You know why LGBTQIA Pride is observed in June? This is because of the uprising that started in a bar in 1969: the Stonewall Inn, which is located in the Greenwich Village of Manhattan, New York City.
That uprising is widely accepted to have helped in paving the way for the modern fight for LGBTQIA rights. And so it can be said that at Stonewall Inn, the rainbow started – well – rising.
Now, this is worth emphasizing: The struggle for human rights of the LGBTQIA community did not just start in 1969 in New York City.
In the Philippines, for instance, often-repeated is the claim that prior to the colonization of the country by the Spaniards in 1521, the natives already had “babaylans” (roughly: shamans/spiritual leaders) who, at times, were males who lived as females (not always; but some were). These people had positions of power, respected for traversing realms/realities. Not surprisingly, therefore, and even if the term re “LGBTQIA” still did not exist in those days, these people ave often been used as examples of how “accepted” gender-non-conforming people were in the past; until they were demonized by West-introduced dogmas (e.g. Christianity).
In the West, social reformer Jeremy Bentham is largely considered to have written the first known argument for homosexual law reform in England sometime around 1785, when the legal penalty for “buggery” (anal sex) was death by hanging. Too bas his essays were only published in… 1978 (!).
Then there’s France, which – in 1791 – became the first nation to decriminalize homosexuality.
The LGBTQIA movement as we know it now is (very) anchored in the West – e.g. because of the anti-LGBTQIA sentiments in Victorian England (around 1890s), English socialist poet Edward Carpenter started a concerted effort to campaign against discrimination; and movements were also started in Germany at the turn of the 20th century. Heck, even one of the very first “homosexual organizations” in the US – called ONE Inc. – pre-dated the Stonewall uprising, having been founded in 1952; while the Mattachine Society was established in 1950. There was also a lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis, established in 1955. And still in the US, there was a 1962 gay march held in front of the Independence Hall in Philadelphia, which some historians consider as the actual “beginning of the modern gay rights movement”.
Suffice to say, though, before the Stonewall uprising, LGBTQIA Americans already faced an anti-gay legal system. In fact, in the 1950s and 1960s, very few establishments welcomed gay people. And those that did were often bars, although bar owners and managers were rarely gay (at the time, the Stonewall Inn was supposedly owned by the Mafia).
Police raids on gay bars were routine in the 1960s. And on June 28, 1969, a police raid was done at the Stonewall Inn.
But the officers lost control of the situation because the patrons fought back.
The tensions between New York City police and LGBTQIA patrons and then residents of Greenwich Village erupted into more protests the next days as the abused eventually held a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against the police raids and, yes, State-sanctioned abuses.
Within months since the uprising, LGBTQIA organizations (to emphasize: THAT WERE MORE POLITICAL) were founded across the US. And a year after the uprising, in June 1970, the first pride marches took place in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The Stonewall National Monument was established at the site in 2016.
Today, LGBTQIA pride events are held annually throughout the world toward the end of June.
On June 26, 1994, ProGay Philippines and Metropolitan Community Church helmed a march in Quezon City. Dubbed as “Stonewall Manila” or as “Pride Revolution”, it was held in remembrance of the Stonewall Inn uprising, and coincided with a bigger march against the imposition of the Value Added Tax (VAT). With this, the Philippines gained the distinction of being the first country in Asia and the Pacific to host a Pride-related march.
Pride now marks that uprising that happened in a somewhat nondescript bar, Stonewall Inn.
