Pride Is More Than Survival (Happy Pride Month)

A group of people celebrating outside Stonewall Inn in New York City (June 30, 1969). By Fred W. McDarrah

On June 28, it will have been 58 years since the police raids and subsequent uprising at the Stonewall Inn gave birth to the modern LGBT rights movement.

In some ways, LGBT identity is inherently political; Pride began as an act of collective resistance to violent, systematic discrimination. Our Pride Month piece from last year focused mainly on the rising political and legal threats the community is facing, and things have not lightened up. We are only halfway through 2026 and already over 790 pieces of legislation that target LGBT Americans, mostly transgender people, have been introduced to state and national legislatures.

While the danger is very real, and solidarity with and advocacy for the LGBT community are as important as ever, this year we wanted to write about the fuller meaning of Pride. Just as much as Pride is about what LGBT people have survived, it is also about what they have built, created, taught, and given to the world. LGBT people are not merely victims of discrimination or subjects of political debate. They are artists, teachers, parents, veterans, workers, public servants, neighbors, and friends.

Their contributions are not abstract. They are woven into the everyday culture people already love. You would be hard pressed to find someone who does not love at least a few songs by gay musicians like Freddie Mercury or Little Richard. Wendy Carlos, a transgender woman, helped bring the synthesizer into popular music, changing the sound of modern music in ways that are still felt today. Walt Whitman, whose poetry has long been read through the lens of same-sex love and desire, helped give America some of its most expansive language about the body, the soul, democracy, and human connection.

Part of the harm of discrimination is that it flattens people. It turns whole lives into arguments and communities into issues to be debated. But no person is only the worst thing done to them, and no community should be understood only through the prejudice it has endured. To celebrate Pride fully, we have to make room for the everyday fullness of life.

James Baldwin once said that “everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.” Baldwin, an openly gay man, understood that gay identity was not something narrow, shameful, or separate from the rest of life. It was part of a person’s full humanity. His work helped generations of readers think more honestly about love, race, family, religion, power, and what it means to live truthfully in a country that often punishes people for doing so. He became one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century by embracing the complexity of who he was and putting it into art that still speaks to us today.

Most of life is made up of simple things: work, friendship, family, laughter, love. LGBT people have always been part of those things, not outside of them. Their differences do not separate them from ordinary life. They help reveal the beauty in the extraordinary thing we call ordinary life.