S. Presidents Clinton and Obama both declared June “Pride Month.” Since then, June holds many LGBTQ+ pride events across America.
The Stonewall Riots
The decision to hold this celebration in June was made mainly to commemorate the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The riots took place in New York during a time when homosexuality was more or less outlawed, when people were fired from their jobs, placed on watch-lists, and diagnosed as mentally ill. With the aftermath of the riots, the LGBTQ+ community started campaigning for fundamental human rights and better treatment. They began pride movements and marches to remember and commemorate the riots.
One year after the riots took place, the very first Pride Parade occurred in New York. Since then, Pride Parades have taken place throughout the world. The glorious city of Atlanta even celebrates Pride with a parade each October.
Atlanta’s Pride Month Celebration
The city of Atlanta has a Pride Run every year, this year on the 15th, which is sponsored and organized by Front Runners Atlanta. They are a LGBTQ+ running club that has been operating for almost thirty years.
The funds raised through the registration fees for this year’s Pride Run will go to Joining Hearts – a charity which helps provide care and housing to those living with HIV/AIDS in Atlanta. There are also history tours, festivals, and fundraising events throughout Atlanta this month! There are plenty of ways to get involved in Pride Month whether you identify with the community or not.
Even though Stonewall was instrumental in the Gay Pride movement, the most tangible aspect of gay pride are the flags that represent the different sexualities. Many people purchase these flags during Pride and wear them as capes or shawls to show their sexualities. However, the very first pride flag, created in 1977 by Harvey Milk and Gilbert Baker in a friendly challenge, was more general than the flags of today.
The Flags of the Community
The original Rainbow Flag was designed to celebrate aspects of queer life and living as a queer individual. Each color on the flag represented a particular aspect of life and pride. The hot pink in the flag represents sex, the red line represents life, the orange represents healing, the yellow represents sunlight, the green portion represents nature, the turquoise represents magic and art, the indigo piece represents serenity, and the violet line represents the spirit. These colors and their organization made up the original pride flag to represent all aspects of queer life. Over time, the pride flag was changed, mainly due to economic reasons and the demand for fabric. For example, the year after the creation of the Pride Flag, hot pink and turquoise were removed. It had become too expensive to keep those colors in the flags.
As people began to change the flag for personal or economic reasons, more flags began being produced to recognize all the different sexualities. For instance, the Bisexual flag has a row of blue, the traditional male color, and a row of pink, the classic female color. These two rows overlap and form the purple row, which represents the fluidity and combination of attraction to both genders.
Another flag created was the Transgender Flag. The colors of this flag and their arrangement represent the transition that many transgender individuals undergo. The symmetry within this flag also helps symbolize the struggle that many transgender individuals experience when trying to find balance and right-ness in their own lives.
Although the community has evolved and is one of the most socially-accepted groups in America, it can be challenging for some people to feel comfortable talking about, displaying, or revealing their sexuality to close friends and family. It may seem as if we live in a time where everyone is comfortable with each other’s differences, but there are still people who are harassed, attacked, or killed because of their sexuality or identity.
We Need to Help
These heinous crimes happen more often to transgender individuals because they are the ones whose identity is most openly displayed. Police consider these to be hate crimes, and they are.
We are lucky, however, that the Atlanta community is very accepting of LGBTQ+ individuals. We have some of the largest pride celebrations in the nation, even going so far as to paint crosswalks in a rainbow during Atlanta’s Pride celebration. With such an accepting and welcoming community, it is nice to be able to be free and open with who you are.
But this does not mean that other people in other places feel the same. In Pakistan, transgender individuals often get killed because of who they are and homosexuality is still illegal in Russia. Many countries in Africa and the Middle East have outlawed homosexuality as well.
As members of the LGBTQ+ community, we need to bring awareness to the violence that is happening because of these laws. We need to help people in need and bad situations get somewhere they can be safe. Helping these people is our moral responsibility as members of the community. With Pride Month beginning, enjoy all the history, love, and compassion that Atlanta has to offer!
