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The first Pride wasn't a parade. It was a response. In the early hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village. Raids like it were routine, and the people inside had lived with that routine for years: gay men, lesbians, drag queens, trans women, and a lot of young people with nowhere safer to be. That night, they were done. The crowd pushed back, and the unrest spilled into the streets for the better part of a week.
Two of the people who turned that moment into something lasting were Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. In the year that followed, they organized, and they started STAR, a group that put a roof over the heads of homeless trans young people when almost no one else would. One year after the raid, marchers walked through Manhattan to mark the date and called it Christopher Street Liberation Day. We've been holding that march, in one form or another, every June since.
A lot has changed. In much of the country, being out is allowed to be ordinary. Couples who once would have been arrested for it can marry, and have been able to nationwide since 2015. A kid today can grow up seeing families that look like the one they might build someday. None of that arrived on its own. People marched, sued, came out to families that weren't ready, and kept going through the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, when much of the country looked away while a generation got sick. The freedom a lot of us treat as ordinary was paid for by people who didn't get to enjoy it.
It also isn't finished. For a lot of LGBTQ+ people, and for trans and nonbinary folks most of all, the ground feels less settled than it did a few years ago. Protections that seemed permanent turn out to be arguments somebody is willing to reopen.
What's changed is that the opposition got organized and well-funded. Groups like Moms for Liberty have spent the last few years running candidates for school boards, pulling books with LGBTQ+ characters off library shelves, and wrapping all of it in the language of “parents' rights.” Last year, Massachusetts' own police-training materials listed the group among hate groups active in the state. This is a national campaign with money behind it and a playbook to follow, and the target is a pretty modest idea: that a queer kid should be able to see themselves at school without it turning into a national story.
A Pride march has always been a head count: a way of saying we're here, there are a lot of us, and we're not going anywhere.
That's the work Pride still does, underneath the music. It's a celebration, and it's also a signal. It mattered in 1970 for the same reason it matters now: there are people who would rather we stayed quiet, and there's always someone, maybe a teenager a few towns over, who needs to see that quiet isn't the only option.
We felt both sides of that this month. Earlier in June, Pride South Coast turned a Taunton park into a daylong celebration, with headliners, vendors, and a crew of volunteers who carried the whole thing. That same month, a few miles away, students in the Gay-Straight Alliance at Dartmouth High School put up a bulletin board that read “Have a Gay Summer,” with rainbow flags and photos of people like Harvey Milk and Marsha P. Johnson. A teacher had signed off on it. When someone demanded it come down, the principal said no, because the message was kind.
That should have been the end of it. Instead a local activist posted it online, a national far-right account and a candidate for state office spread it around, and within days strangers who'll never set foot in that building were calling for the teachers behind it to lose their jobs. No child was harmed by a friendly sign. The harm went the other way: a room full of teenagers got a fast lesson in how quickly a small act of welcome can turn you into a target, minutes from our New Bedford door.
That's the part that's easy to miss about a place like the Network. The programs aren't only for the good days. They run all year, across New Bedford, Fall River, and Taunton: Elevate Youth for young people still figuring things out, Aging Well for elders, many of whom came up without anything like it, and trans and nonbinary services for folks who just need somewhere that gets it.
Celebrate, then. Wear the colors, kiss your person on the sidewalk, bring your kids, bring your parents, dance if the moment calls for it. Then keep showing up after the last weekend of June, when the flags come down and the work gets quieter. Community doesn't come together one month a year. It comes together on the ordinary weeknights, in the rooms where someone walks in not knowing anyone and leaves knowing they have a place to come back to.
Pride started as a refusal to disappear. That's still what it is. We're still here, on the South Coast and everywhere, and as long as anyone is being told they shouldn't be, it's still needed.
You don't have to be in crisis to reach out. These lines are here whenever you want them.