Pride Month begins: Here’s what it looks like in 2018

A drummer and a DJ. A mayor and state lawmakers. Advocates for the elderly and for teens. Two ministers and a stand-up comic. A chemical engineering student and a soon-to-be Division I football player.

All members of the LGBTQ community.

As Pride Month begins today, reporters from the USA TODAY NETWORK interviewed one person from each state and Washington, D.C., to display the diversity, strength, struggle and pride of LGBTQ Americans with “Faces of Pride.”

The profiles tell stories of resilience and hardships. Stories that highlight how much progress has been made and how much discrimination is still

faced. Stories that show what LGBTQ pride looks like and means in 2018.

Ashley Davis and her wife, LaNisha, were certified as foster parents in Mississippi more than a year before they held their adoptive daughter for the first time. They named her Madyson.

The day before they were set to bring her home from the hospital, the couple received a call.

“You’re not going to get that baby,” the woman on the other end of the line said, according to Davis. They never received a clear reason why their baby was taken away.

Growing up in Iowa, Emmet Cummings dreamed of experiencing the American Legion’s annual summer camp on model government — known as Girls State and Boys State.

“I absolutely love government and history,” said Cummings, 17, who’s transgender. “After I transitioned, it was, ‘Guess who’s going to Boys State? This guy!’ ”

In March, the Boys State board disagreed, citing decades-old rules requiring attendees be biologically male. Within weeks, an exception was made — for Cummings but not for all transgender boys.

Cummings decided to attend this summer to show through his example that “having trans people there isn’t a big deal.”

For Cummings, that’s pride. “It’s one thing to stand up for yourself and be proud of who you are,” he said, “but it takes another level to be proud of who (others) are.”

For Allison Scott, the idea of acceptance, much less pride, was unimaginable for most of her childhood in North Carolina.

In 2015, Scott, a transgender woman, began letting her feminine mannerisms come out naturally. She took hormones. She had facial surgery.

She did it all amid fallout over the state’s “bathroom bill,” dictating where transgender North Carolinians could use public facilities and inadvertently drawing the nation’s attention to their struggle.

“A lot of the world conjures an image of parades and LGBTQ people dancing and singing along to songs when they hear about pride,” Scott said. “What most of them don’t picture is the teenager whose parents have thrown them out because they came out or the trans woman of color killed because she walked out the door.”