By Richard Socarides, GLG Chief Communications Officer

This year’s Pride Month has been a study in contrasts. The power of our community was never more evident than when health and safety kept us physically apart. We saw genuine milestones of progress and tragic reminders of how much further we have to go. And all June long, across the U.S., we’ve seen firsthand that the ideal of equal dignity for all people is both powerful and elusive.

Equality has to be demanded, fought for, and won. As LGBTQIA+ organizations have written in an open letter, “Today, we join together again to say #BlackLivesMatter and commit ourselves to the action those words require.”

Pride commemorates the June 1969 Stonewall rebellion in New York City, a series of angry demonstrations against police brutality and harassment which lit the spark that became the modern-day gay rights movement. Over time, it has become part celebration and part protest—appropriate for a movement originally focused on sexual freedom and identity, but which has become an assertion of human rights and equal dignity for all.

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