Honoring the Black and Brown Founders of Pride
Our queer and trans ancestors’ words are as instructive as they are inspirational.
Pride began with an uprising.
In the early morning of June 28, 1968, lights flashed on the dance floor at Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village in New York City. The signal, known to LGBT patrons as an indication of police presence, would shift them from joy to fear as they dodged arrest and sought refuge from the NYPD's inhumane treatment. The early 1960s saw raids similar to the one at Stonewall, each an extension of the mayor's anti-gay agenda and a targeted campaign led by his office to marginalize LGBT people and effectively bar their full self-expression in public spaces. Overpoliced and under-protected, residents of Greenwich Village, home to many in NYC's queer community, gathered around the bar as a familiar scene unfolded. This time, however, patrolling wagons, typical to routine raids, failed to arrive and the few police officers lacked the numbers to inflict the harm they imagined. Bar patrons and bystanders alike rallied around their liberatory desire for a safer, healthier, and more inclusive world welcoming of their vastness.
Already called to action by their shared experience, together they witnessed Stormé DeLarverie, a queer woman, stand like a lighthouse in a storm and resist four police officers. When she turned around to the crowd and shouted, "Why don't you guys do something?!," everyone responded with action leading to a six-day resistance that would become a watershed moment in the gay civil rights movement. Leading on the front lines then and before and after the raid were Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera—two Black and Brown trans women who spent much of their lives advocating for trans and gender non-conforming people of color experiencing compounding harm by the state. A year later, a commemorative event was held in New York to celebrate the unifying turning point and the LGBT pride it commanded, with other states and countries following suit in later years.
As we celebrate Pride this June, we honor DeLarverie, Johnson, Rivera, and the other trans and gender non-conforming people of color who inspired it. Their love, audacity, rage, and yearning were integral to queer liberation, and their words remain instructive for all of ours. Many of our Black queer ancestors were denied the conditions to grow old and taste any part of the freedom they helped forge. Today, policymakers at every level of government, along with right-wing punditry, baseless lies, and sensationalist language used by the media are working in tandem to manufacture the same conditions and vulnerability for the LGBTQ+ community.
Yet, we each have the opportunity to put forth care the ways our queer and trans ancestors' envisioned. It is an active love that demands the heart and advocacy of all of us. At the Black Future Co-op Fund, we understand care in this context as a non-optical allyship, going beyond flags and one-month campaigns to consistently showing up for queer people in times of challenge and celebration. Here are five quotes to reflect on, each with a teaching on care and community that we can embody this Pride month and always:
“We have to be visible. We should not be ashamed of who we are.”
— Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson
A prominent figure at Stonewall, Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson was a beloved and relentless advocate for trans liberation. With her colleague Sylvia Rivers, Marsha co-founded the Gay Liberation Front and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) — groups at the forefront that ignited in the wake of the uprising. Despite their organizing and leadership that made the Stonewall Uprising a landmark moment, Marsha, Sylvia, and members of the trans and non-gender conforming community were asked less than five years later to not participate in the Pride parades they helped establish. Marsha and her people marched anyway, and when asked why by a reporter, she replied, “Darling, I want my gay rights now!”
Marsha was as radical in her care as she was in her action. At STAR, both she and Sylvia acted as “mothers” to homeless LGBT youth and sex workers, ensuring they were cared for, eating, and loved on. She was insistent on living a full life, and like Black trans women past and present, envisioned a freedom that would allow her and anyone anywhere on the gender spectrum the ability to do so without fear. Even in the face of danger and looming threat, she refused to quell her vision of liberation or quiet her demand for it. With orchestrated efforts underway in South Dakota, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, and Texas to dismiss trans people’s needs and stories, Marsha’s words are a reminder of why we need to elevate and include them in all spaces where decisions and envisioning are happening. Their visibility and thriving are a part of ours.
“Somebody has to care. People say, ‘Why do you still do that?’ I said, ‘It’s very simple. If people didn’t care about me when I was growing up, with my mother being Black, raised in the South.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t be here.’”
— Stormé DeLarverie
Revolutionary in her approach to style and direct action, Stormé DeLarverie was the queer woman whose resistance ignited Stonewall. A self-identified drag king and butch lesbian, Stormé lived a life of fluid expression, traveling across the theater circuit with the Jewel Box Revue, North America' ’s first racially integrated drag show. Her early childhood in New Orleans as the daughter of a white man and a Black woman who worked as his family's servant was marked by hardship, bullying, and harassment from Black and white peers because of how she looked. As a biracial woman with an androgynous presence, Stormé was fully aware of the politics of being and the contexts where she was most allowed to be. As reflected in her words here, navigating this unique hardship would not have been possible without the community and the ecosystem of support she and her mother had relied on.
She embodied this love of community in her activism, working for decades as a volunteer street patrol worker and earning the title of "guardian of lesbians in the Village." Aside from acting as a protector and bouncer at lesbian bars across New York City, Stormé brought her theatrical talents to benefit disadvantaged women and children. When she earned her title as an ancestor in May 2014, obituaries shared that well into her 80s, Stormé still patrolled sidewalks and checked in on bars, monitoring for any semblance of abuse, bullying, or intolerance. A writer for the New York Times shared, "She literally walked the streets of downtown Manhattan like a gay superhero, not to be messed with by any stretch of the imagination." Stormé's lifelong commitment to protecting her community is a teaching for all of us, illuminating the lesson that care must be consistent to be meaningful.
“When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.”
— Pauli Murray
A civil rights activist, legal scholar, writer, and priest, Pauli Murray’s life and work helped advance civil and women’s rights. Coining the term Jane Crow, she was an esteemed advocate for African American women uniquely affected by Jim Crow laws and a co-founder of the National Organization of Women. Her critique of state segregation laws substantially influenced the arguments used by the NAACP in Brown v. Board of Education. A pioneer on many fronts, Pauli was the first Black woman to earn a J.D. from Yale Law School, and the first Black woman ordained as an Episcopalian priest.
The quote above captures Pauli's commitment to showing up for everyone, including those insistent on not doing the same for her. Despite the love and labor she invested in Black causes and women's causes, her intersectional identity as a queer Black woman was often relegated to an afterthought in those respective organizing spaces. Modeling the care she wished to see in the world, Pauli relentlessly advocated for all. Her words are a precedent for the care and organizing that'll get us to safety and prosperity.
“I have lived a good citizen for many years in this town and am going to die a good citizen, but I am going to die a woman.”
— Lucy Hicks Anderson
A name and story often lost in history is Lucy Hicks Anderson, a Black trans woman known as a socialite, chef, and business owner during the Prohibition era. Born and raised in Kentucky in the late 1880s, the word ‘transgender’ was unused and unknown to Lucy, but from a young age, she wished to wear dresses and go by a preferred name. On a doctor’s recommendation, her parents raised Lucy according to her preference, a transformative decision that springboarded her thriving as a cook, philanthropist, and community hero known for hosting welcome parties and gatherings across Southern California.
Despite living unquestioned as a woman for decades, Lucy was outed in her late 50s, causing a challenge to her marriage license and her to defend her identity in a court of law. She lived in love for decades and had fostered community for just as long, but in the face of cis-sexism and transphobia, she was commanded to hide who she was by Black and white peers alike. She refused to, and her words are a reminder that selfhood is a sacred right worth protecting and a right we all deserve.
Each of these Black trans and queer women’s words carry an echo that commands us to be expansive, intentional, and present in body, mind, and spirit as we work to secure a vision of Black well-being supportive of all our health. Over 1.2 million Black LGBT people live in the United States. With biases and structural racism working in unison, their experience of the world is uniquely challenging and discriminatory. Black trans people have an unemployment rate of 26%, two times the rate of non-Black transgender people and four times the rate of the general population. Forty-one percent have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, more than five times the U.S. rate for the general population. From education to police brutality to healthcare disparities, the Black queer and trans experience implicate all of us to show up for them and respond to their vulnerability with urgent care.
The purpose of a system is what it does, and our team, along with our grantees, partners, and community, will not rest until that system is supportive of all of us, our Black LGBTQ+siblings included. We carry the words of our Black queer ancestors this month and always as we continue to manifest Black prosperity.
