LGBTQ Pride is turning 50 this year a little short on its signature fanfare, after the coronavirus pandemic drove it to the internet and after calls for racial equality sparked by the killing of George Floyd further overtook it.
Activists and organizers are using the intersection of holiday and history in the making — including the Supreme Court's decision giving LGBT people workplace protections — to uplift the people of color already among them and by making Black Lives Matter the centerpiece of Global Pride events Saturday.
"Pride was born of protest," said Cathy Renna, communications director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, seeing analogies in the pandemic and in common threads of the Black and LGBTQ rights movements.
"Trans women of color have been targeted in what has been called an epidemic, and the Stonewall uprising happened in response to police harassment and brutality," Renna said in an email.
The first Pride march took place June 28, 1970, a year after the 1969 uprisings at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, which were led by trans women of color.
A few other commemorations took place that year and later spread until 50 years on, there's scarcely a patch on Earth that doesn't host some type of Pride event.
New York's is among the largest, but social distancing measures to check the spread of COVID-19 everywhere from Scranton to Sao Paulo made cancellation or postponement a certainty.
Global Pride is billed as a 24-hour stream of music, performances, speeches and messages of support. It is being hosted Saturday by Todrick Hall on his YouTube channel, on iHeartRadio's YouTube channel and on the Global Pride website.
It will feature activists and politicians, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and entertainers such as Betty Who, Deborah Cox, Laverne Cox, Jake Shears and Martha Wash.
"Trans folks, particularly the LGBTQ-I folks of color, have gotten discrimination from the larger systems of white supremacy and on racist terms, and then also have experienced transphobia and homophobia within our own communities," Laverne Cox, the pioneering trans actor who starred in "Orange Is the New Black," told The Associated Press in an interview this month.
"And so, part of what the Black Trans Lives Matter movement ... is acknowledging that communities of color still have a lot of work to do to fully reconcile our history of transphobia, specifically, and homophobia as well," Cox said.
In Minnesota, where Floyd died last month at the hands of Minneapolis police, it was immediately clear that Pride as usual — one of the nation's largest — would be inappropriate, said Twin Cities Pride board member Felix Foster.
Instead, Pride will include a virtual march of recorded videos, a stretch of silence in honor of Floyd, and solidarity with a march for Jamar Clark, a Black man killed by Minneapolis police in 2015, Foster said.
—JEFF McMILLAN
