People at a booth in the Orcas Pride day festival 2025 / Maddie Olsen
Fifty-five years ago, the very first pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. It had been one year since the Stonewall uprising, and now thousands of activists were coming together again to protest for queer rights across the nation. Every year since Pride protests and celebrations have been held, across the country and across the world. Each year, more towns and cities participate.
“But why is it important that the queer community keeps doing this?” you may ask “It has been fifty-five years, surely those who started pride have gotten what they wanted.” Well, only kind of. On the one hand, gay marriage has been legalized and gender-affirming care for trans people is legal in many states. On the other hand, there are still sweeping societal issues facing the queer community. Queer people are vastly more likely to be assaulted, are still facing both legal and social discrimination, trans and gender-nonconforming people have a much lower life expectancy than cis people, and there are many politicians and voters who would prefer that the reforms in place to protect queer people were rolled back.
Pride is both a celebration of queer people and of the freedoms we are granted, and a protest of the current treatment of LGBTQ+ people. These aspects are equally important to the overall meaning and necessity of Pride. Celebration is vital to keeping the community alive and together. In a world where queerness is always outside of the norm, getting together with other queer people is relaxing. Pride is a gathering of queer people and allies, and by taking the form it does, it allows people to feel that their identity is not excluding them from their wider community, but rather drawing them together into a community. Celebrating identities allows for a safe and welcoming space where people can express themselves freely, and when they go back into the world they can take that freedom with them, holding their heads high with pride.
As I mentioned above, Pride is also a protest. Existing as an out queer person can often feel like a political statement, even when you are simply standing in the grocery store or walking down the street. Unfortunately, it is somewhat true. Being out to the world is, in a way, a statement. But it is only a statement in that it says that queer people should not and will not be ashamed. Pride is a continuation of this, a focus point for activists to ramp up awareness and support for LGBTQ+ people’s fundamental human rights to healthcare and to existence. People can learn about issues they were previously unaware of in their communities, people can be enrolled in programs set out to help them that they did not know about, people can organize and educate and love each other openly, because by attending pride–a publicly and explicitly queer event–they are refusing to be ashamed.
Pride is not the only activism that people interested in protecting the queer community should engage in. It is important to keep up the spirit year round, protests, donations, campaigning, and other grass-roots activism is important every day. But it is a point to organize around, a way to reiterate every year to the queer community and to the world at large that queer people still exist, still care, and are still fighting.