LGBTQ Pride Month

June is LGBTQ Pride Month, and all month long we will be celebrating and honoring important women in the LGBTQ community, including many of the women shown here:

Top row (l-r):
Pauli Murray, civil rights and women’s rights activist, lawyer, author and priest
Arden Eversmeyer, founder of the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project
Harmony Hammond, artist, author and pioneer of the feminism art movement
Crystal Jang, co-founder of the Asian Pacific Islander Queer Women and Transgender Community
Achebe Powell, educator and organizer, founder of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice
Brenda Howard, bisexual rights activist who is often referred to as the “Mother of Pride”
Audre Lorde, poet, author, feminist, and civil rights activist

Center row (l-r):
Roma Guy, LGBT and women’s rights activist
Nadine Smith, LGBT activist an executive director of Equality Florida
Beth Brant, poet and author whose work focused on her identity as a Mohawk and a lesbian
Andrea Jenkins, poet, artist, and the first black openly transgender woman elected to public office in the US
Gloria E. Anzaldua, scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory
Blair Imani, queer African-American Muslim author and activist
Joan Nestle, writer and editor and a founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives

Bottom row (l-r):
Marsha P. Johnson, gay liberation activist, pioneering trans activist and advocate for homeless LGBTQ youth
Margaret Chung, the first known Chinese-American woman physician
Sally Ride, astronaut and physicist, the first American woman in space
Sharice Davids, lawyer and politician, the first openly LGBT Native American elected to the U.S. Congress
Billie Jean King, former professional tennis player, pioneer for gender equality and social justice
Sylvia Rivera, Latina American gay liberation and transgender rights activist
Jane Addams, suffragist, settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, and public administrator

Why June is LGBTQ Pride Month

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month is celebrated every year in June.

LGBTQ Pride refers to a worldwide movement and philosophy asserting that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals should be proud of their sexual orientation and gender identity, with Gay Pride advocates working for equal rights and benefits for all LGBTQ people.

The movement has three main premises: that people should be proud of their sexual orientation and gender identity, that sexual and gender diversity is a gift, and that sexual orientation and gender identity are inherent and cannot be intentionally altered.

In June of 2000, Bill Clinton deemed the month of June, “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.” The month was chosen to remember the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, when trans women, gay men, and others at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan fought back against police harassment. This riot is considered to be the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the United States.

June is now the month of acceptance and the month to welcome diversity in communities regardless of sexual orientation and gender presentation. LGBTQ groups celebrate this special time with pride parades, picnics, parties, memorials for those lost from HIV and AIDS, and other group events that attract thousands upon thousands of individuals.

The Invisibility of Lesbians in American History

To Believe in Women, by Lillian Faderman, is a landmark book about lesbian history in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Unfortunately it is no longer available from our distributors, but it is offered through Bookshop (or Amazon).

To address the issue of the invisibility of lesbians in history books, we quote an excerpt from Living with History/Making Social Change, by historian, author, and pioneer in the field of women’s history Gerda Lerner (2002 Honoree):

“Researchers in women’s history often have to depend on autobiographical writing – diaries, letters, memoirs, and fiction – to piece together the life stories of women of the past. . . Self-descriptive narratives of women abound in omission and disguises. . . .A subset of autobiographies and biographies concerns women who had special friendships with other women prior to the period when lesbian relationships were defined. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s essay, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America,’ had long defined the discourse and also limited it (footnote omitted). Smith-Rosenberg had argued that single- sex friendships among women were accepted by society in the nineteenth century and were not considered marks of deviance. Were modern historians justified in defining such friendships as lesbian relationships? Were they reading modern interpretations into the past record? The subject was mostly discussed and written about by lesbian historians, while heterosexual historians, coming upon ample evidence of such special friendships, gingerly danced around them. Among the many prominent nineteenth-women who had lifelong stable relationships with other women, which involved shared home-making, shared finances, and often shared organizational responsibilities, were Jane Addams, Frances Willard, and M. Carey Thomas. What kind of ‘evidence’ did one need to define the relationship as lesbian? Were such relationships lesbian if one could not prove sexual aspects? Heterosexual authors often chose to ignore such relationships or to refer to them simply as ‘friendships,’ allowing the reader to draw her/his own conclusions. I urged historians to report honestly on what their sources told them about these relationships, without necessarily being able to report on how the participants or their contemporaries defined such relationships.”