LGBTQ Pride Month: Everything you should know about its history
Pride Month is celebrated annually in June to honor the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community. Its roots trace back to the 1969 Stonewall riots.
Here are the answers to some of the most common questions about LGBTQ Pride Month, annual LGBTQ Pride parades and the iconic 1969 Stonewall uprising.
LGBTQ Pride Month is a commemoration of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community that is part celebration and part protest. It is often associated with massive parades and parties that honor the community’s joys and accomplishments. But the rallies, marches and political actions can be just as important to draw attention to the issues still facing the community.
LGBTQ Pride Month traces its roots back to the 1969 Stonewall riots, which started on June 28, 1969. The first Pride marches started the following year, on June 28, 1970, to commemorate the multiday riots, and these one-day celebrations eventually evolved into a full month of LGBTQ pride.
A crowd attempts to impede police arrests outside the Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969.NY Daily News via Getty Images fileAccording to a search of Newspapers.com, an online archive of more than 26,000 newspapers, the first mention of “Pride Month” was in a June 5, 1972, issue of Pennsylvania’s Delaware County Daily Times. In the article, gay activist Byrna Aronson talks about the gay rights rallies popping up across the country and shortly after says, “We call it Gay Pride week and Gay Pride Month, the whole month of June.”
The first time The New York Times mentioned Pride Month, according to its online archive, was in a 1989 article about Mayor Ed Koch being heckled as he “proclaimed the month of June as Lesbian and Gay Pride and History Month” at a ceremony in Greenwich Village.
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