Pride Month is kicking off around the world with parades and festivals in cities large and small
Pride Month, the worldwide celebration of LGBTQ+ culture and rights, kicks off Saturday with events around the globe.
But this year’s festivities in the U.S. will unfold against a backdrop of dozens of new state laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, particularly transgender young people.
Here are things to know about the celebrations and the politics around them.
The monthlong global celebration began with Gay Pride Week in late June 1970, a public celebration that marked the first anniversary of the violent police raid at New York’s Stonewall Inn, a gay bar.
At a time when LGBTQ+ people largely kept their identity or orientation quiet, the June 28, 1969, raid sparked a series of protests and catalyzed the movement for rights.
The first pride week featured marches in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, and it has grown ever since. Some events fall outside of June: Tokyo’s Rainbow Pride was in April and Rio de Janeiro has a major event in November.
In 1999, President Bill Clinton proclaimed June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.
Pride’s hallmark rainbow-laden parades and festivals celebrate the progress the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement has made.
In the U.S. in April, a federal appeals court ruled North Carolina and West Virginia’s refusal to cover certain health care for transgender people with government-sponsored insurance is discriminatory.
In one compromise in March, a settlement of legal challenges to a Florida law critics called “Don’t Say Gay” clarifies that teachers can have pictures on their desks of their same-sex partners and books with LGBTQ+ themes. It also says books with LGBTQ+ characters and themes can remain in campus libraries and gay-straight alliance chapters at schools need not be forced underground.
Greece this year legalized same-sex marriage, one of three dozen nations around the world to do so, and a similar law approved in Estonia in June 2023 took effect this year.
