“On the day that I was born Black, I was also born a homosexual. They either believe in freedom and justice for all or they do not.”

— Bayard Rustin

June is here. And with it comes the flags, the floats, the branded merchandise, and the corporate emails with rainbow logos from companies that quietly funded the politicians dismantling the rights those rainbows are supposed to represent.

I am not here to police anyone’s celebration. Joy is resistance. I believe that with everything in me. But I am here — as I always am — to insist that we hold the full story. Because if we flatten Pride into a party, we dishonor the people who bled for it. And if we celebrate without confronting what is currently being done to queer people in this country, we are performing allyship rather than practicing it.

So let us begin where it all began.

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, officers from the New York City Police Department raided the Stonewall Inn — a mob-owned gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Police raids on gay establishments were routine.

LGBTQIA+ people had no legal protection, no political power, and no presumption of dignity in the eyes of American law. Bars like Stonewall Inn were among the only places LGBTQIA+ people could gather — and even those spaces were subject to the constant humiliation of state-sanctioned violence.

That June night, something different happened. Our siblings fought back.

They weren’t the polished, respectable faces who’d later become the marketable image of gay rights. Most were drag queens, transgender people, gay men of color, butch lesbians, sex workers, and homeless queer youth.

The uprising lasted six days. It didn’t end police harassment overnight. It didn’t produce immediate legislative change. However, it ignited an entire generation of queer people.

“We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going anywhere! We won’t cooperate with our own destruction.*

An honest account of PRIDE history must center the women most responsible for it — women systematically hidden for decades.

A 23-year-old Marsha P. Johnson was a Black transgender woman, activist, drag queen, and among the first to resist the police at Stonewall. After the uprising, Johnson joined the Gay Liberation Front and, along with her Puerto Rican trans sister Sylvia Rivera.

Rivera co-founded STAR — Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries — to provide housing and support for homeless transgender youth. They literally opened their home to young trans people with nowhere to go.

Rivera faced relentless exclusion from the very movement she helped birth. Gay Activists Alliance, dominated by white men, frequently minimized or erased the role of transgender people — especially trans people of color — in Stonewall.

March organizers banned drag queens from participating in the New York City Pride parade. Johnson and Rivera marched ahead of the parade anyway.

Read that again. The founders were banned from the celebration they founded.

This isn’t ancient history. It’s the theological origin point of every conversation about who gets centered in liberation movements — and who gets used and discarded.

Bisexual feminist activist Brenda Howard— the “Mother of Pride” — organized the Christopher Street Liberation Day March on the one-year anniversary of Stonewall in 1970, creating the Pride event template globally. Robert A. Howard, Robert E. Howard, and L. Craig Schoonmaker popularized the word PRIDE itself in this fabulous context.

Their names deserve to be spoken aloud in every Pride celebration.

Over the following decades, the LGBTQIA+ rights movement won hard, incremental victories. President Clinton officially recognized Pride Month in 1999 and 2000. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws in *Lawrence v. Texas* in 2003 and upheld Obergefell v. Hodges* in 2015—making marriage equality the law of the land.

And President Obama designated the Stonewall Inn as a National Monument in 2016, making it the first LGBTQIA+ history monument in U.S. history.

These were genuine victories. I will not minimize them.

But we must be honest about what victories in a system designed to exclude us actually mean: they aren’t permanent. They aren’t guaranteed. They are always, always, always subject to reversal when power changes hands and political will wanes.

We’re living in that moment right now.

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President Trump signed Executive Order 14168, titled (with breathtaking audacity), “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

That order directed the State Department to stop issuing accurate passports for transgender people, ordered the Bureau of Prisons to deny trans inmates appropriate healthcare and housing, and instructed federal agencies to erase the language of gender identity from all materials, websites, and forms.

Trump signed Executive Order 14183 eight days later. It reinstated the ban on transgender people serving in the U.S. military.

Let me be pastorally blunt: these orders aren’t policy disagreements. They’re acts of theological violence — using power to declare certain human beings don’t exist, don’t matter, and don’t deserve dignity or protection.

When the government says your identity is “ideology,” and your body is a lie, that’s not a legal position. That’s a declaration of war against your humanity.

The legislative assault has been equally brutal. In 2025, 1,022 anti-trans bills were introduced across 49 states and the federal government.

As of early 2026, 648 active bills seek to restrict healthcare, ban inclusive school curricula, exclude trans youth from athletics, and otherwise dismantle every inch of legal protection trans people have fought for.

Transgender people are [four times more likely to face violent attacks than their cisgender peers]. More than 40 percent of trans people have attempted suicide. These aren’t statistics. These are names. These are children. These are beloveds.

The theologian in me refuses to descend into despair. But the prophet in me refuses to just celebrate.

Pride Month, in its truest form, is an act of prophetic memory. It’s insisting that what was done to queer people — the raids, the arrests, the pathologizing, the erasure, the violence — was wrong. Those fabulous people who resisted were right. Their resistance was, in fact, holy.

It’s also a demand. A demand we show up for the most vulnerable — trans women of color, queer youth in hostile homes, LGBTQIA+ people in rural communities, and undocumented queer people.

The question this Pride Month isn’t whether we’re going don gay apparel, glitter, and rainbows. The question is whether we’re going to show up. Whether our celebration translates into action. Whether professed for queer people will be shown in the spaces where they’re most endangered.

Johnson and Rivera didn’t wait for permission to love people or to fight for them. They just did it — with no budget, no institutional support, no guarantee of success.

That’s our inheritance. That’s our assignment.

Happy Pride — and get to work.

In faith and fire,

Rev. Jason Carson Wilson

Author, Makeshift Messiahs: Why the American Right Keeps Creating Political Saviors (Riley Press, 2025)