Forget infighting: Pride is powerful

Washington is getting ready for another weekend of Pride events, more glitter and glam, a concert and parade, days of a city rainbowing its face off.

But is all the hoopla still necessary?

The modern gay rights movement began when sodomy was illegal in most states, when bars could lose their liquor licenses serving gay clients, when the simple act of love could get folks fired, expelled, evicted, beaten, jailed, shot and killed.

This isn’t ancient history. It was only 1970 when the Pride parades were born as a solemn march commemorating the Stonewall Riots a year earlier.

What’s the big story on the District of Columbia’s Capital Pride celebration this week?

Infighting over the big-money corporate sponsors helping bankroll an ever-glammier, increasingly mainstream event.

Basically, the kind of places that used to openly discriminate against gays and lesbians hotels, banks, federal and local law enforcement agencies - now want to march, dance and celebrate with them, to sponsor the event and link their brands to the community.

And this has some activists turned off.

We now live in a country that recognizes same-sex marriage. Federal and state law prohibit discrimination against anyone based on sexual orientation. Even President Evil, who wouldn’t surprise anyone if he signed an executive order banning kitten videos today, hasn’t had the LGBT community in his crosshairs.

When I want to remember the light speed of the movement, I think back on steamy June day in 2003, when the Supreme Court surprised even the die-hard activists when it struck down a Texas law prohibiting consensual sex between adults of the same gender - effectively killing all of the state’s sodomy laws.

“I can’t believe I’m seeing this,” said Frank Kameny, who was 78 at that time and a pioneer of the gay rights movement. Kameny was a World War II veteran and Harvard University PhD who sued the federal government and lost after he was fired from his job as an astronomer at the Army Map Service in 1957.

He picketed outside the White House in 1965, launching a halfcentury of public activism. Kameny died in 2011 and never got to see marriage equality become the law of the land. So I remember his complete surprise and joy with the 2003 ruling — we’d never met, but he embraced me when I approached him with my notebook that day — and imagine how pleased and still surprised he would be with marriage equality.

So that means the book is closed on LGBT activism? Can all those activists stand in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner and declare victory? Not at all. Let’s start with the T part of LGBT. Tacked on at the end and rarely at the forefront, transgender Americans have roller coastered through these past few years.

We’re a country that went from Caitlyn to bathroom bills in just two years.

So the protest part of Pride still has work to do, beginning with a lobbying rally for transgender rights on Capitol Hill on Friday.

And in case we start to believe that marriage equality and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” means that the struggle is over, there are still police blotters telling you we’re not all on the same page.

FBI data shows that in the past few years, the LGBT population is still the group most likely to be targeted in hate crimes, twice as likely as African Americans.

And don’t forget, we’re coming on the first anniversary of the deadliest mass shooting in the United States: the Pulse gay nightclub massacre that left 49 people dead.

The legislative books may say we’re all about equality, but American hearts and minds still need work.

Pride, it turns out, is still powerful when it embodies its very name.

I remember this a couple years ago, when I spent hours at the Capital Pride parade interviewing dozens of folks there about a political race.

I never wrote the story because folks weren’t really there to talk politics. In D.C.? No politics. Yup. Lots of the people I spoke to were from out of town. They took Amtrak, buses and road-tripped from places that don’t have gay council members, or rainbow flags on homes or LGBTQ clubs at school.

They were there to not be alone and to be in a place where they are celebrated.

Progress has been made, but only Pride can keep everyone moving forward.