June is Pride Month with celebrations promoting awareness, communication, and respect within and surrounding the LGBTQIA+ community.
Origins at the Stonewall Inn
Pride month began after the Stonewall Uprising. The Stonewall Uprising was a series of gay liberation events over the course of six days beginning on June 28, 1969. These events began shortly after a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, an openly gay bar in New York.
The first Pride Parade
In 1970, on the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, the first Pride parades, festivals, and events started to pop up in celebration of LGBT rights and pride. Saturday, June 27, 1970, one of the very first Pride parades occurred in Chicago. On the west coast, another march occurred in San Francisco on the same date and a ‘Gay-in’ on June 28, 1970, followed by a similar march in Los Angeles on the same date.
The very first U.S. Gay Pride Week and March was about promoting community to the LGBTQ+ population,
“These events will be the culmination of Gay Pride Week (June 22-28), a week throughout which the East Coast Gay organizations will commemorate the “Christopher Street Uprisings” of last summer in which thousands of Homosexuals went to the streets to demonstrate against centuries of abuse; official betrayal of their human rights by virtually all segments of society; from government hostility to employment and Housing discrimination, Mafia control of Gay bars, and anti-Homsexual laws.”
-Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee Fliers External. The University of Connecticut Digital Collections
Over the decades, celebrations of Pride Month and pride parades have spread to international levels making its way to South Africa and Hong Kong.
How to Celebrate
Want to learn more? How to celebrate? The library has many resources to learn about the LGBTQIA+ community and its history.
General Resources and Historic Events
The Book of Pride
LGBTQIA+ Memoirs and Biographies
Who Was Harvey Milk?
Read past Pride Month blog posts for more reading lists to choose from:
Post from 2022: LGBTQIA+ Pride Month, opens a new window
Post from 2021: It’s Pride Month!, opens a new window
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