June is GLBT Pride Month.
It began one night in June in 1969 in New York City’s Greenwich Village at a dive bar.
It wasn’t organized and it wasn’t very pretty, and no one who was there that night knew that when their frustration at police raids boiled over it would ignite a movement that had been coming to a boil.
The Stonewall Rebellion was a spontaneous community reaction to yet another demeaning raid on a Gay bar that was routine back then, a reaction that then spread out like ripples from a pebble thrown in a pond.
In the years that followed, progress toward GLBT equality was achieved unevenly throughout the country with the gains made having to be defended from those who claim recognizing the rights of GLBT people would somehow reduce theirs, like giving a slice of pizza to the eighth person to arrive at the table where seven people already sat would somehow mean you could not eat the slice you already had.
My entry into GLBT activism was simple and quiet.
It began with accepting myself for who I am, the complete and true me, and not what even I thought I was supposed to be from the limited and filtered information I had stumbled upon or had heard from those who really did not know as their information was similarly limited and filtered.
When living in Boston I had joined the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus and, as was the tradition at the time, joined in my first Gay Pride Parade at the tail end of the organized parade where people were allowed to join in, carrying a banner I had made for those friends with whom I marched and who lived on Queensberry Street in Boston’s Fenway Gayborhood.
After the parade GLBT couples freely walked the streets of downtown Boston holding hands and engaging in public displays of affection taken for granted by straight people every day and not limited to one day a year on a weekend when the city streets were practically empty but for us.
It was a taste of what should be.
There was no shame in our normalcy.
When I got to Southern California, although further along in GLBT equality, there was still much progress to be made. I joined the Los Angeles and then the Long Beach Gay Men’s Choruses, began doing political cartoons for a local Gay newspaper, got involved in the Union’s GLBT subcommittee of which I was the chair when it became a full standing committee of the Union and marched for the first time in the Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade representing the United Teachers of Los Angeles, and enjoyed what rights and equal treatment had been won before I arrived and increased while I was there and had helped work for.
Then I went to Oklahoma that was far behind Massachusetts and further behind Los Angeles. There I joined GLBT political and Civil Rights groups, attended multiple rallies, took on politicians and a school District to get policy protections for GLBT students, continued my cartoon work in a GLBT newspaper, and marched openly as a Gay Teacher in the Oklahoma City GLBT Pride parade carrying a sign declaring that.
Progress was made, and continues to be made, by some very fine and very hard working people there.
And then, to be closer to family, I returned to Massachusetts where, while I was away, in 1989 laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation in credit, employment, union practices, housing, and public accommodations had been passed, and in May 2004 Marriage Equality had come to be.
There is still progress to be made and gained rights to be defended, but we are not just getting started, and we have seen with hard work and perseverance that full equality is possible, and we will attain it.