Essay

Pride has always been about Black lives too

Every June a familiar argument resurfaces: should Pride be a party or a protest, and what on earth does “Black Lives Matter” have to do with a parade about being gay? The honest answer is that the two were never separate to begin with. Queer liberation in its modern form was built in large part by Black and brown people, many of them poor, many of them criminalised twice over — for who they were and for the colour of their skin. A Pride that cannot say their names, and cannot extend its solidarity past its own front door, is celebrating a history it has quietly edited.

Who actually did the early work

The story of how queer people went from hiding to marching is usually told as a tidy parable with a few heroic names. The fuller version is messier, more crowded, and far more Black and brown than the postcard suggests. The people most exposed to police harassment in the mid-twentieth century were rarely the respectable, closeted professionals who had something to lose by being seen. They were the ones already pushed to the margins — drag queens, street kids, sex workers, trans women, butch lesbians — and a great many of them were people of colour, because racism and poverty had put them on those streets in the first place.

That is why the uprisings modern Pride descends from did not look like a polite petition. The resistance around Stonewall in 1969, and the smaller flashpoints before it, were led from the front by people who had been told by everyone — straight society, the police, and frequently the better-behaved gay establishment — that they were an embarrassment. They fought anyway, and the movement that followed was built on a fight they started. You can read our own account of that summer in our history of Pride and the Stonewall riots.

It matters that we credit this leadership honestly, and that we resist the urge to flatten it into a single tidy origin myth. The precise authorship of any one night is genuinely contested by historians, and we are not going to pretend otherwise or hand you a single "first brick" you can frame on a wall. What is not contested is the larger pattern: that the people with the least social protection took the greatest risks, and that a disproportionate share of them were Black and brown. The names we do remember — and the many we do not — point in the same direction.

Solidarity is structural, not a gesture

It has become common to treat solidarity as a kind of mood — a warm feeling, a hashtag, a flag added to a profile. That is not what the word meant to the people who built this movement, and it is not what it can afford to mean now. Solidarity is structural. It is the recognition that the systems crushing one group are usually the same systems, wearing a different hat, crushing another.

Consider what actually shapes a queer life. Policing. Housing. Who gets stopped, who gets believed, who gets a landlord to return a call, who can walk into a hospital and be treated like a person. For a Black trans woman, the danger from a police encounter is not a separate issue she experiences after her queerness; it is braided into it. You cannot hand her "LGBTQ rights" in one box and "racial justice" in another and expect her to assemble a safe life from the parts. The oppression arrives integrated. The response has to be integrated too.

Solidarity is not a feeling you have about other people’s struggles. It is the recognition that the machine grinding them is the same machine, on a different setting, that grinds you.

This is what people mean when they say liberation is indivisible. It is not a slogan; it is a description of how power works. A queer movement that wins legal recognition for the most comfortable of its members while leaving the most exposed to the police has not finished the job — it has simply rescued the people who were always going to be rescued first and called it victory. Organisations rooted in this analysis, like the Trevor Project and advocacy groups such as GLAAD, keep returning to the same point: the young people and the trans people most at risk are very often the ones a single-issue politics is most willing to leave behind.

Corporate Pride and movement Pride

None of this is abstract once you stand on a modern Pride route and watch the floats go by. Somewhere between the riot and the rainbow capitalism, two different things started sharing a name. There is corporate Pride — branded, ticketed, sponsored, sanded down into something a bank can put on a tote bag without alarming its shareholders. And there is movement Pride, which still understands itself as a protest that happens to be joyful rather than a celebration that occasionally remembers to be political.

The tension is not that joy is bad. Joy is one of the things the movement was fighting for; a queer life should get to be more than an emergency. The problem is when the celebration is used to retire the politics — when a company will fly a flag in June and lobby against trans healthcare in the other eleven months, or when organisers decide that "Black Lives Matter" is too divisive for an event that was literally born from a confrontation with the police. A Pride that markets the aesthetics of a riot while disowning its substance has performed a strange trick: it has sold the costume of liberation back to the people it left behind.

You can usually tell the two apart by a simple test. Movement Pride is willing to make its sponsors and its city slightly uncomfortable on behalf of the people with the least power in the room. Corporate Pride is willing to make those people uncomfortable on behalf of its sponsors. The flags look identical from a distance. The difference is in who the day is actually for.

What showing up actually looks like

So what does it mean, in practice, to take this seriously rather than just feel good about it once a year? It is not complicated, but it is not free either.

• Follow the leadership that already exists. Black and brown queer organisers are not waiting to be discovered; they have been doing this work for decades. Showing up means amplifying and resourcing them, not arriving to explain their own struggle back to them.
• Refuse the trade-off. When someone frames racial justice and queer rights as competing demands on a limited budget of public sympathy, that framing is the problem. The honest answer is that they were always the same fight.
• Put it where it costs something. Solidarity that never inconveniences you is usually decoration. It looks like money, time, votes, and the willingness to lose comfort or standing by saying the unpopular true thing in a room that would rather you didn’t.
• Keep it up in the off-season. The needs do not pause in July. A commitment that only appears during the parade is a brand, not a politics.

And it looks like memory. A movement that wants a future has to be honest about its past — about who was on the front line, who was written out of the photographs, and who is still being asked to wait their turn. To say that Pride has always been about Black lives is not to import an outside cause into a queer space. It is to give that space back its own history.

The good news, and it is real good news, is that this is not a heavier version of the movement bolted on from outside. It is the original one. The people who started this were never fighting for a single, comfortable slice of liberation. They were fighting, against very long odds, for all of it — and they expected us to keep fighting for all of it too. The least we can do is not lose the thread. You can read more of where we stand in our coverage of Pride and the longer history behind it.

SectionPride, beyond the paradeWhy the day was a protest first — and what it still owes the people who started it.Read →From the archiveHow Pride beganStonewall, the summer of 1969, and the long memory of who actually fought.Read →SectionWhere the movement comes fromThe fuller, more crowded story of queer liberation — credited honestly.Read →