‘Pride has saved lives’

Since 1970, Pride Month celebrations have commemorated the activists who led New York’s Stonewall Inn riots in 1969 to protest the discrimination and harassment of LGBTQ+ people. Today, many in the community say that their civil rights are under attack by executive orders from the Trump administration and calls to overturn same-sex marriage by the Southern Baptists and Evangelical Christian groups.

Northwestern Now spoke with five experts about the importance of Pride Month, the challenges facing the LGBTQ community today and more. Here’s what they said:

The contributions of LGBTQ people

“LGBTQ people are valuable parts of your community whose individual and collective efforts have helped make life better for everyone. Our contributions are many, from blockbuster Hollywood films to crucial political work for equality, from cracking the enigma code to diagnosing tuberculosis. Yet our right to exist in public, free from violence, is currently under threat. Your support of the queer people around you makes a huge difference to our shared future.”

– Jillana Enteen, professor of instruction in the gender and sexuality studies program in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

The role of Pride Month and ‘day-to-day pride’

“It’s vital to remember and to celebrate the endurance and limitless achievements of LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. and elsewhere. Public symbolic markers like Pride Month are so sustaining for this expansive and always-embattled community; it is not hyperbole to say that Pride has saved lives, not least those of the young and the dispossessed.

“But even when those affirming symbols are undermined or called into question, nobody can take away LGBTQ+ people’s actual day-to-day pride in each other, or the work our community constantly does to lift ourselves up and take care of our own, especially the most vulnerable among us. Before we had the rights and recognitions for which we and others worked so hard (and which are our due, and everyone’s due), we had and continue to have our history, our integrity, our bonds and our respect for the infinite ways people live their lives and relationships under and around our multi-colored banner. So, let’s hold and defend our well-earned ground, keep our heads high and sustain our collective legacies of loving, survival and solidarity within and beyond our gender-expansive and sexually diverse circles.”

– Nick Davis, associate professor of English and associate professor and director of the gender and sexuality studies program in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

The role of the courts

“The role of the courts is essential in maintaining the rule of law and safeguarding the rights of the politically marginalized. Namely, in the U.S., the courts are the place of last resort for making the case for progress or equality for interest groups like women, people of color or low-income workers who may not be able to sway the vote at the ballot box for their group’s needs to be best addressed or represented in legislatures or in the executive branch. The courts must hold firm as a check in the balance of powers to maintain the progress achieved for gender equality and equity in this country.”  

– Kara Ingelhart, clinical assistant professor of law and director of the LGBTQI+ Rights Clinic at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law

How Pride commemorates the ongoing struggle for equality

“Pride plays an important role for LGBTQ people in the United States and around the world. As a form of collective memory, it is a celebration and commemoration of the hard work of the LGBTQ movement and its successes at pursuing greater equality for a long-stigmatized minority. Pride powerfully reminds us that the LGBTQ movement’s struggle for rights is not finished, especially at a time when opponents of equality are redoubling their efforts to discriminate against those who they see as ‘others’ because of their sexuality, gender and race.”

– Héctor Carrillo, professor of sociology and a professor of gender and sexuality studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

We shouldn’t fear difference

“In the current ‘anti-DEI’ climate, we seem to be hearing the suggestion that any celebration of diversity or reminder of historical injustice is somehow inappropriate. But the true lessons of Pride are that difference is not something to fear, and only by reckoning with its past can a society move forward.”

– Steven Epstein, professor of sociology and John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences