THE Gay Pride festival marching through the streets of Rosebank, Johannesburg, in October 2010. | JOHANN HATTINGH / SAPA
History of Pride Month
REVELLERS take part in a Pride Parade in Cape Town in March 2013. The parade started with a minute’s silence for South Africans who died in anti-gay hate crimes. | Nardus Engelbrecht / SAPA
LIAM KARABO JOYCE liam.joyce@inl.co.za
LIKE most things in life, change happens when the masses take to the streets. Freedom in South Africa came after a long struggle that saw many go to the streets protesting against a repressive government. The Arab Spring saw citizens in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain take to the streets. Black Americans fought for freedom on the streets. And in the same way, so has the LGBTQIA+ community. And as all life-changing moments in history are celebrated, June is a celebration of queerness in all its forms. With it being Pride Month, it is a time where members and allies get to celebrate their true authentic self and reflect on the bravery of those before them. LGBTQIA+ pride is the promotion of the equality, self-affirmation, dignity and increased visibility of lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual people as a social group. The 1950s and 1960s in the US was an extremely repressive legal and social period for queer people. In this context American homophile organisations such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society co-ordinated some of the earliest demonstrations of the modern queer rights movement. These two organisations in particular carried out pickets called “Annual Reminders” to inform and remind Americans that queer people did not receive basic civil rights protection. They began in 1965 and took place on July 4 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The anti-queer discourse of these times equated both male and female homosexuality with mental illness. Inspired by Stokely Carmichael’s Black is Beautiful, gay civil rights pioneer and participant in the Annual
