This year’s LGBTQ+ Pride Month takes place amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic and the extraordinary international uprising for Black lives. It’s an important time to remember and honor the birth of the contemporary LGBTQ+ rights movement at Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966. And again when Black and Latinx trans people, including Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, pushed back against police harassment at New York City’s Stonewall Inn in June 1969. Nights of riots galvanized an emerging LGBTQ+ movement, giving rise to the nation’s first Pride parades and a new sense of freedom and community cohesion.
The echoes of our current moment call us to honor the Black and Latinx leaders of the Stonewall uprising, who fought for their communities – Black, brown, queer, trans – to be fully included in this nation’s promises of liberty and justice for all. Today’s Black Lives protestors stand on the shoulders of earlier Black LGBTQ+ civil rights and community liberation activists, such as Bayard Rustin, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin.
There are other echoes in today’s headlines: Like COVID-19, the emergence of HIV/AIDS led to discrimination against certain groups of people—Asian Americans in the case of the coronavirus and LGBTQ+ people during the height of the AIDS crisis. As with HIV/AIDS, COVID-19’s health and economic impacts have been most devastating among queer communities of color. And violence against LGBTQ+ people of color, particularly Black trans people, continues, as we mourn the recent death of Tony McDade, a Black trans man in Tallahassee, Florida, at the hands of police.
As an economic justice organization working at the intersections of race, class, and gender, Family Values @ Work has always understood that LGBTQ+ identities and needs are complex. We work for a society and an economy where LGBTQ+ workers and their families are valued, where Black LGBTQ+ lives matter, and where this nation’s promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness apply to all.
In this season of struggle, Family Values @ Work wishes everyone a month full of Pride, solidarity, progress and hope.
By Jennifer Morales Family Values @ Work’s Network Learning Accelerator
