How Trump Is Making LGBT Pride Return To Its Radical Roots
The LGBT community has made so much progress in the last 20 years, it might be easy to forget that pride parades haven’t always been about glitter, boas, and booze.
Or at least, plenty of people worry that it might be easy to forget. Every year during pride season, we see an abundance of think pieces and hot-takes decrying the “commercialization of Pride.”
The specifics vary, but the people and communities voicing these concerns typically share one primary gripe: Pride used to be political, and now it’s just a drunken revelry sponsored by major corporations. Those corporations get a nice PR boost through their apparent support of the LGBT community, even if they’re seriously lacking in corporate ethics in other ways that negatively impact the community’s health and wellbeing — by degrading the environment or refusing to pay workers a living wage, for example.
They also argue that while our progress and our pride are well worth celebrating, there’s still a ton of actual work left to be done—and they’re right. Despite our increased social acceptance and the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 marriage equality ruling, the LGBT community still has a long way to go before achieving full equality.
LGBT Americans, and Transgender Americans in particular, continue to face disproportionate rates of violence. In a majority of states, you can still be legally fired, denied a job, or denied access to housing just because of your sexual orientation or gender identity. LGBT people experience greater barriers to health care, higher rates of illness and disease, and higher rates of poverty than their heterosexual counterparts.
Things are even worse for LGBT youth: Queer teens are twice as likely to have been bullied or physically assaulted than their straight peers. In all but six states, it remains legal to send kids and teens to “conversion therapy,” which has been roundly condemned as ineffective and harmful by the international psychology community. Due to family rejection, approximately 40% percent of the 1.6 million homeless youth in the country identify as LGBT.
If we hope to resolve these issues, it’s well worth remembering Pride’s radical roots.
When America’s first gay pride marches began in 1970, they were launched as protests against widespread homophobia, discrimination, and violence against the LGBT community. Many were, and still are, held in June to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in 1969. At the time, the mere act of publicly claiming an LGBT identity with pride— of demanding to be seen and respected instead of quietly succumbing to shame and social stigma—was outright revolutionary.
This year, many more LGBT communities than usual are considering those radical roots while planning their pride celebrations. In DC and LA, pride parade organizers have obtained new permits to officially re-frame their parades on June 11th as massive protests. The goal is to build on the momentum of January’s Women’s March on Washington.
Unfortunately, we have the general panic inspired by Donald Trump’s presidency to thank for that.
To the extent that things are getting worse for all historically marginalized communities under Trump, things are also getting demonstrably worse for the LGBT community. In just his first 90 days in office, Trump has managed to quietly overturn a number of key protections for LGBT people in a series of moves that advocates have referred to as “Death by a thousand cuts.” Hate crimes against LGBT people have also been on the rise since the election — and nearly a fifth of the assailants have reportedly actually invoked Donald Trump’s name while committing the assaults.
It’s unfortunate that things had to get this bad for us to arrive here. But it is absolutely a good thing that “mainstream” LGBT communities are finally listening to what those at the margins of our community have been saying for decades: Pride is inherently political. Is always has been. Until there’s nothing left to fight for, it must continue to be.
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