Pride at 50: Focus shifts to pandemic, racial unrest

SCRANTON, Pa. — LGBTQ Pride is turning 50 this year a little short on its signature fanfare, after the coronavirus pandemic drove it to the internet and after calls for racial equality sparked by the killing of George Floyd further overtook it.

Activists and organizers are using the intersection of holiday and history in the making — including the Supreme Court’s decision giving LGBT people workplace protections — to uplift the people of color already among them and by making Black Lives Matter the centerpiece of Global Pride events Saturday.

“Pride was born of protest,” said Cathy Renna, communications director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, seeing analogies in the pandemic and in common threads of the Black and LGBTQ rights movements.

“Trans women of color have been targeted in what has been called an epidemic, and the Stonewall uprising happened in response to police harassment and brutality,” Renna said in an email.

The first Pride march took place June 28, 1970, a year after the 1969 uprisings at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York, which were led by trans women of color.

New York’s is among the largest, but social distancing measures to check the spread of COVID-19 everywhere from Scranton to Sao Paulo made cancellation or postponement a certainty.

Global Pride is billed as a 24-hour stream of music, performances and speeches. It is being hosted Saturday by Todrick Hall on his YouTube channel, on iHeartRadio’s YouTube channel and on the Global Pride website.