Before the corporate sponsors. Before the branded water bottles and rainbow-wrapped product launches. Before the politicians who show up in June and vanish in July. Before any of that — there was a brick.

Or maybe a coin. Or a shot glass hurled at a police officer on a summer night in 1969.

The exact projectile is still debated. What is not debated is what it meant: Enough.

On June 28, 1969, New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village— as they had done dozens of times before. They expected compliance. They’d always gotten it. Instead, the bar’s patrons — drag queens, transgender people, gay men of color, homeless queer youth — resisted. The Stonewall Uprising lasted six days and launched the modern LGBTQIA+ rights movement.

That is the foundation. That is the ground we stand on each June.

Pride’s history has been sanitized beyond reality and recognition. So, let’s name names.

Marsha P. Johnson — a 23-year-old Black transgender woman — was among the most prominent resisters at Stonewall. Johnson and her Puerto Rican trans sister Sylvia Rivera co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) to shelter and support homeless trans youth and people of color. 

They gave despite their poverty. They loved despite their marginalization. They weren’t polished advocates with nonprofit budgets. They were women who decided their community’s survival was worth the risk to themselves.

Brenda Howard, a bisexual feminist activist known as the Mother of Pride, organized the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March in 1970 — the template for every Pride parade since. She and fellow activists also popularized the term Pride as the name of this movement. 

The word was chosen deliberately. Not “tolerance.” Not “acceptance.” Pride. They understood that the first step toward liberation is refusing to be ashamed.

The movement secured real victories over the next 50 years. Sodomy laws fell. Marriage equality arrived — though not without a fight that took decades. In 2016, President Obama designated the Stonewall Inn as a National Monument, the first in U.S. history to honor LGBTQIA+ history.

But we’re living proof that progress isn’t permanent — not in a country where political will can reverse it on a new administration’s first day.

Executive Order 14168, signed on January 20, 2025, ordered the erasure of transgender identity from federal documents, stripped trans Americans of accurate passports, and directed agencies to remove all gender identity language from their materials. Executive Order 14183, signed just days later, reinstated the ban on transgender people serving in the military.

These weren’t the first shots. In 2025, more than 1,022 anti-trans bills were introduced in 49 states. As of 2026, 648 remain active. The legislation targets healthcare, schools, sports, and shelter — every dimension of a trans person’s ability to live openly and safely.

I’m an ordained minister—who was raised in a homophobic conservative evangelical church in Urbana, Ill. Our founding pastor decreed all boys should become ministers and all should become ministers’ wives. However, this future faith leader answered God’s call rather than my pastor’s edict.

Although I began diligent preparation—participating in a church youth group called Seminarians, learning to read commentaries and concordances, and preaching at age 9—anti-gay sermons (and the church outing me) forced me to abandon the call.

Journalism became what I considered a suitable alternative. Meanwhile, God kept dropping breadcrumbs. Interviewing a local pastor for the Ottawa (Ill.) Daily Times in 2001 introduced me to the United Church of Christ, which the pastor claimed would welcome me with open arms. That sounded ridiculous.

Reporting on a white male serial killer in Pekin, Ill., in 2004 led me to a United Church of Christ clergy couple, the Revs. Carole Hoke and Lauren Padgett, who were then serving in Peoria. Hoke and Padgett formed a support group for the families of the killer’s seven victims.

We connected so I could interview the families and write stories that humanized the Black women who were murdered—long before #BLACKLIVESMATTER. That profound opportunity affirmed my call to social justice ministry and affirmed that LGBTQIA+ people could be ministers.

Trusting the church not to hurt me again took a little longer. Interviewing a United Church of Christ pastor in Freeport, Ill., made me comfortable enough to start attending—especially after it became Open & Affirming. The congregation eventually affirmed my call to ministry, paving the way for me to earn a Master of Divinity at Chicago Theological Seminary in 2016 and to serve as a United Church of Christ Justice & Peace Policy Fellow on Capitol Hill.

Why return to and engage with a church that hurt me? Challenge the church’s homophobia and fight to create a true sanctuary that recognizes all God’s children as fabulous creations, no matter who they worship or whether they worship.

Pride Month in 2026 isn’t an invitation to pretend our movement is better than it is. It’s an invitation to remember that we have survived worse, that resistance has always been our inheritance, and that the most marginalized among us deserve our loudest voices and our most concrete actions.

The Stonewall uprising began in a bar at two in the morning. Liberation rarely looks like what we expect. It usually starts when someone who has been pushed too far finally decides they won’t be pushed anymore.

That someone was Marsha. That someone was Sylvia. That someone could be you.

Show up. Speak up. Happy Pride.

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Rev. Jason Carson Wilson is the founder of Politically Pastoral. Follow Wilson on Instagram and TikTok @PoliticallyPastoral. He’s also the author of Makeshift Messiahs: Why The American Right Keeps Creating Political Saviors (Riley Press, 2025).